From The Marxist Archives-Against Illusions in Bourgeois Democracy

	Workers Vanguard No. 924	7 November 2008

TROTSKY

LENIN

Against Illusions in Bourgeois Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought the proletariat of Russia to power, explained that bourgeois democracy serves as a mask for the bloody dictatorship of the capitalist class. Writing in 1918 in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (a continuation of his 1917 work, The State and Revolution), Lenin polemicized against apologists for “democratic” bourgeois rule such as Karl Kautsky, a German Social Democrat and an opponent of the October Revolution and soviet rule (i.e., workers democracy).

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth, which forms a most essential part of Marx’s teaching, that Kautsky the “Marxist” has failed to understand. On this—the fundamental issue—Kautsky offers “delights” for the bourgeoisie instead of a scientific criticism of those conditions which make every bourgeois democracy a democracy for the rich….

The learned Mr. Kautsky has “forgotten”—accidentally forgotten, probably—a “trifle,” namely, that the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the “protection of the minority.” The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.

—V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

************

Vladimir Lenin

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

---

How Kautsky Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal

The fundamental question that Kautsky discusses in his pamphlet is that of the very essence of proletarian revolution, namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a question that is of the greatest importance for all countries, especially for the advanced ones, especially for those at war, and especially at the present time. One may say without fear of exaggeration that this is the key problem of the entire proletarian class struggle. It is, therefore, necessary to pay particular attention to it .
Kautsky formulates the question as follows: “The contrast between the two socialist trends” (i.e., the Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks) “is the contrast between two radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic” (p. 3).
Let us point out, in passing, that when calling the non-Bolsheviks in Russia, i.e., the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, socialists, Kautsky was guided by their name, that is, by a word, and not by the actual place they occupy in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What a wonderful understanding and application of Marxism! But more of this later.
For the moment we must deal with the main point, namely, with Kautsky’s great discovery of the “fundamental contrast” between “democratic and dictatorial methods”. That is the crux of the matter; that is the essence of Kautsky’s pamphlet. And that is such an awful theoretical muddle, such a complete renunciation of Marxism, that Kautsky, it must be confessed, has far excelled Bernstein.
The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a question of the relation of the proletarian state to the bourgeois state, of proletarian democracy to bourgeois democracy. One would think that this is as plain as a pikestall. But Kautsky, like a schoolmaster who has become as dry as dust from quoting the same old textbooks on history, persistently turns his back on the twentieth century and his face to the eighteenth century, and for the hundredth time, in a number of paragraphs, in an incredibly tedious fashion chews the old cud over the relation of bourgeois democracy to absolutism and medievalism!
It sounds just like he were chewing rags in his sleep!
But this means he utterly fails to understand what is what! One cannot help smiling at Kautsky’s effort to make it appear that there are people who preach “contempt for democracy” (p. IA) and so forth. That is the sort of twaddle Kautsky uses to befog and confuse the issue, for he talks like the liberals, speaking of democracy in general, and not of bourgeois democracy; he even avoids using this precise, class term, and, instead, tries to speak about “presocialist” democracy. This windbag devotes almost one-third of his pamphlet, twenty pages out of sixty-three, to this twaddle, which is so agreeable to the bourgeoisie, for it is tantamount to embellishing bourgeois democracy, and obscures the question of the proletarian revolution.
But, alter all, the title of Kautsky’s pamphlet is The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Everybody knows that this is the very essence of Marx’s doctrine; and after a lot of irrelevant twaddle Kautsky was obliged to quote Marx’s words on the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the way in which he the “Marxist” did it was simply farcical! Listen to this:
“This view” (which Kautsky dubs “contempt for democracy") “rests upon a single word of Karl Marx’s”. This is what Kautsky literally says on page 20. And on page 60 the same thing is repeated even in the form that they (the Bolsheviks) “opportunely recalled the little word” (that is literally what he says-des Wörtchens!!) “about the dictatorship of the proletariat which Marx once used in 1875 in a letter”.
Here is Marx’s “little word":

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”^[3]

First of all, to call this classical reasoning of Marx’s, which sums up the whole of his revolutionary teaching, “a single word” and even “a little word,” is an insult to and complete renunciation of Marxism. It must not be forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart, and, judging by all he has written, he has in his desk, or in his head, a number of pigeon-holes in which all that was ever written by Marx is most carefully filed so as to be ready at hand for quotation. Kautsky must know that both Marx and Engels, in their letters as well as in their published works, repeatedly spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat, before and especially after the Paris Commune. Kautsky must know that the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” is merely a more historically concrete and scientifically exact formulation of the proletariat’s task of “smashing” the bourgeois state machine, about which both Marx and Engels, in summing up the experience of the Revolution of 1848, and, still more so, of 1871, spoke for forty years, between 1852 and 1891,
How is this monstrous distortion of Marxism by that Marxist pedant Kautsky to be explained? As far as the philosophical roots of this phenomenon are concerned, it amounts to the substitution of eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics. Kautsky is a past master at this sort of substitution. Regarded from the point of view of practical politics, it amounts to subservience to the opportunists, that is, in the last analysis to the bourgeoisie. Since the outbreak of thel’ war, Kautsky has made increasingly rapid progress in this art of being a Marxist in words and a lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds, until he has become a virtuoso at it.
One feels even more convinced of this when examining the remarkable way in which Kautsky “interprets” Marx’s “little word” about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Listen to this:
“Marx, unfortunately, neglected to show us in greater detail how he conceived this dictatorship ....” (This is an utterly mendacious phrase of a renegade, for Marx and Engels gave us, indeed, quite a number of most detailed indications, which Kautsky, the Marxist pedant, has deliberately ignored.) “Literally, the word dictatorship means the abolition of democracy. But, of course, taken literally, this word also means the undivided rule of a single person unrestricted by any laws-an autocracy, which differs from despotism only insofar as it is not meant as a permanent state institution, but as a transient emergency measure.
“The term, dictatorship of the proletariat’, hence not the dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class, ipso facto precludes the possibility that Marx in this connection had in mind a dictatorship in the literal sense of the term.
“He speaks here not of a form of government, but of a conditton, which must necessarily arise wherever the proletariat has gained political power. That Marx in this case did not have in mind a form of government is proved by the fact that he was of the opinion that in Britain and America the transition might take place peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way” (p. 20).
We have deliberately quoted this argument in full so that the reader may clearly see the methods Kautsky the “theoretician” employs.
Kautsky chose to approach the question in such a way as to begin with a definition of the “word”dictatorship.
Very well. Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious and honest approach from a dishonest one. Anyone who wants to be serious in approaching the question in this way ought to give his own definition of the “word”. Then the question would be put fairly and squarely. But Kautsky does not do that. “Literally,” he writes, “the word dictatorship means the abolition of democracy.”
In the first place, this is not a definition. If Kautsky wanted to avoid giving a definition of the concept dictatorship, why did he choose this particular approach to the question?
Secondly, it is obviously wrong. It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” Everyone knows, for instance (and Kautskythe “historian” knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slave owners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everyhody knows that it did not.
Kautsky the “Marxist” made this monstrously absurd and untrue statement because he “forgot“ the class struggle ....
To transform Kautsky’s liberal and false assertion into a Marxist and true one, one must say: dictatorship does not necessarily1 mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) of democracy for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised.
But, however true this assertion may be, it does not give a definition of dictatorship.
Let us examine Kautsky’s next sentence:

“. . . But, of course, taken literally, this word also means the undivided rule of a single person unrestricted by any laws ....”

