For more information on the East & West Coast
events, Please click here: http://nepajac.org/mumia1.html
UNAC to join May Day March and Rally in New
York
Please join UNAC at
the Mayday Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights march and rally on Mayday,
May 1, 2014 starting at Union Sq., NYC. The various countries represented by
the immigrant communities throughout the New York area are countries that have a
US military presence and /or are under economic pressure by US imperialism.
Workers throughout the world and in the US are feeling the brunt of the world
crisis of capitalism. Therefore, UNAC will help organize an antiwar contingent
in this important demonstration for worker and immigrant rights. Please join
us.
We will gather
during the afternoon of May 1st starting at 12 noon at Union Square
(14th & B’way, NYC).
We will form our
contingent and march to various locations in lower Manhattan starting at 5:30
PM. Please join us for as much of the day as you can.
• We demand
Legalization for All, End to Deportations and Detentions, and an End to
militarization of our borders.
• We demand a $15
Minimum Wage. Everyone deserves a living wage.
• We demand
immediate contracts for all city employees. No concessions! No givebacks! Full
retro pay!
• Housing,
Healthcare, Education and Jobs for All
• End U.S. Wars,
Bring the Troops Home
• Stop Racist War on
Black Community and All People of Color (POC) • Climate Justice Now
• Abolish the Prison
Industrial Complex
• International
Solidarity, No to TPP
• Stop the violence
against Transgender POC, and all LGBT Communities
• End Common Core
• Gentrification of
our Communities
Some other possible
slogans for our contingent:
No war on workers at
home,
No war on workers in
Ukraine!
International
Mayday! /
"Endless War Steals
from the Poor"
Mayday
2014:
No war on
Immigrants, or workers ANYWHERE! /
No War on Syria,
Iran, Ukraine, Russia
Money for Jobs, Not
for War!
UNAC will have some
signs, please also bring your own in English and Spanish or other languages.
For more
information, call Joe at 518-281-1968
To add yourself to the
UNAC listserv, please send an email to: UNAC-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
|
Friday, April 25, 2014
The Class Struggle Continues….On The First Anniversary Of the Murderous Bangladesh Factory Collapse Fire-Solidarity Event In Boston
Some events, some occurrences in the class struggle, should be etched deeply into the minds of every leftist pro-working militant and supporter. The events around the 2013 Bangladesh factory collapse like around the infamous Triangle Factory fire of 1913 in America cry out for vengeance. If the capitalists involved in making policy at either site were no less blood-thirsty for profits than the rest of their class they nevertheless stand in the forefront for that motive which had wreaked more lives than can be counted in capitalism’s now several hundred year tenure as the major mode of production on this good green earth. Time to put such a system into the dustbin of history-for good.
************
One year has passed since the infamous Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, in which over 1100 workers were killed. No significant change in labor rights, factory safety, or social attitudes has taken place since then. Factory owners, government officials and retailers in the west have fast returned to “business-as-usual” amnesia.
http://thesouthernpraxis.org/2014/02/23/bangladeshs-monstrous-normality/
The Bangladesh Workers Solidarity Network (BWSN) invites your participation in commemorating the disaster. Benefits go to families of workers killed and injured at Rana Plaza. The Commemoration will take place this Saturday, 4/26, starting at 5:30 pm, at the SEIU Local 32BJ/District 615 Union Hall, located at 26 West Street (Theater District), Boston, MA. This event is timed to take place after the Jobs Not Jails rally, and conveniently located just steps from the rally.
Music by Saraswathi Jones
$10 Suggested – No one turned away
Co-Sponsors: Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, Asian American Resource Workshop, Jobs With Justice, Industrial Workers of the World, Massachusetts Global Action and Center for Marxist Education.
www.bangladeshWorkersSolidarityNetwork.org
Contact Info:workersNov25@gmail.com
480-299-9876
http://thesouthernpraxis.org/2014/02/23/bangladeshs-monstrous-normality/
The Bangladesh Workers Solidarity Network (BWSN) invites your participation in commemorating the disaster. Benefits go to families of workers killed and injured at Rana Plaza. The Commemoration will take place this Saturday, 4/26, starting at 5:30 pm, at the SEIU Local 32BJ/District 615 Union Hall, located at 26 West Street (Theater District), Boston, MA. This event is timed to take place after the Jobs Not Jails rally, and conveniently located just steps from the rally.
