***From The Archives Of The "Revolutionary History" Journal- The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM

Durgan: Spanish Trotskyists and the POUM (Part 1)

Andy Durgan

The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM
In September 1935 the Spanish Trotskyist group, the Communist Left (ICE), fused with the Workers and Peasants Bloc to form the POUM. Both at the time and retrospectively, this decision was widely criticised within the international Trotskyist movement. Whilst the political development of the POUM, or at least Trotsky's criticisms of it, are relatively well known [1], the history of the Spanish Trotskyists and their reasons for helping to found this party are far less known. [2]
The Left Opposition in Spain
The Communist Opposition of Spain (OCE), as it was first called, was founded in Liege, Belgium, on 28 February 1930 at a meeting of Spanish Communist exiles resident in that country, Luxembourg and France. The leader of this group, a founder member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), was 'Henri Lacroix' (Francisco Garcia Lavid). Lacroix, a house painter by trade, had spent some years in the Soviet Union, at least between 1925 and 1927, before living in Luxembourg and Belgium. It was here where he had entered into contact with French oppositionists. Inside Spain a number of former leading members of the PCE also sympathised with the Left Opposition, and soon formed part of the OCE. The most important of these was Juan Andrade in Madrid, a founder member and leader of the PCE and editor of its paper La Antorcha until 1926. Andrade had opposed the increasingly bureaucratic tendencies inside the PCE, and had been expelled from the party in 1927.
Following the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera in January 1930, many political exiles, including the Trotskyists, returned to Spain to take advantage of the relative liberalisation. During 1930 the OCE was able to establish groups in a handful of centres, and probably had some 50 militants at this time. [3]
The group was strengthened by the return of Andreu Nin to Spain from the Soviet Union in September 1930. Nin, originally a teacher, had first entered into organised political activity in 1911 at the age of 19 as a member of a left wing Catalan nationalist group, but his concern for social issues led him to join the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) barely two years later.

In 1918, under the impact of the postwar revolutionary upsurge, both in Spain and the rest of Europe, he joined the Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union federation, the CNT, becoming one of its leaders in its stronghold of Barcelona. A sympathiser of the Russian Revolution, he had been fully won over to Communism after attending the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in 1921 as part of the CNT delegation. Unable to return to Spain because his name was connected, unjustly, with the assassination of the Prime Minister, Eduardo Dato, he stayed in the Soviet Union. He became the Assistant Secretary of the RILU, joined the CPSU, and was elected onto the Moscow Soviet. Nin sided with the Left Opposition, probably in 1926, and consequently was stripped of all his official responsibilities. He was expelled from both the CPSU and PCE in 1928. Until 1930 he lived precariously in the Russian capital, and only his status as a foreigner saved him from arrest. [4]
Over the next few years the Spanish Trotskyist group included in its ranks many talented militants, most of whom were later to play a leading role in the POUM. Apart from Nin and Andrade, the other principal intellectuals of the group were Esteben Bilbao, the Basque doctor Jose Luis Arenillas, and Enrique Fernandez Sendon ('Person'). Bilbao, like Lacroix and another leading Trotskyist militant, Gregorio Ibarrondo ('Carnicero'), had been founding members of the Basque PCE. Other militants of note were the lawyer of the CNT miners' union in Asturias, Jose Loredo Aparicio; the Catalan journalist, Narcis Molins i Fabrega; the group's organiser in Estremadura, Luis Rastrollo; and a founding member of the Madrid PCE and former leader of the Communist Youth, Luis Garcia Palacios.
The group's many working class cadres included such militants as the petroleum workers' leader in Astillero (Santander), Eusebio Cortezon; Emilio Garcia, a leading member of the CNT woodworkers' union in Gijon, and like Cortezon a founder member of the PCE; Julio Alutiz, the railway worker from Pamplona, Emiliano Diaz in Seville, and Manuel Sanchez in Salamanca.
Among the many outstanding younger activists were Ignacio Iglesias, a former Socialist Youth leader from Sama de Langreo (Asturias); Enrique Rodriguez and Jesus Blanco, recruited from the Madrid Communist Youth; G. Munis (Manuel Fernandez Grandizo) from Llerena (Estremadura), who was also active in the Mexican Trotskyist movement, and Julio Cid, recruited from the Socialist Youth of Gerena (Andalusia) in 1933. £5]
Although the OCE was small, it was able to take advantage of the complete disarray of the PCE and the new political opportunities opened up by the collapse of the dictatorship and the subsequent rise in mass struggle. The PCE had barely 500 members during the late 1920s, and most of these had either been in jail or exile. [6] Moreover, many of its leaders, albeit for different reasons, were in opposition to the official party line.
The establishment of the Republic on 14 April 1931 led to a further extension of political freedoms, a massive strike wave, and the growth of all working class organisations, including the PCE.
Despite being relatively few in number, the Trotskyists" level of analysis was in stark contrast with the general theoretical poverty of Spanish Marxism at this time. In particular, their monthly theoretical journal Comunismo, which was published from May 1931 through to October 1934, stands out as the most serious Marxist journal published in Spain during the years prior to the Civil War. |7J
Organisationally, however, the Spanish Trotskyists were less successful. The domination of the Spanish workers' movement by Anarcho-Syndicalism and reformist Socialism was a problem for all the Communist factions. Despite all its weaknesses, the PCE, as the defender of official orthodoxy, proved more attractive to most workers sympathetic to Communism than the much maligned and generally isolated Trotskyists. Only the Catalan dissidents, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC), were able seriously to challenge the PCE at an organisational level.
But although small, the Spanish group compared favourably with Trotskyist organisations elsewhere in the world. According to Pelai Pages, by 1934 the ICE (as the OCE had become in March 1932) had around 800 members. [8] They were mostly in small groups scattered throughout the country. The exception was in the province of Badajoz (Estremadura), where nearly half their membership was concentrated in and around the town of Llerena. [9] This was the only area where the Trotskyists won a real mass base, mainly among farm workers, in part thanks to their leadership of peasant strikes between 1932 and 1934, and the efforts of Luis Rastrollo and the peasant leaders Jose Martin, Felix Galan and others. Elsewhere, there were relatively important Trotskyist nuclei in Madrid, Asturias, Galicia, Seville, Salamanca and Astillero (Santander), as well as scattered groups in Northern Castille, the Basque Country and in and around Barcelona. In contrast, the PCE probably had some 10 000 members by 1934, and the BOC around 4000, mainly in Catalonia. [UJ]
Notes
1. It is not the aim of this article to comment on Trotsky's extensive and generally excellent writings on Spain between 1930 and 1940.
2._ References to much, although not all, of the material cited in this article can also be found in P. Pages, El movimiento trotskista en Espana 1930-1935, Barcelona 1977, and Pierre Broue's extensive notes and appendices to the Spanish edition of Trotsky's writings on Spain, La revolution espanola, two volumes, Barcelona 1977.
3. V. Alba, Dos revolucionarios, Madrid 1975, p.358. We know of the existence of OCE groups at this time in Madrid, Bilbao, Asturias and, perhaps, Valencia.
4 On Nin's life in Moscow at this time, Cf. V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford 1975, pp.275-6.
5. Munis and Cid were members of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the Civil War, Cid being killed during the 'May Days' in Barcelona in 1937. Biographies of most of the leading militants of the OCE can be found in Trotsky, op. cit, Volume 2, pp.529-43.
6. According to one Communist International leader at the time, Piatnitsky, the PCE had only 120 members by 1930 (Communist International, 20 February 1934).
L An anthology of the most important articles from Comunismo was published in Madrid in 1978.
JL P. Pages, op. cit, pp.70-94.
9. La Batalla, 5 June 1936, states that the POUM had 122 members in Llerena at this time.
10. The PCE's own membership figures are notoriously unreliable. According to its own figures, the party grew from around 3,000 members in May 1931 to 8,800 by the end of that year. By February 1936 there were supposedly 20,000 members, and 83,967 in July, on the eve of the Civil War.
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The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM

The Trotskyists and the Workers and Peasants Bloc 1931-32

The relationship between the Spanish Trotskyists and the international movement of which they were a part was never very harmonious. The first of various disputes arose in early 1931 over how the OCE should be built. Nin was initially against an exclusive orientation towards the PCE, of which the Trotskyists considered themselves a faction, proposing instead that the OCE should also work inside the various dissident Communist groups, in particular the Workers and Peasants Bloc in Catalonia.
This disagreement with the official line of the Left Opposition at an international level was reflected in the correspondence between Nin and Trotsky during the first half of 1931. £11] Trotsky urged his supporters in Spain not to waste their time trying to influence the BOC, which he considered as a confused and rightist organisation, but to direct their energies to strengthening their own independent organisation with its own publications, and to orientate themselves towards the PCE. The official parties, despite all their manifold weaknesses, still represented the political 'centre' of the international Communist movement, unlike 'national' and 'opportunist' groups like the BOC.
The BOC had been formed as a result of the fusion in March 1931 of two groups: the former Catalan Federation of the PCE and the Catalan Communist Party. The majority of the Catalan Federation's leaders had been members of a pro-Communist grouping inside the CNT in the early 1920s, which had included Andreu Nin. Led by Joaquim Maurin, this group had not formally joined the PCE until October 1924.
Due to its Syndicalist origins and the more or less complete disorganisation of the PCE during the mid-1920s, the Catalan Federation had never been fully integrated into the party. The bureaucratisation of the PCE, in line with developments on an international level, was vigorously opposed by Maurin, who was in prison from 1925 to the end of 1927, and then in exile in France.
The opposition of the Catalan Federation's leaders came to a head in 1929-30. Not only did they oppose the bureaucratic methods of the party leadership, but also its general analysis of the situation in Spain and its call, inspired by the Communist International, for a 'workers' and peasants' democratic dictatorship'. The Catalans claimed that the forthcoming revolution in Spain would be democratic, although given the political weakness of the middle classes, it could only be completed under proletarian leadership, thus leading to a Socialist revolution. The Catalan Federation also opposed the PCE's attempts to split the CNT. A similar position was taken by the PCE's Madrid and Levante Federations, as well as an important part of the party's organisation in Asturias.
The Catalan Federation was finally expelled from the PCE in June 1930 as "bourgeois agents", "counter-revolutionary elements" and for its relations with the "petit-bourgeois" Catalan Communist Party. The latter had been formed in November 1928 by young militants, some from a left wing nationalist background, and others from the Catalan Federation itself, although most of them were new to political activity. They were attracted to Communism mainly on the basis of the Soviet Union's apparent solution of the national question.
Rather than join the PCE, which they saw as bureaucratic and unsympathetic to the national liberation movement in Catalonia, they decided to form a new party. The PCC was fairly loosely organised, and by 1930 it was working closely with the dissident Catalan Federation. At the unification congress it was decided to keep the name Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation (FCC-B), and also to form a broader organisation of sympathisers, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC). In practice the FCC-B and the BOC were the same organisation, having the same press, the same leaders and, more often than not, the same membership.
Like other opposition groups in Spain, with the exception of the Trotskyists, the Catalan dissidents initially blamed the PCE leaders, rather than the Communist International, for the party's disastrous policies. In fact, until Maurin was formally expelled from the Communist International in July 1931, they appealed to it to intervene in Spain and throw out the party leadership. In the face of the divisions inside the Soviet party, the Catalans adopted an abstentionist position, describing themselves as "neither Stalinists nor Trotskyists but Communists". Events were to force them to clarify their views of the international Communist movement, and to adopt an increasingly anti-Stalinist stance.
Nin favoured working inside the BOC basically for two reasons. Firstly, by early 1931 the majority of Spanish Communists were outside the PCE, and the formation of an independent Communist grouping appeared as a real possibility. During early 1931 Nin favoured forming part of such a grouping rather than maintaining the fiction of the OCE being a faction of the PCE. Perhaps more significant was Nin's friendship with the BOC's undisputed leader, Joaquim Maurin. Outside the ranks of the Trotskyists, Maurin was the most able Communist leader and theoretician in Spain. His writings on the historical development of the Spanish revolution alone testify to that. [12]
In December 1930 Maurin, Nin and other Catalan Communists found themselves in prison together following the failure of a revolutionary uprising against the monarchy. Whilst in prison Maurin read Trotsky's letters to his Spanish followers and appeared to be in general agreement with his analysis. Moreover, Nin wrote for the Federation's press and helped Maurin to draft the BOC's first political thesis - the general line of which was practically identical with that of the Trotskyists. £13]
Nevertheless, Nin does not seem to have taken into account the general nature of the BOC, Maurin apart. Although in opposition to the PCE leadership, the BOC's leaders had yet to question the Stalinist leadership of the international Communist movement. Despite Nin's influence on its first political programme, the FCC-B/BOC soon reverted towards more 'official' positions, because of its continued aim to avoid a final rupture with the Communist International. Thus in April 1931, only two months after the publication of its political thesis, the BOC stood candidates in the local elections under the Third Period slogan of "class against class". £14]
And despite breaking from the Communist International as a result of Maurin's expulsion in July 1931, references to "Social Fascism" continued to appear in the BOC's press until early 1932. In addition, as Trotsky himself had feared, [15] the Federation's leaders were not prepared to tolerate open factional work by the Trotskyists inside their organisation. Once this work started, Nin's apparently cosy relationship with the BOC came to an end. In May 1931 Nin's formal request to join the BOC was turned down, and mutual attacks soon began to appear in the press of both groups. However, the formal constitution of the OCE in Barcelona did not take place until September 1931. [16] A tiny group of Trotskyists continued to try and defend their ideas inside the BOC, but they were expelled in October 1931 for "factional activity aimed at destroying the party". £17]
Thus by late 1931 the OCE finally appeared to be taking a more orthodox position, presenting itself unequivocally as a faction of the official party, and submitting the BOC's "confused" and "vacillating" politics to the "pitiless and incessant criticism" that Trotsky had advocated. "Maybe it would not be possible", one Spanish Trotskyist leader wrote in April 1932, "to find in today's working class movement an organisation crippled by a more unhealthy opportunism than that from which the Catalan Federation suffers." £18] The OCE's attacks were centred on the BOC's initial refusal to take up a position in relation to the Communist International, its organisational structure, its nationalism, its confusion over the question of revolutionary power, and its trade union policy.
Maurin's party, because of its "national" outlook, was seen by the Trotskyists as being on the right, close to the politics of Bukharin or Brandler. Lacroix argued, as he had in 1930, that the real aim of the leaders of the Catalan Federation was to replace the current PCE leadership, hence their refusal to differentiate themselves openly from the Stalinist line of the Communist International. £19] The relationship between the FCC-B and the BOC was far from clear. Was the latter a broad front, or was it a party? The OCE reminded the Federation of a similar confusion that had been made by the Chinese Communists in 1927, with terrible results. In reality the two organisations were increasingly one and the same, as was later admitted by the BOC leaders themselves [20], although Nin had already pointed this out as early as January 1932. £2JJ
Even more disturbing was the FCC-B's position on the national question. Rather than just defend the right to self-determination of existing national movements, the BOC went much further. In June 1931 Maurin declared himself in favour of "separatism", albeit not from Spain but from the Spanish state, the disintegration of which could give way to genuine Iberian unity. It was not sufficient, the BOC argued, to win over the leadership of existing national liberation movements, it was actually necessary to participate in their formation. Thus, where national movements did not exist, be it in Andalusia, Aragon, Castille or elsewhere, it was necessary for Communists to help create them.
Maurin believed that "the prospects for Socialist revolution were greatly favoured by the presence of a national problem", so much so that "if it did not exist, it would be necessary to create it". [22] Not surprisingly, the Trotskyists were scathing in their attacks on what they described as the FCC-B's predilection for "separatist rather than class politics", and even described it as "more Catalanist than the Catalan Republican Left", the principal petit-bourgeois nationalist party in Catalonia. [23]
Equally alarming was the FCC-B's position on revolutionary power. After initially adopting a fairly benevolent attitude towards the new Republican regime, in June 1931 Maurin's party, influenced by the increasingly radicalised strike movement led by the Anarcho-Syndicalists, suddenly lurched to the left. The FCC-B/BOC now called on the CNT itself to "take power", arguing that the illusions of the masses in the bourgeois Republic were "burnt out". Maurin defended his party's position by claiming that the hegemony of the CNT in the strike movement, coupled with the radicalisation of its rank and file, meant that the Anarcho-Syndicalist unions could perform the role which Soviets had played in Russia. The BOC leader argued that in the same way that a soviet system had developed in Russia, a "Syndicalist system" could develop in Spain. He predicted that his position would "horrify the mimics of fossilised Marxism" with their "grotesque equation of Spain with Russia". [24]
The BOC leaders recognised, however, that the CNT, given its Anarcho-Syndicalist principles, was not interested in "taking power". Thus the BOC's task was to "create an atmosphere" through its propaganda whereby the leadership would be swept aside, and the unions would pass into the hands of the Communists. Parallel with this call for "power to the CNT", the BOC still defended the need to form workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils.
Understandably, the Trotskyists attacked the position of the FCC-B/BOC on a number of levels. [25] To call for the CNT unions to take power was pure Syndicalism, and appeared to show that the BOC had forgotten all the most basic lessons of the Russian Revolution. In addition, the exact role of the unions in the revolutionary process was hardly clear when Maurin and his comrades continued to call for councils to be set up through a "congress of all working class organisations".[26] Moreover, by talking of a revolutionary movement based solely on the CNT, the BOC was ignoring the great mass of workers, especially outside of Catalonia, who were in Socialist or other unions, or, as in the case of the majority, still unorganised.
The Trotskyists also argued that despite the strike wave, the majority of workers and peasants still had illusions in the Republic. In order to dispel these illusions, Communists had to continue to call for partial demands and for the Socialists to end their collaboration with the bourgeois parties, and not to reject such agitation, as the BOC had done, in favour of generalised calls for "the proletariat to take power".
The abortive Anarchist uprising in the Alt Llobregat region of Catalonia in January 1932, and the increasing persecution of Communists inside the Catalan CNT, led the BOC to drop its calls for the unions to take power. But the Trotskyists now saw another error arising in that the BOC saw itself as being forced to leave the CNT altogether. The ICE considered that whilst the BOC formally opposed any splits in the unions, many of its trade unionists did little to fight to stay in such a hostile environment. The Trotskyists, in contrast, recognised the importance of trying to remain at all costs within the CNT. The BOC's decision in 1933 effectively to build a separate trade union federation would render later attempts to influence the Anarcho-Syndicalists that much more difficult. [27]
The confusion and opportunism that characterised the FCC-B/BOC's politics, especially in 1931-32, was not merely due to its lack of programmatic clarity in relation to a Stalinised international Communist movement. As the Catalan Trotskyist and future POUM leader, Narcis Molins i Fabrega, was to point out, it was also a reflection of its social base. [21] In the towns the BOC related to a "section of the working class which feels itself to be above the rest of the proletariat, and closer to the petit-bourgeoisie". Most of its urban members were not factory workers, Molins claimed, but shop assistants and clerks. In the countryside the BOC was based on medium peasants, "who had no argument with the bourgeoisie other than over the right to land". This social composition, he concluded, had led the Catalan Federation "to break its links with Communism", and it was now in "the front line of the extreme left of the petit-bourgeoisie".
After 1932 the attacks of the Trotskyists on Maurin's party became less frequent and more moderate in tone. This was partly due both to changes inside the BOC itself and changes within the Trotskyist movement after 1933 in relation to the need to build parties independent of the Communist International. By mid-193 3 the Trotskyists recognised that some sections of the BOC's rank and file believed that there was little between themselves and the ICE on most major issues. However, "nothing could have been further from the truth". The BOC may have made similar criticisms to the Trotskyists of other sections of the workers' movement, but there was "no continuity in their politics". [29] Even as late as June 1934, when the two organisations were working quite closely, the ICE press described the BOC as "opportunist" and "lacking any clear programme". It was, the Trotskyists concluded, repeating Trotsky's prediction of three years previously, "doomed to collapse". 110]
If the Trotskyists were harsh in their criticism of the BOC, the latter was even more so in its treatment of Trotskyism. Maurin himself had been accused of "Trotskyism" by the PCE leadership during the late 1920s, and this had been one of the reasons given for his eventual expulsion. Maurin and other Federation leaders were, however, quite contemptuous of Trotskyism, and dismissed the OCE as a divisive and irrelevant sect condemned to the sidelines of the working class movement, from where it "would blindly follow the positions handed down by Trotsky". They even accused the Trotskyists of being the "mirror image of Stalinism" whose same "mechanical centralist methods" they had copied.
Nin, in an obvious reference to his stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, was accused of having deserted the Spanish workers' movement in its "most difficult moments", and of having at first sided with the PCE leadership against the Catalans. "Experience has shown", the FCC-B stated in September 1931, that Nin could easily change his position, and that he would soon be "knocking on the door of the BOC". [31] The BOC's attitude towards the Trotskyists remained basically unchanged over the next three years, although attacks on them became less frequent. At the end of 1933 Maurin described Trotskyism as "the antithesis of organisation" which introduced "civil war" wherever it intervened in the workers' movement.{32]
Whilst the FCC-B/BOC were totally dismissive of Trotskyist organisations, they were less so when it came to Trotsky himself. Articles by Trotsky still occasionally appeared in the BOC press, and the former Bolshevik leader was even defended from Stalinist slanders, being described as "Lenin's best comrade ... the man of the October Revolution ... a great fighter for the Communist cause" and "one of the most extraordinary brains of world Socialism". {33} More contradictory was the BOC's treatment of the speech which Trotsky gave to young Social Democrats in Copenhagen in December 1932. Whilst its weekly, La Batalla, praised his speech and printed extracts from it, Maurin was talking elsewhere of Trotsky's "definitive political failure". [34]
Notes
1L Cf. L.D. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, New York, 1973 pp.370-400.
12. J. Maurin, La revolucion espanola, originally published in 1931, and republished in Barcelona, 1977; Hacia la segunda revolucion, originally published in 1935, republished as Revolucion y contrarrevolucion en espafia, Paris 1966.
13. La Batalla, 12 February 1931. The demands in the FCC-B's first Political Thesis are similar to those contained in Trotsky's pamphlet The Revolution in Spain (Cf. The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit, pp.67-89). Nin mentioned his participation in writing the Thesis in a letter to Trotsky dated 17 January 1931 (ibid., pp.3 71-2). Molins i Fabrega speaks of how Maurin and other BOC leaders read Trotsky's letters whilst in prison with Nin, Cf. Una linea politica: el Bloque Obreroy Campesino, Comunismo, April 1932.
14. La Batalla, 19 and 26 March 1931.
15. Cf. Trotsky's letter to Nin, 15 March 1931, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p.386.
16. According to Molinier the Catalan group had a dozen members at this time. Cf. R. Molinier, Rapport sur la delegation en Espagne, 21 September 1931.
17. La Batalla, 12 November 1931. The Trotskyist faction's own account can be found in the document Organization Comunista de Izquierda, For la unidad de todos los comunistas de Espana, Barcelona, December 1931.
18. L. Fersen, Acerca del congreso de la FCC-B, Comunismo, April 1932.
19± La Verite, 13 June 1930; El Soviet, 15 October 1931.
20. Cf. for example the BOC's Organisation Thesis, La Batalla, 11 May 1933.
21. A. Nin, iBloque, partido u organization de simpatizantes?, Comunismo, January 1932.
22. La Batalla, 4 July 1931; J. Maurin, La revolution espanola, op. tit., p.128.
23. Tesis sobre las nacionalidades, Comunismo, April 1932; N. Molins i Fabrega, La position politico yfuerzas del Bloque Obrero y Campesino, Comunismo, December 1931.
24. J. Maurin, La revolution espanola, op. tit., p. 168.
25. See the article by Nin, Los comunistas y el momenta presents. A proposito de unas declaraciones de Maurin, El Soviet, 22 October 1931; ^A donde va el Bloque Obrero y Campesino?, Comunismo, September 1931; La huelga general de Barcelona, Comunismo, October 1931. Cf. L. Fersen, Elcongreso delBOC, Comunismo, March 1932.
26i La Batalla, 30 July 1931.
27. Underestimation of the Catalan CNT became widespread on the Spanish Marxist left. Nin claimed in May 1936 that the Anarcho-Syndicalists had "definitely lost their hegemony" over the region's labour movement (La Batalla, 15 May 1936). The CNT's dramatic loss of members in Catalonia between 1931 and 1936 - from 300,000 to 140,000, according to its own undoubtedly inflated figures - led many to believe mistakenly that the Anarcho-Syndicalists were losing their grip over the Catalan workers' movement. Such a view is also expressed by a member of the Bolshevik-Leninist group during the war, Cf. G. Munis, Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria, Madrid 1977, first published in Mexico in 1948, p.l 18.
28. N. Molins i Fabrega, La position politico y las fuerzas del Bloque Obrero y Campesino, Comunismo, December 1931.
29. Comunismo, July 1933.
30L La Antorcha, 30 June 1934; L.D. Trotsky, A Narrow or a Broad Faction, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. tit., p. 165.
3L La Batalla, 17 September 1931.
32L J. Maurin, La quiebra del trotskismo, La Batalla, 26 October 1933.
33. La Batalla, 22 and 29 December 1932, 27 April 1933 and 26 October 1933.
34. La Batalla, 22 December 1932; J. Maurin, Trotsky alpais d'Hamlet, Front, 17 December 1932. 28.7.2003
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The change in name also reflected the group's relative consolidation both organisationally (it now claimed 1,000 members) and politically. Despite their insistence on not having established themselves as an independent party as such, the Spanish Trotskyists' decision appeared to the ILO to be just that. [38] Moreover, the ICE, with the aim of posing this tactical change on an international level, called upon the International Secretariat to call a conference as soon as possible. The ICE also called for both the expelled Rosmer and Landau groups to be represented at the proposed conference, although not as official delegates, so that they could present their case.
This new crisis in the relations between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ILO was further complicated by the 'Lacroix case'. At the third conference Lacroix had resigned as General Secretary of the Spanish Opposition, supposedly for "health reasons". [39] His subsequent factional activity gave his resignation a political character - although he did not state this explicitly until a year later. [40] In fact Lacroix's role in the growing crisis both inside the ICE and in its relations with the ILO is highly suspect. With hindsight, Lacroix's activities were at least opportunist, if not, as Georges Vereeken has argued, a deliberate provocation.
Hi]
Internationally, the German and French sections were particularly incensed by the ICE's apparent defence of Landau and Rosmer. In late 1932 first the Germans and then the French Trotskyists produced documents criticising the position of the Spanish group. [42] Apart from attacking the latter's change of name, and its positions on elections and the Rosmer and Landau cases, both groups spoke of the ICE's lack of a concrete programme for the Spanish revolution and of not wanting to pose its differences openly with the International Secretariat. Basically similar criticisms were made by the International Secretariat and by Trotsky himself.
The ICE replied to these attacks by pointing out that it still considered itself to be a faction of the PCE and not a new party.[43.] In fact in both the Catalan elections of November 1932 and the general election a year later, the Trotskyists not only called for a vote for the PCE (and not the BOC), but also distributed the PCE's propaganda, and in a few areas held joint meetings with its local branches. The Spanish Trotskyists argued that they were obliged by circumstances to counter the influence and the tactics of the PCE in a more positive fashion. Moreover, both the French and US sections had changed their names from "Opposition" to the "Communist League". The ICE insisted on its complete "loyalty to the ILO, the International Secretariat and comrade Trotsky". It had differences over questions of "detail and organisation but not fundamental political questions". According to the Spanish section, the fact that it had defended the right of the Rosmer and Landau groups to put their case did not mean that it supported these groups in any way.
In retrospect, Trotsky's criticisms of the ICE at this time seem particularly harsh. In August 1933 he was to describe the "struggle of Nin and company against the ILO [as] ... violating every fundamental principle of Marxism". The ICE's position on the independence of its group with regard to the PCE would soon differ little from that adopted by the international Trotskyist movement during 1933. The severe tone of Trotsky's polemic with the Spanish section was probably due to his fears that Nin would form a bloc with his old friend Rosmer.