Like a blind puppy sniffing at random first in one direction and then in another, Kautsky accidentally stumbled upon one true idea (namely, that dictatorship is rule unrestricted by any laws), nevertheless, he failed to give a definition of dictatorship, and, moreover, he made an obvious historical blunder, namely, that dictatorship means the rule of a single person. This is even grammatically incor rect, since dictatorship may also be exercised by a handful of persons, or by an oligarchy, or by a class, etc.
Kautsky then goes on to point out the difference between dictatorship and despotism, but, although what he says is obviously incorrect, we shall not dwell upon it, as it is wholly irrelevant to the question that interests us. Everyone knows Kautsky’s inclination to turn from the twentieth century to the eighteenth, and from the eighteenth century to classical antiquity, and we hope that the German proletariat, after it has attained its dictatorship, will bear this inclination of his in mind and appoint him, say, teacher of ancient history at some Gymnasium. To try to evade a definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat by philosophising about despotism is either crass stupidity or very clumsy trickery.
As a result, we find that, having undertaken to discuss the dictatorship, Kautsky rattled off a great deal of manifest lies, but has given no definition! Yet, instead of relying on his mental faculties he could have used his memory to extract from “pigeon-holes” all those instances in which Marx speaks of dictatorship. Had he done so, he would certainly have arrived either at the following definition or at one in substance coinciding with it:
Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
This simple truth, a truth that is as plain as a pikestaff to every class-conscious worker (who represents the people, and not an upper section of petty-bourgeois scoundrels who have been bribed by the capitalists, such as are the social-imperialists of all countries), this truth, which is obvious to every representative of the exploited classes fighting for their emancipation, this truth, which is beyond dispute for every Marxist, has to be “extracted by force” from the most learned Mr. Kautsky! How is it to be explained? Simply by that spirit of servility with which the leaders of the Second International, who have become contemptible sycophants in the service of the bourgeoisie, are imbued.
Kautsky first committed a sleight of hand by proclaiming the obvious nonsense that the word dictatorship, in its literal sense, means the dictatorship of a single person, and then-on the strength of this sleight of hand—he declared that “hence” Marx’s words about the dictatorship of a class were not meant in the literal sense (but in one in which dictatorship does not imply revolutionary violence, but the “peaceful” winning of a majority under bourgeois mark you—“democracy”).
One must, if you please, distinguish between a “condition” and a “form of government”. A wonderfully profound distinction; it is like drawing a distinction between the “condition” of stupidity of a man who reasons foolishly and the “form” of his stupidity.
Kautsky finds it necessary to interpret dictatorship as a “condition of domination” (this is the literal expression he uses on the very next page, p. 21), because then revolutionary violence, and violent revolution, disappear. The “condition of domination” is a condition in which any majority finds itself under ... “democracy"! Thanks to such a fraud, revolution happily disappears!
The fraud, however, is too crude and will not save Kautsky. One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies a “condition,” one so disagreeable to renegades, of revolutionary violence of one class against another. It is patently absurd to draw a distinction between a “condition” and a “form of government”. To speak of forms of government in this connection is trebly stupid, for every schoolboy knows that monarchy and republic are two different forms of government. It must be explained to Mr. Kautsky that both these forms of government, like all transitional “forms of government” under capitalism, are only variations of the bourgeois state, that is, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Lastly, to speak of forms of government is not only a stupid, but also a very crude falsification of Marx, who was very clearly speaking here of this or that form or type of state, and not of forms of government.
The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”.^[4]
Because of his renegade position, Kautsky, however, has to befog and belie all this.
Look what wretched subterfuges he uses.
First subterfuge. “That Marx in this case did not have in mind a form of government is proved by the fact that he was of the opinion that in Britain and America the transition might take place peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way.”
The form of government has absolutely nothing to do with it, for there are monarchies which are not typical of the bourgeois state, such, for instance, as have no military clique, and there are republics which are quite typical in this respect, such, for instance, as have a military clique and a bureaucracy. This is a universally known historical and political fact, and Kautsky cannot falsify it.
If Kautsky had wanted to argue in a serious and honest manner he would have asked himself: Are there historical laws relating to revolution which know of no exception? And the reply would have been: No, there are no such laws. Such laws only apply to the typical, to what Marx once termed the “ideal,” meaning average, normal, typical capitalism.
Further, was there in the seventies anything which made England and America exceptional in regard to what we are now discussing? It will be obvious to anyone at all familiar with the requirements of science in regard to the problems of history that this question must be put. To fail to put it is tantamount to falsifying science, to engaging in sophistry. And, the question having been put, there can be no doubt as to the reply: the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is violence against the bourgeoisie; and the necessity of such violence is particularly called for, as Marx and Engels have repeatedly explained in detail (especially in The Civil War in France and in the preface to it), by the existence of militarism and a bureaucracy. But it is precisely these institutions that were non-existent in Britain and America in the seventies, when Marx made his observations (they do exist in Britain and in America now)!
Kautsky has to resort to trickery literally at every step to cover up his apostasy!
And note how he inadvertently betrayed his cloven hoof when he wrote: “peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way"!
In defining dictatorship, Kautsky tried his utmost to conceal from the reader the fundamental feature of this concept, namely, revolutionary violence. But now the truth is out: it is a question of the contrast between peaceful and violent revolutions.
That is the crux of the matter. Kautsky has to resort to all these subterfuges, sophistries and falsifications only to excuse himself from violent revolution, and to conceal his renunciation of it, his desertion to the side of the liberal labour policy, i.e., to the side of the bourgeoisie. That is the crux of the matter.
Kautsky the “historian” so shamelessly falsifies history that he “forgets” the fundamental fact that pre-monopoly capitalism-which actually reached its zenith in the seventies-was by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, which found most typical expression in Britain and in America, distinguished by a, relatively speaking, maximum fondness for peace and freedom. Imperialism, on the other hand, i.e., monopoly capitalism, which finally matured only in the twentieth century, is, by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, distinguished by a minimum fondness for peace and freedom, and by a maximum and universal development of militarism. To “fail to notice” this in discussing the extent to which a peaceful or violent revolution is typical or probable is to stoop to the level of a most ordinary lackey of the bourgeoisie.
Second subterfuge. The Paris Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it was elected by universal suffrage, i.e., without depriving the bourgeoisie of the franchise, i.e., “democratically”. And Kautsky says triumphantly: “... The dictatorship of the proletariat was for Marx” (or: according to Marx) “a condition which ;necessarily follows from pure democracy, if the proletariat forms the majority” (bei überwiegendem. Proletariat, S. 21).
This argument of Kautsky’s is so amusing that one truly suffers from a veritable embarras de richesses (an embarrassment due to the wealth ... of objections that can be made to it). Firstly, it is well known that the flower, the General Staff, the upper sections of the bourgeoisie, had fled from Paris to Versailles. In Versailles there was the “socialist” Louis Blanc-which, by the way, proves the falsity of Kautsky’s assertion that “all trends” of socialism took part in the Paris Commune. Is it not ridiculous to represent the division of the inhabitants of Paris into two belligerent camps, one of which embraced the entire militant and politically active section of the bourgeoisie, as “pure democracy” with “universal suffrage"?
Secondly, the Paris Commune waged war against Versailles as the workers’ government of France against the bourgeois government. What have “pure democracy” and “universal suffrage” to do with it, when Paris was deciding the fate of France? When Marx expressed the opinion that the Paris, Commune had committed a mistake in failing to seize the bank, which belonged to the whole of France,^[5] did he not proceed from the principles and practice of “pure democracy”?
In actual fact, it is obvious that Kautsky is writing in a country where the police forbid people to laugh “in crowds,” otherwise Kautsky would have been killed by ridicule.
Thirdly, I would respectfully remind Mr. Kautsky, who has Marx and Engels off pat, of the following appraisal of the Paris Commune given by Engels from the point of view of ... “pure democracy”:
“Have these gentlemen” (the anti-authoritarians) “ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon-all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?”^[6]
Here is your “pure democracy”! How Engels would have ridiculed the vulgar petty bourgeois, the “Social-Democrat” (in the French sense of the forties and the general European sense of 1915-18), who took it into his head to talk about “pure democracy” in a class-divided society!
But that’s enough. It is impossible to enumerate all Kautsky’s various absurdities, since every phrase he utters is a bottomless pit of apostasy.
Marx and Engels analysed the Paris Commune in a most detailed manner and showed that its merit lay in its attempt to smash, to break up the “ready-made state machinery”. Marx and Engels considered this conclusion to be so important that this was the only amendment they introduced in 1872 into the “obsolete” (in parts) programme of the Communist Manifesto.^[7] Marx and Engels showed that the Paris1 Commune had abolished the army and the bureaucracy, had abolished parliamentarism, had destroyed “that parasitic excrescence, the state,” etc. But the sage Kautsky, donning his nightcap, repeats the fairy-tale about “pure democracy,” which has been told a thousand times by liberal professors.
No wonder Rosa Luxemburg declared, 011 August 5, 1915, that German Social-Democracy was a stinking corpse.
Third subterfuge. “When we speak of the dictatorship as a form of government we cannot speak of the dictatorship of a class, since a class, as we have already pointed out, can only rule but not govern ....” It is “organisations” or “parties” that govern.
That is a muddle, a disgusting muddle, Mr. “Muddleheaded Counsellor"! Dictatorship is not a “form of government"; that is ridiculous nonsense. And Marx does not speak of the “form of government” but of the form or type of state. That is something altogether different, entirely different. It is altogether wrong, too, to say that a class cannot govern: such an absurdity could only have been uttered by a “parliamentary cretin,” who sees nothing but bourgeois parliaments and notices nothing but “ruling parties”. Any European country will provide Kautsky with examples of government by a ruling class, for instance, by the landowners in the Middle Ages, in spite of their insufficient organisation.
To sum up: Kautsky has in a most unparalleled manner distorted the concept dictatorship of the proletariat, and has turned Marx into a common liberal; that is, he himself has sunk to the level of a liberal who utters banal phrases about “pure democracy,” embellishing and glossing over the class content of bourgeois democracy, and shrinking, above all, from the use of revolutionary violence by the oppressed class. By so “interpreting” the concept “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” as to expunge the revolutionary violence of the oppressed class against its oppressors, Kautsky has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx. The renegade Bernstein has proved to be a more puppy compared with the renegade Kautsky.

---

Endnotes

[3] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gothia Programme (Marx and Eiigels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. II, pp. 32-33).

[4] See Engels’s Letter to A. Bebel of March 18-28, 1875 (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 357). Further, on pp. 253, 266 of this volume, Lenin quotes the same letter.

[5] This proposition is contained in Engels’s Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 581).

[6] Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 630.

[7] Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow, 1957, pp. 8-9.