Music by Saraswathi Jones
$10 Suggested – No one turned away
Co-Sponsors: Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, Asian American Resource Workshop, Jobs With Justice, Industrial Workers of the World, Massachusetts Global Action and Center for Marxist Education.
www.bangladeshWorkersSolidarityNetwork.org
Contact Info:workersNov25@gmail.com
480-299-9876
Jobs Not Jails Rally on Boston Common!
When: Saturday, April 26, 2014, 12:00
pm
Where: Boston Common •
Boston
Let us ALL bring together 10,000 people from across Massachusetts to say NO to incarcerating our family, friends, neighbors, and loved ones. Let us say YES to good jobs that are meaningful and pay living wages.
We will listen to speakers. We will chant with one another. We will be motivated to act with loud voices.
This event is being organized by a statewide coalition. JOIN US! www.jobsnotjails.org
Massachusetts taxpayers are expected to build 10,000 new prison unitsby 2023, costing $2 billion, unless dramatic reforms are made;
Reforms in other states have led to greater public safety while actuallyclosing prisons (e.g. New York, Texas);
Reducing long-term unemployment also improves public safety state-wide;
We call upon our legislators and Governor to:
- Enact criminal justice reforms that have been proven to work in other states, including: reducing barriers to employment; diversion to treatment; ending mandatory minimum drug sentences; and improving access to education.
- Halt the construction of new prison units until these reforms can take effect.
- Re-direct the $2 billion savings into a jobs program targeting communities with high rates of poverty and crime, further improving public safety for everyone.
Participating Organizations:
10-Point Coalition
Action fo Regional Equity
AIDS Project Worcester
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
American Friends Service Committee
Arise for Social Justice, Springfield
Arlington Street Church
Black and Pink
Blackstonian.com
Boston Feminist Liberation
Boston Living Center
Boston Workers’ Alliance
Children’s League of Massachusetts
Cleghorn Neighborhood Center, Fitchburg
Coalition for Effective Public Safety
Coalition for Social Justice, Fall River and New Bedford
Coalition to Fund our Communities
Committee for Public Counsel Services
Committee of Friends and Relatives of Prisoners
Community Labor United
Criminal Justice Policy Coalition
Dismas House
Dorchester People for Peace
EPOCA (Ex-prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancment)
Families Against Mandatory Minimums
Families for Justice as Healing
First Parish Church of Arlington
First Parish Church of Northborough
Fitchburg Minority Coalition
Harvard Law Students PLAP
Lesley College – PAWS
Lynn Youth Street Outreach Advocacy (LYSOA)
Massachusetts CURE
Massachusetts Organization for Addiction Recovery
Massachusetts Women’s Justice Network
Mothers for Justice and Equality
Multicultural Wellness Center
NAACP Youth Council, Boston Chapter
National Association of Social Workers, SIG
National Lawyers’ Guild
Old Cambridge Baptist Church
Prison Policy Initiative
Prisoners’ Legal Services
Progressive Massachusetts
Real Cost of Prisons Project
Roxbury Youth Works
SPAN, Inc.
Spontaneous Celebrations – Beantown Society
St. John Missionary Baptist Church
Straight Ahead Ministries
Teen Empowerment
Teens Leading the Way
Timothy Baptist Church
Toastmasters Prison Volunteers
United Church of Christ, Innocence Commission Task Force
Worcester Branch, NAACP
Worcester Homeless Action Committee
Worcester Youth Center
Youth Against Mass Incarceration
Thursday, April 24, 2014
1984 Carnage of Sikhs-Communalism in India: Tool of Capitalist Rule
Workers Vanguard No. 1044 | 18 April 2014 |
1984 Carnage of Sikhs-Communalism in India: Tool of Capitalist Rule
The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 226 (Spring 2014), newspaper of our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.
As the 30th anniversary of the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar approaches, official documents made public in Britain revealed that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government aided the Indian military in planning the attack in the Sikh holy city. The documents that were declassified in January include a personal letter from Thatcher expressing support for Indira Gandhi’s policy on the Punjab. Support for the 1984 atrocity against the Sikhs is hardly shocking, coming from the former colonial power that was directly responsible for the first Amritsar massacre. In 1919, under the command of General Reginald Dyer, troops gunned down and killed somewhere between 400 and 1,000 civilians who were gathered in a park. Many had come to celebrate a religious holiday; others came out in defiance of a British ban on political protests against colonial rule. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron paid a high profile visit to Jallianwala Bagh, the scene of the 1919 Amritsar massacre. Cameron’s hypocritical expression of “regret” was a cheap ploy to garner votes from among Britain’s 500,000 Sikhs.
