Communism and the Family

Workers Vanguard No. 1041   7 March 2014 TROTSKY LENIN Communism and the Family (Quote of the Week) International Women’s Day, March 8, originated in 1908 among female needle trades workers who marched in New York City for the eight-hour day, for an end to child labor and for women’s suffrage. To mark this proletarian holiday, we print an excerpt from a work by leading Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai that describes the early Soviet workers state’s perspective to eradicate women’s oppression, which is based on the institution of the family. The revolutionary regime understood that the full emancipation of women was dependent on qualitatively raising the material level of backward Russia, requiring the extension of proletarian power to the wealthy industrialized countries. Never having known genuine freedom, we cannot predict how human relations will unfold in a communist society. But Kollontai’s projection provides a useful point of departure. There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity. The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable: the family distracts the worker from more useful and productive labour. The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective. In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them independent and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up. The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work. It is not in her husband but in her capacity for work that she will find support. She need have no anxiety about her children. The workers’ state will assume responsibility for them. Marriage will lose all the elements of material calculation which cripple family life. Marriage will be a union of two persons who love and trust each other. Such a union promises to the working men and women who understand themselves and the world around them the most complete happiness and the maximum satisfaction. Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it. —Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family (1920) Alexandra Kollontai 1920 Communism and the Family First Published: in Komunistka, No. 2, 1920, and in English in The Worker, 1920; Source: Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, 1977; Translated: by Alix Holt. Women’s role in production: its effect upon the family Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”. No wonder that working women are beginning to think these questions over. Another fact that invites attention is that divorce has been made easier in Soviet Russia. The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars issued on 18 December 1917 means that divorce is, no longer a luxury that only the rich can afford; henceforth, a working woman will not have to petition for months or even for years to secure the right to live separately from a husband who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness and uncouth behaviour. Divorce by mutual agreement now takes no more than a week or two to obtain. Women who are unhappy in their married life welcome this easy divorce. But others, particularly those who are used to looking upon their husband as “breadwinners”, are frightened. They have not yet understood that a woman must accustom herself to seek and find support in the collective and in society, and not from the individual man. There is no point in not facing up to the truth: the old family in which the man was everything and the woman nothing, the typical family where the woman had no will of her own, no time of her own and no money of her own, is changing before our very eyes. But there is no ne d for alarm. It is only our ignorance that leads us to think that the things we are used to can never change. Nothing could be less true than the saying “as it was, so it shall be”. We have only to read how people lived in the past to see that everything is subject to change and that no customs, political organisations or moral principles are fixed and inviolable. In the course of history, the structure of the family has changed many times; it was once quite different from the family of today. There was a time when the kinship family was considered the norm: the mother headed a family consisting of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who lived and worked together. At another period the patriarchal family was the rule. In this case it was the father whose will was law for all the other members of the family: even today such families may be found among the peasantry in the Russian villages. Here the morals and customs of family life are not those of the urban proletariat. In the countryside, they observe norms which the worker has long forgotten. The structure of the family and the customs of family life also vary from nation to nation. Among some peoples such as the Turks. Arabs and Persians, a man is allowed to have several wives. There have been and there still are tribes where the woman may have several husbands. We are used to the fact that a young girl is expected to remain a virgin until marriage; however, there are tribes where it is a matter of pride to have had many lovers and where the women decorate their arms and legs with the corresponding number of bracelets. Many practices which might astonish us and which might even seem immoral are considered by other peoples to be quite normal and they, in their turn, consider our laws and customs “sinful”. There is, therefore, no reason to be frightened of the fact that the family is in the process of change, and that outdated and unnecessary things are being discarded and new relations between men and women developing our job is to decide which aspects of our family system are outdated and to determine what relations, between the men and women of the working and peasant classes and which rights and duties would best harmonise with the conditions of life in the new workers’ Russia. That which is in be With the new life should be maintained, while all that is old and outdated and derives from the cursed epoch of servitude and domination, of landed proprietors and capitalists, should be swept aside together with the exploiting class itself and the other enemies of the proletariat and the poor. The type of family to which the urban and rural proletariat has grown accustomed is one of these, legacies of the past. There was a time when the isolated, firmly-knit family, based on a church wedding, was equally necessary to all its members. If there had been no family, who would have fed, clothed and brought up the children? Who would have given them advice? In days gone by, to be an orphan was one of the worst fates imaginable. In the family of old, the husband earns and orts his wife and children. The wife for her part is occupied with housekeeping and with bringing up the children as best she can. But over the last hundred years this customary family structure has been falling apart in all the countries where capitalism is dominant and where the number of factories and other enterprises which employ hired labour is increasing. The customs and moral principles of family life are changing as the general conditions of life change. It is the universal spread of female labour that has contributed most of all to the radical change in family life. Formerly only the man was considered a breadwinner. But Russian women have for the past fifty or sixty years (and in other capitalist countries for a somewhat longer period of time) been forced to seek paid work outside the family and outside the home. The wages of the “breadwinner” being insufficient for the needs of the family, the woman found herself obliged to look for a wage and to knock at the factory door. With every year the number of working-class women starting work outside the home as day labourers, saleswomen, clerks, washerwomen and servants increased. Statistics show that in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, there were about sixty million women earning their own living in the countries of Europe and America, and during the war this number increased considerably. Almost half of these women are married. What kind of family life they must have can easily be imagined. What kind of “family life” can there be if the wife and mother is out at work for at least eight hours and, counting the travelling, is away from home for ten hours a day? Her home is neglected; the children grow up without any maternal care, spending most of the time out on the streets, exposed to all the dangers of this environment. The woman who is wife, mother and worker has to expend every ounce of energy to fulfil these roles. She has to work the same hours as her husband in some factory, printing-house or commercial establishment and then on top of that she has to find the time to attend to her household and look after her children. Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother. Woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load. She suffers, her face is always wet with tears. Life has never been easy for woman, but never has her lot been harder and more desperate than that of the millions of working women under the capitalist yoke in this heyday of factory production. The family breaks down as more and more women go out to work. How can one talk about family life when the man and woman work different shifts, and where the wife does not even have the time to prepare a decent meal for her offspring? How can one talk of parents when the mother and father are out working all day and cannot find the time to spend even a few minutes with their children? It was quite different in the old days. The mother remained at home and occupied herself with her household duties; her children were at her side, under her watchful eye. Nowadays the working woman hastens out of the house early in the morning when the factory whistle blows. When evening comes and the whistle sounds again, she hurries home to scramble through the most pressing of her domestic tasks. Then it’s oil to work again the next morning, and she is tired from lack of sleep. For the married working woman, life is as had as the workhouse. It is not surprising therefore that family ties should loosen and the family begin to fall apart. The circumstances that held the family together no longer exist. The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole. The old family structure is now merely a hindrance. What used to make the old family so strong? First, because the husband and father was the family’s breadwinner; secondly, because the family economy was necessary to all its members: and thirdly, because children were brought up by their parents. What is left of this former type of family? The husband, as we have just seen, has ceased to he the sole breadwinner. The wife who goes to work earns wages. She has learned to cam her own living, to support her children and not infrequently her husband. The family now only serves as the primary economic unit of society and the supporter and educator of young children. Let us examine the matter in more detail, to see whether or not the family is about to be relieved of these tasks as well. Housework ceases to be necessary There was a time when the women of the poorer classes in city and country spent their entire lives within the four walls of the home. A woman knew nothing beyond the threshold of her own home, and in most cases had no wish to know anything. After all, in her own home, there was so much to do, and this work was most necessary and useful not only for the family itself but also for the state as a whole. The woman did everything that the modern working and peasant woman has to do, but besides this cooking, washing, cleaning and mending, she spun wool and linen, wove cloth and garments, knitted stockings, made lace, prepared – as far as her resources permitted – all sorts of pickles, jams and other preserves for winter, and manufactured, her own candles. It is difficult to make a complete list of all her duties. That is how our mothers and grandmothers lived. Even today you may still come across remote villages deep in the country, far from the railroads and the big rivers, where this mode of life has been preserved and where the mistress of the house is overburdened with all kinds of chores over which the working woman of the big cities and of the populous industrial regions has long ceased to worry. In our grandmother’s day, all this domestic work was necessary and beneficial; it ensured the well-being of the family. The more the mistress of the house applied herself, the better the peasant or craftsman’s family lived. Even the national economy benefited from the housewife’s activity, for the woman did not limit herself to making soup and cooking potatoes (i.e. satisfying the Immediate needs of the family), she also produced such things as cloth, thread, butter, etc. which had a value as commodities that could be sold on the market. And every man, whether peasant or worker, tried to find a wife who had “hands of gold”, for he knew that a family could not get along without this “domestic labour”. The interests of the whole nation were involved, for the more work the woman and the other members of the family put into making cloth, leather and wool (the surplus of which was sold in the neighbouring market), the greater the economic prosperity of the country as a whole. But capitalism has changed all this. All that was formerly produced in the bosom of the family is now being manufactured on a mass scale m workshops and factories. The machine has superseded the wife. What housekeeper would now bother to make candles, spin wool or weave, cloth? All these products can be bought in the shop next door, formerly every girl would learn to knit stockings. Nowadays, what working woman would think of making her own? In the first place she doesn’t have the time. Time is money, and no one wants to waste time in an unproductive and useless manner. Few working