South Africa: Strikes, Protests Mount-Metal Workers Union Drops Electoral Support to ANC Workers Vanguard No. 1039	7 February 2014

South Africa: Strikes, Protests Mount-Metal Workers Union Drops Electoral Support to ANC

 

Forge a Leninist-Trotskyist Party! For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

FEBRUARY 4—Up to 80,000 members of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) in Rustenburg are on strike against South Africa’s three largest platinum producers—Impala Platinum, Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) and Lonmin—demanding major pay raises for both underground and surface workers. Shutting down production of one of the country’s leading exports, the walkout, which began on January 23, follows an eleven-week strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against Northam platinum that ended with workers winning a 9.5 percent pay hike. The National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), which organizes Amplats refinery and smelting operations but had been keeping its members on the job during the AMCU strike, also walked out on February 3 over their own demands. Union solidarity is crucial in the fight against the platinum bosses, who had heavily stockpiled the mineral in anticipation of the miners strike.

Meanwhile, police continue to terrorize desperate black township residents demanding provision of basic services like housing, water and electricity. On January 13, four people in Mothutlong, a township in North West province near the platinum belt, were killed demonstrating for what should be a basic right: access to clean drinking water. Ten days later, a man participating in a protest demanding housing was shot dead by cops in the Durban Deep area of Johannesburg.

Waves of strikes and ubiquitous “service delivery protests” demonstrate the increasing frustration of the mainly black working class and the impoverished masses with the continuation of their degraded conditions 20 years after the formal end of apartheid, a system of legally enforced white supremacy. The economic structure of this capitalist society, based primarily upon the superexploitation of black labor, has not changed since Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were voted into government in 1994. Today, the overwhelming bulk of the country’s wealth, including mines, industry and land, is still in the hands of white capitalists and their imperialist patrons in Britain and the U.S. While a few black faces have been added to corporate boardrooms, the mass of black workers and all the urban and rural poor struggle merely to survive.

During the August 2012 Lonmin miners wildcat strike at Marikana, the ruling Tripartite Alliance—a nationalist popular front comprising the bourgeois ANC, the Stalinist-derived South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)—unleashed the worst instance of lethal police violence against the struggling black masses since the end of apartheid. In scenes reminiscent of the killing of black protesters at Sharpeville in 1960 and Soweto in 1976, cops gunned down 34 miners in cold blood.

Now, with these and other platinum miners organized by AMCU on strike again, the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers, which has lost tens of thousands of members to AMCU, is scabbing on the strike. And COSATU has called for more deadly repression against strikers, demanding in a January 29 statement that police and company security protect the scabs! In fact, today police fired stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse some 3,000 strikers at an Amplats mine shaft. Revealing the treachery of its own leadership, AMCU scabbed on a national NUM strike at the gold mines last year.

On December 10, the growing anger at the ANC coming from the base of society was on public display when President Jacob Zuma was booed at an official memorial service for historic ANC leader Mandela at Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium. Mass memorials were held throughout the country for Mandela, who was imprisoned by the vicious racist regime for 27 years before being released in order to ease negotiations that, ultimately, led to a brokered end to apartheid rule. We Trotskyists defended the ANC and other opponents of apartheid against state repression. However, we never gave an ounce of political support to the ANC, whose bourgeois-nationalist program could only keep the black majority chained to the system of capitalist wage slavery. In the 1994 elections, the International Communist League opposed any support to the ANC, declaring:

“A vote for the ANC—including its Communist Party members and affiliated trade-union leaders of COSATU—is a vote to perpetuate the racist oppression and superexploitation of the black, coloured (mixed-race) and Indian toilers in a different political form. The workers and all the oppressed must be mobilized independently of the capitalist masters.”

— “South Africa Elections: ANC’s Deal with Apartheid Bosses,” WV No. 598, 15 April 1994

Now, as working-class discontent continues to rise, fissures are opening in the Tripartite Alliance. At a Special National Congress in December, NUMSA—an affiliate of COSATU and, with 338,000 members, the largest union in the country—voted to withhold support from the ANC in upcoming national elections, projected to take place in April or May. Resolving not to support any other party, NUMSA, which is mainly based in the auto industry, also declared that it would cease paying into the COSATU/SACP political levy and would press COSATU to break from the Alliance. NUMSA had been joined by eight other unions in opposing the suspension of COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi last August on charges that he had had sex with another COSATU employee at the federation’s headquarters. However, most of those unions have just resolved to maintain their electoral support to the ANC.

The Johannesburg Sunday Independent (19 January) reported that at the NUMSA congress “delegates were more militant than its national leadership, including outspoken general secretary Irvin Jim.” While ANC bigwigs were not invited to the congress, guests included representatives of the imperialist U.S. and German embassies. On paper, NUMSA’s decision on the elections marks a significant break from the ANC, but it was not on the basis of a principled opposition to supporting a capitalist party.

In an 11 December 2013 leaflet, our Spartacist South Africa comrades noted that the NUMSA leadership maintains its loyalty to Mandela’s ANC, particularly the bourgeois-populist Freedom Charter adopted in 1955. The NUMSA tops also swear by the “two-stage revolution” doctrine of the SACP, long a formula for allying with a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie. While Irvin Jim decries particular “neoliberal” policies adopted by the Alliance, such as the late 1990s GEAR program and the current National Development Plan (NDP), he upholds the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of the first ANC-led government, a blueprint for a “reformed” capitalism that did nothing to satisfy the masses’ needs.