The 1984 assault on the Golden Temple ordered by Indira Gandhi’s Congress government in Delhi was an atrocity against all Sikhs. Ostensibly intended to overpower armed Sikh fundamentalists, followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had taken up positions in the temple complex, the attack slaughtered as many as 2,000 people, many of them pilgrims, including women and children. The attack made a martyr out of Bhindranwale and dramatically boosted support for religious fundamentalism among Sikhs. In India and abroad, angry protests erupted, often led by reactionaries demanding Khalistan, a theocratic Sikh state. Some 4,000 Sikh soldiers deserted their regiments as the unrest spread to India’s armed forces, over ten per cent of which were Sikh. Throughout Punjab and in cities such as Delhi, Sikhs were arrested and tortured by the thousands. At the time we wrote, “the vicious crackdown by the Hindu-chauvinist Gandhi regime was an attack on the entire Sikh community and a bloody lesson to all opponents of the regime. And the repercussions are likely to be immense, and even bloodier, as the reactionary legacy of British imperialist rule continues to wreak havoc upon the Indian masses” (Spartacist Britain No. 60, August 1984). That legacy was again played out in a communalist frenzy, directed overwhelmingly against the Sikhs, that recalled the horrors of Partition [that divided the subcontinent between majority-Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947].
By declaring war on the Sikhs, Mrs. Gandhi got more than she bargained for. On 31 October, she herself was assassinated by Sikh members of her bodyguard. For the next three days the capital city was engulfed in a wave of pogroms that culminated in a massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi alone. One particularly heinous atrocity took place in Trilokpuri, east Delhi, in a colony housing impoverished low-caste Sikhs. Over a 72-hour period, some 350 people were butchered in a single block. A team of journalists who had been tipped off by a survivor made their way to Trilokpuri suspecting that, “even while the whole city was in the grip of mass killings, there was something exceptionally dreadful about the plight of Block 32.” One of the journalists, Rahul Bedi, later testified that the street was “littered with limbs of human bodies, hairs and charred bodies” (When a Tree Shook Delhi, M. Mitta and H. Phoolka, 2007). Some 30 Sikh women from Trilokpuri were raped. Mass rapes are part of a gruesome pattern that was seen during Partition and almost always accompany communalist bloodletting. Again in 1991 in Kunan Poshpora, Kashmir, Indian Army troops gang-raped nearly 100 women in a single night.
In the three decades that have elapsed since 1984, the families of the victims have fought courageously for the legal system to punish those responsible. But ten official “enquiries” have whitewashed the crimes, while leading figures in the Congress party have built political careers out of their involvement in inciting terror against the Sikh community. Among them are Jagdish Tytler, who served several times as a minister in the federal government, and leading politician Sajjan Kumar, who had charges filed against him, including for murder and rioting, but whose case has been bogged down in the courts. Rajiv Gandhi, who took over as Congress leader and prime minister after his mother’s death, condoned the anti-Sikh terror in his infamous November 1984 statement that:
“Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”
—When a Tree Shook Delhi
Congress romped to victory in elections in December 1984. Today, with India-wide elections imminent, the Hindu-supremacist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is expected to win and its candidate, Narendra Modi, is tipped to become prime minister. Among liberals and reformists, opposition to BJP communalism frequently takes the form of presenting Congress as a supposedly secular alternative. The BJP rose to prominence in Indian politics based on its association with the violent attacks on Muslims that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu-chauvinist mobs. By the end of the 1990s the BJP led a coalition government of all India. Similarly, Narendra Modi, who was chief minister in Gujarat during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms, has built a political career on the back of this violence. The role played by Congress leaders in 1984, and the 30-year cover-up of their guilt, gives the lie to the notion that Congress is an alternative to BJP communalism.