The choice of Communist Left as the Spanish group's new name, denounced by Trotsky as "an obviously false name from the standpoint of theory", appeared particularly significant because it was the same as Rosmer's group, the Gauche Communiste. Nin had, in fact, initially supported Trotsky and the International Secretariat over the question of Landau and Rosmer, only to change his attitude in late 1931. The failure of Molinier, one of Rosmer's principal opponents in France, to provide the OCE with the financial support he had promised, may well have contributed to Nin's change of position.
Parallel to these criticisms of the ICE inside the ILO, Lacroix formed an opposition faction, which in the first edition of its bulletin accused the ICE leadership of being opposed to the international movement, and of using "Stalinist practices". In addition, it accused Nin, who had replaced Lacroix as General Secretary, of being a "petit-bourgeois opportunist", and called on the International Secretariat to intervene inside the Spanish section. [44] However, it was not until January 1933, that is after the International Secretariat and the French and German groups had attacked the ICE's positions, that Lacroix came out with an identical line of argument. The ICE leaders initially tried to counter Lacroix's opposition by inviting him to take up the post of General Secretary once more. This being refused, the Spanish section moved the headquarters of its Executive Committee to Barcelona to avoid the disruptive activities of Lacroix's group in Madrid.
Meanwhile the International Secretariat had begun to talk of the "profound differences" in the Spanish section, speaking of the "Lacroix current" and the "Nin current", thus giving each equal credibility. In fact, Lacroix's group was based upon six or seven militants in Madrid. [45] What is more, throughout this crisis the ICE Executive Committee received numerous motions of support from local branches. Thus when the ILO organised a pre-conference in Paris in February 1933 and called on both tendencies to send delegates, the ICE leadership angrily refused to comply, and denounced the International Secretariat for "wanting to give a political character to Lacroix's dishonest and intolerable campaign against the Executive Committee". [46] In the event both tendencies were represented at the pre-conference, the official ICE delegate, and a delegate from Lacroix's group who was invited without the knowledge of the Spanish group's leadership.
The pre-conference referred to the situation inside the ICE, and demanded that disciplinary measures against Lacroix be stopped. [47] It also condemned the ICE for supporting "confusionists and deserters" such as Landau, Rosmer and Mill, and, seemingly oblivious of its recent campaign in favour of the PCE in the Catalan elections, of "tail-ending the petit-bourgeois nationalist and provincial phrasemonger Maurin" and of favouring participation in parliamentary elections in a manner contrary to the policy of the ILO.
In reply, Fersen, the official Spanish delegate, agreed to the establishment of an internal bulletin open to "all tendencies", and that nobody would be excluded from the organisation until a national conference could be held. Nevertheless, Fersen defended the measures already taken against Lacroix's group as "necessary to maintain discipline and avoid the degeneration of the organisation's progress". The ICE later bemoaned the "frank support" of the pre-conference for "comrade Lacroix's campaign of sabotage and disorganisation". JM