We reprint below the SSA leaflet, which was distributed at the NUMSA congress.

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From all sides, the Special National Congress of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) on 13-16 December (now postponed to 17-20 December) has become the focus of intense interest. In particular, the congress is supposed to decide on a proposal that NUMSA not support the ANC in the 2014 elections (including refusing to pay a R2 million [$180,000] “political levy” to the ANC), and another proposal to investigate “alternatives” to the ANC/SACP/COSATU Tripartite Alliance. These decisions could have a significant impact on politics and the labour movement in neo-apartheid South Africa. Recognising this, the leaders of the bourgeois ANC—together with their cronies in the leaderships of the SACP and COSATU—have been working overtime to intimidate the NUMSA delegates and either force them to back down or isolate them. The congress is also supposed to discuss a campaign of political strikes beginning in February 2014 to protest the National Development Plan (NDP) and other government attacks.

Many militants in NUMSA (and other COSATU-affiliated unions) have great expectations that the congress will be a step toward ending the union’s subordination to the ANC and the capitalist government, and seriously fighting for the working class and poor. The likes of NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim and COSATU’s suspended general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi have been using a lot of left rhetoric to build support among these workers, including acknowledging that “the post-apartheid state is a capitalist state” (Vavi), that the ANC is “bourgeois,” and suggesting that their opponents in the Alliance play the role, under neo-apartheid, of “receptionists of white monopoly capital and imperialism” (Jim and NUMSA deputy general secretary Karl Cloete). This is cynical hypocrisy on the part of the NUMSA leaders and Vavi, given that they themselves have been very reliable “receptionists” over the last 20 years of neo-apartheid rule, strangling strikes on behalf of the bosses and repeatedly herding the working class as voting cattle for the bourgeois ANC.

The anger and disgust of many workers toward COSATU president Sdumo Dlamini and others in the “anti-Vavi” faction of COSATU is understandable. Dlamini and Co. are open, craven apologists for every atrocity committed by the Zuma-led government—most despicably for the bloody massacre of 34 striking mineworkers in Marikana last year. But the role of Vavi, Jim and Co. has fundamentally been no different—they just spout some “critical” phrases and adopt an “independent” posture while pushing through the same class-collaborationist betrayals. Last year they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Dlamini and the National Union of Mineworkers tops against the Marikana strikers, including supporting Zuma for a second term just a few months after the massacre. Earlier that year, Irvin Jim and other NUMSA leaders visited Zuma at his lavish Nkandla homestead, where they reportedly discussed the possibility of Vavi being promoted to Zuma’s deputy among other measures to smooth over tensions in the Alliance. And don’t think for a minute that they have “learned their lesson”: Vavi and the NUMSA tops are currently suing COSATU in the courts of the very same state—a capitalist state, as even Vavi now admits—to have Vavi’s suspension lifted. This is yet another betrayal of elementary working-class principles.

What’s urgently needed is a policy of complete political and organisational independence from the bourgeoisie, its parties and its state. A decision to not vote for the ANC in the elections would be significant, but on its own this is not enough for working-class political independence. The NUMSA leadership’s proposals are not based on any principled opposition to political support for bourgeois parties, but on the hopes of pressuring the ANC and the government to change some of their policies. This is clear from the NUMSA National Office Bearers’ (NOB) notes distributed to delegates of the NUMSA Regional Congresses on 23 November. Everything is blamed on “the neo-liberal NDP”—as if the capitalist Tripartite Alliance government hadn’t been carrying out constant attacks on workers, immigrants and unemployed people in the townships and rural areas for some 19 years before the adoption of the NDP, whether under the RDP, GEAR or some other label!

The point of the NUMSA tops’ focus on particular policies is to cover up their own role in propping up neo-apartheid capitalism all these years, and to channel the anger of the working class and poor into the reformist dead-end of tinkering with the system of capitalist exploitation and oppression—to “transform the state” or “fundamentally change the current socioeconomic strategy of the government,” as the NUMSA NOB notes put it. The capitalist government, and the state it administers, can never “fundamentally change” to represent the interests of the workers and oppressed. As comrade Lenin explained in State and Revolution (1917), the capitalist state can never be used to serve the interests of the oppressed and exploited classes; it must be smashed, broken through a workers revolution, and replaced with the dictatorship of the proletariat to suppress the capitalist exploiters and begin socialist reconstruction of society. In South Africa, where the unresolved task of national liberation for the non-white majority is strategic, this means a black-centred workers government, which would include full democratic rights and an important role for the coloured and Indian toilers, as well as for those whites who would accept a government based centrally on the black working people.

As a possible alternative to the Tripartite Alliance, the NUMSA National Office Bearers propose something they call a “United Front,” which they say would be “similar to the UDF [United Democratic Front] of the 1980s” and based centrally on the “full implementation of the Freedom Charter.” The formation envisioned by the NOB proposal, like the UDF of the 1980s, is a popular front and has nothing at all in common with the united front tactic as employed by the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky and the early Communist International. The united front is an agreement reached between two or more parties or organisations, which have different programmes, for joint action on specific demands. Each organisation retains intact its entire programme as well as the right to put it forward and criticise the other organisations in the united front.

