AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Monday, February 24, 2014

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947

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.
********

Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947

The position of the ICL on the events of 1945-47 is much better known than that of La Lutte, its Trotskyist rival. Apart from the accounts by Comrade Ngo Van Xuyet above, we have the description below written by ‘Lucien’ who was a comrade who had escaped to France in 1947, where he worked among Vietnamese factory workers, returning to Saigon in 1954. He died of tuberculosis in 1982. It is thus impossible to accept the remark of Stephen Johns (in Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, part 1, p.119) that “no Vietnamese Trotskyist has ever written an account of the Saigon events”.
Of secondary sources, John Sharpe’s description in Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam (Spartacist, New York, 1978), an informative treatment that originally appeared as a series of articles in Workers Vanguard in 1973, also sympathises with the ICL’s views, as does that of Stig Eriksson.
The ICL criticised the support accorded to the Vietminh by the La Lutte group, and had a separate list. They considered that the formation of military forces was most important, advocating the arming of the people against the reorganised French and the British imperialist army of occupation. They founded a workers’ militia, and attempted to create a system of dual power to oppose both the Allies, setting up peoples’ committees of workers and peasants, among whom they had some 30 militants. They favoured the expansion of the revolution by the abolition of private property, of land to the peasants and the factories to the workers. In 1945 they had as yet no differences with the La Lutte group over the class characterisation of the Soviet state, such as appear in our document here. Trotsky quotes the La Lutte group’s description of October, the ICL’s predecessor, as “centrist” in Trotskyism and the PSOP, 15 July 1939, Leon Trotsky on France, New York 1979, p.241.
This programme comes from the archives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (where it bears the number ‘Don no 69546, FOD Rs 445’), to whom our thanks are due, and here appears for the first time in English.
1. August 1945, sounding the knell of Japanese domination, marked the birth of the Vietnamese Revolution.
It was born in the gap created by the disarray of the ruling Japanese military authorities and the inability of the Allies to cause relief troops to come to the spot. The causes that gave birth to it are classic: the centuries-old slavery to which the Vietnamese people had been subjected by French imperialism, the misery and countless sufferings engendered by the last ‘war to end wars’ (two million dead during the 1945 famine in Tonkin), the growth in the political understanding of the masses, the knowledge they had of the inferiority of French imperialism caused by the military disasters it experienced when confronted with German imperialism, to the ‘yellow’ Japanese imperialism, and to the sensible organisation of the Vietminh.
II. The Vietnamese revolution could be claimed to encompass all classes and social layers, and all the political economic, religious, social, philosophical and cultural organisations of the Vietnamese, people. Saigon and Hanoi have witnessed enormous demonstrations of more than a million, recalling the great revolutionary days in Paris, where all the banners were mixed together. Even if the worker and peasant population is very much the basis and inexhaustible reserve of the Vietnamese resistance, many of the bourgeoisie and landowners, up to and including the Emperor Bao Dai (citizen Vinh Thuy today) and a very great number of intellectuals have carried on a great struggle,.
The Vietnamese Revolution is truly national and popular.
It has inaugurated the Vietnamese democratic republic with its own government, its own national assembly, its army and its finances.
III. (A) Dominated, however, as it is by the policy of a ‘bloc of classes’ of the Indochinese Communist Party, the strongest and best organised of all the parties that make up the Vietminh, the policy of the Vietnamese republican government defends primarily the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the landowners. The defence of private property (including the property of French imperialism), the defence of national integrity, a bourgeois parliament, finances and customs of an equally bourgeois type, together with an army, police and bureaucracy intended to guarantee private property are all crowned with a policy of building an independent economy – obviously a bourgeois one – away from the grip of the world imperialist economy.
As for the layers of the petty bourgeoisie, the republic will reserve a host of careers for them, in parliament, in the administration, in the police, in the army, in commerce, in agriculture, in diplomacy, etc.
With regard to the mass of the poor peasantry, the Ta-dien, nothing, or practically nothing. Obviously the Dia to (tenant farming system) will be reformed, but private landed property remains sacred and inalienable.
As for the still weak working class, it was only granted a slight amount of labour legislation.
However, since the Vietnamese bourgeoisie has turned out to be congenitally impotent, an impotence from which the French imperialism of the great industrial combines, trading companies and large plantations of the Bank of IndoChina never allowed it to break free, just as in another way the interests of the native gentry are intimately linked with and subordinated to the interests of French imperialism, this bourgeois policy of the Vietnamese republic has been shown to be unworkable.
Economic, and consequently political, independence is no more than a hollow dream. Agrarian revolution would have been considered a crime. Thus neither of the two great tasks of the democratic revolution came to be resolved; the dream of the Stalinist strategists has evaporated, largely because of themselves.
Even more so, they have sabotaged both the one and the other.
(B) In fact, confronted by imperialism, they merely practised the grovelling policy of cowardly pacifists. At the news of the defeat of the, Japanese, having straightaway seized power by a bold coup d’etat in Tonkin, they posed as democrats, boasting of their struggle on the side of the democratic Allies against Japanese militarism. They naively thought that the Sino-English imperialists whom they had received with open arms were going to grant them the independence promised by the Atlantic Charter. Their illusions were soon dispelled when General Gracey opened the gates of Nam-bo (in Cochin China) to the first troops of the puffed-up Leclerc, who in the meantime had been armed by Great Britain at a cost of three billion francs for the conquest of both Vietnam and Indochina.