Relations between the Spanish section and the international organisation were further undermined by the ICE's criticisms of some of the decisions of the pre-conference. In particular, the Spanish section rejected as "totally exotic" the imposition of the title "Communist Left Opposition - Bolshevik-Leninist" on all national sections. For the ICE, the title Left Opposition already gave the impression both inside and outside the Communist movement that the differences of the Trotskyists with the Stalinists were only an "incomprehensible and harmful internal struggle". Instead, the ICE advocated that there should not be one name applicable to all national sections, but that each national section should include the name of the international organisation.
The ICE also criticised the International Secretariat's manner of dealing with internal problems, particularly in relation to the Rosmer group. Finally, the Spanish group claimed that the decision of the pre-conference that following events in Germany, the Opposition "should work systematically in all proletarian organisations ... without modifying its attitude towards the [Communist] party", was identical to the position adopted in Spain 11 months previously. [49]
Immediately following the pre-conference, the International Secretariat initiated a campaign against Nin and the ICE leadership. Trotsky based his attacks, although not explicitly, firstly upon the arguments of Lacroix and then on those of two other dissidents, "Arlen" and Mariano Vela - both of whom had already left the Spanish section. [50] The International Secretariat also published Nin's correspondence with Trotsky of 1930-32 in order to illustrate Nin's continued divergences from the international organisation. In April 1933 a long extract from a recent article by Lacroix attacking the ICE leadership was published without the slightest comment in the International Bulletin. [51]
Whilst it appeared that the International Secretariat was siding with Lacroix against Nin, Trotsky himself pointed out in a letter to Lacroix at the time that he had no intention of favouring one group against the other, and even accused Lacroix of having the "same ideas and methods" as Nin. [52] However, it remained the case that the statements of the International Secretariat on the internal crisis of the Spanish section were directed almost exclusively against Nin. This campaign culminated in August 1933 in a scathing attack by Trotsky on the "inadmissible conduct" of Nin "and his friends" whose policies had been "condemned by all sections of the International Left Opposition ... without exception" at the pre-conference in February. Nin's "radically incorrect policy" had prevented the Spanish section from "winning the place opened up to it by the conditions of the Spanish revolution" and had led to the weakening of the ICE. [53]
Meanwhile, the ICE Executive Committee accused Lacroix of misusing party funds and of systematic obstruction of its work. Evidence relating to these accusations was sent to the International Secretariat, which in turn had to admit that Lacroix had "falsified official documents". [54] The whole ignominious affair finished in June 1933 with the expulsion of Lacroix and the disintegration of his faction. [55]
Subsequent events would shed more light on Lacroix, and thus seemingly vindicate the position of the ICE leadership. In September 1933 he joined the PSOE and in a letter to its daily, El Socialista, renounced his Communist past and recognised his mistaken role as a"sniper against Socialism". [56] Prior to this, however, Lacroix had attempted to rejoin the PCE. His total lack of scruples are revealed in his letter of 15 July 1933 to the PCE Central Committee, which has recently been found in the party's archives in Madrid. [57] According to this letter, only lack of money prevented Lacroix from returning to Madrid (he was in Tolosa at the time), as the PCE leadership had asked him to, in order to explain his recent "evolution back towards the party". Lacroix concluded that "rapid action could put an end to the residues of Trotskyism in Spain, and win back the good, if mistaken, workers who still follow... the masked counter-revolution of Trotskyism".
This letter leaves little doubt as to Lacroix's dubious (to say the least) activities inside the revolutionary movement, and gives some credence to Vereeken's claim that Lacroix was a "Stalinist agent". £58J However, the fact that he was not allowed back into the PCE undermines Vereeken's thesis; nor was he known to have sided with the pro-Stalinist wing of Spanish Socialism during the Civil War. Indeed, according to Pierre Broue, Lacroix, having led a division in the Republican army, was recognised by Stalinist troops whilst crossing into France at the end of the Civil War, and was lynched on the spot. [59]
The Lacroix affair only served to strain relations even further between the ICE and the ILO. Once he had joined the PSOE, the International Secretariat denounced Lacroix for his "violent and poisonous struggle ... against the International Left Opposition and a number of leading comrades", and described him as always having been "an alien element among the Bolshevik-Leninists, alien to their ideas and their methods". [60] This belated recognition of Lacroix's role inside the Trotskyist movement was not very convincing, given the International Secretariat's recent attacks on Nin and its effective support for this "alien element".
The desertion of Lacroix must have been a blow to the Trotskyist movement; to the ICE, of which he had been a founder and one of its principal leaders, and to Trotsky, to whom he had always proclaimed his "total loyalty and agreement". Whilst undoubtedly there were real differences between the ICE and the International Secretariat, particularly over the degree of political independence to be maintained in relation to the official Communist movement prior to August 1933, and over the differences around the Rosmer and Landau cases, the Lacroix affair was marred not only by its personal overtones, but also by the confusion surrounding its exact nature. Any examination of the documents of the ICE, Lacroix and the International Secretariat on the Spanish crisis, along with Trotsky's writings of the time, confirms this confusion. The contradictory nature of the later statements of the International Secretariat on the question and on Lacroix's subsequent betrayal serve to cloud the issues at stake even further.
The decision that the ILO took in August 1933 to form new independent parties and to establish the International Communist League (ICL) as the first step towards the establishment of a new International, was welcomed by the ICE. The Spanish group pointed out, however, that it had been the first to move towards more independent activity, and it criticised the "mechanical way" in which the ILO's change of line had been adopted, as if "obeying a military order", and for its lateness. [61] There was also some opposition inside the ICE during the autumn of 1933 to the idea of creating a Fourth International. [62]
Relations between the ICE and the (by now) ICL appear to have been relatively calm during the first half of 1934, until a new dispute broke out over the tactic of entrism. This tactic appeared particularly relevant in Spain, where, due to the disenchantment with their party's participation in the Republican government between 1931 and 1933, many Socialist militants had turned sharply to the left. The threat of Fascism - both at home and abroad -reinforced this tendency. By mid-1934 the left wing of the Socialists controlled the trade union federation (the UGT), the Socialist Youth and many local and provincial sections of the party. Moreover, its language was increasingly revolutionary in tone.
The importance of the radicalisation of the Spanish Socialist movement was not missed by the ICE, but it baulked at following the example of the French Trotskyists of actually entering the Socialist Party. A national plenum of the ICE voted unanimously in September 1934 to reject the new tactical turn of the ICL. Whilst recognising the importance of the new mood in many countries in favour of united action, the ICE warned that this should not lead to "organic confusion". The plenum concluded:
The guarantee of the future lies in the United Front, but also in the organic independence of the vanguard of the proletariat. In no way can we immerse ourselves in an amorphous conglomerate merely because of circumstantial utilitarianism ... However sad and painful it may be for us, we are prepared to maintain the principled positions that we have learnt from our leader, even at the risk of having to separate from him on the road to victory. [63]
The ICE also proposed the formation of a faction inside the international organisation to fight against the new turn.
The growing distance between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ICL is clearly illustrated by the resolution at the plenum. Not surprisingly, their rejection of entrism has sometimes been cited as the principal reason for their break from the international movement. Nevertheless, the final break would not take place for another 16 months, and the ICE's refusal to enter the Socialist Party would be only one of several contributory factors.
Notes
3fL R. Molinier, op. cit.
36. Cf. Nin's letter to Trotsky, 7 November 1931, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p.380.
31, P. Pages, op. cit., p. 127.
3JL There is no known documentary evidence of the immediate reaction of the International Secretariat, except the testimony of Ignacio Iglesias of the Asturias ICE many years later, Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 128, but, given the subsequent development of relations between the International Secretariat and the ICE, Iglesias' version seems very plausible.
39, Comunismo, April 1932.
40. Informs sobre el caso Lacroix, Boletin interior de la Izquierda Comunista de Espana, 15
July 1933.
41. G. Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, London 1976, pp.48-67.
42. Both documents were published in the Lacroix faction's bulletin, Boletin interior de discusion del Comite Regional de Castilla la Nueva y del Comite Nacional de Jovenes de la Izquierda Comunista Espanola, 3 January 1933.
43. La Izquierda Comunista Espanola y los grupos de Rosmer y Landau, Comunismo, September 1932.
44. Boletin interior de discusion ..., 2 December 1932.
45. Both the Regional Committee of New Castille and the National Committee of the ICE Youth consisted of the same six militants, and were effectively set up by Lacroix to fight the Executive Committee. Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 134.
46. Ante una grave situacion de la ICE, Boletin interior de discusion ..., February 1933.
47. Informe sobre el caso Lacroix, op. cit..
48. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 145.
49. Ibid.
50. 'Arlen' was the pseudonym of an army officer who had joined the OCE from the PCE. Although he maintained correspondence with Trotsky during 1933, he had left the ICE at the end of 1932. In 1936 he refused to accept the command of the POUM militia in Madrid, leading a Socialist unit instead. Cf. L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola, Volume 2, pp.530-1; P. Pages, op. cit, p.135.
5L P. Pages, op. cit., p. 148.
52. L.D. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p. 194. A copy of this letter was also sent to Nin.
53. op. cit, pp. 198-201.
54. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 147.
55. According to Broue (L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola, Volume 1, p.269n) most of Lacroix's group stayed inside the ICE. One member, Grandizo Munis, became a leader of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the Civil War; another, Gomila, joined the Falange. Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 148.
56. El Socialista, 29 September 1933.
57. It has been possible to verify Lacroix's signature. The letter, dated 15 July 1933, can be found in the Archive of the Central Committee of the PCE in Madrid. The previous day (14 July) Lacroix had written to the party complaining that he had yet to receive an answer to his request of "some days before" to "rejoin" the PCE, the "only true Communist organisation" that existed in Spain. He
added that there were "many honourable workers' in the "so-called opposition", with whom he could put the PCE in contact, who were waiting for the decision of the party leadership on his case before joining the party.
58.. G. Vereeken, op. cit., p.66.
59. L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola. Volume 2, op. cit., p.536. 6JX G. Vereeken, op. cit, pp.59-60.
61. Al plena international de la Oposicion de Izquierda, Boletin interior de la ICE, 5 September 1933.
62. Boletin interior de la ICE, 20 November 1933
63. Comunismo. September 1934.