The popular front, on the other hand, is not about agreement for joint action on specific demands, but agreement on a common programme between working-class and bourgeois organisations—and inevitably, that common programme is bourgeois. The popular front is not a tactic to advance the interests of the working class, but a class-collaborationist betrayal of those interests. The history of bloody defeats suffered by the working class as a result of the popular front is long—from strangling the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s and paving the way for the Franco dictatorship, to subordinating the working class in Chile to Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular and opening the way for Pinochet’s bloody coup in 1973, to the Marikana massacre in 2012.

Despite the myths preached by Jim, Vavi and the like, there is nothing “socialist” or “working-class” about the Freedom Charter—it is a bourgeois-populist programme. The ANC leaders have always been quite honest about its bourgeois nature, including the recently deceased ANC icon Nelson Mandela, who emphasised in his 1956 article “In Our Lifetime” that the Charter was “by no means a blueprint for a socialist state,” but rather aimed at making possible “the development of a prosperous Non-European bourgeois class.” The Freedom Charter’s rhetoric about “the people” sharing the wealth, etc., is nothing but a populist smokescreen intended to obscure the class divisions among the black majority and keep the black proletariat shackled by nationalism—the mistaken belief that all who were oppressed under white minority rule have common class interests. The reality of the neo-apartheid system that resulted from the negotiated settlement with the white rulers has been a layer of mainly politically-connected blacks enriching themselves in partnership with the same Randlords and monopoly capitalists who dominated under apartheid. The superexploitation of mainly black labour and grinding oppression of the masses remain unchanged. To try to foist the bourgeois Freedom Charter on the working class now means ignoring the experience from the past 20 years of continued suffering under this system and preparing the way for more betrayals and defeats.

Another alternative proposed by the NUMSA NOB document concerns the kind of party required by the working class: “Given that the SACP has become embedded in the state, we must explore the establishment of a Movement for Socialism.” Just what this means is supposed to be determined by investigating “different types of parties—from mass workers parties to vanguard parties” and studying “the lessons we can learn from such countries as Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Greece.” This could include everything from some kind of reformist workers party that would seek to administer capitalism on its own or in coalition with openly bourgeois forces—like Lula’s Workers Party (PT) in Brazil—to outright bourgeois populist parties like those led by the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. None of these alternatives offer a solution to the burning problems faced by the working class and the poor, and they can’t because they are all premised on maintaining capitalism.

The Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) has produced a bulletin for the NUMSA Special Congress with the title, “Sikhokhele NUMSA!” [Lead us, NUMSA]. In it, WASP “congratulates the NUMSA leadership for recognising the changed political situation post-Marikana” and “for tabling an agenda that addresses the key issues facing the working class” while writing not a single word of criticism of the betrayals by the NUMSA leaders and Vavi. This is not surprising, because the “mass workers party” that WASP seeks to create is really no different from the reformist party the NUMSA tops are contemplating—based on touching faith in the bourgeois state, narrow trade-union economism, ignoring questions of special oppression, and tailing bourgeois nationalism. The main force behind WASP, the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), and their international cothinkers [Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International] have a long, rotten history of supporting “strikes” by cops, security guards and prison guards—who they grotesquely embrace as “workers in uniform.” The DSM’s predecessors were buried in the ANC up to the mid-1990s, loyally campaigning for it in elections and opposing the call for a workers party. Like Irvin Jim and Co., their beef with the ANC today is not based on principled opposition to bourgeois parties, but on the ANC’s adoption of certain unpopular, “neo-liberal,” policies like GEAR and the NDP, which they complain are a “betrayal” of the Freedom Charter. Thus, WASP recently tried (unsuccessfully) to negotiate an electoral bloc with the bourgeois populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of Julius Malema.

As a matter of fact, there already is a mass reformist working class party in South Africa—the reformist, Stalinist-derived SACP. While the SACP tops are widely reviled by many workers in NUMSA and other unions (and by militants in the SACP itself) for their wretched betrayals, the reformist, anti-revolutionary programme of the SACP is fundamentally what Jim, Vavi and others are offering up today as an “alternative”—from recycling the Freedom Charter, UDF and other treacherous popular fronts, to promoting “Two-Stage Revolution” and alliance with a mythical, “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie under the label of “National Democratic Revolution.” It is crucial that advanced workers learn to consciously reject this reformist programme in favour of the genuine communism practiced by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky—the revolutionary internationalist programme that was trampled under-foot by the Stalinists and replaced by its opposite.

We urge workers to study the true programme and history of the Bolsheviks, who were able to lead the only successful workers revolution to date in October 1917. That party was built on the basis of an uncompromising struggle for the independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie and for proletarian leadership of the toiling masses, acting as a revolutionary tribune of the people to oppose every manifestation of capitalist oppression. This is the kind of party that Spartacist/South Africa, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), is trying to build. We have consistently opposed, on principle, any political support to the ANC or any other bourgeois parties and from the beginning denounced the post-1994 neo-apartheid system, administered by the Tripartite Alliance government, as a betrayal of the struggle for black freedom. Today, it is necessary to assimilate the lessons of the history of international class struggle—including the last 20 years under neo-apartheid South Africa—to begin the work of building the revolutionary vanguard party needed to get rid of this racist system of capitalist exploitation. Toward that end, we raise the following:

1. Break with the bourgeois Tripartite Alliance! For political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois parties—ANC, EFF, PAC [Pan Africanist Congress], AZAPO [Azanian People’s Organisation], DA [Democratic Alliance], Agang, etc.