Marxists and the Sikh Question
In India as a whole, with a Hindu majority of over 80 per cent and a population of some 1.2 billion, the Sikhs are a tiny minority of about two per cent, concentrated in Indian Punjab. The Punjab was severely affected by the horrors of Partition, which were the culmination of systematic divide-and-rule machinations by the British imperialists. The violence was not only a consequence of, but “was a principal mechanism for creating the conditions for partition” (P. Brass, Journal of Genocide Research, 2003). In the main, the mass killing, raping, looting and forced population transfers on an enormous scale were carried out by organised paramilitary outfits. Hindus and Sikhs who lived in western Punjab were driven eastwards to India by outfits such as the National Guards of the Muslim League. Muslims were forced to flee in the opposite direction, often at the behest of Hindu communalist forces such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or by Sikh militia. Calling for the formation of an Akali Fauj (Sikh army) on the steps of Lahore legislative building in March 1947, the principal Sikh leader at the time, Master Tara Singh, declared that Sikhs must be prepared to die for their cause.
In post-Partition India, the Sikh leadership has repeatedly shown its anti-Pakistan, anti-Muslim credentials. As a reward for loyalty in the 1965 war with Pakistan, the capitalist rulers in Delhi granted the Sikhs’ demand for new state borders. In 1966, the state boundaries were re-drawn, creating the present Sikh-majority state of Indian Punjab and a new state of Haryana and enlarging Himachal Pradesh in the process. Sikhs are heavily represented in India’s armed forces, which are a vital bulwark of the unity of the state. It was a Sikh general, Kuldeep Singh Brar, who led the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple (while the Khalistani forces inside the Temple were led by a former army officer, General Shabeg Singh). On the eve of the slaughter in Amritsar—which lies less than 20 miles from the Pakistan border—Brar rallied his troops by warning that “the enemy” had links to Pakistan.
The anti-Communist Khalistani forces certainly looked to Pakistan for support. During the 1980s, Pakistan’s rulers, together with the U.S. and British imperialists, massively armed and funded the reactionary Islamic-fundamentalist mujahedin forces in Afghanistan in a “holy war” against the Soviet Union. As Trotskyists, from the beginning of the 1979 Soviet intervention we proclaimed: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend the social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!” [See “Afghanistan: Women Under Imperialist Occupation”, WV No. 998, 16 March 2012].
The 1984 attack on the Sikhs posed a litmus test for revolutionaries. Post-independence India fits Lenin’s description of tsarist Russia as a “prison house of peoples.” As part of their programme for proletarian power, Lenin’s Bolsheviks trenchantly opposed Great Russian chauvinism and called for the right of self-determination for all nations, including their right to secede. At the same time Lenin insisted that “Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilised brand” (Critical Remarks on the National Question, 1913). Our position on the Sikh question was not conditional on the reactionary character of the Khalistani leadership, of which there was no doubt. Bhindranwale, who had once threatened to kill 5,000 Hindus, and his theocratic Dal Khalsa movement were fundamentalist anti-woman thugs who carried out murderous terror against Communists in the Punjab. In the early 1990s, Sikh communalists carried out attacks on Hindus, often targeting buses and killing scores of people at a time.
In the summer of 1984 we wrote: “We demand an immediate halt to the repressive military/police operation in the Punjab, the withdrawal of all troops and the release of all Sikhs imprisoned in the dragnet.” At the same time, we insisted:
“Isolated from a revolutionary perspective, however, these elementary demands will not end—and in the short term might well inflame—the communalist turmoil which today threatens to engulf the Punjab. The only progressive answer lies in the Indian proletariat, which has historically demonstrated militancy and organisation.... Armed with a revolutionary programme to overthrow capitalism, the relatively small but strategically powerful working class is the one social force that, carrying the agrarian masses behind it, can put an end to the communalist horrors and furnish a just solution to the legitimate grievances of India’s many oppressed minorities. And this requires the forging of a Trotskyist party.”
— Spartacist Britain No. 60, August 1984
And we added:
“The Sikhs are not just a religious grouping, however, but form a distinct community inhabiting a particular territory with a common language (Punjabi) and customs. And while the Sikhs may not yet be a nation, the present dynamic points to their further national consolidation. Nations are not born fully-fledged but are consolidated in struggle (generally by expelling or destroying other peoples). Undoubtedly, and more emphatically since the bloodbath at Amritsar, many Sikhs see themselves as a nation. But whether they achieve the fundamentalist dream of Khalistan (‘state of the pure’) or some other form of self-determination, or they are genocidally repressed by the Hindu majority, under capitalism the outcome can only be reactionary.”