All Out! Emergency Rally!

Stand with the Boston School Bus Drivers!

Stop the Terminations of the "School Bus Union 5"!

Rally: Monday, Oct. 28th

1:30 PM – on.

(Come immediately after work. The Rally will last and grow into the evening.)

Veolia Transportation general offices

35 Freeport Way, Dorchester

(one block from Dorchester Ave. off Freeport St., behind the school bus yard)

Stand in Solidarity with USW Local 8751, the Boston School Bus Drivers’ Union, in its struggle to stop the union-busting corporation Veolia Transportation in its illegal attack on the union’s members, leadership and contract.

On Monday, Oct. 28^th, Veolia has planned a disciplinary hearing, threatening to terminate 5 of USW Local 8751’s elected officers. Join the protest at Veolia in Dorchester from 1:30 PM on. If you’re working, come immediately after work to demand, “Veolia: Hands Off the School Bus Union 5!” - Grievance Chair Steve Kirschbaum, Recording Secretary Andre Francois, Vice President Steve Gillis, Steward Garry Murchison and Steward Rick Lynch.

Since day one of taking over the Boston school bus management contract on July 1, 2013, Veolia has committed numerous Unfair Labor Practices, violated nearly every term and condition of the drivers’ employment contract, and engaged in actions designed to steal literally millions of dollars from drivers’ paychecks. In the process, Veolia has sacrificed student safety on the altar of profit, among other things creating routes designed by GPS-based software that result in massive lateness to school and to home, and refusing to pay drivers for all their time worked.

On October 8^th, when drivers engaged in a legally protected protest of Veolia’s unfair labor practices, Veolia wrongly called the police and forcibly removed the drivers, illegally locking the gates and refusing to let the drivers back in to work. Boston Mayor Menino and Veolia then targeted 5 officers of Local 8751 for termination, which disciplinary hearing is scheduled for Monday, October 28^th.

Boston School Bus Drivers Union Local 8751 exemplifies what a labor union should be. Not only has its members been successful in winning living wages, benefits and unprecedented contract language, This local is willing to extend real solidarity to other workers whenever possible. This union has fought racism, sexism, anti-gay bigotry, every war since the 1970's and practiced solidarity with all workers struggles inside and outside of union organizations.

This union-busting action by Veolia Transportation is outrageous. Solidarity is not a crime. Standing up with the members’ for their rights is not a crime. All of labor needs to stand up and say, “We will join ranks to ensure that Veolia’s crime will not succeed, in Boston or any of its world-wide operations.”

Veolia: “Hands Off the Boston School Bus Union 5!”

Stop the attacks on USW Local 8751!

*** A  Saga Of The Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27-Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"

 

Markin comment:

Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.

BOOK REVIEW

MAN'S FATE, ANDRE MALRAUX, VINTAGE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1990

As a young man many held out high hopes that the French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. "Man’s Fate" is a prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work. Although later events would destroy his reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well-written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois,and as is the case in this book also the feudal,world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society.

The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Second Chinese revolution at a point where the alliance between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down and Chiang was ready to butcher the Communists in order to take undisputed control of the Chinese state. Like Russia before it, everyone had known that a second Chinese Revolution was coming. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a bourgeois revolution in the classic Western sense or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1920’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. As it turned out neither event occurred at that time. This tension, and especially the tension of the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to Chiang unconditionally, is what drives the action.

The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International's ‘high policy’ of collaboration with Chiang looked like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Chinese Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. In that context, it is additionally an early literary expose of the relationship between those who carry out, even if in small ways, Western imperialist policy in their separate and exclusive colonial enclaves and those ‘natives’ who do the ‘coolie’ work. That tension exists today, as can readily be seen in places like Iraq, so one should pay particular attention to that dynamic. Read on.
 

***Where The Communist Fellow-Traveler Meets The Existentialist Fellow-Traveler- The Early Career of French Novelist Andre Malraux- Some Essays

Book Review

Malraux: A Collection Of Critical Essays, edited by R.W.B Lewis, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1964
No question that the early novels of Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate and The Conquerors about the motivations, hopes and understanding developed by the second Chinese Revolution in the 1920s and Man’s Hope about the seemingly absurd nature of the hard-bitten struggle against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s caught my imagination in my early years as a communist. Written when Malraux was enthralled by the heroic days of the communist movement in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and of its leaders at first the huge heroic figure of Leon Trotsky and then the arch symbol of power Stalin he had the pulse of the struggle in hand. If not, in the end, of the plebeian aspects of the struggle then the travails of the lonely intellectual as he (or she but for Malraux almost exclusively he) tries to come to grips with the modern age and its challenges. Later Malraux just as easily changed hats and explored the lonely pursuits of the intellectual as bureaucrat as he took his place as official cultural mouthpiece for French imperialism under Charles DeGaulle.

Those two poles of attraction pretty well sum up the examination of Malraux life as various literary critics, including Leon Trotsky wearing his literary hat on this one, and others try to get some measure of the man. His influence on communist literary theory was minimal as one would expect of a fellow-traveler in an age of “proletarian culture” and “socialist realism” although his attempts to bring the heroic individual element into play as a factor in mass struggles is a subject well worth exploring for those interested in social struggle down at the bottom of society. There is always a sense though that Malraux stood outside the struggle and viewed himself as a mere spectator even then as Trotsky captures in his essay (book review) on The Conquerors.

Malraux fares better, if not literarily then philosophically, when he later breaks with communism or his idealized Stalin-influenced version of it under the impact of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (he was hardly the first or last to break over that one) and explores humankind’s futile modern sense of loneliness and estrangement as he flirts with existentialism. This was done in a series of lesser novels around World War II and essays on art and art history although the work and the essays on them here are the weakest parts of the collection. Probably the best overall essay is the last one by Gaetan Picon, Malraux on Malraux, where the essayist understands that whatever else Malraux has always been concerned about the role of the intellectual, his passions, his hurts and his “place in the sun” in modern society. That more than anything explains why Malraux was able to so adroitly move from one captain to another as his life drifted along. Read Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, and The Conquerors and then read these critical essays about an important author from the first half of the 20th century.

 

***Writer's Corner- Andre Malraux In His Prime

Markin comment:

Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents in "The Conquerors" and "Man's Fate", tales of the Chinese Revolution. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.

***"Man and Superman"-The Immoralist, Andre Gide

BOOK REVIEW

The Immoralist, Andre Gide, Penguin Classics, New York, 2001

Andre Gide was always justly famous for writing tight little novels that presented unusual moral dilemmas that did not, as in real life, necessarily get resolved or resolved in a way that one would think. That is the case here with one of his early and perhaps most famous offerings. The story line centers on the bedraggled life of a consummate French bourgeois scholar who is going through a personal crisis after the death of his father and his unsought `shot gun' marriage in the early part of the 20th century. The newly weds travel to various exotic outposts of French imperialism, including the dry Northern African coast. Along the way he becomes sick with a life-threatening illness but by an act of will, and the extraordinary care of his new wife, overcomes that crisis. As a result of her loving efforts she in turn gets sick (during her pregnancy). He is decidedly inattentive to her illness. The scholar, in the final analysis, permits her to die by his self-centered actions.