women would start to pickle cucumbers or make other preserves when all these things can be bought in the shop. Even if the products sold in the store are of an inferior quality and not prepared with the care of the home-made equivalent the working woman has neither the time nor the energy needed to 1 perform these domestic operations. First and foremost she is a hired worker. Thus the family economy is gradually being deprived of all the domestic work without which our grandmothers could hardly have imagined a family. What was formerly produced in the family is now produced by the collective labour of working men and women in the factories. The family no longer produces; it only consumes. The housework that remains consists of cleaning (cleaning the floors, dusting, heating water, care of the lamps etc.), cooking (preparation of dinners and suppers), washing and the care of the linen and clothing of the “family (darning and mending). These are difficult and exhausting tasks and they absorb all the spare time and energy of the working woman who must, in addition, put in her hours at a factory. But this work is different in one important way from the work our grandmothers did: the four tasks enumerated above, which still serve to keep the family together, are of no value to the state and the national economy, for they do not create any new values or make any contribution to the prosperity of the country. The housewife may spend all day, from morning to evening, cleaning her home, she may wash and iron the linen daily, make every effort to keep her clothing in good order and prepare whatever dishes she pleases and her modest resources allow, and she will still end the day without having created any values. Despite her industry she would not have made anything that could be considered a commodity. Even if a working woman were to live a thousand years, she would still have to begin every day from the beginning. There would always be a new layer of dust to be removed from the mantelpiece, her husband would always come in hungry and her children bring in mud on their shoes. Women’s work is becoming less useful to the community as a whole. It is becoming unproductive. The individual household is dying. It is giving way in our society to collective housekeeping. Instead of the working woman cleaning her flat, the communist society can arrange for men and women whose job it is to go round in the morning cleaning rooms. The wives of the rich have long since been freed from these irritating and tiring domestic duties. Why should working woman continue to be burdened with them? In Soviet Russia the working woman should be surrounded by the same ease and light, hygiene and beauty that previously only the very rich could afford. Instead of the working woman having to struggle with the cooking and spend her last free hours in the kitchen preparing dinner and supper, communist society win organise public restaurants and communal kitchens. Even under capitalism such establishments have begun to appear. In fact over the last half a century the number of restaurants and cafes in all the great cities of Europe has been growing daily; they are springing up like mushrooms after the autumn rain. But under capitalism only people with well-lined purses can afford to take their meals in restaurants, while under communism everyone will be able to eat in the communal kitchens and dining-rooms. The working woman will not have to slave over the washtub any longer, or ruin her eyes in darning her stockings and mending her linen; she will simply take these things to the central laundries each week and collect the washed and ironed garments later. That will be another job less to do. Special clothes-mending centres will free the working woman from the hours spent on mending and give her the opportunity to devote her evenings to reading, attending meetings and concerts. Thus the four categories of housework are doomed to extinction with the victory of communism. And the working woman will surely have no cause to regret this. Communism liberates worm from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier. The state is responsible for the upbringing of children But even if housework disappears, you may argue, there are still the children to look after. But here too, the workers’ state will come to replace the family, society will gradually take upon itself all the tasks that before the revolution fell to the individual parents. Even before the revolution, the instruction of the child had ceased to be the duty of the parents. Once the children had attained school age the parents could breathe more freely, for they were no longer responsible for the intellectual development of their offspring. But there were still plenty of obligations to fulfil. There was still the matter of feeding the children, buying them shoes and clothes and seeing that they developed into skilled and honest workers able, when the time came, to earn their own living and feed and support their parents in old age. Few workers’ families however, were able to fulfil these obligations. Their low wages did not enable them to give the children enough to eat, while lack of free time prevented them from devoting the necessary attention to the education of the rising generation. The family is supposed to bring up the children, but in reality proletarian children grow up on the streets. Our forefathers knew some family life, but the children of the proletariat know none. Furthermore, the parents’ small income and the precarious position in which the family is placed financially often force the child to become an independent worker at scarcely ten years of age. And when children begin, to earn their own money they consider themselves their own masters, and the words and counsels of the parents are no longer law; the authority of the parents weakens, and obedience is at an end. Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective. The parental care of children in the family could be divided into three parts: (a) the care of the very young baby, (b) the bringing up of the child, and (c) the instruction of the child. Even in capitalist society the education of the child in primary schools and later in secondary and higher educational establishments became the responsibility of the state. Even in capitalist society the needs of the workers were to some extent met by the provision of playgrounds, kindergartens, play groups, etc. The more the workers became conscious of their rights and the better they were organised, the more society had to relieve the family of the care of the children. But bourgeois society was afraid of going too far towards meeting the interests of the working class, lest this contribute to the break-up of the family. For the capitalists are well aware that the old type of family, where the woman is a slave and where the husband is responsible for the well-being of his wife and children, constitutes the best weapon in the struggle to stifle the desire of the working class for freedom and to weaken the revolutionary spirit of the working man and working woman. The worker is weighed down by his family cares and is obliged to compromise with capital. The father and mother are ready to agree to any terms when their children are hungry. Capitalist society has not been able to transform education into a truly social and state matter because the property owners, the bourgeoisie, have been against this. Communist society considers the social education of the rising generation to be one of the fundamental aspects of the new life. The old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the “new person”. The playgrounds, gardens, homes and other amenities where the child will spend the greater part of the day under the supervision of qualified educators will, on the other hand, offer an environment in which the child can grow up a conscious communist who recognises the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective. What responsibilities are left to the parents, when they no longer have to take charge of upbringing and education? The very small baby, you might answer, while it is still learning to walk and clinging to its mother’s skirt, still needs her attention. Here again the communist state hastens to the aid of the working mother. No longer will there be any women who are alone. The workers’ state aims to support every mother, married or unmarried, while she is suckling her child, and to establish maternity homes, day nurseries and other such facilities in every city and village, in order to give women the opportunity to combine work in society with maternity. Working mothers have no need to be alarmed; communist not intending to take children away from their parents or to tear the baby from the breast of its mother, and neither is it planning to take, violent measures to destroy the family. No such thing! The aims of communist society are quite different. Communist society sees that the old type of family is breaking up, and that all the old pillars which supported the family as a social unit are being removed: the domestic economy is dying, and working-class parents are unable to take care of their children or provide them with sustenance and education. Parents and children suffer equally from this situation. Communist society has this to say to the working woman and working man: “You are young, you love each other. Everyone has the right to happiness. Therefore live your life. Do not flee happiness. Do not fear marriage, even though under capitalism marriage was truly a chain of sorrow. Do not be afraid of having children. Society needs more workers and rejoices at the birth of every child. You do not have to worry about the future of your child; your child will know neither hunger nor cold.” Communist society takes care of every child and guarantees both him and his mother material and moral support. Society will feed, bring up and educate the child. At the same time, those parents who desire to participate in the education of their children will by no, means be prevented from doing so. Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. Such are the plans of communist society and they can hardly be interpreted as the forcible destruction of the family and the forcible separation of child from mother. There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity. The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable: the family distracts the worker from more useful and productive labour. The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective. In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them independent and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up. The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work. It is not in her husband but in her capacity for work that she will find support. She need have no anxiety about her children. The workers’ state will assume responsibility for them. Marriage will lose all the elements of material calculation which cripple family life. Marriage will be a union of two persons who love and trust each other. Such a union promises to the working men and women who understand themselves and the world around them the most complete happiness and the maximum satisfaction. Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it. Once the conditions of labour have been transformed and the material security of the working women has increased, and once marriage such as the church used to perform it – this so-called indissoluble marriage which was at bottom merely a fraud – has given place to the free and honest union of men and women who are lovers and comrades, prostitution will disappear. This evil, which is a stain on humanity and the scourge of hungry working women, has its roots in commodity production and the institution of private property. Once these economic forms are superseded, the trade in women will automatically disappear. The women of the working class, therefore, need not worry over the fact that the family is doomed to disappear. They should, on the contrary, welcome the dawn of a new society which will liberate women from domestic servitude, lighten the burden of motherhood and finally put an end to the terrible curse of prostitution. The woman who takes up the struggle for the liberation of the working class must learn to understand that there is no more room for the old proprietary attitude which says: “These are my children, I owe them all my maternal solicitude and affection; those are your children, they are no concern of mine and I don’t care if they go hungry and cold – I have no time for other children.” The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers. The workers’ state needs new relations between the sexes, just as the narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family, the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equal members of the workers’ state who are united by love and mutual respect. In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relations between men and women, in the communist society will be like. These new relations will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial society of a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners. Communist society wants bright healthy children and strong, happy young people, free in their feelings and affections. In the name of equality, liberty and the comradely love of the new marriage we call upon the working and peasant men and women, to apply themselves courageously and with faith to the work of rebuilding human society, in order to render it more perfect, more just and more capable of ensuring the individual the happiness which he or she deserves. The red flag of the social revolution which flies above Russia and is now being hoisted aloft in other countries of the world proclaim the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.   Alexandra Kollontai Archive | Marxism & Ethics