Stirred

Then the people, whom up till then the Stalinist leaders of the Vietminh had accustomed to bleat out the slogan “Hurrah Allied Forces”, who had been partly stirred up by revolutionary groupings, either extremist nationalists or International Communists, as if by instinct came to their senses and armed themselves spontaneously, some with sharpened bamboo sticks, some with hatchets, with machettes, with knives, and some with weapons that had been stolen or seized from Japanese soldiers, and organised themselves rapidly into popular militias and revolutionary peoples’ committees. The peasants began to take over the land and the workers the factories, mainly belonging to the French.
All these revolutionary measures were forbidden by the governmental committee of Nam-bo of Tran Van Giau, Nguyen Van Tao and Duong Bach Mai, all three of them ministers and leaders of the Indochinese Communist Party.
Arming the people! What a Trotskyist provocation to the Allies! It was up to the popular militias to surrender all their weapons, including the sharpened bamboo sticks, to the governmental committee who would hand them back to the Japanese, since they had to render account for them to the British, who had entrusted them with the maintenance of law and order. Revolutionary Committees! Yet another Trotskyist provocation! Only administrative committees are necessary. Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers! Yet more Trotskyist provocations!
Thus the Stalinist leaders had opposed all the popular initiatives that would have guaranteed national liberation and the agrarian revolution.
Their enemies are the defenders of the working people and of the armed revolutionary people, they are the supporters of the Fourth International, they are those who, at least during the first period of the resistance, the Stalinist leaders imprisoned, assassinated and offered as victims on the altar of the democratic Allies as represented by Gracey, for defending the poor peasants. It is thus understandable why numerous militants of the Fourth International as well as of the Hoa Hao were exterminated physically, and why it was necessary for the Stalinists to secure the liquidation of the Fourth International, for this was a sine qua non condition of their maintaining power and of their flirtation with imperialism.
(C) In spite of this attitude, or because of it, they were driven from the capital by the first French troops. Their ‘friend’ Gracey lifted not a little finger to defend them, just as he had never even allowed them to see him via the back stairs. They gave up Saigon without firing a single bullet and left the people to itself, to the fury of the enemy ... but also to its revolutionary militants.
Finding cadres within its own ranks, the people, angered by the flight of the Stalinist government, organised the resistance everywhere. It has lit up the bloody road of armed insurrection by a flame never to be forgotten that will yet astonish the world.
(D) Having recovered from their fright, our Stalinist ministers, trained as they were in the school of the Guomindang, then tried to regain the leadership of the movement of the insurrection, not without effecting the assassination of authentic revolutionary militants. But as always, they went from surrender to surrender.
First there was the suspension of hostilities in Nam-bofor the parleys with General Gracey that allowed the French reinforcements to arrive. Then there was the agreement of 6 March, which in exchange for the formal recognition of the Vietnamese Republic opened the gates of Tonkin to the troops of Leclerc, and finally the modus vivendi, a booby trap that in spite of the warnings of the revolutionary opposition allowed the Moutet-D’Argenlieu-Leclerc trio to finalise its plans for the reconquest of Tonkin and Annam. The entire Stalinist policy has betrayed the cause of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and has continually played the game of imperialism.
IV. Resistance, effective, violent and burning, is still continuing at present by the most sophisticated methods of the guerilla. The enemy, however, has reoccupied almost all the vital and strategic centres. It is, nonetheless, exhausted even by that. The permanent internal crisis in France (finance, food, supplies, interminable strikes, the threat of civil war), the financial incapacity of French imperialism to send and maintain an expeditionary force of between 250,000 and 500,000 men that would be necessary for the complete reconquest of Vietnam, and the revolts of other French colonies should and could have induced them to bargain with the Ho Chi Minh government. But there we are; he is of the Moscow obedience, and clerico-republican French reaction, following its yankee orchestral conductor, did not want any of it. For Vietnamese territory is coveted by Sino-American expansionism. Besides, it is likely to serve as a base for the future ‘war to end wars’.
Whilst one faction of the bourgeoisie went back to its old master, another faction ‘ for fear of seeing itself ruined by an interminable policy of ‘scorched earth’ (houses and factories burnt down, rice fields abandoned, trade ruined and communications cut), fearing the measures of ‘War Communism’ (confiscation of the harvest, of property and of requisitions of all kinds) – this faction of Nguyen Hai Than, of Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Van Sam has turned towards the ex-emperor Bao Dai to mediate with the Americans in exchange for a consideration.
These latter have systematically organised themselves, made a stand and regained their courage against the Stalinist policy of the Vietminh under the name of the National United Front.
Making themselves the echo of a more gigantic struggle, that of the USA-USSR, these two fronts have entered into open conflict, saturating Western Cochin China in blood. And so the Vietnamese drama continues, without any foreseeable way out for the moment.
What does, however, remain certain is that the Vietnamese working people and peasants, who did not struggle only in the end to remain inside the imperialist French Union, to allow itself to be still exploited and plundered, or to serve Sino-American interests, has shown itself to be satisfied neither by the Ho Chi Minh setup, nor by the set-up of Than Tam Sam (Nguyen Hai Than, Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Van Sam).
The Viet Hong organisation in Tonkin is already being talked about as being the revolutionary wing of the resistance. Groups for resistance to the end are being born practically everywhere.