Now, after his illness, and as a result of overcoming that experience the scholar begins to believes that he is `superman' a la Nietzsche and therefore consciously or unconsciously becomes the agent of his wife's descend into greater illness and eventually death. Quite a dilemma, to be sure, but he is not crying over it. The real question here is whether, in a hard and unforgiving world where each person is his or her own agent, that it was his duty to thoughtfully care for his wife or whether his need to take actions to `understand' himself was paramount.

Some other moral questions concerning his role as landlord in his inherited rural estate pop up along the way, as well. Also, just a hint of homosexual tension in his dealings with the young Arab boys in the neighborhood hovers in the background. This is a subject that then was almost always covered in discreet language so it is hard to tell the full extent of the attraction. And whether he did anything about it. This is a question that concerned Gide personally, as well.

I would note that this theme (and the sub theme of homosexuality) and the book itself at the start of the 20th century may have been somewhat scandalous but reading it after some of the harrowing events done by humankind in the last century has cut deeply into the impact that it was intended to have. Still it is a great book and a quick read. Any lessons to be drawn about the dark side of human nature, as it has evolved thus far, take a lot longer.

 

 

On One Nick Charles (Okay, Nora Too), Private Eye- The (Real) Thin Man Case 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman –with kudos to Dashiell Hammett    

Don’t believe everything you hear or read in the damn newspapers about how Nick Charles (born Nicolas Charlopoulas, a Greek guy from the old neighborhood who could hardly wait to Anglicize his name like half the other immigrants who stepped off the boat from Ellis Island back in the day in order to move in with the uptown crowd, the WASPs, when they, he, came of age ) solved what all the newspapers and radio reports called, for lack of a better moniker,  the Thin Man case, the case of the murder of Lawrence Winot the big inventor/ industrialist, right under noses of New York’s finest, including me. Yeah, me, Detective Lieutenant Tom Mallory is here to tell exactly what did and did not happen in that case because the papers, radio too since the just cribbed the AP-UPI ticker,  got it all balled up. Especially the guy from the Gazette , Dashiell Hammett, who was mainly the flak-catcher on the case, the only guy there who could walk on two feet over there I guess, case trying to make a big name for himself, move up in the business, and win a by-line over the dead body of Winot.

The guy, Hammett not Winot carried a lot of water in this town whatever little quirks he might have exhibited, was nothing but a two-bit cub reporter. Christ, writing an advice or how to column or something like that, you know “Should I wear brown shoes with a grey suit-coat?” that kind of stuff, lightweight stuff, for the Gazette newspaper before the police beat reporter, old reliable Glenn Hubbard, passed away and they needed somebody to  cover the spot until they got a real beat reporter. This Hammett was nothing but a bother, soaking up other guys’ material, real reporters, and just re-writing the stuff in that awful hard-boiled cop manner that he thought was the real thing, thought was the way cops, victim, or witnesses talked, gruff talk. You know, highlighting some cop, some cop he slipped a fiver to telling the reading public about how he saved somebody’s bacon, or gunning down some desperado with no thought to his own safety. Not worrying about truth or anything like that. The situation was awful until we threw him out of the reporters’ pit down at Precinct. But he started making stuff up out of whole cloth as he went along grabbling stuff for the police channel and embellishing it. He was the guy who coined it the Thin Man case since when we found Winot’s body it turned out that he was a tall thin guy. Jesus, see what I mean.

So you know Hammett was nothing but putty in a smoothie like Nick Charles’ hands.  Nick wouldn’t even have to work up a sweat just throwing out whatever “evidence” came into that alcohol-addled head. And Hammett lapped it up, all of it just like a dog. And printing whatever his wife, Nora, had to say for that matter who I guess had nothing better to do that clipping stock dividend coupons and decided that wouldn’t it be lovely to be crime-busters for a while, until the social season started anyway. So Nick Charles, or wife Nora, or the both of them gave him all the information they wanted planted (and drinks at their favorite afternoon watering hole over at the Alhambra too). Hammett never checked any of it out and wound up with egg on his face when Nick, drunk probably, swore he had dinner with Winot one afternoon. It must have been a very quiet dinner since according to the coroner’s report Winot had been dead a couple of weeks by that time. Of course once we, I, solved the case all of that was water under the bridge and Nick came up like some Mayfair swell smelling of roses. So if you want the real story, the unvarnished story, follow me on this as I give you the skinny.

This Nick Charles like I said was a Greek kid from my old neighborhood, from the only Greek family in our Irish neighborhood, his father ran the corner market is why. I ran with his older brother Samos stealing hubcaps, batteries from cars and stuff, doing five-finger discounts of almost anything with some value from stores for a while before I got on the force. (Truth: I, we, got nabbed a couple of times but my father, a twenty- year cop himself got it squashed, squashed real good.) Nick later got on the force too through my father who liked the kid, and he was likable in an Irish sort of way for a guy who wasn’t Irish but pure Greek. He left the force after a few years because he didn’t like the red tape and the paper work or something, didn’t get the big cases but was walking some beat out in Five Points before that place got too rough for cops to walk around in. (I heard the real reason he left was he was not getting what he thought was his proper cut of the graft from the bookies, tavern owners, an dope-peddlers and made a stink about it but let’s leave it at the reason he gave Hammett since that is what everybody will believe of Saint Nick now anyway.

After a couple of years of bumming around, riding the rails (to get a feel for the country according to Hammett like running from railroad bulls with blackjacks and eating “jungle” stew was some kind of lark to see how the other half lived) Nick went private. Yeah, became a private key-hole peeper, a shamus, a gumshoe and every other put down name you can think of that real cops call home-wreckers, divorce work guys mainly, or just plain leeches. Hell all you needed was a cheapjack license from the real cops (my father in his case) and five bucks and you were ready to go so don’t make more out it than that like you had to grind away at some four- year college to get going.

I worked a couple of cases with Nick when he was around New York,  nothing big, some stolen jewelry from a department store (I used my old time expertise as a five-finger discounter to wrap that one up for him. Hell, he wanted to fingerprint every kid under twenty who came the store for any reason, Jesus.). Another time a guy who skipped out of his wife and who we were interested in on a Bunco charge, nothing stuff. I forget whether we ever nabbed that guy, maybe not. Then I didn’t hear about him for a while until I ran into Samos one day back in the old neighborhood where I went to visit my mother. I stepped into the market that Samos had taken over from his father when he got too old to do it.  By the way, I also stepped by in order to collect some protection money since Sammy was running a betting parlor out of the back of the store. If you want to do such an illegal activity you best pay some protection money to the men in blue or you will find out fast that such activity is against the law. Sammy was wise to that and paid up, paid up regularly and on time, no problem. Samos said Nick had gone to the West Coast to try his luck there after he heard about a guy named Philip Marlowe, nothing but a private dick but with some street smarts. Marlowe was making a bundle solving cases, especially one big Hollywood case where he saved some producer’s  bacon after a busted kidnap ransom on his daughter went sour, and was getting some silky sheets action from the starlets (courtesy of that grateful producer) down in Los Angeles. Los Angeles before the war, before everything went crazy out there, before everybody and their brother and sister was crazy to go to Babylon.

So Nick tried his luck up north in Frisco. I didn’t see his name or photograph in the papers here like you would about every other week with Marlowe escorting some starlet at an opening night so I figured he busted. Later I heard he had given up the private dick game and had gotten married to some frill with dough out there that he had met on some case. I found out later (from Nora’s maid, maids always a good source for information) that he had actually dropped the ball on the case, an embezzlement of one of her father’s companies by a trusted employee, who got away to some Pacific island and was never caught. The father had subsequently had a heart attack and Nick was there to hold the daughter’s, Nora’s, hand before he passed on.  

So I guess it was true about that private eye silky sheets stuff but it never came my way on the force, not that I would look for it since I am happily married and have three fine kids to show for it. Like I said for a while I didn’t hear the name Nick Charles then one night I was working the Club Soto, looking for a couple of guys, wise guys that I had questions to ask about a certain robbery at Kay’s Jewelry Store over on 42^nd Street, when I spied Nick and his wife, Nora, a looker. They had come to town for some stockholders’ meeting or something and were enjoying the night life while they were here. He had been drinking heavily and maybe she had too although she carried it better. We greeted, he introduced me to Nora, cut up a few old torches and parted. That was the last I heard of them until the Thin Man case broke a couple of months later, around Christmas. The Chief told me, no ordered me, to bring Nick (and as it turned out this Nora who was the one with the real pull, with the dough to do the pulling) into the case since he, they, had bought a whole block of tickets to the upcoming Policemen’s Ball. So that was that. But already, and I haven’t even told you thing one about the case, you can see where bringing in Mayfair swells, even if one of them is busted-down gumshoe who got lucky, would ball the whole thing up. Would make more work for us before he, they, were through.   

I might as well tell you about the case now so you can see who, or who did not have the investigative smarts to round the killer up. This thin man, this  Lawrence Winot, who I mentioned before and who I am sure you have heard of, or somebody you know has heard of, was a giant in the invention game, mostly about making automobiles faster and safer, and then producing the cars at one of his plants. Naturally a guy who can make cars safer and faster in this car-crazy world would have nothing but money hanging off of him. And he did, except that was not what pulled his chain. Thinking up new inventions was what made him tick. His family, his wife, really ex-wife and three young marriage- eligible daughters though were another matter, they wanted dough and plenty. But him, people would see him around town and kind of laugh at him, privately laugh averting his face since you don’t laugh out loud when that much money is walking down the street and someday you might need a job, or a favor. The reason that they laughed though was that this Winot, about sixty years old was gangling, was a tall skinny guy who always looked a little disheveled, a little too long- haired and a bleary-eyed look like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

But the biggest laugh was that he was kind of an absent-minded professor-type. You know head down and bumping into people or tripping and falling off a curbstone. That is why nobody, nobody meaning the family since his companies were managed by professionals who kept him away from production and company finances leaving him a toy- box laboratory to fiddle around in in one of the downtown buildings off of Seventh Avenue where could be found at all hours, was nervous when he didn’t show up for a couple of weeks.