We warned that: “To establish their own state, the Sikhs must necessarily remove, one way or another, millions who share the land of Punjab with them.” The population of the Punjab is deeply interpenetrated. Business and industry in the cities tend to be in the hands of Hindus, and in rural areas, 75 per cent are Sikhs. The competing claims of the peoples of South Asia as a whole can only be equitably resolved within a socialist federation of South Asia. We are necessarily algebraic about the future relationships of the workers states that may make up such a federation, and cannot pre-determine whether or not the Sikhs would form their own state.
The Indian reformist left generally denied the legitimacy of the Sikh struggle against national oppression. The Moscow-loyal Communist Party of India (CPI), which for years had been a servile creature of the Indira Gandhi regime, shamelessly supported the army’s assault in Amritsar. The CPI general secretary at the time, C.R. Rao, declared: “We have always been for effective steps to put down extremist violence. These should, however, be combined with efforts for a political solution, which will go a long way in isolating the extremists” (Overseas Hindustan Times, 23 June 1984). As for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), its then leader, Harkishan Singh Surjeet, issued an almost identical statement and praised the army for its “tremendous precautions to protect the Golden temple” (Hindu, International Edition, 23 June 1984).
Today, the CPI (M) shows the same loyalty to India’s capitalist rulers over Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. While refusing to call for Indian troops to get out, in 2010, CPI (M) general secretary Prakash Karat wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, pleading with him to “take a bold initiative for a political dialogue with all sections in the state” (cpim.org, 4 September 2010). In contrast to these reformists, we Marxists have said: “Today, insofar as the Kashmiri struggle is not decisively subordinated to a military conflict between the Pakistani ruling class and its Indian rival, Marxists uphold the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir, which means the right to independence or—should they so choose—to merge with Pakistan (or India)” [“Down With India’s Bloody Repression in Kashmir! All Indian and Pakistani Troops Out Now!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010].
Myth of Post-Communal Punjab
The Indian state crushed the Sikh insurgency in a wave of repression that lasted until the early 1990s and incurred a death toll in Punjab estimated in the tens of thousands. Support for Khalistan remains strong among the Sikh diaspora in Britain and Canada. Among the Sikh population as a whole, the enormous crimes and injustices have not been forgotten. The anger and frustration that still burns was seen recently in London where General Brar, now retired, was holidaying in 2012 and was physically attacked by Sikhs. Brar’s assailants were given outrageous prison terms, ranging from ten to 14 years, for inflicting a couple of superficial wounds on the general, who was one of the chief architects of mass murder in Amritsar in 1984.
Since 1997, the state of Punjab has been governed almost continuously by an alliance of the Akali Dal, a Sikh party, and the BJP. The Akali-BJP alliance is often touted as the end of communalism in the Punjab. This is a fallacy. The Akali Dal was founded in 1920, as the political arm of the committee to manage the Sikh temples (gurdwaras). From its inception it operated within the framework of communal divisions laid down by the British rulers by introducing separate electorates for Sikhs in 1921 (as they had done for Hindus and Muslims in [1909]). The Sikh nationalist leadership has now thrown in its lot with the Hindu communalist BJP, in an alliance that is necessarily anti-Muslim.
Moreover, the Akali Dal today represents the interests of Sikh farmers belonging to the Jat caste of wealthy landowners. The Akali-BJP alliance “has united the dominant castes among the Sikhs and Hindus” that “replicates the social structure of the Punjab village in its legislative assembly” (Economic and Political Weekly, 31 March 2012). Although Sikhism originated in the fifteenth century in part in opposition to the Hindu caste system, caste oppression is rampant in Punjab.
The tenth guru, Gobind Singh, turned Sikhism into a fighting religion in 1699, establishing its distinctive symbols— including beard and dagger. When the Sikhs were defeated in the Anglo-Sikh wars that ended in 1849, the British incorporated the former foes into the army. The racist British rulers designated the Sikhs as a “martial race” and granted them special privileges as a reward for Sikh military support in suppressing the uprising of 1857, known as the Sepoy Mutiny but more appropriately described as the “first Indian war of independence.” As part of their determination to prevent any such rebellion in the future, the British reorganised the army on the principle of divide-and-rule, awarded Punjabi peasants land as an incentive to join the army, and undertook a vast expansion of agriculture. The predominance of the Jat caste of rich farmers among the Sikh population today has its origins in these colonial schemes.