2. No reliance on the state that massacred the Marikana strikers. Cops and security guards out of the unions! The capitalist courts have no place in disputes of the workers movement. Labour must clean its own house!

3. Down with labour brokers! The unions must fight for full, permanent jobs for all contract and temporary workers and for equal pay for equal work. Organise the unorganised!

4. For integrated, multi-ethnic defence guards based on the trade unions to fight against anti-immigrant attacks and defend working-class communities against vigilantism. Labour must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and oppose deportations.

5. Down with the Traditional Courts Bill! This and other attacks hit particularly black women, who are triply oppressed under neo-apartheid. For access to free, safe abortion and birth control on demand, as part of free, high-quality health care for all. Oppose oppressive, backward traditional practices like polygamy, lobola [bride price] and ukuthwala [abducting girls or young women for marriage].

6. For a massive public works programme, at union wages and conditions, to maintain and expand roads, build hospitals, schools, housing, etc. For free, quality health care for all! For free education, open admissions, and a state-paid living stipend through to the university level! Smash “e-tolls”—for free, safe, mass transport!

7. For a 30 hour workweek with no loss in pay to distribute the available jobs among all who need work and combat unemployment at the expense of the capitalists. For massive wage increases to close the apartheid wage gap, and a sliding scale of wages to keep pace with the skyrocketing costs of living. For a class-struggle leadership in the unions!

8. New October Revolutions—not the Freedom Charter—are the only way forward to national liberation of the black majority. For a black-centred workers government, part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, that fights for international workers rule and an international planned socialist economy. Expropriate the bourgeoisie—from Jo’burg, to London, to Wall Street!

9. Forge a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party as a section of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

Free Chelsea Manning Now!

Update 2/20/2014: Jesselyn Radack asked at Heathrow Airport “Who is Bradley Manning?”

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Edward Snowden’s lawyer Jesselyn Radack  was recently detained while going through customs at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Jesselyn Radack told Firedoglake she was subjected to “very hostile questioning” about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an inhibited persons list, a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers.
In an interview with Democracy Now! Jesselyn explained the bizzare list of questions she was asked by the airport security at Heathrow. Jesselyn recalled:  ”They said, ‘Who is Edward Snowden?’ And I just said matter-of-factly, ‘He is a whistleblower and an asylee.’ They next asked, ‘Who is Bradley Manning?’”
To read the full story, click here.

Chelsea Manning acceptance statement of Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence

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Aaron Kirkhouse (left), a childhood friend of Chelsea Manning, accepting the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence on her behalf. Also in photo: US Army Col. Ann Wright (ret.), Craig Murray, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Chelsea Manning via Aaron Kirkhouse. February 19, 2014
The founders of America – fresh from a war of independence from King George lll – were particularly fearful of concentrating power. James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”(1)
To address these concerns, the founders of America actively took steps when drafting the Constitution and ratifying a Bill of Rights-including protections echoing the Libertarianism of John Locke-to ensure that no person be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
More recently, though, since the rise of the national security apparatus – after a brief hiatus between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center – the American government has been pursuing an unprecedented amount of secrecy and power consolidation in the Executive branch, under the President and the Cabinet.
When drafting Article III of the American Constitution, the founders were rather leery of accusations of treason, and accorded special protections for those accused of such a capital offense, providing that “[n]o person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”
For those of you familiar with the American Constitution, you may notice that this provision is under the Article concerning the Judiciary, Article III, and not the Legislative or Executive Articles, I and II respectively. And, historically, when the American government accuses an American of such crimes, it has prosecuted them in a federal criminal court.
In a recent Freedom of Information Act case(2) – a seemingly Orwellian “newspeak” name for a statute that actually exempts categories of documents from release to the public – a federal district court judge ruled against the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Times and the ACLU argued that documents regarding the practice of “targeted killing” of American citizens, such as the radical Sunni cleric Anwar Nasser al-Aulaqi were in the public’s interest and were being withheld improperly.
The government first refused to acknowledge the existence of the documents, but later argued that their release could harm national security and were therefore exempt from disclosure. The court, however, felt constrained by the law and “conclud[ed] that the Government [had] not violated the FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and [could not] be compelled . . . to explain in detail the reasons why [the Government's] actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
However, the judge also wrote candidly about her frustration with her sense that the request “implicate[d] serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States,” and that the Presidential “Administration ha[d] engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of [American] citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways.” In other words, it wasn’t that she didn’t think that the public didn’t have a right to know – it was that she didn’t feel that she had the “legal” authority to compel disclosure.
This case, like too many others, presents a critical problem that can also be seen in several recent cases, including my court-martial. For instance, I was accused by the Executive branch, and particularly the Department of Defense, of aiding the enemy – a treasonable offense covered under Article III of the Constitution.
Granted, I received due process. I received charges, was arraigned before a military judge for trial, and eventually acquitted. But, the al-Aulaqi case raises a fundamental question: did the American government, and particularly the same President and Department, have the power to unilaterally determine my guilt of such an offense, and execute me at the will of the pilot of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle?
Until documents held by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel were released after significant political pressure in mid-2013, I could not tell you. And, very likely, I do not believe I could speak intelligently of the Administration’s policy on “targeted killing” today either.
There is a problem with this level of secrecy, obfuscation, and classification or protective marking, in that they supposedly protect citizens of their nation; yet, it also breeds a unilateralism that the founders feared, and deliberately tried to prevent when drafting the American Constitution. Now, we have a “disposition matrix,” classified military commissions, and foreign intelligence and surveillance courts – modern Star Chamber equivalents.
I am now accepting this award, through my friend, former school peer, and former small business partner, Aaron, for the release of a video and documents that “sparked a worldwide dialogue about the importance of government accountability for human rights abuses,” it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the dangers of withholding documents, legal interpretations, and court jurisprudence from the public that pertain to the right to “life, liberty, and property” of a state’s citizens is as fundamental and important to protecting against such human rights abuses.
When the public lacks the ability to access what its government is doing, it ceases to be involved in the governing process. There is a distinct difference between citizens, in which people are entitled to rights and privileges protected by and from the state, and subjects, in which people are placed under the absolute authority and control of the state. In essence, this is the difference between tyranny and freedom. To echo a maxim from Milton and Foes Friedman: a society that puts secrecy – in the sense of state secrecy – ahead of transparency and accountability will end up neither secure nor free.
Thank you,
CHELSEA E. MANNING
1 – Federalist Papers, No. 47 (1788).
2 – New York Times v. United States Department of Justice, 915 F. Supp.2d 5O8, (S.D.N.Y.,2013.01.03).