Oh yeah, we found out once NYPD was on the case, although it was like pulling teeth to get the family to provide that information, that like a lot of guys with money and some old time reversion to a young man’s sexual dreams he was keeping company with his secretary. This secretary, this Janet, was a looker although I don’t know how she was at dictation or whether it mattered to Winot but she was all blonde and curves.  I had her down as nothing but a gold-digger or high ticket call girl but that was not important. What was important was everybody, family, company executives, his lawyer, thought he was either with Janet under the silky sheets somewhere or out in some desolate, isolated spot inventing something on the QT. When Janet showed up one day at the office after coming back from vacation and said she hadn’t seen Winot for a couple of weeks and nobody could figure out from any evidence his whereabouts then the family, really Winot’s oldest daughter, Dorothy, filed a missing person’s report and that was how we lammed onto the case.

Now this Winot family was buggy, buggy as Winot himself. Seems that Winot divorced his wife, Ida, in order to play with Janet. Such things happen all the time in and around our town but she had remarried on the rebound to some gigolo, a guy named Roman Griffin who we had a book on for pandering and some Bunco activities. Nothing big but enough to figure he was working some scam and for a while we had he set in stone for the big step-off. Ida, Mrs. Winot, ah, Mrs. Griffin thought Roman had dough, dough being very necessary to her up-town lifestyle which was threatened since Janet made sure that Winot cut Ida off after the alimony settlement. Griffin like I said was nothing but a gold-digger, male version. This Dorothy thought Roman had something to do with her father’s disappearance (as I said so did we once we had a look at his rap sheet) and convinced her two younger sisters to go along with her on the story.

Jesus those two were nuts, nuts plain and simple, a couple of wayward nubiles with time on their hands while waiting for some guy to spring a wedding ring on them They, night and day, began spying on Roman, sending goofy notes, and threatening murder and mayhem if he did not confess to kidnapping their father. And that is where this Hammett guy, this cub reporter came into the picture. They, the sisters egged on by Dorothy who hunted down some information about Griffin and his previous shady life, had called him and as much as said Roman was the one. Hammett printed their sad-ass story and the whole town was ready to lynch Roman. But see Roman was known to us, very well-known and so after a little friendly third –degree grilling we put him on ice as a material witness like we do all the time when we are not sure who did what and to whom. Just so you aren’t in suspense and get an example of how I was in charge right from the beginning this Roman was cleared early, was nothing but a pretty boy con man, and in my long experience con men don’t go in for murder, no way.

In all the uproar it turned out that Nick Charles, once he got sober enough to read, or have the newspaper read to him from what I heard about the wild parties at his place over at The Duchess Hotel where they were staying for their over-extended visit to our fair city, had been on a case for Winot back when he worked the New York City shamus streets. An industrial espionage case where Winot suspected an ex-partner, a guy named Livermore, of selling his plans to General Motors that Nick could never solve, but which gave him entrée with the Winot family. So between that big block of Ball tickets and his knowing the family Nick wormed his way into the case. (Apparently the Winot sisters were not the only ones with time on their hands or were looking for an off-handed thrill since Nora, charming, good-looking Nora, egged Nick on to take the case so they would have something to tell people at their next party, or something like that.)

I tell you thought I kept Nick at arm’s length most of the time, and he kept himself supplied with enough liquor to waltz through the thing. And I mean waltzed. It was this flak-catcher Hammett and his daily bull that got all the attention while we were hunkered down doing the real work. Every day page one in the Gazette Nick Charles this, Nora Charles that. Nick suspected some gangster one day or some ex-lover, or Janet the next while they were really either throwing some party for half of Nick’s old crumb bum friends from the old days or were out on the town drinking from slippers or something.

Truth, he, they, never were a factor in the case at all until that last night when I, me, Tom Malloy, had all the suspects up to their place for a final grilling. See Winot had not disappeared, at least not on his own disappeared to silky sheets or to inventive isolation. One day we got a warrant and searched Winot’s lab looking for evidence that might help us find him if he was out inventing something once the silky sheets with Janet angle blew up after she surfaced at the office one day. In one corner of the lab, a wall really, we “found” Winot, found his bones anyway, found him very dead, okay. So that was when I came up with the idea of using a party at Nick’s place to nail the killer since I had a pretty good idea what happened at the lab, and who did the nasty deed. The way Hammett reported it after the dust settled was based on the idea that because it was Nick’s party where the killer was apprehended then it was Nick’s collar. Hammett was clueless that the “party” was a trap, had been set up that way not that somehow between martinis, dry, that Nick out of the blue exposed the killer and he crumbled before the great man’s deductive reasoning. I was steaming for a month over that one.

Oh yeah how did we find that killer. Simple police work, simple tax-payer public police work. Like I said we figured foul play from the time Janet surfaced without Winot after a couple of weeks. We followed her, followed her for a couple of weeks until one afternoon she met at the Automat with a guy, a guy who we later identified as James Livermore, a competitor and ex-partner when they both were starting out after studying at MIT and a man with a grudge since he believed that Winot had stolen some patent, some patent for automobile transmissions and which made Winot a bundle like I said before. This Livermore got nothing, nothing except for living out in the open air bumming and thumbing most of his life. This Janet was his daughter whom he had convinced to seduce Winot and then after he was perfume-crazed grab his dough while doing her job in the office.

That strategy proved too slow though, and Winot was kind of crafty and a cheapskate always hovering around when it came down to it, so they hatched the kidnap-ransom gag that has been used since about Adam and Eve, maybe before. The problem was that Winot recognized Livermore’s voice during the abduction at the lab and so old Winot’s days were numbered. Very numbered. We checked every place Livermore or Janet might have been where Winot might have been also, checked carefully and we hit pay-dirt when we checked Winot’s workshop area and noticed that what looked like a fresh digging in one corner of the shop. We had that section of the wall dug up and there we found the remains of a man, a tall, skinny man.

It is one thing to suspect a guy of a crime, even murder, it is another to have a case against him, although a few times we have had to frame a guy just to close a case. But not this one, not with the Chief over my shoulder, not with Nick snooping around when he was dead drunk, and not with Hammett printing every fool theory that Charles threw his way. That is when I decided to spring my trap at Nick’s house while everybody of interest was at his dinner party. I had arranged the guest list to include the Winot family in toto, Julia, Winot’s lawyer, a few yeggs, and of course the Charles pair and their lapdog Hammett. Of course we had a few coppers acting as waiters and doormen to keep order and prevent our guy getting away. And the guest of honor although he didn’t know it? One James Livermore whom we were able to get there using the ruse that Winot’s lawyer had information about settling up with him through his will.

When we had everybody gathered and a couple of courses served I played a little game. I asked Nick to eliminate anybody that he was sure was not involved in Winot’s disappearance and for a dipso he did pretty good, getting it down to Janet Livermore and an old yegg, John “Studs” Murphy. At that point James flipped out, flipped out badly yelling that Janet had nothing to do with Winot’s disappearance. He drew a gun and naturally I had to put two slugs into him.

As for Janet, well we left Janet alone although we could have charged her with kidnapping pure and simple. The last I heard she was married to some big money stockbroker who likes blondes with curves and maybe have murder in their hearts. As for Nick and Nora Charles they took the fastest train out of town that night, after the gun play started. The Red-Eye Special that left around midnight and the last I heard of them was they were back clipping stock coupons out in Frisco while using the lounge at the Drake Hotel as their favorite watering hole. Hammett, well, Hammett gave up the newspaper dodge and the last I heard he was writing detective novels based on Nick and Nora’s exploits in that Thin Man case. What a laugh,              

     

 

From the Archives of Marxism-“Who Can Save the Unions?”-By James P. Cannon Workers Vanguard No. 1032

At its convention in Los Angeles last month, the AFL-CIO voted to bolster its numbers through affiliating unorganized “worker centers” and individual workers, creating “a student membership” and joining with “community partners” such as religious and environmental groups in its lobbying efforts. Purporting to address the massive decline in union membership after decades of anti-labor attacks by the bosses and their government, this policy is counterposed to any perspective of labor using its own weapons—from militant organizing drives to strikes—to beat back the capitalist offensive.

The following article by James P. Cannon—a founding leader of the Communist movement in the U.S. and later of American Trotskyism whose early political education was in the Industrial Workers of the World—addressed a similar situation faced by the labor movement nine decades ago, when it was dominated by conservative craft unions. A period of labor radicalism inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution had crested in the U.S. in 1919, receding in the face of a wave of anti-black pogroms as well as the Palmer Raids in which thousands of Communists and other militants were arrested or deported. Membership in the American Federation of Labor would decline from over 5 million in 1920 to less than 3.5 million in 1929, as the bourgeoisie wielded “anti-trust” injunctions against unions and “yellow dog” contracts giving employment only to those who pledged not to join a union. Cannon’s call to revive the labor movement through class-struggle means would find powerful expression in the mass strikes of the 1930s, out of which this country’s industrial unions were forged.

Cannon’s article was published in the 7 May 1921 issue of The Toiler, newspaper of the United Communist Party (later the Communist Party). It is reprinted in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 (Prometheus Research Library, 1992).