Union Tops Bow to Profit Drive-Postal Workers Face Jobs Massacre Workers Vanguard No. 1028	9 August 2013

Union Tops Bow to Profit Drive-Postal Workers Face Jobs Massacre

In the past two years, postal workers have been subjected to waves of draconian layoffs linked to service cutbacks and post office closures. As many as 220,000 union jobs are at stake as Washington, goaded by capitalists standing to profit directly from privatization and by ideologues hell-bent on “downsizing” government, takes the ax to this essential social service. Under Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s plans, 211 mail-processing plants will have closed by the end of this year, with more closures projected after that. This alone will eliminate 35,000 jobs while slowing mail delivery. Meanwhile, trucking and custodial jobs are being contracted out to private companies in California, New Jersey and elsewhere. Particularly dependent on the postal service, the poor, the elderly and minorities are hit hardest as post office hours are cut and first-class mail delivery standards are relaxed.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is the second-largest employer in the country after Wal-Mart. Its unionized public workforce—some 550,000 workers, down from 683,000 in 2007—makes it a big, juicy target for the enemies of labor. The postal cutbacks are a special threat to black workers, who make up 21 percent of the workforce. USPS is also a significant employer of Latinos and Asians, and 40 percent of its workers are women.

For generations, the post office was one of the few places where black people could get decent jobs, including during the Jim Crow era when even college-educated blacks were systematically excluded from most occupations. At the same time, racist discrimination pervaded the postal service. Letter carriers were usually white so as to present a “white face” to the public, and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) continued to have separate black and white locals in the South until that practice was banned by the federal government in 1962, at the height of Southern civil rights struggles. Black postal workers’ struggles against racism in the workplace and inside the unions in the post-World War II era were an important component of the early civil rights movement. This made them a particular target of the purges of reds and union militants during the McCarthy period.

Universal postal service and national post offices were integral to industrial development under capitalism. The need for speedy mail delivery was a factor in the development of railroads in the 19th century and air transport in the 20th. In the past quarter century, however, postal workers have been hit by privatization, outsourcing and job slashing in a range of advanced capitalist countries, particularly in the European Union and Japan. In the Netherlands, privatization has progressed so far that, in conditions redolent of Charles Dickens’ time, mail sorting and delivery are done out of private houses by casual workers denied contracts and benefits and paid measly piecework wages. In Britain, the former Labour government opened the way to privatizations and forced through tens of thousands of job cuts, longer workweeks, speedup, effective pay cuts and office closures. The current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition is poised to sell off the Royal Mail outright. In response, the Communications Workers Union has threatened to ballot its members for a national strike.

In the U.S., the pretext for closures and layoffs is the deficits in the postal services budget. The “free market” apostles leading the attack scream that the postal service needs to make a profit. But mail is a basic public service, like garbage collection, running water, public transit, education and health care. The requirement that the post office generate all its own revenue dates back to the 1970 Postal Service Reorganization Act. In order to expose postal workers to “market discipline,” the Post Office Department was reorganized as the self-funded, semi-independent agency USPS, which nevertheless remained subject to Congressional oversight.

In 2002, the government declared that USPS was “overfunding” pensions paid into the federal Civil Service Retirement System to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Postal union officials argued that this money—in actuality, deferred wages—be used by USPS to stave off rate increases and otherwise keep the postal service “competitive.” Workers saw the question differently: they wanted full funding of their pensions and health care!

In 2006, Congress and the Bush White House cooked up a scheme, codified in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), to shuffle retiree health care funds onto the Treasury Department’s balance sheet, where they could be used to help offset the federal deficit. Originally supported by the NALC leadership, the measure gave USPS until 2016 to pay 50 years’ worth of projected health care benefits—as much as $100 billion—into a new Retiree Health Benefits Fund. This has led to the massive postal service deficits that have put wind in the sails of the union-busters and profiteers who want to break up USPS and sell it for a song.

The drive to ax postal jobs, while long in the making, accelerated in recent years as part of the bipartisan, one-sided class war against public employees unions, as working people and the poor are made to pay for the bosses’ economic crisis. Donahoe was elected in 2010 by a USPS Board of Governors packed with corporate lobbyists appointed by the White House. At every turn, Donahoe has sought to bust the postal unions and undermine the service while corporations such as Pitney Bowes, FedEx and UPS jockey for the profits they expect to get if USPS is privatized. When he demanded that Congress invalidate the clauses in union contracts that prohibit layoffs of workers with at least six years of service, he complained that he could not get rid of enough workers fast enough through attrition, buyouts, etc.

The latest attack originating from Capitol Hill is the “Postal Reform Act,” which was submitted on June 13 by California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, a point man for the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. The bill would end Saturday delivery for first-class mail and begin to phase out door-to-door delivery. Putting USPS under a “temporary governance authority,” the measure would ban layoff protections from union contracts and target 30 percent of post offices for closure in favor of contracted retail outlets.

1970 Postal Strike Defied the Law and Won

Facing these attacks, postal workers are crippled by union misleaders who have all but relinquished labor’s own weapons, not daring to even threaten a strike in defense of their members’ jobs and benefits. It took hard class struggle—not begging Congress or the White House—for labor to wrest real gains from the capitalist masters. This lesson is part of the postal workers’ own history, as seen in the 1970 national postal strike. Defying the government’s anti-strike laws, the strike won huge gains for postal workers and their unions and advanced the cause of the entire labor movement.

By 1970, the struggle for black rights and the U.S. rulers’ counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam had polarized society. While students and others staged mass antiwar demonstrations, workers’ wages were being rapidly eroded by inflation caused by the war. Exemplifying the dramatic rise in rank-and-file labor militancy, in March 1970 the New York branch of the NALC walked out in defiance of their national leadership. Like all federal workers, postal workers were banned from striking. On March 23, President Richard Nixon declared a national emergency and ordered 23,000 troops to occupy the post offices in New York. But the wildcat spread throughout the country, mostly against the will of the union leadership. With young and black militants taking the lead, postal workers defied back-to-work court injunctions. All told, over 210,000 workers struck nationally in the largest strike ever against the U.S. government.

It is not accidental that the action started in New York City, where a series of public workers strikes in defiance of the bosses’ laws had taken place, including the victorious 1966 NYC transit strike. In 1968, Mayor John Lindsay backed off from his threat to use the National Guard against striking sanitation workers after the Central Labor Council, under pressure from the city’s workers, threatened a general strike.

When the NYC letter carriers went out, the Spartacist League issued a leaflet on March 23 headlined: “Postal Strike Aids All Workers! Answer Any Troops’ Use by General Strike!” The leaflet pointed out: “The same army that Nixon is threatening to use in breaking the postal strike is being used to suppress the Vietnamese workers and peasants in order to keep Asia safe for American business.” It went on:

“To win this strike, the postal workers need an aggressive leadership, capable of bargaining hard against the government, going to jail if necessary, organizing mass support rallies, and appealing to other groups of workers. More than that, the postal workers need the active support of the entire labor movement.... If troops are brought in, the entire city labor movement must go out on strike.”

The leaflet concluded by demanding the right to strike for all workers and calling for the working class to break with the Democrats and Republicans and build its own party.

Nixon figured out quickly that you can’t sort the mail with bayonets. The Post Office Department quickly conceded wage increases and collective bargaining rights, with no reprisals. Not only was the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) formed out of the strike, but the postal wildcat helped spur the rapid growth of public sector unions in the 1970s. However, strikes by federal workers remained banned, and union officials increasingly used federal and state anti-strike laws, often including the threat of big fines and jail time for union leaders, as an excuse for shelving the strike weapon.

The labor bureaucracy’s subservience to anti-labor laws led to a crushing defeat for all workers when the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers strike was smashed. PATCO members were among those unionists who had been inspired by the 1970 postal strike, carrying out a number of job actions to win union recognition and better pay and working conditions prior to the decisive 1981 showdown with the government. Using plans drawn up by the Democratic Carter administration, Republican president Ronald Reagan moved to crush the strike he declared illegal. PATCO leaders were dragged off to jail in chains and military personnel were dispatched to help run the system.

With anger in the labor movement mounting against Reagan’s strikebreaking, the SL called for the unions in the industry to shut down the airports in defense of PATCO. But the craven AFL-CIO officialdom refused any such course of action, and the union was busted. The postal union misleaders did their bit by rushing to accept a sellout contract rather than strike alongside PATCO. The government’s smashing of PATCO ushered in a decades-long drive by the capitalists to gut the unions and drive down wages.

As giveback contracts and tiered wage scales increasingly became the norm, in 1984 postal workers were pressured to accept major contract concessions. Meanwhile, horrendous work conditions were leading to several cases of workers “going postal.” Commenting on this phenomenon, a letter carrier wrote to Workers Vanguard:

“There hasn’t been a nationwide strike since 1970, and particularly since PATCO was busted in 1981...management has turned the screws ever tighter, getting more work out of fewer workers.... Forced overtime is a way of life.... Back and neck injuries are endemic.... In the absence of strike action and with our union bureaucrats selling us out in every conceivable way, the intense pressure and exploitation have driven some postal workers to desperate and crazy acts. What we really need is some hard class struggle. It’ll take a workers revolution to sweep away our exploiters once and for all.”

— “The Post Office Drives You Crazy,” WV No. 542, 10 January 1992

Begging Democrats, Rejecting Class Struggle

Postal workers today are weakened by being divided into many unions. The largest, with over 200,000 members each, are the NALC and the APWU, with smaller numbers in the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (part of the Laborers union). In 2011, the APWU agreed to a concessionary contract while keeping a no-layoff clause for six-year employees. The other three unions got similar contracts through binding arbitration.