From the Archives of Marxism-The Heritage of the Paris Commune   Workers Vanguard No. 1041	7 March 2014

 

On 18 March 1871, as the bourgeoisie fled Paris for Versailles, the workers established the world’s first proletarian dictatorship in the French capital. The heroic Communards, as Karl Marx put it, “stormed heaven” and seized power, which they held until late May when the Commune was drowned in blood by the resurgent capitalists.

We reprint below an excerpt from 1871: The Paris Commune, a pamphlet written in 1927 by Max Shachtman, at the time a cadre of the American Communist Party. Shachtman explains how lessons drawn from the Commune later helped guide the Bolshevik Party through the three Russian Revolutions referred to in the text below: the defeated revolution of 1905; February 1917, when the tsar was overthrown; and October 1917, when the working class took power. The shortcomings of the Commune laid bare the bankruptcy of the political program of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an ideological father of anarchism, and of Auguste Blanqui, who envisaged an insurrection led by a conspiratorial group of revolutionaries. Typographical errors in the excerpt have been corrected.

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The Commune is written large in the history of the working class of the world. It was the first great attempt of the proletariat of a nation to establish the rule of the working class thru the dictatorship of the proletariat, accompanied by weak, unclear efforts to adapt to this overthrow of bourgeois domination a new social order.

The weaknesses, shortcomings, hesitance, lack of clarity and insufficiencies of the Commune have been pointed out. The lessons to be learned from its experience must be studied by the struggling working class of the world.

The main source of the weakness of the Commune can be traced to the absence of a determined, conscious revolutionary party which would have given it direction, firmness and decision.

“If in September, 1870, there had been found at the head of the proletariat of France the centralized party of revolutionary action,” writes Trotsky, “the entire history of France and with it the entire history of Humanity would have taken another direction. If on the 18 of March power was found in the hands of the proletariat of Paris it was not because they had consciously seized it, but because their enemies had quit Paris.”

Without a revolutionary proletarian party, without such an instrument the Paris Commune could not, despite the unparalleled heroism and the self-sacrifice of its noble defenders, maintain itself. With a ruling body in which almost every delegate represented a different viewpoint, in which there did not reign a dominating single clear idea, it was natural that the results would prove fatal to the uprising. Even the vague viewpoint which united its two leading groups was shattered by the concrete experiences which they underwent. The Proudhonians found their doctrinaire hatred for association of labor and industry confronted by their own decrees in the Commune which aimed at the organization of great industries and the federation of the workers in every factory into one great association. The Blanquists, the doctrinaires of highly-pitched dictatorial centralism, failed to follow out even their own theories and neglected completely the centralization of the political and military apparatus, as well as the agitation in the provinces for the unity of revolutionary Communes thruout the land.

The Communards made the error of failing to use the power which had fallen into their hands to consolidate the rule of the working class and complete the ruin of the bourgeoisie. The failure to push the attack upon the Versaillese and spread the hegemony of the revolutionary proletariat thruout the country was a fatal blow to the uprising. Their refusal to push forward determinedly the work of expropriating the expropriators, taking over the economic life and substance of the city was another source of weakness.

The feebleness of their attempts to put hands on the Bank of France, which as Engels says was worth ten thousand hostages, was an indication of this grave fault. This point was only a sharp indication of the failure of the Communards to take even a thousandth part of the advantages of power to suppress with an iron hand the enemy, that the Versaillese took.