Satisfy

In any case, negotiations could yet take place. Governmental combinations could halt the hostilities momentarily, though this does not appear probable.
But since nothing will be done to satisfy the deep aspirations of the people, at present organised and armed, the struggle will continue.
V. What has been the policy followed up till now by the working class political and trade union organisations of the metropolitan country as regards the Vietnamese revolution?
The Stalinist Party, wishing to see the tricolour of France floating over all its overseas territories, has betrayed the Leninist policy of the right of peoples to self-determination up to and including the right of separation from the metropolitan country. They have shown themselves to be accessories in this by their collaboration with the Bidault-Moutet and Ramadier-Moutet governments. Abstention during the vote for military credits for Indochina does not excuse the betrayal of its war minister. The support it has given to the Ho Chi Minh government has only been token. Will not, moreover, the prolongation of the war in Vietnam for certain aggravate the present crisis threatening the French finances (over 100 million per day is being gobbled up by the expedition to Vietnam), finally involving French imperialism with another Syria-Lebanon, at least? Its policy has in the end imprisoned Vietnam inside the French Union for the glory of a ‘strong and happy’ France, the France of Leclerc, of the Bank of IndoChina, of the rubber planters, of water, of electricity, etc., etc. ... obviously.
French imperial grandeur in danger could not find better defenders. Besides, isn’t the Stalinist policy of class collaboration and Millerandism a permanent betrayal of the Socialist proletariat and the oppressed people?
The Socialist Party, which has again become the leading governmental party 10 years after the Popular Front, has yet again revealed its thoroughly social-imperialist nature. Even the most experienced pen pushers of Le Populaire (of Paris) could not disagree with the fact that Bidault, Leclerc, D’Argenlieu, Moutet and its own Ramadier well and truly make up one and the same admirably balanced team. The truth is that the Socialist Party, characteristic as it is of the Fourth Republic, is parliamentarism, and is only there to make the Vietnamese pill palatable to the working people of France. History will one day tell us the amounts on the cheques that Moutet and Ramadier and sons have handled from Ganny, the planters and other sharks during their stay in Saigon. We must assign responsibility properly. But between them and us it is a question of war.
The Pivert-Rous tendency, the left wing of the Socialist Party, has indeed protested against the opportunism of their comrade ministers. But it only aimed at being able to replace them in order to realise a better policy of understanding imperialist interests. Isn’t Dechezelles joining ranks with the Stalinists in recommending the inclusion of Vietnam within the French imperialist union, for an agreement with the Ho Chi Minh government, may we add? What else could this ‘French Union’ be under the Fourth Republic, for ourselves and the working class, in the absence of a Socialist proletarian revolution, if not a union of exploiters and exploited, dominated by imperialism, naturally?
As for the CGT, its leadership, under the orders of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, has also failed in its duty of revolutionary support for colonial peoples in their struggle for liberation. Moreover, can we expect anything better from the bonzes, Jouhaux-Racamond-Frachon?
Faced with the Vietnamese revolution, all the great working class organisations of France have either howled with the wolf or have shown themselves t® be its accomplices.
The group of La Revue Internationaliste, pitifully, has only the attitude of a student amateur.
Only the Parti Communiste Internationaliste has adopted a correct attitude of unconditional revolutionary support. But, in its organ at least, it does not seem to have sketched out perspectives for the future.
VI. As far as we Internationalist Communists are concerned, we lay claim to the best traditions of Bolshevism on the national question: forever making the principles of the permanent revolution our own, we think that the resolution of the national-democratic tasks in Vietnam – which are pressing down more sharply than ever – can only be accomplished by the resolution of the revolutionary Socialist tasks. In other words, if for example we remain within the limits of the French empire, the true national liberation of Vietnam, as well as the agrarian revolution, can only be accomplished borne on the wings of the proletarian Socialist revolution in France (or in another advanced country), which will sweep along in its wake of Socialist liberation all the oppressed peoples in order to transform their national democratic revolution into a Socialist revolution, with the aim of building a Union of French Soviet Socialist Republics.
We therefore oppose to the imperialist slogans of the French Union that of the Union of French Socialist Republics.
If, therefore, the Vietnamese revolution is stagnating, for the time being, it is due to the lack of a revolutionary Socialist upsurge in the advanced countries.
To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be obtained by negotiations with French imperialism, with or without the mediation of other imperialisms, we say; we will only obtain this liberation by a concerted struggle of the Vietnamese worker and peasant population with the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan country, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples.
To this end, given that French imperialism can only emerge from the present crisis by trampling upon the oppressed peoples of Africa and Asia, and by the installation of a military or a Fascist dictatorship, being faced with the tragic dilemma of Socialist revolution or military-Fascist reaction, our duty is not to hold back the Vietnamese resistance for whatever independence to the advantage of the national bourgeoisie and of imperialism, but to prolong it, to accentuate the general crisis of France, to help the revolts of the Madagascans and the Moroccans, and whilst waiting for the French revolutionary upsurge, to prepare for the transformation of the present revolution into a Socialist revolution. Outside of this way, there is no solution.
International Communist League (Vietnamese Section)
Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee, 8 July 1947