Faced with a full-bore assault on jobs and benefits, the union officials have readily accepted a framework in which the only two choices posed are dismantling the postal service or keeping the post office intact by screwing the workers! Calling to “Save America’s Postal Service,” they pitch the problem as the postal service being uniquely and unfairly burdened by the legal requirements for funding these benefits. In thrall to the capitalist profit motive, the union tops complain that the mandate to “pre-fund” retiree health care prevents USPS from competing on level ground with private companies like UPS. They also object to the legal ban on developing new products like secure e-mail, which prevents the postal service from grabbing market share from Google.

The kind of “struggle” offered by the leaders of the APWU and NALC is to beg the class enemy in Congress, wooing sympathetic Democrats whom they sell to the membership as “friends of labor,” supplemented by the occasional street protest. Reformists like the International Socialist Organization and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) aid and abet these trade-union bureaucrats in their diversionary schemes. Both groups enthusiastically back Communities and Postal Workers United (CPWU), which was founded in May 2012 at a Chicago conference of Labor Notes, a social-democratic publication associated with the Solidarity organization.

CPWU has mainly organized public-relations stunts and civil disobedience actions in order to pressure USPS, Congress and the White House. Thus a four-day “D.C. Hunger Strike to Save the Post Office” in June 2012, heavily built by the PSL’s ANSWER coalition, was centered on lobbying Congress. The PSL has even created a Web site, Justicefirst.org, where anyone can print out the placard “Saturday Delivery: The People Want It & It’s the Law!”—a fair summation of the labor bureaucrats’ cringing legalism.

To placate postal workers’ anger, the NALC and other postal unions endorsed March 24 rallies to save Saturday mail delivery. Protests against budget cuts, closures and mail delay took place in 112 cities and drew thousands of union members. Held in out-of-the-way locations on a Sunday, when post offices are closed, these rallies exemplified the role of the reformists as water boys for the bureaucracy. At a rally in Maryland that his group helped organize, PSL leader Brian Becker stood shoulder to shoulder with APWU and NALC officials, who were only too happy to let the workers blow off some steam. Giving their efforts a faintly militant gloss, Becker paid lip service to the 1970 strike while neglecting to mention that this was a wildcat strike opposed by most union officials and deemed illegal by the state.

Budgetary shenanigans and outright thievery of workers’ pensions and health benefits by the capitalists are nothing new. In the private sector, bankruptcy has long been a favorite method of airline, auto and coal bosses to dissolve union contracts and discharge pension and retiree health care obligations into thin air. States and municipalities have routinely underfunded pensions or stopped paying altogether in times of budgetary crisis—in Detroit today, this means leaving tens of thousands to twist in the wind. Meanwhile, Wall Street regularly scrapes the cream off the top of massive pension fund investments, to say nothing of profits derived from the 401(k) scam that has largely replaced defined-benefit pensions since the 1980s.

Throughout the labor movement, a new leadership is needed to chart a course of class struggle against the capitalists and their government. Fighting for such a leadership is a key part of building a workers party that can lead all the exploited and oppressed in sweeping away the racist capitalist order through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, we can begin to rebuild this society through a planned, socialist economy for the benefit of all. 

Zimmerman Verdict—21st Century Dred Scott Decision-There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Workers Vanguard No. 1028	9 August 2013

Zimmerman Verdict—21st Century Dred Scott Decision-There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!

We reprint below a leaflet issued by the Spartacist League on July 17 and distributed at some of the protests that broke out around the country in the week after George Zimmerman walked. At all levels—municipal, state and federal—the courts are an integral part of the bourgeois state apparatus, dishing out plenty of justice for the capitalist ruling class at one end while workers, minorities and the poor get less than none at the other. The exploited and the oppressed will get due justice only once the capitalist state machinery is swept away through socialist revolution. The reprint incorporates a factual correction.

*   *   *

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 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.

The acquittal of Zimmerman—by a jury without a single black person on it—was no aberration in the American justice system. On the contrary, that system worked according to script. Here was a case study in the machinery of courts, cops and prosecutors whose job is to maintain and defend a system rooted in the brutal exploitation of the many by the few—a system built on a bedrock of racial oppression, from chattel slavery to wage slavery.

The only unusual thing was that Trayvon wasn’t gunned down by a cop, the fate of so many young black men in this country. The Zimmerman verdict coincided with the release of the movie Fruitvale Station, based on the last day of Oscar Grant’s life. A 22-year-old black man, Grant was shot in the back by a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop on New Year’s Day, 2009, as he lay handcuffed and prone on the floor of the Oakland station. The movie stands out for depicting Oscar Grant as a human being with all the strengths and frailties of a young black man in capitalist America. This cuts against the grain of this society, where black youth are written off as violent predators, as suspects who are guilty until proven innocent.

It wasn’t George Zimmerman on trial in that Florida courtroom, it was Trayvon Martin. His “crime” was being black in America. After killing Martin, Zimmerman was released without charges by the cops. Only six weeks later did a state prosecutor file an indictment. The same prosecutor had just won a case against a 31-year-old black mother, Marissa Alexander, who was given 20 years for firing a warning shot into a wall when threatened with violent attack by her husband. There was no such zeal when it came to prosecuting Zimmerman. It wasn’t that the prosecution didn’t have a case. The truth is that this wasn’t their field of expertise, which is railroading black people to prison.

The judge ruled that race, the central issue in the case, could not be raised in court. But racist fear and loathing of black people was at the core of the defense case. By repeatedly pounding a dummy into the courtroom floor as “evidence” that it was the lanky teenager who assaulted the far heftier Zimmerman, they turned “the victim into the predator and the predator into the victim,” in the words of black academic Robin Kelley. Contempt and derision for the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, the young black woman who was talking to Martin on his cell phone while he was stalked by the “creepy-ass cracker” Zimmerman, oozed from the courtroom to the media.

When the verdict was announced, black preachers and Democratic Party politicians scrambled to contain the outrage, appealing for peace. Replying to the call for calm, Gary Younge wrote in his London Guardian (14 July) column: “Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.” The role of the preachers and bourgeois politicians is to serve the interests of the rulers of this society by maintaining people’s illusions in the “justice” system. This is what’s behind Al Sharpton’s call for protests at federal courthouses on July 20 to pressure the Justice Department to bring a civil rights case against Zimmerman.

Attorney General Eric Holder may be a black man, but he is the top cop in the vast state apparatus—the police, courts and prisons—whose purpose is to enforce the subjugation of the working class and the oppressed to the capitalist exploiters. As Richard Pryor so incisively put it, “You go down there looking for justice; that’s what you find: just us”—that is, prisons overflowing with black people. As for the kind of investigations the Obama/Holder Justice Department are fervently pursuing, these are mainly aimed at silencing “whistle-blowers” like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden for exposing U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars, drone attacks and torture chambers targeting brown-skinned peoples around the globe as well as their domestic spying apparatus. The savagery perpetrated against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and detainees at Guantánamo is but a concentrated expression of the systematic brutality of the cops and prisons on U.S. soil.

Obama, the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism who keeps a list of people for targeted assassinations abroad, used the Zimmerman verdict to piously ask “if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence.” Actually, if Trayvon Martin had been armed he might be alive today, although he would also most likely be behind bars. Zimmerman invoked Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which, like similar laws in other states, allows for the use of deadly force by anyone claiming “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary. In this country, any black kid in a hoodie is enough for someone to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. By eliminating retreat as a criterion for self-defense, these laws are a license to kill. And as shown in the case of Marissa Alexander, black people are not allowed such ground to stand on.

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.

It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, with 200,000 black troops, guns in hand, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. But the promise of black freedom was soon betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, which allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. It will take a third American Revolution—a proletarian socialist revolution that breaks the chains of capitalist wage slavery—to finish the Civil War.

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.

But there are real battalions of organized labor, like the overwhelmingly black longshore unions in the Florida ports of Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa. Their labor is essential to the profitability of U.S. imperialism. In this lies their social power to take on the capitalist rulers. In turn, such workers provide a critical link to the defense of the black poor.

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.

Workers Vanguard No. 1028	9 August 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

On Bourgeois Justice

(Quote of the Week)

The following excerpt from The ABC of Communism, a textbook for the education of Communist cadres in the early Soviet workers state, explains how the ruling class in capitalist society uses its “justice” system to repress the working class and the oppressed, whatever democratic trappings that system is wrapped in.

Among the various institutions of bourgeois society which serve to oppress and deceive the working masses, must be mentioned bourgeois justice. This estimable institution is carried on under the guidance of laws passed in the interests of the exploiting class. Whatever the composition of the court, its decisions are restricted in accordance with the volumes of statutes in which are incorporated all the privileges of capital and all the lack of privileges of the toiling masses.

As far as the organization of bourgeois justice is concerned, this is in perfect harmony with the characteristics of the bourgeois State. Where the bourgeois State is comparatively frank in its methods, where it is free from hypocrisy in its determination that the decisions of the courts shall be favourable to the ruling class, there the judges are appointed from above; but even when they are elected, only the members of the privileged stratum are entitled to vote. When the masses have been sufficiently brought to heel by capital, so that they are duly submissive and regard the laws of the bourgeois State as their own laws, the workers are permitted to a certain extent to be their own judges, just as they are allowed to vote exploiters and their henchmen into parliament. Thus originated trial by jury, thanks to which legal decisions made in the interests of capital can masquerade as decisions made by the “whole people.”

—Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (1920)

 

§ 23 The dictatorship of the proletariat

For the realization of the communist system the proletariat must have all authority and all power in its hands. The prolet ariat cannot overthrow the old world unless it has power in its hands, unless for a time it becomes the ruling class. Manifestly the bourgeoisie will not abandon its position without a fight. For the bourgeoisie, communism signifies the loss of its former power, the loss of its 'freedom' to extort blood and sweat from the workers; the loss of its right to rent, interest, and profit. Consequently the communist revolution of the proletariat, the communist transformation of society, is fiercely resisted by the exploiters. It follows that the principal task of the workers' government is to crush this opposition ruthlessly. Precisely because the opposition will inevitably be so embittered, it is necessary that the workers' authority, the proletarian rule, shall take the form of a dictatorship. Now 'dictatorship' signifies very strict methods of government and a resolute crushing of enemies. It is obvious that in such a state of affairs there can be no talk of 'freedom' for everyone. The dictatorship of the proletariat is incompatible with freedom for the bourgeoisie. This is the very reason why the dictatorship of the proletariat is needed: to deprive the bourgeoisie of freedom; to bind it hand and foot; to make it impossible for it to carry on a struggle against the revolutionary proletariat. The more vigorous the resistance of the bourgeoisie, the more desperate the mobilization of its forces, the more threatening its attitude, the sterner and harsher must be the proletarian dictatorship. In extreme cases the workers' government must not hesitate to use the method of the terror. Only when the suppression of the exploiters is complete, when they have ceased to resist, when it is no longer in their power to injure the working class, will the proletarian dictatorship grow progressively milder. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie, little by little, will fuse with the proletariat; the workers' State will gradually die out; society as a whole will be transformed into a communist society in which there will be no classes.

Under the dictatorship of the proletariat (a temporary institution) the means of production will from the nature of the case belong, not to society as a whole, but only to the proletariat, to its State organization. For the time being, the working class, that is the majority of the population, monopolizes the means of production. Consequently there does not yet exist communist production in all its completeness. There still exists the division of society into classes; there is still a governing class (the proletariat); all the means of production are monopolized by this new governing class; there is still a State authority (the proletarian authority) which crushes its enemies. But as the resistance of the sometime capitalists, landlords, bankers, generals, and bishops, is crushed, in like measure the system of proletarian dictatorship will without any revolution undergo transformation into communism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not only an instrument for the crushing of enemies; it is likewise a lever for effecting economic transformation. Private ownership of the means of production must be replaced by social ownership; the bourgeoisie must be deprived of the means of production and exchange, must be 'expropriated'. Who will and can do this? Obviously no isolated individual could do it, even if he should be of proletarian origin. If it were to be done by an isolated individual or even by isolated groups of individuals, at the best it would be nothing more than a dividing up, and at the worst it would be a mere act of robbery. We understand, therefore, why the expropriation of the bourgeoisie must be effected by the organized power of the proletariat. Now this organized power takes the form of the dictatorial workers' State.

Objections to the dictatorship of the proletariat arise from various quarters. First of all come the anarchists. They say that they are in revolt against all authority and against every kind of State, whereas the communist bolsheviks are the sustainers of the Soviet Government. Every kind of government, they continue, involves the abuse of power and the limitation of freedom. For this reason it is necessary to overthrow the bolsheviks, the Soviet Government, the dictatorship of the proletariat. No dictatorship is necessary, no State is necessary. Such are the arguments of the anarchists. Only in appearance is their criticism revolutionary. In actual fact the anarchists do not stand more to the left, but more to the right than the bolsheviks. Why, indeed, do we need the dictatorship? We need it for the organized destruction of the bourgeois régime; we need it that we may crush the enemies of the proletariat by force. Quite openly we say, by force. The dictatorship is the axe in the hands of the proletariat. Anyone who is opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat is one who is afraid of decisive action, is afraid of hurting the bourgeoisie, is no revolutionist. When we have completely vanquished the bourgeoisie, the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat will no longer exist. But as long as the life-and-death struggle continues it is absolutely incumbent upon the working class to crush its enemies utterly. AN EPOCH OF PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP MUST INEVITABLY INTERVENE BETWEEN A CAPITALIST AND A COMMUNIST SOCIETY.

Next, as objectors to the dictatorship, come the social democrats, and in especial the mensheviks. These worthies have completely forgotten what they wrote about the matter in former days. In our old programme, drawn up by ourselves and the mensheviks together, it is expressly stated: 'An essential condition of the social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say the conquest of political power by the proletariat, which will enable the workers to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters.' The mensheviks signed this statement. But when the time came for action, they raised a clamour against the crushing of the freedom of the bourgeoisie, against the suppression of bourgeois newspapers, against the bolshevist 'reign of terror', and so on. Even Plekhanoff, at one time, thoroughly approved of the most ruthless measures against the bourgeoisie, saying that we could deprive the bourgeois of their electoral rights, and so on. Nowadays the mensheviks have forgotten all this; they have taken refuge in the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Finally, a number of moral considerations are brought into the argument against us. We are told that we form our judgements like the savage Hottentots. The Hottentot says: 'When I steal my neighbour's wife, it is good; when he steals my wife, it is bad.' The bolsheviks, it is contended, resemble these savages, for they say: 'When the bourgeoisie uses force to crush the proletariat, it is bad; but when the proletariat uses force to crush the bourgeoisie, it is good.' Those who argue thus, do not know what they are talking about. In the case of the Hottentots we are concerned with two equal individuals who are stealing one another's wives for identical reasons. But the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are not on equal terms. Proletarians comprise an enormous class, bourgeois form a comparatively small group. The proletariat is fighting for the liberation of all mankind; but the bourgeoisie is fighting for the maintenance of oppression, wars, exploitation. The proletariat is fighting for communism, the bourgeoisie for the preservation of capitalism. If capitalism and communism were one and the same thing, then the bourgeoisie and the proletariat could be compared to the two Hottentots. The proletariat is fighting solely on behalf of the new social order. Whatever helps in the struggle is good; whatever hinders, is bad.

Convicted for Revealing Crimes of U.S. Imperialism-Free Bradley Manning!     Workers Vanguard No. 1028	9 August 2013

Convicted for Revealing Crimes of U.S. Imperialism-Free Bradley Manning!

Bradley Manning, the courageous and self-sacrificing truth-teller who further revealed the exploitative everyday workings of U.S. imperialism as well as its heinous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was found guilty by a military judge on charges carrying a possible 136-year sentence. Imprisoned for more than three years before trial, including torture in solitary confinement, Manning persevered, aiming to change U.S. policy through exposure and public debate.

Manning’s conviction in this court-martial was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, he pleaded guilty to lesser charges that could put him away for 20 years. That was not good enough for the vindictive U.S. government. Now in the sentencing phase, this show trial is a government experiment in political cryogenics to see how deeply it can freeze free speech and dissent by making an example of Manning. It is intended to set the stage for prosecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, still sheltered in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while U.S. lawmakers scream for his blood. Throwing the book at Bradley Manning also foreshadows what the U.S. would like to do to Edward Snowden, who was just granted temporary asylum in Russia. Fundamentally, the prosecution of Manning is intended to frighten everyone else into passive acceptance of U.S. outrages at home and abroad.

Manning was not convicted of aiding the enemy. This not-insignificant development was widely applauded by the capitalist press, which felt directly threatened by the prosecution’s assertion that publication of documents constitutes direct or indirect aid to the enemy because someone, somewhere, sometime might use that information against the U.S. government. However, the judge left open the future use of this ominous catchall by denying a defense motion to throw out the charge. In the end, the court merely found that the prosecution had not proved its case on that count.

Manning’s defense team eventually got the government to name two of the three enemies Manning allegedly aided (Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula), but the third remained classified information. A July 27 posting on the ProPublica investigative journalism Web site reports that the Pentagon told them that “revealing who we’re actually at war with would do serious damage to national security.” ProPublica added: “The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more.”

Whether targeted by the CIA or the Pentagon, the people being shot at and bombed are aware that they are being shot and bombed. Some elements in the American ruling class are uncomfortable with the Pentagon’s “logic.” The Obama administration’s fanatical prosecution of whistle-blowers alarms some. Even more are aghast at the revelations by Edward Snowden et al. of the boundless domestic spying on the population, which includes them too. This disquiet in ruling circles no doubt had an impact on the judge.

Among other charges, Manning was convicted of six counts under the 1917 Espionage Act. The prosecution reached into a Cold War-era tool kit to construct a red scare and portray Manning as an “anarchist.” Civil libertarians complain that “whistle-blowing” is not spying, and they’re right. But in fact, the draconian Espionage Act has historically been wielded to repress domestic political opposition to imperialist war.

John Reed, a journalist and founding member of the American Communist Party, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for articles against World War I published in the radical journal, The Masses. Reed and others associated with the journal defeated the government in court, but the Feds then yanked the publication’s mailing permit because it “skipped” an issue—the one seized by the government as allegedly seditious! Reed aptly summed up the workings of capitalist “justice”: “In America law is merely the instrument for good or evil of the most powerful interest, and there are no Constitutional safeguards worth the powder to blow them to hell” (“One Solid Month of Liberty,” The Masses, September 1917).