The caste prejudices of the Akali leaders were manifest in the 1930s, when Dr. B.R. Ambedkar proposed to lead India’s 60 million dalits (“untouchables”) into the Sikh religion. The Akali leadership rejected this and, according to author Kapur Singh, “they unanimously decided that Ambedkar and his follower untouchables must be dissuaded and stopped from becoming Sikhs for all time” (quoted in “Scheduled Castes in Sikh Community,” Economic and Political Weekly, 28 June 2003). The Punjab’s Green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s enriched the Jat farmers, while creating the need for unskilled farm labourers, with the result that many lower caste migrant workers flocked to the state from areas such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Today, dalits constitute some 30 per cent of the Punjab’s population—the highest proportion in India—and more than 80 per cent of those dalits live in rural areas and are among the most deprived and impoverished section of the population. Caste oppression compounds the subjugation of women in the villages, where rape and violence against women are daily occurrences.
Following independence from Britain, India continues to be dependent on imperialist finance capital, and will remain so while capitalist rule persists. This underlines the importance of an internationalist perspective that is not limited to South Asia, but linked to socialist revolution in the imperialist centres, including Britain, Canada and the U.S. India remains heavily agricultural, which means that agrarian revolution is a key component of the programme for proletarian state power. The working class must win the support of the rural masses to its side by championing agrarian revolution to overthrow the landlords and capitalists.
At the same time, India has a significant industrial proletariat, which is the motor force of the Indian socialist revolution. Not far from Punjab lies the industrial centre of Gurgaon, including Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest car maker. Workers at this plant have carried out a series of powerful strikes, uniting workers across caste and religious divisions. In July 2012, the bosses made a frontal attack on the trade union in the plant. When a manager mysteriously died in a fire, some 147 workers were arrested, falsely accused of murder and put in jail, where they have languished ever since. This is an attack on all workers. The capitalist bosses who have gone to such lengths to stamp out the union among these workers are well aware of the potential power of the working class.
The labour of the proletariat produces the profits that enrich the ruling class. But this potential power is hamstrung by the existing political leadership. What is essential is forging a new leadership of the working class that fights to turn the unions into organs of proletarian unity and class independence from the bosses and their state. This task is linked to the forging of a revolutionary vanguard party.
The communalism that repeatedly threatens to tear India apart is not some inevitable condition of the country, but a legacy of British colonial rule and a cornerstone of capitalist rule in the region. The carnage of Partition was not the only possible outcome of the independence struggle. But a democratic, secular capitalist India was not on the historic agenda. The militant upsurge against colonial rule at the end of World War II could have signalled the opening of great possibilities for a revolutionary party. Instead, there was the Stalinist CPI, whose support for British imperialism during WWII was a betrayal that had fateful consequences for the Indian independence struggle. As we noted:
“Britain had lost control. Posed pointblank was not only India’s political independence from two hundred and fifty years of the British jackboot; the social liberation of India’s toiling masses from millennia of indigenous caste, gender, communal and class oppression was also now suddenly within grasp. What was needed was a revolutionary vanguard party of India’s small but strategic and modern, urbanised industrial working class which could rally and draw behind it the millions of peasant poor and other oppressed, oust the British, and put the native capitalist-landlord alliance out of business, launching a direct offensive for both national and social liberation through capturing proletarian state power.”
Instead, the CPI’s perspective was to subordinate the interests of the proletariat to the bourgeois nationalists, particularly the Congress leaders, and to peddle illusions in “Gandhiji.” As the above article pointed out:
“The Congress leaders feared the unleashing of the workers and peasants against the capitalists and landlords many times more than they desired to enforce the demand to ‘Quit India’ on the British imperialists; the Stalinists with their grovelling before Churchill had made themselves for a key period of time ‘the most universally detested political organisation in India’. The intervention of a revolutionary Trotskyist party with some real weight in the proletariat was at this juncture the decisive element in whether the question of India was solved along the October model or left after post-war ‘independence’ to the bloody partition designed by the British imperialists.”
— “The 1940s ‘Quit India’ Movement—Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution,” Workers Hammer Nos. 131 and 132 (September/October and November/December 1992) [reprinted in WV No. 970, 3 December 2010]
We base ourselves on the programme of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in the victorious October Revolution of 1917. In India during World War II, this programme was upheld by the Trotskyist forces of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India [BLPI], section of the Trotskyist Fourth International. But the small forces of the BLPI were insufficient to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis. As our article cited above continued:
“Yet by midnight of 14 August 1947, when Congress prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rose to address ‘free’ India’s parliament of capitalists, landlords and princes, the spectacular upsurge had been derailed. Instead, a pro-imperialist alliance of the Congress bourgeoisie and the Muslim League landlords had successfully diverted the revolutionary momentum into British imperialism’s waiting trap, the nightmare of communalist Partition. India’s working masses had paid with their lives—and were now about to pay even more—for the absence of a revolutionary party to lead its millions in an independent struggle for workers power.”