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

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…he had walked pass that blessed then defaced, 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 footed 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.

Yes he had 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 blinkered pass 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 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 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.

Then one cloudy day, not a 1960s day but much later, he happened to notice some work being done in the area around the monument while walking toward Park Street Station and a ride to the suburbs. Walked toward the site and asked about what was going on. Restoration they called it, bringing the dead back to life he thought. Suddenly the sun glistened though a cloud and he noticed something on the frieze, a figure of a man, an old man trooper, bearded, bed-rolled, knap-sacked, rifle-shouldered, marching in step just in front and to the left (from a front view of the scene) of a white officer on horse (whom he would find out later was the Colonel Shaw who was buried with his black brethren in knighted dignity in some ashy pit in front of bloodied Fort Wagner). He stopped in his tracks as he realized that old soldier looked very much like his paternal grandfather, the father of his own rolling stone father who had taken off for parts unknown and left him and his mother to the tender mercies when he was about seven. That old man had (along with his grandmother) saved him from gathering a storm in the streets with the lure of the corner boy life.

He was befuddled at first since as a veteran of the Vietnam War he knew that no old pappy guys were filling the ranks of the American army in his time and so that old pappy figure perked his interest. One day he went to the Boston Public Library over in Copley Square and found a book that dealt with the history of what he had found out was a memorial to the heroic Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, all volunteers, all black ranks, and all white officers raised right there in Boston. His interest further perked he sought to find who was the model for that old pappy soldier. Had he a history, some story to tell. He never did find out if there was a real live model but he liked to think that old pappy had escaped from some desperate Tidewater plantation, had followed the northern star, had made something of himself, learned a respectable trade and had prospered. Then when Frederick Douglass or one of those hot-tempered abolitionist orators raised the call he had laid down his tools and joined up. Joined up amid ancient memories of kin in Pharaoh’s thrall and had not waited, said no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom...

***Oh The Shark, Babe… -Kevin Spacey’s Beyond The Sea-A Film Review

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Beyond The Sea, starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, directed by Barry Levinson, 2004

No question I am a child of rock and roll, a child of what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (ouch!), when the likes of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Wanda Jackson, Laverne Baker, the Big Bopper, and about a million doo wop groups roamed freely on the earth. And lit up the transistor radio night airwaves for perplexed teenagers along the way. Then came something of a musical counter-revolution as Elvis went slick, Chuck had tax and white women trouble, Jerry Lee had cousin problems, and the others faded and that magical moment went silent. Also faded once parents, our parents, got hooked on the idea that rock and roll meant, ah, sex, (maybe) and thus the devil’s music and started pushing back with singers like Bobby Vee, Fabian, the Everly Brothers, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, and, well, Bobby Darin. Yes, Bobby Darin, the subject of the film under review, Beyond The Sea.

To be fair as least as far as this biopic portrayed him accurately apparently Bobby Darin (played very nicely if unevenly by super-actor Kevin Spacey) did not want to be solely seen as a teenage heartthrob but fancied himself a popular entertainer in the mode of the previous generation’s (our classic age of rock and roll parents’ generation) Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. However on the ground, the teenage ground, in those days, especially junior high school days, Bobby with his Splish- Splash –Beyond The Sea-Dream Lover good manners and his popular translation of the Bertolt Brecht Three-Penny Opera song Mack The Knife every mother in the neighborhood pointed him out as prima facie evidence of good taste in teen music. Someone to actually be listened to. Worst of all when he teamed up with and married teenage actress heartthrob Sandra Dee (played by Kate Bosworth) every girl in the neighborhood (and a few traitor boys hooked on perky blondes) could hardly contain themselves with every tidbit of information they could gather from the teen magazines about the pair.