It is urgently necessary to continue to fight in defense of Bradley Manning. The organized labor movement, minorities, all opponents of the depredations of U.S. imperialism have an interest in this fight. As we wrote in “Truth-Teller on Trial: Free Bradley Manning,” (WV No. 1026, 14 June): “Lifting the veil on the U.S. war machine was a gutsy act of conscience that objectively helps the victims and opponents of the imperialist system.” Key information from the government’s own sources that Manning provided to WikiLeaks included:

• Iraq war logs, including a civilian death count, showing that for every dead Iraqi officially classified as a combatant, two civilian men, women or children were killed

• U.S. military support to repression of political dissidents in Iraq and Afghanistan and tolerance of torture as policy toward political prisoners

• Guantánamo detainee files showing the innocence of prisoners and their torture by the U.S. military

• FBI training of torturers for the deposed Mubarak regime in Egypt

• State Department-led opposition to raising the minimum wage in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere

• the Obama administration’s drone bombing campaigns in Yemen

• Hillary Clinton’s authorization of theft of the U.N. Secretary General’s DNA [!]

• the notorious “collateral damage” video showing the military’s blood lust in gunning down Reuters reporters and Iraqi civilians

In publicizing this material, and more, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange have helped open the eyes of the working class to the systematic workings of the state run by and for the capitalist class. But as Marxists, we understand that the whole system of capitalist exploitation cannot be changed by simply providing information. This system is based on the exploitation of labor for private profit, buttressed in the U.S. by systematic racial oppression. Imperialist war and subjugation of the Third World are inherent outgrowths of capitalism and will continue until politically conscious workers sweep away the whole system and replace it with an egalitarian socialist society.

Frame-Ups and Omissions by the Capitalist Press

The prosecution of Bradley Manning has provided a diagnostic X-ray of the capitalist media. The New York Times, which flatters itself with the motto “All the news that’s fit to print,” did not initially find the hugely valuable and unassailable evidence of U.S. war crimes that Manning offered them “fit to print.” Neither did the Washington Post. So Manning submitted the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and a trove of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. The Times did not find the lengthy pre-trial detention and torture of Bradley Manning fit to print either; indeed, the paper barely covered the case until its own public editor lodged a protest. Then the coup de grace: upon his conviction, the Times ran a creepy, character-assassinating portrait of Manning as a psychologically unstable social misfit on the front page.

There is a purpose driven by big economic interests that dictates the behavior of the so-called “free press.” As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote, “Under capitalism, a newspaper is a capitalist enterprise, a means of enrichment, a medium of information and entertainment for the rich, and an instrument for duping and cheating the mass of working people” (“Work of People’s Commissariat for Education,” 7 February 1921). In defense of the interests of their class, the government and its mouthpieces in the bourgeois press portray their opponents as criminal and/or of unsound mind. By its own perverse standards, what the ruling class considers normal is dropping atomic weapons, ordering drone attacks on civilians and unleashing the Lieutenant Calleys who burned down entire villages in Vietnam, and later the kill-crazy mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The government’s need to conduct its dirty work in secret and the subservience of the capitalist media to their masters made it a massive struggle simply to get the news about Manning’s court-martial. Hundreds of journalists were denied media credentials by the Army, including those from Workers Vanguard who managed anyway to get into the Fort Meade courtroom to cover the initial part of the trial.

We are indebted to a few politically committed independent journalists, without whom little to nothing would be known about the dirty war against Manning. For a year and a half, Alexa O’Brien published the only available transcripts of the pre-trial proceedings. Her daily reports from the court-martial punctured the “managed obscurity” (her term), despite intimidation by armed soldiers snooping over her shoulder in Fort Meade’s media pit. Daily trial reports by Nathan Fuller on the Bradley Manning Support Network’s Web site and by Kevin Gosztola on the Firedoglake Web site have also been invaluable. Since the U.S. military refuses to release transcripts of the pre-trial hearings and court-martial, the Freedom of the Press Foundation raised funds to hire court stenographers for those sessions that were open to the public.

The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. vastly increased its security apparatuses to spy on, well, almost everyone. This created its own security nightmare for the ruling class. The Augean stables of classified information require armies of employees with digital trowels to move the crap around. Close to five million people have security clearances, of which more than 1.4 million are cleared for “top secret” material. Bradley Manning was one with the moral and political conscience to oppose what he discovered U.S. imperialism does every day all over the world, and he had the rare courage to act on his convictions, at great personal sacrifice. His act encouraged Edward Snowden to reveal PRISM—the National Security Agency’s vacuuming of metadata from virtually everyone’s e-mails and Web searches, in cahoots with corporations like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Snowden flew to Hong Kong to reveal the nefarious workings of the U.S. intelligence net and then spent more than a month in the transit zone of a Moscow airport while fighting for asylum, which Russia has granted him for one year. The spectacle of Attorney General Eric Holder, who presides over a justice system that massively incarcerates black people and railroads many to death row, promising Moscow that Snowden would not be tortured (like Bradley Manning) or face the death penalty, was a hoot. Here in the “belly of the beast,” it is delightful to see U.S. imperialism get a black eye and have its pretensions to rule the world on behalf of “democracy” further exposed for the lie it is.

There has been vastly more outrage expressed by bourgeois “public opinion” over Snowden’s revelations than Bradley Manning’s because the former hits the wealthy where they live: their e-mails, their Internet search histories, the GPS data on their smart phones. By contrast, Manning was the lowly working-class soldier who was supposed to protect their class privileges by enforcing U.S. domination of the globe.

In These Times, a social-patriotic journal described by the Democratic Socialists of America as “DSA-ish,” defended NSA spying and denounced Snowden. A July 2 article by Louis Nayman headlined “In Defense of PRISM” railed that a government contractor who runs with classified data to “regimes who fine, imprison and rub out public critics” is not a “People’s Hero.” This was a bit much even for the Democratic Party stalwarts of the DSA, which subsequently printed a polite rebuttal to Nayman, who is described as a longtime union organizer. We suggest that Mr. Nayman register as an agent of a foreign power in the labor movement—the capitalist class.

Daniel Ellsberg, who more than 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies designed to cover up what the U.S. was really doing in Vietnam, has laudably and energetically defended Bradley Manning. He expresses the views of civil libertarians who think that the prosecution of whistle-blowers damages U.S. prestige in the world and feel embarrassed by the protests of rival imperialist powers. Cold War liberal anti-Communism dripped from Ellsberg’s article in the London Guardian (10 June), which, alluding to the East German state spy agency, was titled: “Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America.” Ellsberg has no fundamental problem with NSA spying; he just wants an informed public to pressure Congress to keep U.S. imperialism’s bloodhounds on a somewhat shorter leash.

Liberals who uphold the fraud of U.S. “democracy” against Soviet-era and Stasi “totalitarianism” prettify the brutally violent rule of the rapacious U.S. ruling class that Bradley Manning exposed. As Marxists, we value and fight hard for democratic rights, which make it easier for labor and the oppressed to fight in their own interests. What the liberals will not tell you is that democratic rights are extended to the working class and poor as gains of arduous class and social struggles; they are not granted from on high by an enlightened ruling class. Moreover, democratic rights in capitalist society are ephemeral and can be taken away in an instant.

Liberal darling Franklin Delano Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans during World War II, adopting the racist argument that this “enemy race” would soon commit sabotage because they had not done so yet. Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were gunned down in Hampton’s apartment in Chicago in 1969 for challenging systematic racist oppression. The same state persecution of anti-racist, anti-capitalist fighters continues today in the frame-up and life sentence of award-winning black journalist and MOVE supporter Mumia Abu-Jamal and the unspeakably cruel imprisonment of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who is dying of cancer. The prosecution of Bradley Manning and the drive to capture Edward Snowden and Julian Assange form part of this larger picture.

As opposed to Ellsberg, who argues that U.S. government overreach carries a whiff of Stalinist rule, we argue that the worst crimes of Stalinism were not ham-fisted repression, of which we Trotskyists were the first and foremost victims, but its appeasement of capitalist rule worldwide by abandoning the proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist goals of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. This led, ultimately, to capitalist counterrevolution and economic immiseration in the former Soviet Union and across East Europe. We Trotskyists fought for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. Now, without Soviet power to check the hand of Washington, American imperialism is riding unbridled over most of the world. On the domestic front, a prostrate labor officialdom and low tide of class and social struggle help enable the government to get away with rampant surveillance and shredding of democratic rights.

The Spartacist League seeks to win opponents of this system to an understanding that it will take a series of socialist revolutions around the world to overturn the capitalist order and establish an internationally planned and collectivized economy based on human need, not private profit. Indeed, communism is America’s and the world’s last best hope. 

*   *   *

Donate to Bradley Manning’s Legal Defense!

The Partisan Defense Committee has donated to Bradley Manning’s defense and encourages others to do the same. Send checks or money orders earmarked “Manning defense” and payable to: The Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Avenue #41, Oakland, CA 94610.