The history of Bloody Week is a bitter lesson learned by the proletariat, a lesson which means unrelenting struggle against an unscrupulous enemy, the utilization of all the instruments and means of proletarian power for the extermination of the brutal vampire of the ruling class.

The difficulty of an insufficiently developed working class, the lack of a political party of clear principles, tactics and experience, and the absence of highly developed industry, might have been overcome by the Commune had it not been forced to assume the defensive on the military field from the beginning. Its natural anxiety for defense from extermination by the Versaillese made it, to put it mildly, difficult to begin very much economic work. The steps it took despite these difficulties already gave an indication as to the real socialist nature of its economic measures and quite safe predictions can be made as to the development towards a socialist economy that might have resulted thru the military victory of the Communards over Thiers.

The Commune, slandered and calumniated by the bourgeoisie for decades, is the property of the revolutionary working class today, in the Communist movement where its spirit is embodied. The Commune lives in even more heroic form, in broader lines, with more power and greater clarity of purpose in the revolution of the Russian workers and peasants. The existence of the revolutionary movement of the working class today, honoring the great Paris Commune and carefully learning from its experience, the existence of the first working class republic in Russia is the vindication which history and the working class have rendered the heroic efforts of the Parisian working men.

The working class of Russia has long ago learned the lesson of the Paris Commune. Painstakingly they built up their iron regiments into a mighty Bolshevik party, armed with the sharp weapons of Marxism, and dominated by the irresistible will to power which led the first successful proletarian revolution in the world. The revolutionaries of Russia knew that the chief source of success in the uprising for liberty was a conscious group, a party of the vanguard of the working class which would be able to give leadership and direction to the struggle, the lack of which was the evil genius of the Commune.

And the Communist movement of the world today, learning equally the lessons of the Commune and of the three revolutions in Russia; of the revolutions and uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Finland, is preparing for the revolution by building up more strongly every day the fighting parties of Communism, steeled in every struggle.

“Workingmen’s Paris,” wrote Marx in his brilliant Civil War in France, “with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”

It is the admirable and fitting eulogy to the immemorable action of the Paris workers. The celebration of the Commune is the celebration of the approaching victory of the most oppressed class in history. The lessons of the Commune are being slowly learned by the workers. In its lofty spirit of heroism the revolution of today finds new inspiration and courage and determination.

“The cause of the Commune is the cause of the social revolution,” said the greatest Communard of all times, Lenin, “of the complete political and economic liberation of the working class, the cause of the proletariat of the entire world. And in this sense it is immortal.”

Urgent Medical Appeal for Lynne Stewart Workers Vanguard No. 1041	7 March 2014

 

 

Seventy-four years old and suffering from Stage IV breast cancer, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart may have only months to live. The government is dedicated to making that time as painful as possible. After being denied compassionate medical release for nearly a year, Stewart was finally let out of prison on December 31 by a U.S. district judge who cited her “terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy.” Stewart, whose cancer has metastasized to her back, lung, bones and lymph nodes, discovered after her release that she had been stripped of Medicare coverage while in prison. She will not be enrolled again until July. Medicaid will not cover her because Stewart and her husband’s combined Social Security benefits exceed the monthly income limit. She must now pay the sky-high costs of treatment and medication herself—or go without!

Stewart should never have spent a day in prison. In 2005, she was convicted of giving material support to terrorism for her vigorous defense of an Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist cleric who had been imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart’s purported “material support” was to communicate her client’s views to Reuters news service. Her Arabic translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar were also convicted. These watershed convictions gave the capitalist government a green light to prosecute lawyers as co-conspirators of their clients—a frontal attack on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. In 2010, at the instigation of the Obama administration, a federal appeals court instructed the judge who had originally sentenced Stewart to reexamine her sentence. Appeasing his superiors, the judge jacked up the original 28-month sentence to ten years.

Lynne Stewart dedicated her adult life to keeping Black Panthers, radical leftists and others who are reviled by the capitalist state out of the clutches of its prison system. Tens of thousands worldwide supported Stewart’s fight for a medical release. She must not face this new attack alone. The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee has issued an appeal for funds for Stewart’s medical needs. The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has contributed funds. We urge our readers to contribute now! Make checks payable to “Lynne Stewart Organization” and mail to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY 11216.

Please contribute to Lynne's Immediate Medical Needs! As Valentine's Day approaches, show your continued love and support for Lynne Stewart and her tireless efforts to fight for justice. And if you donate now, your gift will be matched dollar for dollar by a generous friend of the fight for justice for Lynne Stewart. TO DONATE GO HERE: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lynne-stewart-s-medical-fund

Ukraine Coup: Spearheaded by Fascists, Backed by U.S./EU Imperialists-Crimea Is Russian-For The Right To Crimean Self-Determination Workers Vanguard No. 1041	7 March 2014

 

 

MARCH 3—As Russian strongman Vladimir Putin deployed troops into Crimea, following a resolution in the Russian parliament, the Western propaganda machine went into hysterical overdrive. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that Russia would pay “a huge price” for its incursion, threatening Russia’s removal from the imperialist Group of 8 and the freezing of Russian assets abroad. Without the slightest hint of irony, Kerry pontificated, “You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.—the list of countries threatened and invaded by the U.S. imperialists “in the 21st century” goes on and on. Indeed, events in Ukraine have the hands of the U.S. imperialists in particular, as well as those of the European Union (EU), all over them.

Russia’s intervention into Crimea is a direct response to the overthrow of the government in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. On February 22, the corrupt pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovich, was toppled by a right-wing coup spearheaded by fascists and supported by the U.S. and EU; Yanukovich subsequently fled to Russia. The thugs toting Molotov cocktails who have been at the head of the three-month mass mobilizations in the streets of Kiev, seizing government buildings and violently confronting the police, now have the upper hand. The fascists of the Svoboda party have a deputy prime minister and several ministers in the new government. Svoboda cofounder Andriy Parubiy is now head of the National Security and Defense Council, which supervises the armed forces. The new deputy prime minister for economic affairs is Oleksandr Sych of Svoboda, a member of parliament infamous for his attempts to ban all abortions, including in the event of rape. While Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Washington’s favorite and head of the Fatherland party, is now in charge as prime minister, the thugs of Maidan square continue to dictate policy.

The seizure of power by a right-wing Ukrainian nationalist coup deeply alarmed the populace in Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southeastern Ukraine in particular. Indeed, one of the first acts of the new regime was to abolish a 2012 law allowing the official use of Russian and other minority languages. This was rightly seen as an attack on non-Ukrainian minorities, prompting widespread protests, including even in Lviv, where the fascists have a sizable base. Thirteen out of Ukraine’s 27 regions, primarily in eastern Ukraine, had adopted Russian as a second official language, and two western regions adopted Romanian, Hungarian and Moldovan. In Crimea—where 58.5 percent of the population is ethnic Russian, 24.4 percent is Ukrainian and 12.1 percent are Tatars—Kiev’s new chauvinist law hit particularly hard, as some 97 percent of the region’s two million people use Russian as their main language, regardless of ethnic background.