Enough though about Bobby’s role in the music counter-revolution and the clamp-down of decent rock music. What is really at issue with this film, what is wrong with it to be frank, is its obvious sentimentality, its odd-ball song and dance routines and it flights of fantasy as Bobby Darin meets…well meets his younger Bobby self along the way. Quickly put any film that makes the likes of Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth and John Goodman out of place is a film that should be avoided. Instead just wait a few years for the Beatles and the Stones and the children of classic rock and rock will get well again.

the original is here

BRAVO, oh ye COTW [citizens of the world]
terrific banner drop!! :-)

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Sunday, February 23, 2014

In Honor Of The 143^rd Anniversary Of The Paris Commune -Jean Jacques Paget’s Dream

Jean Jacques Paget, all of age fourteen, son of Francois Paget the journeyman tinsmith and a known radical thinker, a follower of Proudhon, around the neighborhood, had not slept a wink the past twenty-four hours. Well, maybe a couple of winks after they, he and his comrades, had erected the barricade at the corner of Saint Catherine’s, and he had rested his eyes for a few minutes. But like the bulletin from the Central Committee of the National Guard stated every citizen of Paris, every honest democrat, every person who stood against the depredations of the Theirs government that had fled to Versailles in panic needed to be vigilant, needed to defend the Commune with his or her life. And young Paget, leaning for support against some chairs that had hastily been thrown on the pile was willing, young as he was, to defend the Commune with his life (and he thought his father too although he was away at the Hotel de Ville attending to Committee of Public Safety business and so not at the barricade). He was sure of that, just as sure as he was of the dream he had of what would come of all this when the dust settled, when they could take down the barricades and begin life, a people’s commune life, like his father kept arguing with one and all about.

Young Paget, if he had been asked the finer points of political doctrine would have had to confess that he was unaware of what the programs of Blanqui and Proudhon and like were about but he knew, knew in a mind’s eye way, what he wanted. First and foremost he wanted cheap bread for the table; bread so he did not allows feel hungry like now with bread dear in his growing bones, bones suffering all the suffering a fourteen year old suffers. He wanted free education so he could learn to read better, and maybe become a printer or a skilled tradesman and not have to drudge away in some crummy old factory like the ones that were starting to foul up the air of the neighborhood. He wanted an end to military service for the state, the state that had taken his older brother Leon away, Leon who was now a prisoner of the bloody Germans who were howling at the outer walls of his dear Paris. Let the Central Committee of the National Guard provide for the defense, they could do better than that fool Louis Bonaparte had done. He wanted the banks abolished, or at least controlled some so Paget, Senior, Papa, could finally end his journeymanship and open his own shop. He wanted the streets cleaned up too so every time it rained he didn’t get his shoes all mucked up and smelly for a week. He wanted a house that where the roof didn’t leak and there were not about eight people to each room. He wanted a room of his own, if possible, no more than two though. He wanted free boat rides on the Seine although he would not insist on that demand. Mainly though he wanted the government to leave him and family alone, stop taking their money for never-ending taxes and keeping Paget, Senior away from his dream. And he thought he was right, right in the sense that he was feeling that his father and his friends and comrades could figure out how to run the government without a lot of muss and fuss, and that was what he really was willing to defend, defend to the death if necessary if it came to that…

For the Political Independence of the Working Class

	Workers Vanguard No. 1039	7 February 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

For the Political Independence of the Working Class

(Quote of the Week)

The South African Communist Party, part of the ruling Tripartite Alliance led by the African National Congress (ANC), has long subordinated itself to the bourgeois-nationalist ANC, portraying it as leading the mainly black working class and the poor in a “national democratic revolution.” During the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky fought against the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, a policy ordered by the Communist International leadership of J.V. Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin with the rationale that the Guomindang was the leader of China’s national revolution. The subordination of the CCP to the Guomindang, founded by Sun Yat-sen, culminated in the April 1927 slaughter of tens of thousands of Communists in Shanghai by forces led by Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek.

Bourgeois society, as is known, is so constructed that the propertyless, discontented, and deceived masses are at the bottom and the contented fakers remain on top. Every bourgeois party, if it is a real party, that is, if it embraces considerable masses, is built on the self-same principle. The exploiters, fakers, and despots compose the minority in class society. Every capitalist party is therefore compelled in its internal relations, in one way or another, to reproduce and reflect the relations in bourgeois society as a whole. In every mass bourgeois party the lower ranks are therefore more democratic and further to the “Left” than the tops....