President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Six Ways To Support Freedom For Chelsea Manning- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

The Struggle Continues …

Six Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea  Manning

*Sign the public petition to President Obama – Sign online http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/chelseamanning  “President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning,” and make copies to share with friends and family!

You  can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.

*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns.  Contact the Private Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips http://www.bradleymanning.org/

*Contribute to the Private  Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/

*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Bradley E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304. You must use Bradley on the address envelope.

Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.

*Call: (913) 758-3600-Write to:Col. Sioban Ledwith, Commander U.S. Detention Barracks 1301 N Warehouse Rd
Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027-Tell them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).” (for more details-http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html#!/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html

Send The Following Message (Or Write Your Own) To The President In Support Of A Pardon For Private Manning

To: President Barack Obama
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge, Colonel Lind, on August 21, 2013 to Private Manning (Chelsea formerly known as Bradley) has outraged many citizens including me.
Under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution the President of the United States had the authority to grant pardons to those who fall under federal jurisdiction.
Some of the reasons for my request include: 

*that Private Manning  was held for nearly a year in abusive solitary confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, which the UN rapporteur in his findings has called “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”

*that the media had been continually blocked from transcripts and documents related to the trial and that it has only been through the efforts of Private Manning’s supporters that any transcripts exist.

*that under the UCMJ a soldier has the right to a speedy trial and that it was unconscionable and unconstitutional to wait 3 years before starting the court martial.

*that absolutely no one was harmed by the release of documents that exposed war crimes, unnecessary secrecy and disturbing foreign policy.

*that Private Manning is a hero who did the right thing when she revealed truth about wars that had been based on lies.

I urge you to use your authority under the Constitution to right the wrongs done to Private Manning – Enough is enough!

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Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The 1960s Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

Nine –To Be Judged By One’s Own

No question, no question at all that Robertson Edgars, twenty-two, all sable warrior tough, six-two, two hundred and forty pounds, who had played some ball in high school, a rumbling, tumbling, stumbling break back fullback, the worst kind, who devoured opposing linemen, was every white man’s nightmare, every white man’s nightmare dream that if he, Robertson Edgars, came into that white man’s range, say his neighborhood at dusk or dawn, never mind into his curtilage anytime, that he would sweat, sweat like hell, about what to do with the bastard, especially if the wife and kids were there to see him sweat, sweat death fear sweat. And no question either that every white woman (well, maybe not everyone since Brother Edgars had had a bed full of white chicks, white chicks who status conscious in high school craved amazing break back fullbacks and later craved that ersatz black man experience when the times dictated that as a rite of passage experience among certain white educated women, and a few not so well educated too, although nothing steady, that was strictly black stuff, strictly, some educated, some not), every white women, mothering woman, feared, feared that black night fear when she came within fifty feet of a monster like the brother.

So Robertson’s lawyer, his mother downtown red brick textile sweat shop crimp and save bought lawyer, Jim Everett, was surprised (and in fact had tried like hell to argue him out of the decision, try to explain one more time the what and why of the white man’s justice system that even he, an honored white man, knew, knew not just in his bones but through his pile of black convictions and the many years prison time was stacked again him) when he had told him that he preferred to have his case, his burglary case tried before a jury rather than a judge (the judge in this case, Judge Abbott, notorious in the Court of Common Pleas, for his quick dispatch of young men into the Texas prison system night with heavy terms, and fines too).

And here was the rub. In Macomb County even though blacks outnumbered whites about three to two that the jury pool would probably wind up being majority white. Robertson’s argument that a few black mothers empaneled might take pity on him since he actually was innocent and had an alibi (a black alibi but an alibi nevertheless) and although he had some priors (a couple of drug busts, a couple of DUIs, kid’s stuff really) he thought he could survive that information if the situation came to that since those mothers would perhaps have had their own crimp and save son in trouble woes, (or knew of such doings) time came for that. His back-up was that maybe some black father (although not Robertson’s, his father had died in some stinking jungle hellhole in Vietnam in 1971) worried about his own son might see where Robertson had been framed, framed like a million other black kids. Jim thought he was foolish to believe that might happen but he kept it to himself one Robertson made it plain he was adamant on the question.