The Russian military, with the aid of local “self-defense” forces, has established control over the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Reportedly, the majority of Ukrainian troops in Crimea have switched sides, with some resigning. Meanwhile, the head of the Ukrainian navy has defected to the Russian side, as well as the 800 personnel of a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea. Unrest has also spread to eastern Ukraine.

There are numerous Russian troops and naval personnel on the Crimean peninsula. By agreement with previous Ukrainian governments, the city of Sevastopol is the home base for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The new pro-Russian government in Crimea has called a plebiscite for March 30 to decide the territory’s status: to remain part of Ukraine or to seek de facto independence and closer affiliation with Russia.

Predictably, the new Ukrainian government has denounced Putin’s intervention as a Russian seizure of Ukrainian territory, and bourgeois pundits have raised comparisons with the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. The Russian military intervention into Crimea is not akin to that war, during which Russian forces moved into Georgian territory. In that war, Marxists had a revolutionary defeatist line, opposing both bourgeois military forces. (Georgia was backed by Western imperialism.)

Contrary to how it is often presented in the Western media, the Russian intervention into Crimea is not an intervention into a “foreign country,” notwithstanding Crimea’s formal status as part of Ukraine. Crimea has been Russian since the late 18th century, when it was wrested from the Ottoman Empire. It was only in 1954 that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev ceded Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this took on significance, as the fate of the area was the subject of heated disputes between the now bourgeois states of Russia and Ukraine. In 1991, an attempt by local inhabitants to hold a referendum on Crimea’s independence was indefinitely banned by the Ukrainian authorities.

The main opposition from within Crimea to seceding from Ukraine comes from the Tatars, an overwhelmingly Muslim Turkic people. On February 26, fighting in the Crimean capital of Simferopol broke out between Tatars and pro-Russian demonstrators, leaving two dead and 30 injured. Distrust of Russian authorities among the Tatars dates back to the period of Joseph Stalin, who deported the Crimean Tatars en masse in 1944 from their historic homeland to Central Asia and other parts of the Soviet Union.

Since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, we have emphasized the need for working people to join together in struggle against capitalist exploitation and all manifestations of oppression, national subjugation and anti-Jewish bigotry. In a 3 April 1995 statement by the International Communist League, issued at a time when we were banned from Ukraine as part of an anti-communist witchhunt, we stressed that “today, in our quest for the democratic rights of the working people and all nationalities to be asserted and defended, we believe that a plebiscite on national affiliation is in order in the Crimea and Chechnya” (WV No. 620, 7 April 1995).

The people of Crimea have every right to self-determination, including independence or incorporation into Russia. In the present juncture, exercising that right might well depend on the support of Russian forces. Indeed, it was the new Crimean government that requested Russian intervention.

It is principled for Marxists to support the Russian intervention into Crimea so long as Russia were to implement special rights for the Crimean Tatar minority, who are plenty oppressed under Ukrainian rule. That Crimea was ever transfered to Ukraine was a stupid administrative error of the Khrushchev regime, contrary to the history as well as the national and linguistic make-up of Crimea. Although it remains to be seen, the new authorities have at least verbally stated that they want to redress Tatar concerns. Crimea’s deputy prime minister, Rustam Temirgaliev, has declared that the local government will offer the Crimean Tatars a place on Crimea’s Supreme Council and that funding for programs of resettlement and reintegration of those deported during the Stalin era will be plentiful (Russia Today, 2 March).

For the Right of All Nations to Self-Determination!

The right of self-determination and other national rights apply to the peoples of all nations, including those of great powers like Russia. As Marxists, we have always rejected the methodology that democratic rights apply only to certain “progressive” peoples, as opposed to those designated “reactionary.” For example, the Zionist state viciously oppresses the Palestinians, but we recognize the national rights of Israeli Jews as well as the Palestinians and oppose the view that the Jews should be driven into the sea. In Northern Ireland, the Catholic minority is oppressed by the (slim) Protestant majority and the British state. But we recognize that the Protestants are a distinct community and oppose their forcible reunification into an Irish Catholic state. We stand for an Irish workers republic as part of a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles.

Self-determination is a democratic right and not an absolute one. Its application is subject to the demands of the class struggle. For example, if Russian forces use the takeover of the Crimea to deepen the oppression of the Tatars, it would then be unprincipled to support the Russian intervention.

As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underlined, the recognition of the right of self-determination is a way to get the national question off the agenda and to foster the fighting unity of the proletariat, thereby enabling the working people of different nations to see who their real enemies are—namely, their respective capitalist classes. We are implacable opponents of Russian nationalism, just as we oppose all forms of nationalism. Thus we supported the Chechen people in their military struggles for independence against their brutal Russian bourgeois oppressors, under both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

In intervening into Crimea, Putin is seeking to defend the interests of capitalist Russia against the Western imperialists, who are aiming to establish a client state on his border. At the same time, in the context of increasing hostilities against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Russia’s realpolitik military maneuvers intersect the very real national fears faced by Russians in Crimea.

Workers Must Sweep the Fascists Off the Streets!

Just as our attitude toward Russian intervention into Crimea does not entail the slightest political support to Putin’s capitalist regime, our opposition to the Ukraine coup does not entail any political support to Yanukovich and his cronies. What was necessary in the lead-up to the coup was for proletarian class unity to be asserted above the national and ethnic divisions that plague that country. It would have been in the interest of the international proletariat for the working class in Ukraine to mobilize to sweep the fascists off the streets of Kiev. Today, it would certainly be in the interest of the proletariat for multiethnic, non-sectarian workers militias to be formed to crush the fascists and repel any and all expressions of communal violence.

In our article “Ukraine Turmoil: Capitalist Powers in Tug of War” (WV No. 1038, 24 January), we pointed out the major role played by fascists in the anti-government demonstrations in Ukraine. But despite ample evidence that neo-Nazis have a strong hold on the opposition now in power, the New York Times and other mouthpieces of the American ruling class still will not call them by their right name. The Western media continues to sell the lie that this coup is the result of a “peaceful revolution” for democracy and against corruption.

Svoboda is a fascist anti-Jewish party whose leader Oleg Tyagnibok claims that a “Moscow-Jewish mafia” controls Ukraine. This party derives from the Ukrainian nationalists led by Stepan Bandera, who militarily collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and carried out mass murders of Jews, Communists, Soviet soldiers and Poles. The party was initially named Social-National Party of Ukraine, an intentional reference to the German Nazi (National Socialist) party. In January, Svoboda led a 15,000-strong torch-lit march in Kiev and another in its stronghold of Lviv, in western Ukraine, in memory of their hero Bandera.

Even more extreme groups such as the Right Sector, which considers Svoboda too “liberal” and “conformist,” went on to outflank Svoboda in the protests. Introducing paramilitary gangs, they turned the tide of the protests in Kiev to attacks on police, with the aim of overthrowing the government. Following the coup, Right Sector supporters in Stryi, in the Lviv region, destroyed a national monument to the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Ukraine from Nazi Germany. (Dozens of statues of Lenin have also been dismantled in the past couple of months.) Aleksandr Muzychko, leader of the West Ukrainian section of the group, has pledged to fight against “Jews, communists and Russian scum until I die.” Asserting the Right Sector’s authority over the situation, Muzychko declared that now that the government has been overthrown, “there will be order and discipline” or “Right Sector squads will shoot the bastards on the spot.”