Bukharin asks, “And what about the Kuomintang masses, are they mere cattle?” Of course they are cattle. The masses of any bourgeois party are always cattle, although in different degrees. But for us, the masses are not cattle, are they? No, that is precisely why we are forbidden to drive them into the arms of the bourgeoisie, camouflaging the latter under the label of a workers’ and peasants’ party. That is precisely why we are forbidden to subordinate the proletarian party to a bourgeois party, but on the contrary, must at every step, oppose the former to the latter. The “high” summit of the Kuomintang of whom Bukharin speaks so ironically, as of something secondary, accidental, and temporary is in reality the soul of the Kuomintang, its social essence. Of course, the bourgeoisie constitutes only the “summit” in the party as well as in society. But this summit is powerful in its capital, knowledge, and connections: it can always fall back on the imperialists for support, and what is most important, it can always resort to the actual political and military power which is intimately fused with the leadership in the Kuomintang itself. It is precisely this summit that wrote laws against strikes, throttled the uprisings of the peasants, shoved the communists into a dark corner, and, at best, allowed them to be only one-third of the party, exacted an oath from them that petty-bourgeois Sun Yat-senism takes precedence over Marxism. The rank and file were picked and harnessed by this summit, serving it, like Moscow, as a “Left” support, just as the generals, compradores, and imperialists served it as a Right support. To consider the Kuomintang not as a bourgeois party, but as a neutral arena of struggle for the masses, to play with words about nine-tenths of the Left rank and file in order to mask the question as to who is the real master, meant to add to the strength and power of the summit, to assist the latter to convert ever broader masses into “cattle,” and, under conditions most favorable to it to prepare the Shanghai coup d’état.... In this the theory of the bloc of classes, the theory that the Kuomintang is a workers’ and peasants’ party, provides the best possible assistance for the bourgeoisie. When the bourgeoisie later comes into hostile conflict with the masses and shoots them down, in this clash between the two real forces, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, not even the bleating of the celebrated nine-tenths is heard. The pitiful democratic fiction evaporates without a trace in face of the bloody reality of the class struggle.

—Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (1928)

Surveillance State à la Française Workers Vanguard No. 1039	7 February 2014

The immense reach of the U.S. and European spy agencies is now out in the open due to the efforts of former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden. In response, the imperialist powers are taking steps to give their mass surveillance greater legal sanction. A prime example is provided by the French government of Socialist Party president François Hollande, which devised a new domestic spying law—presented as “Article 20” of a military spending bill—to take advantage of the latest technologies like GPS.

Enacted in December without any serious objection in Parliament, this legislation defined the conditions under which government agencies may harvest telephone conversations, e-mails, Internet activity and personal location data. Lacking even the pretense of judicial oversight, the guidelines allow the vacuuming up of data for a broad range of purposes, including “national security,” prevention of “terrorism” or the protection of France’s “scientific and economic potential,” thus expanding the list of state agencies authorized to engage in electronic surveillance.

The groundwork for Article 20 was laid in 1991 under Socialist Party president François Mitterrand, who legalized the longstanding and widespread practice of domestic snooping. The Mitterrand government also established a global satellite surveillance network with bases in the colonies of Mayotte and French Guyana operated in collaboration with the German secret service (BND).

In the U.S., with a wide swath of the population expressing unease over the scope of the NSA spying, president Obama announced a series of measures last month to give the capitalist rulers’ spying apparatus the appearance of greater accountability. A number of liberals hailed the proposals, among them Democrats on Capitol Hill considered critics of certain NSA practices. As we previously noted, we would welcome any hurdle thrown up in the path of the expanding surveillance state. But what Obama has offered is nothing of the sort. In fact, his speech was largely a paean to the NSA.

In a forum presentation held in October and November in New York City, Paris and London, Spartacist League spokesman Alison Spencer explained:

“The spy agencies’ central purpose is to do the dirty work that goes on behind the scenes of the ‘normal’ administrative mechanisms of bourgeois democracy—the surveillance, burglaries, black-bag jobs, infiltration and tricks by agents provocateurs, extraordinary renditions, torture and murder. A whole system of class exploitation—and in this country racial oppression—that is maintained through state repression is not going to come crashing down or be fundamentally reformed…through Congressional cosmetic reforms behind which the state continues its murderous work. Nothing less than victorious socialist revolution can abolish capitalism’s secret police and their deadly ‘dirty tricks’.”

— “Spying, Repression, War: Pillars of Capitalist Rule,” WV No. 1037, 10 January

The forum traced the history of U.S. domestic spying and state repression of leftists, union militants and fighters for black rights over the last century. By shedding some light on the more recent predations and surveillance operations of the American government, Chelsea Manning and Snowden provided a great service to the working class and oppressed. But doing so came at great personal cost. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in military prison last year, and Attorney General Eric Holder recently ruled out any deal involving clemency for Snowden, who is for now still holed up in Russia. Then there is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who remains in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

We reprint below, edited for publication, accompanying remarks by Xavier Brunoy from the Ligue Trotskyste de France at the forum in Paris on 21 November 2013 that addressed similar themes in the case of France.