Malcolm X on 1963 March:“Farce on Washington”

Workers Vanguard No. 1028	9 August 2013

Malcolm X on 1963 March:“Farce on Washington”

Anger over the exoneration of Trayvon Martin’s killer will no doubt swell attendance at the August 24 rally marking the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. It is precisely the role of Al Sharpton and the other Democrats and preachers heading up the event to channel indignation over such atrocities into support for their program of trying to prod the U.S. government—the chief overseer of the racist capitalist system—to bring justice.

It is fitting that Sharpton & Co. are celebrating the 28 August 1963 March on Washington. Officially hailed as an iconic event of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington was expressly organized to enforce the domination of the “moderate” leaders over the massive and convulsive battles for black rights. Dubbed the “farce on Washington” by Malcolm X, the event was organized in collaboration with the Kennedy White House, which wanted to stop any militant struggle in its tracks as well as to corral votes for the Democratic Party.

The main immediate aim of the March on Washington was to get a civil rights bill passed through pressuring President Kennedy. But when Kennedy called the “representative leaders” into the Oval Office, they quickly found out who was calling the shots. The destination of the march was changed from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial. March leaders deleted a “statement to the president” and a call to confront Congress from the event’s official handbook. Participation was denied to “subversive” groups and speeches were censored. John Lewis, then a leader of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and today a Georgia Congressman, was not allowed to deliver the part of his remarks criticizing the Democrats. Even the acclaimed writer James Baldwin was censored: Fearing he would extemporize, organizers would not let him read his own speech, which instead was delivered by the actor Burt Lancaster.

On November 10, some two months after the March on Washington, Malcolm X gave his famous “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in Detroit. He pointed out that it was only when militants in Birmingham, Alabama, started fighting back against racist violence and cop attacks that the government started to profess support for black people’s rights. As Malcolm put it: “And right after that Kennedy got on the television and said ‘this is a moral issue.’ That’s when he said he was going to put out a civil rights bill.” With Martin Luther King pursuing his liberal-pacifist strategy while protesters were being brutally beaten, Malcolm deemed him and the other well-known leaders “fallen idols,” a sentiment shared by many activists, both South and North.

Accounts of the mass struggle for black equality often omit the ferment that was shaking Northern cities, where for years there were protests against rat-infested housing, decrepit and segregated schools, unemployment and murderous cop terror. By the early 1960s, there were as many protests in the North and West as in the South. Over the summer of 1963, the Justice Department recorded 1,412 separate civil rights demonstrations across the country. In New York City in 1963 and ’64, thousands of Harlem residents formed tenants councils, organizing to withhold rent to force services and repairs from the slumlords.

The images of Birmingham cops unleashing attack dogs on black protesters spurred explosions of anger by Northern blacks, not just over Jim Crow in the South but also over the raw racist reality that was their own American nightmare. When a black minister addressing a Harlem rally in support of the Birmingham demonstrators intoned, “I did not come here to inflame you,” a voice in the crowd shouted out, “We want to be inflamed.”

The largest of the early Northern protests was the 23 June 1963 “Walk to Freedom March” in Detroit—an event that is barely a footnote in official histories of the civil rights movement. Organized by Rev. Albert Cleage and Rev. C.L. Franklin of the Detroit Council for Human Rights, the march was meant, in Cleage’s words, to “show people how we feel about Birmingham but also about conditions here in Detroit” (Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour [2006]). Up to 200,000 people marched along Woodward Avenue to Cobo Arena, where King gave an early rendition of his “I have a dream” speech.

The purpose of the march was the same as that of the March on Washington two months later, with King parading at the front along with Detroit’s mayor and social-democratic auto union bureaucrat Walter Reuther. In the words of Malcolm X, they were the “clowns” leading this “circus.” But unlike the celebrity-studded, tightly censored Washington affair, it was working-class, black Detroit that was in the streets that day, and many had little sympathy for King’s “turn the other cheek” nostrums. Behind a group of children singing “We Shall Overcome” was a contingent of young men carrying a sign reading, “Negroes With Guns Shall Overcome.”

In a letter to the mayor and police commissioner following the march, King praised the Detroit cops, stating, “You have proved to the Negro citizenry of your community that you are a friend rather than an enemy.” For King’s friends in uniform, it was soon time for business as usual. On July 5, they blew away black prostitute Cynthia Scott, shooting her twice in the back and again in the stomach as she lay bleeding on the ground. After the city prosecutor called the shooting justified, 3,000 demonstrators massed outside police headquarters shouting, “Get the killer cops!”

In his “Grass Roots” speech, Malcolm X scathingly recounted how the prominent black spokesmen co-opted sentiment for a militant march in Washington at the behest of the White House, which, he said, was “scared to death” that “this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital.” Malcolm said:

“They called in [Roy] Wilkins; they called in [A. Philip] Randolph; they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, ‘Call it off.’ Kennedy said, ‘look, you all are letting this thing go too far.’ And Old Tom said, ‘Boss, I can’t stop it, because I didn’t start it.’... And that old shrewd fox, he said, ‘If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it.’...

“And as they took it over, it lost its militancy.... Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.

“They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out of town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown.”

The liberal-led civil rights movement was able to uproot official Jim Crow segregation in the South, which had become economically outmoded and an embarrassment to the U.S. rulers internationally. But it could not tackle the pervasive oppression of the black masses that is rooted in the U.S. capitalist economy. In fact, the movement ran into a brick wall when it came North. The basic truth is that black emancipation requires sweeping capitalism away through socialist revolution.

For Marxists, Malcolm X was a contradictory figure whose political motion was uncompleted at the time of his assassination in 1965. His break from the religiosity of the Black Muslims was partial and his eclectic politics of Third Worldism and black nationalism were incapable of generating a program that could achieve black liberation. But he was hated and feared by the capitalist rulers for telling the truth about racist America. Malcolm X deeply understood that the U.S. government and its representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans, are deadly enemies of black freedom. For workers and youth today, this understanding would be a good beginning. While liberals and reformist “socialists” fawn over the 1963 March on Washington, we honor Malcolm X, who recognized bourgeois hypocrites and treacherous black “leaders” when he saw them. 

Malcolm X on the March on Washington, 1964

From The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964. 278-281.

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling and deluding effects of so-called "integration." It was that "Farce in Washington," I call it. The idea of a mass of blacks marching on Washington was originally the brainchild of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters' A. Philip Randolph. For twenty or more years the March on Washington idea had floated around among Negroes. And, spontaneously, suddenly now, that idea caught on. Overalled rural Southern Negroes, small town Negroes, Northern ghetto Negroes, even thousands of previously Uncle Tom Negroes began talking "March!" Nothing since Joe Louis had so coalesced the masses of Negroes. Groups of Negroes were talking of getting to Washington any way they could--in rickety old cars, on buses, hitch-hiking--walking, even, if they had to. They envisioned thousands of black brothers converging together upon Washington--to lie down in the streets, on airport runways, on government lawns--demanding of the Congress and the White House some concrete civil rights action. This was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless. Predominantly, it was young Negroes, defiant of whatever might be the consequences, sick and tired of the black man's neck under the white man's heel. The white man had plenty of good reasons for nervous worry. The right spark--some unpredictable emotional chemistry--could set off a black uprising. The government knew that thousands of milling, angry blacks not only could completely disrupt Washington--but they could erupt in Washington. The White House speedily invited in the major civil rights Negro "leaders." They were asked to stop the planned March. They truthfully said they hadn't begun it, they had no control over it--the idea was national, spontaneous, unorganized, and leaderless. In other words, it was a black powder keg. Any student of how "integration" can weaken the black man's movement was about to observe a master lesson. The White House, with a fanfare of international publicity, "approved," "endorsed," and "welcomed" a March on Washington. The big civil rights organizations right at this time had been publicly squabbling about donations. The New York Times had broken the story. The NAACP had charged that other agencies' demonstrations, highly publicized, had attracted a major part of the civil rights donations--while the NAACP got left holding the bag, supplying costly bail and legal talent for the other organizations' jailed demonstrators. It was like a movie. The next scene was the "big six" civil rights Negro "leaders" meeting in New York City with the white head of a big philanthropic agency. They were told that their money--wrangling in public was damaging their image. And a reported $800,000 was donated to a United Civil Rights Leadership council that was quickly organized by the "big six." Now, what had instantly achieved black unity? The white man's money. What string was attached to the money? Advice. Not only was there this donation, but another comparable sum was promised, for sometime later on, after the March. . . obviously if all went well. The original "angry" March on Washington was now about to be entirely changed. Massive international publicity projected the "big six" as March on Washington leaders. It was news to those angry grass-roots Negroes steadily adding steam to their March plans. They probably assumed that now those famous "leaders" were endorsing and joining them. Invited next to join the March were four famous white public figures: one Catholic, one Jew, one Protestant, and one labor boss. The massive publicity now gently hinted that the "big ten" would "supervise" the March on Washington's "mood," and its "direction." The four white figures began nodding. The word spread fast among so-called "liberal" Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and laborites: it was "democratic" to join this black March. And suddenly, the previously March--nervous whites began announcing they were going. It was as if electrical current shot through the ranks of bourgeois Negroes--the very so-called "middle class" and "upper class" who had earlier been deploring the March on Washington talk by grass-roots Negroes. But white people, now, were going to march. Why, some downtrodden, jobless, hungry Negroes might have gotten trampled. Those "integration"-mad Negroes practically ran over each other trying to find out where to sign up. The "angry blacks" March suddenly had been made chic. Suddenly it had a Kentucky Derby image. For the status-seeker, it was a status symbol. "Were you there?" You can hear that right today. It had become an outing, a picnic. The morning of the March, any rickety carloads of angry, dusty, sweating small-town Negroes would have gotten lost among the chartered jet planes, railroad cars, and air-conditioned buses. What originally was planned to be an angry riptide, one English newspaper aptly described now as "the gentle flood." Talk about "integrated"! It was like salt and pepper. And, by now, there wasn't a single logistics aspect uncontrolled. The marchers had been instructed to bring no signs--signs were provided. They had been told to sing one song: "We Shall Overcome." They had been told how to arrive, when, where to arrive, where to assemble, when to start marching, the route to march. First aid stations were strategically located--even where to faint! Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing "We Shall Overcome. . .Suum Day. . ." while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and "I Have A Dream" speeches? And the black masses in America were--and still are--having a nightmare.