To the extent that a government exists now in post-coup Ukraine, its laws are largely dictated by these neo-Nazi, Russophobic, anti-Jewish, ultra-nationalist outfits. In addition to stripping the official status of minority languages, the new regime also banned in the western regions of Ukraine the “Communist” Party of Ukraine (CP), which openly collaborated with the bourgeois Yanukovich regime, as well as Yanukovich’s Party of Regions. The CP, which claims 115,000 members and more than two million voters, reports that its supporters have been harassed and beaten and that the CP leader’s house was burned down. Meanwhile, citing “constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions,” a Kiev rabbi called on the Jewish population to leave the city and even the country if possible. Indeed, on February 24 a Jewish synagogue was firebombed in Zaporozhye in southeastern Ukraine. A March 3 statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry noted, “The West’s allies now are outright neo-Nazis who wreck Orthodox churches and synagogues.”

The present crisis in Ukraine was precipitated by Yanukovich’s decision to reject a “partnership” with the EU. That deal was tied to an IMF loan that would have put the Ukrainian working class on starvation rations, as happened to the Greeks and others. U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland, EU representative for foreign affairs Catherine Ashton, U.S. Senator John McCain and numerous other American and European politicians rushed to Maidan square in Kiev to encourage the protesters and show their support. On December 17, Russian president Putin offered the cash-strapped Yanukovich a $15 billion loan and a reduction in gas prices. While far from enough to lift the country out of poverty, this would have been a temporary reprieve for Ukraine, which is about to default. Putin’s loan was immediately denounced by the U.S. Senate as “Russian economic coercion.”

At every level, what is going on in Ukraine is the product of the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state and ravaged the economies and peoples of the former Soviet republics. The Ukrainian economy, which had been integrated into an all-Union economic division of labor, was dealt a severe blow. Living standards plummeted throughout the former USSR. In Ukraine, real wages in 2000 were at best only one-third of 1991 levels, while industrial employment fell 50 percent between 1991 and 2001.

As a former Soviet Republic, Ukraine is still economically very dependent on Russia. The bulk of industry—the production of steel, metals, railway cars and nuclear equipment—is located in the heavily Russified and Orthodox eastern Ukraine, not in the more rural and Uniate Catholic west. These industries, crucial for Russia, are of no use to the Western imperialists, who are intent on liquidating them.

Ukraine’s population of 46 million is deeply divided, with much of western Ukraine advocating closer ties with the EU while eastern and southern regions look to Russia for support. The country was also polarized between corrupt gangs of capitalist tycoons who were earlier scratching each other’s backs while gorging themselves on the theft of the industrial wealth built up over decades by the multinational Soviet working class. Some of these oligarchs, with an appetite for more European investment, orient to the West. Meanwhile, Yanukovich’s support derived from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which trade with Russia.

The Ukrainian working class, which had shown militancy in the early 1990s in the eastern industrial Donetsk region, has so far remained silent as a class. No doubt the workers feel little sympathy for mafia chief Yanukovich. But the pro-imperialist coup in Ukraine, ushered in by fascists, offers up the working class for even more savage exploitation by the imperialists.

Great-Power Rivalries

Siding with ultra-reactionaries and fascists has never bothered the “democratic” U.S. imperialists. In fact, the Banderaites are old friends of Washington. After World War II, Western intelligence protected Bandera’s units and turned them into a guerrilla force against the Soviets, also making them a mainstay of Radio Free Europe. Today, in need of even harsher austerity to keep profits flowing, the Ukrainian ruling class and its imperialist godfathers may find the fascists handy to divert the focus of social discontent from the oligarchs and foreign capitalists to minorities like Jews and immigrants, or to crush militant workers and leftists.

When Barack Obama first came to power, he talked of attempting a “reset” of relations with Russia. However, the U.S. attitude toward Russia today resembles something from the days of the Dulles brothers during the 1950s Cold War era, with the vilification of Russia a theme constantly reiterated by both U.S. media and politicians. But the U.S. imperialists’ hostility to Russia is no longer about overthrowing the collectivized property relations that were established by the 1917 October Revolution. Rather, it is an expression of “great power” politics.

Seven decades of a planned economy transformed Soviet Russia from a largely peasant country to a mainly urbanized one, with rough military parity with the U.S., a skilled workforce and a very substantial number of highly trained scientific and technical personnel. Thanks in great part to the high price of oil and gas in recent years, the Russian economy has recovered from the catastrophe of “shock therapy” that came with capitalist counterrevolution. Russia is the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, and it still has a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal. It also has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and the power to at times be a thorn in the side of the U.S., as when Obama threatened to attack Syria last year.

In its constant drive for world hegemony, the U.S. has been trying to curtail Russia’s strength as a regional power, continuously expanding NATO into East Europe and attempting to install pliant regimes through a series of color “revolutions” in former Soviet republics. The U.S. has also established bases across Central Asia and elsewhere on Russia’s periphery. This military extension is aimed at the encirclement not only of capitalist Russia but also of China, the largest and most powerful of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states. For its part, Russia has numerous times gone along with American imperialism. For example, since 2009 Russia has allowed the U.S. to transport troops and weapons to Afghanistan through its airspace, having previously limited transport through its territory to “nonlethal” supplies.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, the U.S. and EU—with their media mouthpieces in tow—condemn Russia for “interference” into Ukraine’s affairs. It is, in fact, the imperialists who have their dirty hands all over Ukraine. When a telephone conversation was leaked last month between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, all the focus in the media revolved around her statement, “Fuck the EU.” Disappeared was the fact that this was a dispute over who should take power after Yanukovich, with Nuland outright rejecting the prospect of former boxer Vitali Klitschko, who was being promoted by German imperialism (Klitschko actually pays taxes in Germany). As professor Stephen Cohen aptly described the phone call in a February 20 Democracy Now! interview, “The highest-ranking State Department official, who presumably represents the Obama administration, and the American ambassador in Kiev are, to put it in blunt terms, plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.”

In the recent coup, the EU—with Germany, France and Poland taking the lead—has played a prominent role as a battering ram for IMF austerity. The EU is an imperialist trade bloc dominated by Germany, and its “offer” of partnership would spell even deeper poverty for the Ukrainian working class. The IMF loan tied to the EU agreement stipulates that Ukraine cannot accept any financial support from Russia. It requires the slashing of gas and oil subsidies for Ukrainians, making it impossible for many to heat their homes in the frigid winter, and demands further and far more drastic privatizations of public services and industries. In short, it would ensure massive economic privation for Ukraine’s working people, east and west.

Ironically, Yanukovich, who had been more than willing to work with the EU, probably turned down the loan agreement because he feared he would not politically survive the social consequences of the austerity package accompanying it. Ukraine needs some $35 billion just to meet its debt obligations over the next two years. But not much is actually on offer from the EU and U.S. imperialists.

State Department Socialists

While the Western bourgeois media is working overtime to pass off the reactionary demonstrations in Kiev as a “fight for democracy,” the International Socialist Organization (ISO) chimes in with its own version of this tune. A February 24 socialistworker.org article acknowledges that fascists like Right Sector were “increasingly at the forefront of the clashes with government forces” and notes, “The menace of the far right in Ukraine cannot be understated.” Nonetheless, the article continues, “it would be wrong to dismiss the protest movement wholesale because [of] its presence,” describing the protests in Kiev as an “action from below.” So were the rampages of Nazi stormtroopers!