* * *

Loud howls of protest were provoked in Europe when Snowden revealed that the NSA was tapping the cell phones of “European partners,” such as German chancellor Angela Merkel and French diplomats. These cries had barely died down when more revelations came out, exposing that these “victims” were doing exactly the same thing as the U.S. The German BND foreign intelligence agency asked the Merkel government to amend the law “to make it more flexible for sharing protected data with foreign partners.” The British imperialists operate a secret service that plays a central role in the NSA’s network. They showed their loyalty by detaining David Miranda (the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, who published Snowden’s initial revelations) at London Heathrow airport and by destroying the Guardian’s copy of Snowden’s files. Thankfully, several other copies exist.

The shrewd Bernard Kouchner, Minister of Foreign Affairs under former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, exposed the hypocrisy of Hollande’s whining about the NSA when he stated on a France-Info radio broadcast: “They pretend to have just discovered this surveillance, meanwhile their own secret service agencies work together and France has a similar system.” And he’s right. When it was revealed that more than 70 million communications were intercepted in France, the NSA director hastened to fire back that the majority of these intercepted communications were provided to the NSA by the French secret services. And the French were compelled to admit it was true. Kouchner added: “Let’s be honest, we listen in too. Everybody listens in on everybody else. It’s just that we don’t have the means the United States does, and that makes us jealous.”

Le Monde revealed that the French company Amesys sold an Eagle surveillance system (functionally equivalent to the NSA’s Prism program) to the Libyan government. In 2008, former directors of French military intelligence trained Libyan spies. A similar system was sold to the Syrian government by the German company Utimaco. Sensors that make it possible to intercept 5.3 million calls simultaneously and retain two years of metadata were provided by the French company Qosmos, which also, according to one of the company’s founders, worked with the DGSE (the French foreign intelligence service). So much for the innocence of French imperialism.

It is interesting to note that these Qosmos sensors are sold to government spy agencies as well as to private telecommunications companies, which for financial purposes gather essentially the same metadata as the police. This explains the permeability between leaders of private communications companies and the NSA.

French Bourgeoisie: Pioneers of Mass Surveillance

Alison observed that all fighters for social change are on a list. In this regard, the French bourgeoisie has a long history, and we can even say that it was, in its time, a pioneer. In the 19th century, the French bourgeoisie established the first police records on people in Europe. The files included everyone who had been found guilty in a court of law. Or to put it more plainly, all the poor people who were struggling to survive in the cities.

This work was later rationalized in the 1880s by a guy named Bertillon, whose methods were then copied by police agencies all over the world. The records included color-coded cards and notes on physical traits, to which fingerprints and photographs were later added. One hardly needs to point out how useful these types of files were for the army and the police. At the end of the 19th century, socialist militants had files on them, as did the anarchists, who were actively tracked. For example, in 1886 French General Boulanger began compiling the notorious Carnet B list of those considered potential wartime subversives.

Foreigners were also under surveillance, with records kept on them. As a result of wars as well as the massive increase in immigration brought about by the industrial revolution, the number of people with records rapidly grew as the police sought to keep tabs on the entire “non-French” population. In the 1880s, foreigners had to register and get a receipt, which became the “alien identity card” during World War I. This card was an extremely effective means of control: the police knew immediately whether or not the person they stopped was in good standing, that is, whether or not they should be imprisoned or deported. This card was maintained after the war.

As we said in our supplement on Leonarda [the Roma schoolgirl deported from France last October, see WV No. 1035, 29 November 2013], nomadic people were always particular targets for surveillance and kept in the files. Those “found guilty and without a permanent address” were put on special lists. Thereafter, all nomadic people were subject to even more persecution. The witchhunt against the Roma by Sarkozy and now Minister of Interior Manuel Valls is simply the continuation of a long tradition.

Of course, in the computer age, and in light of the new figures of those spied upon with each passing day, all this may seem like small potatoes. But at the time it was substantial.

Police Records and the Vichy Regime

The dangers inherent in being on file under the Third Republic became blatantly obvious when it gave way to the Vichy regime during World War II. Marshall Pétain, the quisling pro-Nazi leader of Vichy France, inherited the files on everyone. All the French police had to do was consult the files to organize roundups and arrests. First the Jews, but also homosexuals, Gypsies and more. All those who the national intelligence agencies had patiently and meticulously kept files on, day after day, for years on end, could suddenly end up in one of Pétain’s jails or a death camp.

The French bourgeoisie’s dreams of keeping files on the entire population to control everyone were realized under the Vichy regime. Every individual living in France was assigned a unique number. A census was organized to assure that nobody had been overlooked, and the country was combed by thousands of census-takers. The national identity card, which served as an internal passport, was instituted in 1940. Starting in 1942, it specified whether the holder was Jewish. This card became universal and mandatory in 1943, featuring the infamous number stamped on it.