On the day set for trial Judge Abbott, according to Jim Everett, seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. He was known to be ill-tempered even on his good days and was deliberately rude to Jim when he requested dismissal of the charges for lack of evidence, some standard Jim argued not met by the prosecution, and he ruled that motion down in about two seconds with no arguments heard. This action by the judge only confirmed in Robertson’s mind the wisdom of his choice. Shortly thereafter the jury selection proceeded and from the start it things went badly when a young white woman was dismissed for some cause and then a young black woman who looked like she was making eyes at Robertson (neither of those two women would be picked, or have survived challenge, under any circumstances, black or white, being young was a bar to selection, an unwritten law). By noontime the jury had been selected and Robertson almost, as big as he was, cried. Not only in three to two black Macomb County was the jury all- white it was ten men and two women. And the two women might as well have been men because they looked and acted like they were prison guards at the women’s prison or some such thing. Robertson reached back as he was walking outside for a cigarette before the start of the trial itself that afternoon and said out loud to himself Paul (his black brother alibi) better come through, he had better come through…

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 

***La Dolce Vita Redux- Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)    

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), starring Toni Sevillo, directed by Paolo Sorrentino , Medusa Films, 2013  

Many of us have seen the great epic explorations of the tattered and worn decadent post-World War Italian high society social scene done by the late director Federico Fellini. Most notably his La Dolce Vita which captured his fine sense of the absurd machinations of the high rollers with plenty of time (and lira) on their hands. That film is a direct descendent of the film under review Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza where the leading character Jep (played by Toni Sevillo), a classic product of current Italian high society, conclusively proves that the rich and their hangers-on have not changes much in the last half century except their habits are become more exotic and expensive.

The plot, well, this kind of film really has no plot, is centered on an exploration of Jep’s, well, boredom with life now that he had reached the age of sixty-five and has seen it all, heard it all, and done it all without making much of a dent in the world. Oh sure Jep (and maybe some others in his crowd) had youthful aspirations (maybe even dabbled a little in leftist politics), had written a book, maybe more but had settled into a life of bourgeois comfort and forgetfulness. While the “plot” may not be much the reason to watch this film, and you should, is the remarkable acting of Toni Sevillo as the faded novelist turned cultural critic bound to shoulder on in the vacuum of high society. That acting and the lush party scenes when high society breaks out are what kept my eyes riveted to the screen. A last fifteen minute or so of the seemingly mandatory attack on the powerful Roman Catholic Church in Italian life could, no, should have been cut at no lost to the great beauty of this cinematic study.

     

On Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw And The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (Volunteers) –Take Two  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…he had walked pass that blessed then muddied- unattended frieze across the street from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston it seemed like half his now graying life. Anytime he had cadged a hooky day from high school back in the early 1960s in order to head into downtown Boston and check out the day life on the Common, grab an off-beat movie at the many big house theaters on lower Washington Street to kill a couple of hours, or just hang out he would circle around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station. Walked around just to get a “feel” for his city, the city of his birth, on humid summer days, leaves falling orange/red/yellow/autumn days, bleak snow-bound winter lights days, and rebirth green spring days. Walked head down right by the seemingly obscure defaced and unrepaired marble. Walked by thinking of his big world existential problems too intense to worry about faded pasts  

Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school, a two-year school and then transferred to Suffolk University in that same downtown Boston and had to work trucks down toward Congress Street to make his daily meat he would pass the memorial on his way to school. Still later when he lived on the hill (Beacon Hill) with some rarified suburban girl from Long Island who foot the bill (or rather some New Jack City banker Daddy) in sullen splendor (until she in her turn married some junior up and coming stockbroker) his studied neglect continued.

Passed it, that subtle monument to past fights, like it was just another in a long line of historic ornaments in a town filled with memorials to its ancient arrival long continental history. You know bloody battle number one here, bloody battle number two there, a pigeon-bedecked statute of some fire-breathing Puritan divine casting out heathens here or some furious bearded abolitionist turning up the heat there, some battle-hardened general leaning Grant-like there, some corruption-filled over-fed civic leader in full three piece suit regalia here. Yes, the town was a breathing tribute to all that went down in the cold times American East when west, real west, was someplace around the Hudson River and white man European dreams were of making it along the Eastern seaboard and not having to trek inland luckless to face the unknown, natural or man-make.  

 

 

Had briskly passed blinkered that perfect pre-historic monument to some pretty important history going on right before his eyes down in bloody Birmingham/Selma/Greensboro/Philadelphia (MS that is)/Montgomery/Oxford (MS again) and one thousand other later to be   storied locales after the dust cleared (and the fight reined in). Yet with all that civil rights let-them-vote-sent-books-to Alabama-ride-the-freedom-bus bust he was clueless to that aspect of his history. Clueless (and no high school history class, at least the days he attended ever mentioned such things) to those places, Fort Wagner above all, where his people, his black proud Massachusetts 54^th (and later the 55^th) had made righteous stands for freedom, had filled the sable ranks, had arms in hand confirmed the worst planter’s John Brown-benighted nightmare, had bled rivers of blood and  inelegantly sweated buckets of sweat, had trooped down to their citadel, Charleston, singing marching songs, and had not waited, no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom…

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-A ‘Moscow Trial’ in Ho Chi Minh’s Guerilla Movement

 

Book Review

Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.