The ISO goes further and calls for “a grassroots effort involving independent workers’ organizations, trade unions and a strengthened left establishing an atmosphere of solidarity within the Maidan, in which the toxic message of hate will wither and die” [our emphasis]. To be clear, here the ISO is calling on workers to join and help a movement that is controlled by fascists and far-right forces. Any worker militant unfortunate enough to be influenced by the ISO would have found himself participating in a fascist-led coup.

Naïve left-wing groups, trade unionists and gay activists who tried to join the protests were expelled from the square by force of arms and beaten. The ISO is used to the company of arch-reactionaries. From its inception in the 1950s, the ISO’s international tendency—including its erstwhile partners in the British Socialist Workers Party—has always sided with “democratic” imperialism. At the outbreak of the Korean War, it abandoned Trotskyism by refusing to defend the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, going on to support any and all forces arrayed against the Soviet workers state in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” This included prettifying General Andrey Vlasov, the leader of the Russian fascists who fought on the side of Hitler’s Nazis during the Second World War.

The Russian Revolution and the National Question

The Bolshevik Party that led the October Revolution of 1917 steadfastly stood for the equality of all nations, peoples and languages. The Bolsheviks opposed any form of national inequality or privilege. This enabled them to rally the working people—Russians, Jews, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, etc.—to overthrow the rule of the capitalists and landlords.

For the first several years after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks assiduously defended the rights of the various peoples and nationalities in the country. For example, the Crimean Autonomous Republic was established in 1921 within the Russian Federation; about a fifth of its population were Crimean Tatars. In the first years of Soviet power there was a marked development of Crimean Tatar national culture: the Tatars founded national research centers, museums, libraries and theaters. However, with the triumph and consolidation of a Stalinist bureaucracy beginning in 1923-24, Great Russian chauvinism began to flourish. Within years, teaching of the Crimean Tatar language and literature was ended, and all publications in the language were banned.

When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, a section of the Tatars welcomed them as liberators. But many other Tatars fought in the Soviet Army against Germany. Stalin then vindictively visited collective punishment on the Crimean Tatar population. In 1944, some 180,000 Tatars were deported to Central Asia and other parts of the USSR. The Chechens and Volga Germans received similar treatment. Almost one-half of the Tatars died on the way to exile. It was not until 1967 that Soviet authorities began the “rehabilitation” of the Tatars. Only two decades later were they allowed to begin returning to Crimea, creating great bitterness among the Tatars.

However, it would be a mistake to view national relations in the Soviet degenerated workers state as a simple continuation of the tsarist prison house of peoples. The policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy had a contradictory impact. The existence of a socialized economy with central planning provided the material basis for developing more backward areas of the USSR, such as Soviet Central Asia. Ukraine underwent substantial industrialization and development. The achievement of full employment, medical care for all and other gains undercut the most virulent forms of bourgeois nationalism and anti-Semitism that are fueled by the discontents of capitalist society. The Red Army smashed the Nazi invaders during World War II, liberating Ukraine from the fascist scum.

With the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, all the “old crap” returned, leading to a sharp intensification of communalism and a proliferation of national hatreds pitting working people against each other in a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival. As we have noted in the past, the breakup of the Soviet Union revealed a situation of considerable interpenetration of peoples and of economic production units that were inherited from and geared to a bureaucratically centralized planned economy. That is the situation with Ukraine, particularly in the eastern regions.

The future under capitalism is bleak. Further economic immiseration could well lead to increased bitterness and strife among differing ethnic groups, with a bloody “resolution” of the national question. As we noted in concluding our article on Ukraine three issues ago: “The crucial task is to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties that will wage a thoroughgoing struggle against all manifestations of nationalism and great-power chauvinism as part of patient but persistent propaganda aimed at winning the proletariat to the program of international socialist revolution.”

This Saturday, March 15th at 2pm Join the National Day of Action March for 15 in Boston!        From Seattle to Tampa, from Los Angeles to Boston, workers and activists nationwide are fighting for a $15/hr minimum wage. March 15th will be a national day of action where working people nationwide will show their support for a $15/hr minimum wage.   In Boston this campaign is already underway, and on March 15th we will be marching from the State House in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the state and across the country. Join us on Saturday to show that Boston supports a living wage for all workers!     For any questions about this event or about the campaign for 15 Now, please email us at 15NowNewEngland@gmail.com or call (857) 615-5082 For admission we ask for a donation of around $5, but no one will be turned away because they cant pay.  2pm Saturday March 15th  Mass State House  Beacon and Park St Boston, MA 01233 RSVP on Facebook and invite your friends! Forward this email Join Our Mailing List! STAY CONNECTED

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It's That Time Of Year -Again 

LGBT Inclusive Groups Still Seek to March in South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

TRT Editor | Jan 09, 2014 | Comments 1

Boston St. Patrick’s Peace Parade participants lining up before parade. 
Photo: TRT Archives

By: Chuck Colbert*/ TRT Reporter—

BOSTON, Mass.—When Irish eyes are smiling, the world is bright and gay, or so go lyrics of the popular song. Except, historically, on St. Patrick’s Day in South Boston, where openly gay groups are still not permitted to participate.

For several years, the parade organizers—Allied War Veterans Council—emboldened by a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have denied marching permission for LGBT and peace veterans groups as a matter of First Amendment, free-speech rights. However, serious efforts are underway to change that.

“This is the year we all should put pressure on politicians,” said Pat Scanlon, Vietnam veteran and coordinator of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 9, Smedley D. Butler Brigade, an organization banned from marching in the South Boston parade for several years.

Scanlon pointed to changing demographics of South Boston and a new mayor as hopeful signs the peace veterans contingent will be able to march, along with openly LGBT groups. Back in September 2013, Veterans for Peace applied to Allied War Veterans, but by December 9, 2013, when the peace-vet organization had not received a reply, Scanlon sent a follow up letter. 

“When Massachusetts is, in so many ways, a beacon of inclusion for the LGBTQ community, it is disappointing to see parade organizers continue to cultivate a climate of rejection and exclusion.” —Kara Coredini, MassEquality Director.

“The exclusion of Veterans for Peace, the LGBT community, and other peace organizations, from participating [in the parade] should come to an end,” Scanlon wrote. “It is time that there be one parade that is open, inclusive and welcoming to any group wishing to celebrate this very special day. It is Saint Patrick’s Day, a celebration of the patron saint of Ireland and Saint Patrick was a man of peace.”

Scanlon’s letter pointed not only to changing attitudes toward LGBT people in society at large, but also to cultural and social changes within South Boston.

“Many members of the LGBT community currently live, work and worship” in the neighborhood, he wrote.

In fact, two parades have trekked through the streets of South Boston since 2010 when the peace veterans first applied but were rejected. Scanlon said parade organizers used not wanting the word “peace” connected to the word “veteran” as reason enough to ban the group from marching. Last year, when the Veterans for Peace organized the second march, which took place one hour after the main event and was separated by Boston city street sweepers, the parade had more than 2,000 participants. Those who marched with the St. Patrick’s Peace Parade included six bands, trolleys, duck boats, floats, and the like—all organized into eight separate divisions under the categories of veterans, peace, LGBT, religious, environmental, labor, political, social, and economic justice.