At the end of WWII, during the period called “Liberation,” this apparatus for controlling the population was maintained intact by the de Gaulle/Communist Party coalition governments. The individual number instituted by Pétain became what is commonly known in France as the social security number. In 1947, a directory of all social security numbers was established. Think about it for just one moment: how many files are associated with this infamous number and what can be and is done with it? As for the national identity card, few people are aware that it has not been mandatory since October 1955. But do you know many French people who don’t carry it? And for good reason, since it is still a piece of identification that proves French citizenship, and the cops can demand to see your papers at any time.

France’s Colonial Wars

During the war in Indochina and later the Algerian War, the French army worked out a doctrine of “revolutionary war” to suppress the people in France’s colonies who were struggling for independence. In contrast to classic warfare, the French army found itself in Indochina pitted against an enemy that was completely ensconced in the local population. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front had tremendous support among the masses. The French needed to know who was an enemy and who was not. They had to rely on intelligence to find out who thought what.

The implementation of this doctrine reached new heights during the Battle of Algiers when French General Massu’s and General Bigeard’s infamous paratroopers sought to destroy the political wing of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in that city. To this end, the French paratroopers started records on everyone who lived in the Casbah (where they lived, with whom they lived, etc.) They set up a network of informers and other spies for the purpose of gathering all the information they needed about the “enemy.” The city was sealed off, and its residents were put under surveillance. Continuous patrols systematically knocked on doors and terrorized people in a (failed) attempt to drive a wedge between the population and the nationalist and Communist agitators.

As soon as they found someone with FLN ties, the paratroopers swept the entire area to figure out who was in contact with that individual in order to reconstruct the network around him. The military used every means at its disposal to make that person talk, including torture, an area in which the French army acquired considerable experience.

Those who devised this doctrine of “revolutionary war” were convinced that all nationalists or Communists who fought for independence in the Third World were manipulated by the USSR, that they were the vanguard of international Communism, with Moscow pulling the strings from afar in its quest to rule the world. And anything and everything was permissible to counter the “Communist threat.” The French military brass who perpetrated these horrors, like General Aussaresses, later trained thousands of officers in Latin America as well as the United States. The U.S. Army put this expertise to use in Vietnam, as did various military dictatorships in Latin America. Last September was the 40th anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile. That coup was the Battle of Algiers writ large, with thousands of people killed under torture or otherwise.

“War on Terror” Repression

What’s changed since the demise of the USSR is the primary target of the capitalist state. With the USSR gone and the proletariat no longer on center stage, there is, at the moment, no direct threat to the French bourgeoisie. Of course, they always keep their eyes on the working class, as we saw in the trial in Roanne (in central France) of CGT trade-union activists who refused to provide the police with DNA samples. The secret services focus on those who resist rapacious exploitation and imperialist domination of the neocolonial world. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the “fight against Islamic terrorism” has been wielded to go after such political opposition. Other targets for surveillance are France’s imperialist rivals, as part of the competition for the world’s spoils.

In the fight against “terrorism,” the enemy is considered to live nestled in the heart of the population, among immigrants and their children and grandchildren. The French army’s “revolutionary war” teachings still have currency. There is a continuity between the methods today and those used in the fight against the “terrorists” of the 1950s and ’60s, that is, people struggling for their independence. The same methods, but modernized.

Electronics, computers and technological advances enable the state to search for the same type of information faster. Electronic probes, data centers and software get the job done without the state having to pay for so many finks and informers. Smartphones make it possible to locate people and even record meetings of people considered dangerous. Social networking makes it possible to establish profiles of millions of people. Electronic surveillance facilitates the amassing of all kinds of data on people. All it takes is a few clicks of the mouse to transform any person into a “terrorist,” a designation for which the capitalists set the criteria.

And when the working-class and minority neighborhoods explode, the cops go on patrol, comb the streets and cast a dragnet to terrorize and intimidate, just as the paratroopers did during the Algerian War. What the bourgeoisie fears above all is that the youth in these neighborhoods might trigger a social explosion, as occurred in the past, such as when students sparked the May 1968 general strike. That’s one reason why there is such massive repression against the youth who have no future in this society. The government wages racist campaigns (similar to the psychological warfare conducted during the Algerian War) to separate and isolate not only these youth but the entire layer of the working class that is immigrant or of immigrant descent. Divide and conquer.

With or without electronic means, the bourgeoisie’s army and police can never stop the class struggle and working-class upheavals. We had the 1871 Paris Commune, the first workers government in history. I would note that in its fight against the capitalists and in an effort to avoid getting crushed, the Commune’s police chief ruthlessly tracked down the bourgeois Versailles government’s spies and informers. So he kept files on people. The problem is not keeping files per se, but what class it serves. Unfortunately, such measures were insufficient and incomplete. Among other things, the Commune did not have a revolutionary party to lead it to victory, the kind of party that we want to build.

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.

* * *

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).

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Monday, February 24, 2014

Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947

Stirred

Satisfy

Sunday, February 23, 2014

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

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

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