The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.

Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

A ‘Moscow Trial’ in Ho Chi Minh’s Guerilla Movement

What appears here is an account by the veteran Vietnamese Trotskyist Ngo Van Xuyet, to whom, along with our translator, Simon Pirani, our thanks are due. It should establish once and for all that the Vietnamese Communist Party is an organisation of the purest Stalinist type, and becoming as it did a military apparatus supporting itself on the peasantry, could not do otherwise in a real revolutionary situation than attack the working class movement and its authentic representatives, as Trotsky foresaw so long ago in the case of its sister party, that in China (Peasant War in China and the Proletariat, 22 September 1932, Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, pp.529-30). Readers who are interested in this phenomenon should consult our remarks in the introduction to the article in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no.4, Spring 1990, p22.
The contrary view, that the Vietnamese Communist Party was a real revolutionary working class organisation, is to be found argued by Michael Lowy in The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, London 1981, pp.130-41, and by Pierre Rousset in The Vietnamese Revolution and the Ro1e of the Party, International Socialist Review (SWP, USA), Volume 25 no.4, April 1974, pp.4-25 and in Le parti communiste vietnamien, Paris 1975. The cruder versions of this belief occur in John Spencer’s Vietnamese Trotskyism and the August Revolution of 1945 (Communist Forum, n.d.), Stephen John’s Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, (Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, part 1 , pp.1114-128) and Martin McLaughlin’s Vietnam and the World Revolution, Detroit 1985, the last two, which repeat the old Stalinist canard that the Trotskyists “underestimate the role of the peasantry”.