Born on St. Patrick’s Day, Scanlon, 66, a straight Irish American who grew up Catholic in Philadelphia and attended parochial schools for 19 years, explained his motivation.

“This is an injustice,” Scanlon said. “An injustice against one is an injustice against all, and in one of the most progressive cities in the country, if not the world, to have this injustice taking place should not be tolerable.”

The father of a gay son, Scanlon does not mince words in calling out the ban on LGBT groups. 

“It’s homophobic,” he said, referring to the attitude of parade organizers. “It’s exclusion. It’s hatred. That’s what all this is about.”

In addition to applying to the Allied War Veterans Council, Scanlon said his parade group has also asked the City of Boston for its own parade permit with a 12 p.m. kick-off time, one hour before Allied War Veterans’ start time.

Michael Dowling, 59, a gay resident of South Boston for 35 years and president of the South Boston Association of Non-Profits, is taking another approach. He said the community-based non-profit association has applied to the Allied War Veterans, proposing “an inclusive unit called ‘We are South Boston.’” The application, he explained, contains “really strong, inclusive language, including LGBT language with signs that would identify participants in the parade.”

Dowling said he takes issue with Scanlon’s outsider approach.

“The efforts of Pat Scanlon have helped perpetuate the hardships of the neighborhood and how it is portrayed,” Dowling said.

He went on to explain why.

“Because when [Scanlon] calls the neighborhood bigoted and homophobic, he riles up those hatreds that are still there, and makes it more difficult for people to be out, and makes it more difficult for people to work here,” said Dowling. “So it sets us back.”

But Scanlon takes issue with Dowling’s suggestion of such name calling. The South Boston neighborhood is not the problem, said Scanlon, explaining, “The attitudes of the residents of South Boston have changed dramatically in the last 20 years.” It’s the Allied War Veterans who hold bigoted and homophobic attitudes, he said.

At the same time, both Scanlon and Dowling said they believe South Boston has indeed changed significantly in the last two decades.

“Everything in South Boston has changed,” said Scanlon. “The neighborhood has changed, the politics have changed, the culture has changed, and [Catholic] churches have closed. The only thing that has not changed is the attitude of the six guys who run the parade. That too will change.”

Dowling agreed with the changing demographics and attitudes, citing local civic groups that are inclusive of LGBT people, namely One Southie and The New Southie, both of which have Facebook pages, and the West Broadway Citizens group, which Dowling said consists predominantly of gay men who live on that thoroughfare. Dowling said South Boston Association of Non Profits is working with the neighborhood-based civic and social groups, among others, to gain permission to march.

Like Scanlon, Dowling is also seeking to gain support for their respective approaches from elected officials, including state Senator Linda Dorcena of the First Suffolk District and state Representative Nick Collins of the Fourth Suffolk District, both Democrats. South Boston falls within their respective legislative districts. Both Scanlon and Dowling have also contacted Boston’s new mayor, Martin J. Walsh, and District Two City Councilor Bill Linehan, a lifelong South Boston resident, in hopes that they can broker a deal or solution to the standoff. Linehan was also elected president of city council in early January. Scanlon has also written to the Boston Police Department and penned an open letter to residents of the city.

Dowling said he is hopeful that the neighborhood insider’s approach is the way out of the gay-ban situation, a way for the Allied War Veterans and everybody to move forward. Back in the early 90s when an openly gay group—The Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB)—marched in the parade, Dowling paid a steep price for supporting the gay group. Along the parade route, he handed out pink roses to gay, lesbian, and bisexual marchers. 

“Every window in my house was broken,” Dowling said.He added, consequently, that he had every good reason “to beat up on the neighborhood.”“But I have chosen to replace hatred of our community with service to that community,” Dowling explained.

A painter and noted artist, Dowling founded Medicine Wheels Production as a South Boston-based nonprofit organization in 2000. Its mission is “to transform communities from the inside out” through “the healing and transcendent power of public art.” Medicine Wheel’s signature event is on World AIDS Day. Another focus addresses youth drug abuse and teen suicide.

Neither Veterans for Peace nor South Boston Association of Non Profits have heard back yet from parade organizers. Both Dowling and Scanlon said they are preparing strategies if their applications are rejected. Undoubtedly, the issue will find its way to the office of Mayor Walsh, who told a reporter during the mayoral election last fall, “What needs to happen,” is a private “conversation” away from the media’s glare, with “organizers of the parade.”

“As mayor, I will sit down with them and work out a compromise so that people can feel like they can march in the parade,” Walsh explained. “This parade should be inclusive, and that goes for every other parade marching on public streets.”

Meanwhile, MassEquality, the statewide grassroots organization, has also applied to march.

“We will continue to apply every year until MassEquality is permitted to march,” said Kara S. Coredini, executive director.

Like the other two groups, MassEquality has not yet heard back from parade organizers on the status of its application. However, the parade is not among MassEquality’s highest priorities. 

Neither Veterans for Peace nor South Boston Association of Non Profits have heard back yet from parade organizers.

“The LGBTQ community in Massachusetts faces many issues more urgent than the ability to participate in a parade—youth homelessness, bullying, anti-transgender discrimination, HIV/AIDS, elder abuse, and more,” Coredini explained. “But public rejection by an established cultural institution like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade is significant in that it’s emblematic of the more life-altering rejection our community members face every day. When Massachusetts is, in so many ways, a beacon of inclusion for the LGBTQ community, it is disappointing to see parade organizers continue to cultivate a climate of rejection and exclusion. At the heart of MassEquality’s work electing pro-LGBTQ champions and advancing pro-LGBTQ legislation is changing attitudes, and each day because of that work we come closer to the day when this parade will be opened to all.”

This year’s St. Patrick Day Parade is scheduled for Sunday, March 16._______

*Chuck Colbert marched in the 1992 and 1993 South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade as one of 25 participants in the Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston.

Last Notice For Chelsea Manning Contingent In The Boston Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade

Heroic Wikileaks Whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning ‘s Fight For Freedom Will Again Be Remembered At The Fourth Annual Veterans For Peace-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston On March 16, 2014

VFPers (and many others) are still committed to fighting for freedom for Chelsea Manning and, as we have the past three years, will be prominently displaying signs and stickers on her behalf. We will have an organized group right behind the VFP-lead contingent within the parade in order to honor Chelsea and spread the word about her plight and about the need to have President Obama pardon her.

We will have the VFP Chelsea banner, new Chelsea signs and sticker reflecting Chelsea’s gender-change although others can make signs available to be passed out at the parade. Also Amnesty International/Courage To Resist petitions to be signed calling on President Obama to pardon our sister. We will not leave our sister behind.

We will be forming up at the corner of D Street and West Fourth in South Boston (take Redline MBTA to Broadway Station-walk up four blocks and then left) at 2 PM for a 3 PM step-off (note time change).

Finally the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Organizing Committee has incurred some expenses organizing this effect. In order to off-set those expenses we are urging every participant to buy a Peace Parade 2014 button to commemorate the event. Suggested donation is $5.00 so bring some cash with you if possible.

 

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