There Are People Who Should Have to Plead for Mercy from a Judge—None Are Named Bradley Manning
By: Kevin Gosztola Thursday August 15, 2013 2:34 pm	Tweet190

Pfc. Bradley Mannin and his civilian defense attorney, David Coombs, sit before a judge (Sketch by Clark Stoeckley)

There are people in this world who should find themselves in a position where they must sit on a witness stand, look up to a judge and make a statement pleading with the judge for mercy so they are not put away in jail for the rest of their life. None of those people include Pfc. Bradley Manning and yet that is what he did on Wednesday, as he addressed a military court at Fort Meade.
It was an apology for disclosing US government information to WikiLeaks. “I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I’m sorry that they hurt the United States,” Manning said, as he tried to maintain his composure while facing the judge, Army Col. Denise Lind.
“At the time of my decisions, as you know, I was dealing with a lot of issues, issues that are ongoing and continuing to affect me. Although a considerable difficulty in my life, these issues are not an excuse for my actions,” he added. “I understood what I was doing, and decisions I made. However, I did not fully appreciate the broader effects of my actions.”
He did not only show remorse before the judge but also that he was ashamed of who he had been and what he had thought at the time of the offenses.
“I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people,” Manning told the judge. “The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder how on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly [have believed] I could change the world for the better or the decisions of those with proper authority.”
Prior to being convicted of multiple violations of the Espionage Act, stealing information and other offenses, he had articulated the rationale that led him to select certain information for disclosure to WikiLeaks. This statement he made in court stood in stark contrast.
It was one of the last options his defense team probably advised him that he had, since he faces a potential sentence of 90 years in prison.
Manning was likely told he could go sit before the judge and admit that everything had been wrong because he was going through a bad period in his life where he was struggling with behavioral and mental health issues. He could tell the judge he learned from what he had done and had grown and matured while imprisoned and awaiting trial. He could say that he hoped the judge would see he was a different person than the one who thought he could change the world by exposing secrets. He could beg her to not give him a sentence that would keep him in a military prison for the rest of his life. So, that is what he did.
A statement like this was probably to be expected. He had pled guilty to some offenses on February 28 and his defense had diligently worked to have him acquitted of the more serious federal charges he faced. His defense had sought to present evidence of how government agencies had done reviews after the leaks and found little to no damage or harm had been caused, but the judge deemed such evidence irrelevant to the charges. His defense also tried to stop military prosecutors from preventing the defense from presenting evidence related to Manning’s “good faith” during trial, but that effort failed.
Making the kind of public interest defense supporters—and people throughout the world—wanted to hear would and could not have happened. Such a defense was not relevant to the charges, in the eyes of the judge, and so that limited the defense to presenting evidence about Manning that would easily circulate in the press and be used to attack his character, such as details on how he should have never deployed because he had behavioral health issues, how he was struggling with gender identity disorder while deployed in Iraq or how he had narcissistic, borderline and/or abnormal personality traits.
Rainey Reitman of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has crowd-funded transcripts of the entire trial so far, addressed how Manning did not hurt the United States. She included examples of government officials admitting any damage to the US would be minimal and eloquently wrote:

Bradley Manning didn’t hurt us any more than a dentist hurts a patient when removing an abscessed tooth. The brief discomfort that resulted from the WikiLeaks disclosures was necessary to begin the process of healing and reform. It is a process that we do not yet know will be successful, but which began with Manning’s decision to leak vital documents to WikiLeaks. And for that, we owe Manning thanks; no apologies necessary.

There is no discernible American policy or agenda that Manning stopped the United States from carrying out. The “war on terrorism” continues with drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, despite what was revealed about how the US was undermining the sovereignty of those countries. The torture, rendition and killing of innocent civilians are crimes that remain unpunished and will never be punished, despite what was revealed on how the US obstructed attempts at investigations and concealed figures on civilian casualties in the Iraq War.
The empire still has somewhere around a thousand military bases around the world, and US diplomats continue to make what Manning referred to as “secret pacts and deals with and against each other” (for example, dealings around Edward Snowden). So, how Manning “hurt” the US is not apparent unless one thinks a blow to the ego of American superpower is an injury worthy of subjecting someone to decades in prison.
*
Who should have had to plead for mercy from a judge or who should have to plead for mercy but will never find themselves in such a position because they are in a position of elite privilege or power that insulates them from justice? Or they were engaged in conduct that is an acceptable byproduct of war?
Frank Wuterich led a squad as a Marine sergeant that massacred dozens of unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. Wuterich and seven others involved were charged with crimes for their role in the attack, but one was acquitted and six others ultimately had their cases dropped. Wuterich was the lone conviction and he was faced with no jail time after pleading guilty to one count of “negligent dereliction of duty.”
Wuterich and other Marines involved in the massacre should have had to look up at a judge and plead for mercy because they faced a potential sentence of decades in jail for killing civilians, but none of them ever found themselves in such a position.
A communications log from a United Nations special rapporteur that was released by WikiLeaks, as part of a cache of US diplomatic cables, revealed that ten civilians, including four women and five children, were killed in a raid by multinational forces (MNF) led by the United States. Forces “approached the house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house. And autopsies revealed that “all the corpses were shot in the head” when they were handcuffed.
Soldiers and commanding officers who were clearly involved in the raid and coverup that resulted in the summary execution of innocent civilians. They should have to sit on the witness stand, struggling to maintain composure as they try to convince the judge to give them a second chance at life. But that will never happen.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who was the commander of US ground troops in Iraq, is believed to have issued an order, Frago 242, that instructed US military officers to look the other way as they gave Iraqi federal police prisoners, who would likely be tortured, beaten, raped or abused. It informed, “Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, ‘only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ.’
Manning revealed details related to Frago 242 when he disclosed the “Iraq War Logs” to WikiLeaks. From The Guardian, “A prisoner was kneeling on the ground, blindfolded and handcuffed, when an Iraqi soldier walked over to him and kicked him in the neck. A US marine sergeant was watching and reported the incident, which was duly recorded and judged to be valid.” Another man was arrested on “suspicion of preparing a suicide bomb” and was shot in the leg and “suffered abuse which amounted to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations and welts and bruises from being whipped with a large rod and hose across his back.” Yet another man had “his hands tied behind his back, he was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists. The soldiers had then whipped him with plastic piping and used electric drills on him.”
In all instances, the torture or abuse was documented but there was no investigation into what happened. Many incidents like this occurred, sometimes at the hands of a brutal unit known as the Wolf Brigade.
The commanding officers involved should have had to sit on a witness stand in a courtroom and beg a judge not to put them in jail for the rest of their lives because they were involved in looking the other way when people were tortured or abused. None of them will ever find themselves in this position.
A video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007, where two Reuters journalists are killed along with other civilians, showed soldiers lusting for blood. Manning released this video to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks released it as the “Collateral Murder” video. The soldiers in that video should have to apologize.
Outside of the military, former officials, who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, crafted the legal justification for torture and manufactured a case for war in Iraq, should have to face psychologists testifying on the stand and detailing the psychopathy behind what they did. These officials should have to apologize to a judge and their country for what they did and how they failed to understand the “broader effects” of their actions.
Officials in the administration of President Barack Obama, who have created the legal justification for targeting and killing alleged terror suspects abroad with drones or gunships, should have to face justice for what they have done. They have illegitimately expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and even fired upon rescuers there to help those wounded or to clean up the carnage after attacks. These are crimes and yet it is a guarantee no Obama administration official will ever be in a position where they have to plead for mercy before a judge.
These are but a few examples. From the information disclosed, one could put together a roster of individuals who should have to face time for crimes they committed or have to at minimum give a public apology that makes them feel ashamed of themselves.
Any amount of killing, any amount of torture or abuse, any amount of covering that killing, torture or abuse up can be justifiable to members of the US military and the wider government. Revealing information on that killing, torture or abuse and how it was covered up to the world, however, opens one up to being prosecuted as if they committed a crime just short of treason.
That is because the forces of American power can only operate in the manner in which they do in total secrecy. Violating that secrecy makes the government vulnerable to scrutiny and restraints that might limit the use of force against individuals. Therefore, no matter how much secrecy or over-classification of information there may be in government and how that might breed injustice and totalitarian acts by the powerful, people like Manning, who react to their morals or principles (even when significantly troubled or stressed), will be made to suffer severe consequence including but not limited to humiliation, inhumane treatment or long-term imprisonment.