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

The coming to power of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1945 was favoured by the special conjuncture of circumstances in which the country found itself: the absence of the French imperialist state apparatus, disrupted by the Japanese army since 9 March 1945, and the surrender of Japan itself on 15 August 1945. Arriving at the head of his guerilla bands from the highlands of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh took power in Hanoi. He was able to impose himself upon the insurgent masses not only by his reactionary nationalist demagogy but also above all by force of arms and through the murders carried out by his GPU, the Ty Cong-Au.
Whilst the former mandarins, bourgeois, landlords, peasants and workers were being invited to participate in the Stalinist Vietminh front, Ho Chi Minh was asking the emperor Bao Dai to abdicate in favour of the ‘republic’ and to agree to become Supreme Counsellor/Advisor to the ‘democratic’ government. At the same time his assassination committees were arranging for the ‘thorough’ disappearance of the printer Luong Doc Thi, the leader of the Thanh Nien Thothuyen Xahoi (Socialist Worker Youth), Nguyen Te My and many other internationalist militants, including Tiep, Luong, Vinh, and Sam, who suffered the same fate. Nguyen Te My had been organiser of the Viet Da Tuyen (Independent People’s Front) in the Haiphong area. The teacher Tran Tien Chinh was arrested and died from the effects of torture in [illegible] prison at [illegible].
Just as Ho Chi Minh was occupying Hanoi, the miners of Hoa-gay in Camphu district (a conurbation with a population of 300,000) rose in revolt, set up workers’ committees, and on that basis established a truly proletarian government. The workers took over the mines, tramways, railways and telegraph system, arrested the bosses and the police, and destroyed the local apparatus of the old imperialist state. The Japanese troops, who had surrendered, remained indifferent to the situation. All the means of production were placed under the direct control of a management committee elected by the workers themselves and completely controlled by them. The principle of equal pay for all levels of manual and intellectual work was put into effect. Public order was maintained by armed workers. During the three months of its existence (from the end of August until December 1945) this first proletarian government made mining production work normally, secured the economic life of the region, conducted an intensive struggle against illiteracy and brought in sickness benefit.
But isolated by circumstances, the movement was unable to spread and rouse the other working class centres in the country.
After having established himself in Hanoi and having murdered the proletarian revolution in that city, Ho Chi Minh sent for his armed gangs from the Delta under the leadership of Nguyen Binh (the future Commander-in-Chief of the guerillas of Cochin China) to surround the insurgent mining district and force the workers’ government installed there to dissolve itself. The workers’ militia had only a few rifles and sharpedged weapons, so a compromise was reached: Nguyen Binh’s troops entered the district promising to respect the status quo. Thereupon, by means of underhand police intrigues, the militants S, Lam, Bien, Hien, Le and others, who had been elected by the workers, were ousted from their positions, placed under arrest and taken to Haiphong, where several of them had to be released in face of the anger of the miners. But in the end the entire region was occupied and subjected to the military and police control of the Ho Chi Minh government.
On 14 September 1945 in Cochin China (South Vietnam), this same Vietminh government arrested the Popular Revolutionary Committee at 9 rue Duclos that had been set up on the initiative of the International Communist League (LCI). This embryonic soviet had placed its stamp upon the region of Saigon-Cholon, Gia-dinh and Bien-Hoa. Bombarded by the general staff of General Gracey’s British troops of occupation, as well as the Stalinist Tran Van Giau clique who led the Vietminh government, it had advanced the slogans of arming the people, expropriating the landlords and handi over the land to the peasants, and for workers’ occupation of the factories. The Stalinist Minister of the Interior, Nguy Van Tao, sent soldiers to bring to their senses with bursts of machine gun fire the peasants of Go-den, as well as the peasants of the Plain of Reeds, who had themselves expropriated the landlords.
Whilst Ho Chi Minh and his follow were advertising themselves as supporters of the ‘democratic’ (Russo-Anglo-American imperialist) ‘Allies against Japanese Fascism’, and whilst the Popular Revolutionary Committees were calling the masses to armed insurrection against all the imperialisms (democratic or Fascist), Tran Van Giau sent his police (those same cops who only yesterday had still been in the service first of French and then of Japanese imperialism) to dissolve the Committee, and its militants were sent the Central Prison in Saigon to be shot. When the British troops, whom the Vietminh government had but recently welcomed with a “Hurrah to the Allied Forces”, helped the French to reoccupy Saigon, Tran Van Giau and his gang fled to Cho-dem, leaving the revolutionaries locked up in the hands of the French police and the (British) intelligence service, whilst the popular insurrection, against the wishes of those in flight, erupted against the Franco-British troops on the night of 23 September.
The Vietminh GPU continued to hunt down the revolutionaries on its blacklist even whilst in flight. The leading members of the Socialist Workers Party of Vietnam (whose leader Ta Thu Thau had been murdered on Ho Chi Minh’s personal orders in September 1945) Tran Van Thach, Nguyen Van So, Nguyen Van Tien and many other workers were murdered at Kien-an (Thu-dau-mot) on 23 October 1945; Phan Van Hum and Phan Van Chanh ‘disappeared’ somewhere in the areas controlled by the guerillas in the north of Cochin China; Nguyen Thi Loi, a member of the same party, was murdered at Binh Dang (Cholon) in October 1945; Le Ngoc and Nguyen Van Ky, members of the LCI, were tortured to death by the GPU of the Vietminh in the Hoc-món region at the beginning of 1946.
This marked the end of the period of simple murders and of the ‘execution of traitors’, and was the beginning of the period of the ‘Moscow Trials’.
Having already escaped from Ho Chi Minh’s GPU in 1945, Nguyen Van Linh, known as Rene, and Truong Khanh Hinh, two revolutionary workers from Saigon, fell into a trap laid by the Vietminh in May 1950. [1] Nguyen Van Linh had taken part in the European workers’ movement since 1930 as an activist among the circles of the Left Opposition in France. Having returned to Indochina at the beginning of the war, he had been a member of the LCI from the time of the Saigon Uprising of September 1945. He had been one of the organisers of the Go-Vap Tramway Workers’ militia (whose leader, Tran Dinh Minh, known as Nguyen Hai Au, had died in battle with the French troops on the Cao-Lanh Front). Arrested by the GPU of the Vietminh in 1946, he had escaped from Soc-Trang and returned to Saigon. Last year, having been invited by the guerillas of Bien Hoa to discuss a proposal for a so-called ‘United Front’, Nguyen Van Linh and two other comrades were treacherously arrested. When his wife went to search for him, she too was detained by the GPU. They bound her feet and suspended her from the rafters. Then they made cuts on her limbs with a pen-knife into which they put oil-soaked wicks of cotton, which they set alight to force her to counter-sign a statement allegedly signed by her husband. According to this statement, Nguyen Van Linh had confessed to having been an agent of the French Deuxieme Bureau, and to having received 31,000 piastres from Bazin, the Security Commissioner, for use against the ‘resistance’ movement. His wife, who was being held separately, saw him and hardly recognised him; he was a mere human bundle of rags. There is no need to dwell on the fate that awaits him – if he has not been shot already. The two other comrades have already been killed.
Nguyen Van Linh’s wife escaped from her torturers in the middle of a battle between them and the French troops.
Ho Chi Minh and his GPU are marching in step with the Bao Dai regime and the French expeditionary corps as far as methods of torture and murder are concerned.
The only victims are the oppressed and exploited masses and those who constitute their revolutionary vanguard. Whilst the American imperialist bloc, hand in hand with Mao Zedong, puts Korea to fire and sword and makes intensive preparations for the destruction of mankind with its atom and hydrogen bombs, Russian imperialism, by means of its hired assassins in every corner of the globe – in China, in Central Europe, and in the guerilla areas of South East Asia – proceeds with the methods of the Inquisition, besides which all the Torquemadas of the Middle Ages pale into insignificance, to the total annihilation of what yet remains of those elements that are faithful to the world proletarian revolution, the movement for the liberation of mankind. The case of Vietnam shows that the Stalinists of the Asian guerillas are the equals of their masters in Moscow when it comes to monstrous crimes against the revolutionary proletariat.
Ngo Van Xuyet

Notes

1. According to Ch’en Pi-Lan, Looking Back over My Years with P’eng Shu-tse in P’eng Shu-tse (ed.), The Chinese Communist Party in Power, New York 1980, pp.42-3, Rene and Liu, the two leading Trotskyists, had organised a conference in a zone controlled by the Vietminh army, the chief of staff of which in that area was a Trotskyist. But this was a trap prepared by the Stalinists, and they were all arrested along with the Chinese Trotskyist Lu Chia-Ling, who was on his way to Europe with Peng Shuzi and his wife, and so died in prison in Vietnam.