*   *   *

The Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York has just adopted three recommendations of a special committee of 25 appointed to devise ways and means to combat the “open shop” campaign of the bosses. The unions cannot fight the open shop by the measures proposed; in that respect they have no value. But as striking examples of what not to do they may serve a useful purpose and, from that viewpoint, should be considered and analyzed. This is what the special committee recommended:

1. To organize a speakers bureau which will present the case for unionism to civic bodies, church forums and similar organizations.

2. To amend the constitution of the central body, permitting the seating of fraternal delegates from non-labor organizations interested in unionism.

3. To seek greater cooperation with such bodies as the Interchurch World Movement, and other organizations felt to be working for union labor.

All three of these undertakings are based on a misconception of the nature of the struggle. The impression seems to be that labor’s troubles in the present crisis are mainly due to a “misunderstanding” as to the aims of the labor movement on the part of some pious people who don’t work for a living, but who are “felt to be working for union labor.” But the real misunderstanding is in the minds of the delegates who adopted this program. Civic bodies, church forums, “non-labor organizations”—the elements who go to make up such groupings are poor props for the unions to seek to lean upon. They may “feel” for organized labor, but the organized workers never feel it in the shape of substantial support in their fight.

The “open shop” campaign is one of the manifestations of a state of war that exists in society between two opposing classes: the producers and the parasites. This war cuts through the whole population like a great dividing sword; it creates two hostile camps and puts every man in his place in one or the other. Those to whom the New York unions would turn for aid are beneficiaries of the present system of labor exploitation. Their interests lie with the system and, as a general rule, people do not allow their sympathies to interfere seriously with their interests. They live in the camp of the enemy. Their material welfare is bound up with those who aim to destroy the unions.

No, the labor unions can get no help in their struggle outside of the working class. More than that, they need no other support. The working class has the power not only to defeat the effort to destroy the unions, but to end the system of exploitation altogether. The principal thing lacking for the quick development of this power is the mistaken point of view illustrated by the program of the New York central body.

Let the labor unions put aside their illusions; let them face the issue squarely and fight it out on the basis of the class struggle. Instead of seeking peace when there is no peace, and “understanding” with those who do not want to understand, let them declare war on the whole capitalist regime. That is the way to save the unions and to make them grow in the face of adversity and become powerful war engines for the destruction of capitalism and reorganization of society on the foundation of working class control in industry and government.

Honor The Memory Of Herman Wallace-1941—2013-Former Panther in Solitary for 41 Years Workers Vanguard No. 1032	18 October 2013

 

Herman Wallace-1941—2013-Former Panther in Solitary for 41 Years

Herman Wallace succumbed to liver cancer on the morning of October 4, nine days shy of his 72nd birthday. A Black Panther who organized fellow prison inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, known as “the bloodiest prison in the South,” Wallace had been free for just three days after over four decades in solitary confinement.

Along with fellow Panthers Albert Woodfox and Robert King, Wallace fought against the racist segregation and barbaric abuses rampant at Angola. When a white prison guard was fatally stabbed inside the prison in 1972, Wallace and Woodfox were targeted for their political activism and framed up for the killing. King was also held in solitary for 29 years, falsely charged and convicted of the murder of a fellow inmate. Each of these men, who came to be known as the Angola Three, was convicted by all-white juries.

Robert King was released in 2001 after his conviction was overturned. But James “Buddy” Caldwell, Louisiana’s state attorney general and ambitious Democrat-turned-Republican, went on to obsessively work to block every judicial overturn of the convictions of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Woodfox remains locked up in solitary to this day despite having his conviction overturned by a federal judge in 2013—the third time a court has overturned the conviction—because Caldwell has again appealed his release.

A defiant Wallace made a statement before his death declaring: “I want the world to know that I am an innocent man and that Albert Woodfox is innocent as well.... The state may have stolen my life, but my spirit will continue to struggle along with Albert and the many comrades that have joined us along the way here in the belly of the beast.” In an act both sadistic and vindictive, the state of Louisiana responded to the court order releasing Wallace by indicting him again the day before his death.

This outrage is similar to what the government is doing to 74-year-old Lynne Stewart, an outspoken leftist attorney with a history of defending radicals, black militants and the poor who remains imprisoned despite being terminally ill with Stage IV breast cancer. Convicted in a 2005 “war on terror” show trial for representing Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in court, Stewart has been denied medical release despite an outpouring of appeals on her behalf. All opponents of racial oppression and prison torture must demand: Free Albert Woodfox and Lynne Stewart now!

A statement by angola3.org at the time of Wallace’s death read: “Herman Wallace’s early life in New Orleans during the heyday of an unforgiving and unjust Jim Crow south often found him on the wrong side of the law and eventually he was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for armed robbery.” Wallace had landed in a hellhole of massive proportions. Angola was a former slave plantation named for the Portuguese colony in Africa where slaves had been captured. The land was purchased by a former Confederate officer in 1880. Using the murderously cruel convict lease system, the owner housed inmates in what used to be slave quarters.

As recently as the 1970s, Angola’s all-white corrections officers were called “freemen” and lived with their families on prison grounds, with inmate servants called “house boys.” According to Robert King’s autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap (2008), prison guards stripped prisoners, shaved their heads and made them run a gauntlet of bats and clubs; incoming prisoners were sold as sex slaves.

At Angola—the largest maximum security prison in the country—some 85 to 90 percent of those imprisoned die within its walls. It is run by an evangelical zealot, Warden Burl Cain, who believes, literally, that the only way out of the place should be through redemption by Jesus. Grotesquely, Angola has become a popular stop for Christian fundamentalist tour groups. Mother Jones (23 March) reported: “In a 2008 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, ‘Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller [the slain guard].’ Cain responded, ‘Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [solitary].... I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism’.”

It took remarkable courage for the Angola Three to “practice Black Pantherism” in their patch of hell, establishing the only recognized prison chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the nation. In a radio commentary released on October 12 to coincide with Wallace’s memorial service in New Orleans, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a leading BPP member in his youth, said: “The late L.A. BPP Deputy Minister of Defense, Geronimo Ji-Jaga (Pratt) once called them the most courageous Panthers of them all, for daring to organize in the heart of Angola.”

Of his own nightmare and his struggle, Robert King told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in a February interview: “A lot of people that end up in solitary confinement also end up on the psychiatric ward in Angola or some other institution.” As an article in Slate (7 October) noted, the U.S. invented systematic solitary confinement. Referring to the 1820s, the article remarked: “At the time, the system was considered extraordinarily progressive, given that it did not involve mutilating or executing prisoners for their crimes. It was also quite ineffective, as isolated prisoners tended to go insane.” Wallace, along with King and Woodfox, filed a civil suit seeking to abolish long-term solitary confinement. The suit is still being pursued following Wallace’s death.

The Angola Three collectively spent over 100 years in solitary, held in six-by-nine-by-twelve-foot cells for at least 23 hours a day. But they refused to be bowed. These men were motivated by revolutionary struggle as they understood it. Their persecution speaks to the capitalist rulers’ burning hatred for the Black Panther Party, which represented the best of a generation of black militants. The Panthers were targeted for systematic extermination: In the 1960s-early ’70s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program gunned down 38 Panthers, while hundreds more were imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

As revolutionary Marxists, we never shared the Panthers’ black nationalist program. At the same time, we insisted that it was the duty of the workers movement to defend the Black Panther Party against vicious state repression. Herman Wallace’s story and that of the Angola Three illuminate the workings of the capitalist justice system in all its hideous, racist reality. Our task is to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in sweeping away the entire apparatus of capitalist terror through the conquest of state power, finally uprooting black oppression and the system of wage slavery. Befitting their determined struggle, the Angola Three will be honored in a workers America.

********

'Angola 3' member Herman Wallace dies three days after being freed from 41 years of solitary

- / Herman's House via AFP - Getty Images

Herman Wallace at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in an undated photo. He was confined to solitary confinement for more than 40 years.

By Simon Moya-Smith, Staff Writer, NBC News

A former prisoner who had been free for only three days after serving more than 40 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana died Friday after a bout with liver cancer.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the immediate release of Herman Wallace, a member of the so-called "Angola 3," who served more time in solitary confinement than any other inmate, Wallace’s attorney George Kendall told NBC News.
Wallace, the former Black Panther who was only nine days away from turning 72 years old, died at a friend’s home with friends and family near his bedside, Kendall said.
“He was very comfortable and surrounded by loved ones,” said Kendall. “He was grateful that he was alive on free soil.”

 

 

The judge said on Tuesday that Wallace's petition was granted because women were excluded from the grand jury in his case four decades ago, violating the Fourteenth Amendment.
The state was given 30 days to notify Wallace if it planned to re-indict him, the court ruling said.
Originally serving time for unrelated cases of armed robbery, Wallace and fellow prisoner Albert Woodfox were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972, and placed in isolation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison.
A third inmate, Robert King, was also convicted of murder, but his conviction was overturned in 2001, after 29 years of isolation.
Wallace and Woodfox, who have continued to deny involvement in the guard's killing, have been the subjects of documentary films. In July, Amnesty International called for their release on humanitarian grounds, claiming that "no physical evidence links them to the crime; potentially exculpatory DNA evidence has been lost, and the testimony of the main eyewitness has been discredited."
Welcoming the judge's decision, Wallace left the prison Tuesday night, Kendall said.
In a letter published in the San Francisco Bay View on Sept. 12, Wallace wrote that doctors had given him two months to live after they stopped his treatment altogether on Aug. 31.
Wallace died in a hospice-type setting, Kendall said, and added that Wallace “is a testament to the human spirit.
“He was determined that (solitary confinement) was not going to break him,” he said.
Woodfox's case is pending before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
NBC's Becky Bratu contributed to this report.
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