The key task in India remains the forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist party.
USAID’s Cuba Twitter Plot-#counterrevolution
| Workers Vanguard No. 1044 |
18 April 2014
|
On April 3 the Associated Press revealed that in 2010 the U.S. had launched a Twitter-style social networking service in Cuba with the intent of generating an army of users who could organize “smart mobs” to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society”—that is, overthrow the Cuban deformed workers state. The operation, eventually christened ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet), buried its U.S. origins under a variety of front companies in Central America and Barcelona that were funded out of a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Offering free text messages as bait, the enterprise by March 2011 had quickly acquired 40,000 subscribers—and was quickly unearthed and disrupted by Raúl Castro’s government. By the middle of 2012, it had ceased to exist.
Predictably, ZunZuneo’s revelation has generated much handwringing and sanctimonious hogwash in the halls of Congress and in the bourgeois media, especially as this scam was run under the auspices of the “humanitarian” U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Equally predictably, this “scandal” is now under review by a Senate subcommittee in order to allow both the Senators and USAID head Rajiv Shah to deny prior knowledge of the affair. During its brief period in operation, ZunZuneo’s sole effect was to have augmented the coffers of the Cuban state-owned telecommunications company, to which it was obliged to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees.
Since the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. imperialists have harbored revanchist counterrevolutionary ambitions toward an island that was long run as a subsidiary of the Mafia, the United Fruit Company and other American interests. Once Castro’s forces ousted the U.S.-backed Batista regime in 1959, the new government was confronted with a mounting effort from Washington to bring it to heel through economic pressure, especially after it began expropriating the holdings of major imperialist enterprises. This pressure led Castro to turn to the Soviet Union for crucial economic assistance. By 1961, Cuba was a bureaucratically deformed workers state modeled on the USSR after its degeneration under Stalin.
U.S. imperialism’s efforts to overthrow the Cuban government have been unrelenting since the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. USAID was established in November of the same year and has ever since worked hand in hand with the CIA. In 1962, the U.S. launched its ongoing embargo of Cuba. Over the years, the CIA has hatched innumerable plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The most recent serious attempt was in Panama in 2000 when it planned to put 200 pounds of explosives under a podium where Fidel was due to speak, a venture easily discovered by his security team. Also during the Bill Clinton presidency, a hallucination-driven scheme—deploying a giant mollusk stuffed with explosives to fatally interdict Fidel while he was scuba diving—was scuttled when saner minds intervened.
USAID has recently attracted some scrutiny for funneling 75 percent of the aid earmarked for earthquake relief in Haiti to U.S.-based organizations, to the dismay of the destitute Haitian masses. It also currently has a hand in imperialist intrigues in Venezuela, Ukraine and Syria. Following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, USAID gestated its own Igor, the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). This division issued the following mission statement: “To support U.S. foreign policy objectives by helping local partners advance peace and democracy in priority countries in crisis. Seizing critical windows of opportunity, OTI works on the ground to provide fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs.” In other words: have gun, will travel.
As the Cuba Twitter scam was being devised, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a 2009 speech gave official blessing to this approach: “We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship” (Atlantic, April 2014). The reality is that U.S. imperialism, with its various agencies, has as its sole purpose the maintenance and expansion of its world dominance, using the guise of human rights and democracy to befuddle the American people. USAID is no more humanitarian in its operations than are the forces that invaded Iraq and Afghanistan or those that today send U.S. drones on their missions of murder.
Just before it initiated the ZunZuneo plot, USAID dispatched a contractor, Alan Gross, to smuggle spy-grade computer and satellite communications gear into Cuba. Gross was soon arrested. He is now pleading for release while complaining, with some justice, that ZunZuneo further imperiled him. To be sure, Gross’s skill set seems to resemble that of the vacuum-cleaner salesman turned spy played by Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana.
USAID denies any responsibility for the wellbeing of those who travel to Cuba under its auspices, so Gross’s future, apparently, is his problem. Likewise for the Cuban dissidents whose names USAID sent on an unencrypted line to Cuba. In contrast, the 40,000 subscribers to ZunZuneo seem to have been guilty only of attempting to avoid the Castro regime’s constraints on communications. Nonetheless, for being caught up in USAID’s scheme, they may soon find themselves subjected to more intense attention from the Cuban government.
We stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state, which has good cause to subvert each and every attempt at intervention by U.S. imperialism. However, the regime’s bureaucratic dominance poses a severe threat to the overturn of the capitalist order, i.e., to the very basis of its own rule. The Castro bureaucracy is wedded to the nationalist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” a theory that set the stage for capitalist restoration in East Europe and the Soviet Union. It will require a proletarian political revolution on the island to begin on the road to a future of material abundance and personal freedom, which will come to fruition only if workers come to power internationally, not least in the U.S., the belly of the imperialist beast.
Imperialism and Capitalist Decay
Workers Vanguard No. 1044 |
18 April 2014
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Imperialism and Capitalist Decay
(Quote of the Week)
The utter devastation of Detroit, once the center of U.S. auto manufacturing, is a prime example of the workings of the capitalist profit system in its final, imperialist stage as analyzed by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. Capitalism in its decay points directly to the need for the socialist expropriation of the bourgeoisie through workers revolution.
We have seen that in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism. This in itself determines its place in history, for monopoly that grows out of the soil of free competition, and precisely out of free competition, is the transition from the capitalist system to a higher socioeconomic order....
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the “rentier state,” the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons.” It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (Britain)....
When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)—then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere “interlocking”; that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.
| Obama’s Deportation Machine-Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! Workers Vanguard No. 1044 | 18 April 2014 |
Immigration “Reform” and Liberal Hypocrisy
Three years ago, Obama offered the same share-your-pain blather in announcing that policy would be altered to focus on deporting those who committed “serious crimes.” In reality, of the 368,000 men, women and children deported last year, 152,000 had no criminal convictions. Among the third who qualified as felons were those convicted of such “serious” crimes as filing a false tax return or failing to appear in court as well as, of course, those caught up in the racist “war on drugs.” Under the 2005 Operation Streamline program adopted by the Republican Bush administration, attempts by deportees to re-enter the country to unite with their families are classified as felonies that can carry sentences of up to 20 years in federal prison. Such re-entry cases account for one-half of the growth in federal felony convictions since 1992.
One consequence of the anti-immigrant crackdown under Obama has been the augmenting of the mass incarceration that he and Attorney General Eric Holder have time and again announced their intention to alleviate. Dramatically highlighting the immigrant prisoners’ plight, hundreds of detainees at the Northwest Detention Center outside Tacoma, Washington, joined by detainees in Texas, have launched a series of hunger strikes protesting the deportations as well as their wretched conditions, including being forced to work for $1 per day. The Northwest Detention Center, operated by the private Geo Group company, is part of a nationwide network of prison facilities holding people marked for deportation.
As the London Guardian (10 April) reports, a Congressional directive known as the “bed mandate” requires that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) keep 34,000 detainees per day in custody. But, the article continues, “tighter border controls and a shaky economy have reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level in decades,” leaving I.C.E. and the Border Patrol struggling to meet their quota. While the number of those attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico without papers has indeed declined over the past several years, there has lately been a marked increase in people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras attempting to cross, including many children.
As a result of the quota, enforcement sweeps have ensnared people such as Washington State hunger striker Ramon Mendoza Pascual, a 37-year-old from Mexico who entered the U.S. 20 years ago without legal papers. A construction worker with three children, all of them U.S. citizens, Mendoza was arrested last year for driving under the influence of alcohol, even though he was found in a parked vehicle. The charge against him was dropped. Nevertheless, he was marked for deportation based on a prior DUI conviction.
On March 13, the White House announced that Homeland Security secretary Jeh C. Johnson will lead a review of the administration’s immigration enforcement policies to see if they can be done “more humanely within the confines of the law.” This pledge will have about the same effect as the Senate’s show of moral outrage over CIA torture techniques. Under capitalism, immigration law is fundamentally driven by the economic needs of bourgeois rulers. As described in the International Communist League’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):
“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands.”
Many immigrants flee their homelands to escape grinding poverty and brutal repression resulting from imperialist plunder. We say that those who make it into this country are entitled to all the rights of anyone already here. Our demand is for full citizenship rights for all immigrants—from the right to vote to the right to a U.S. passport, as well as full access to medical care, bilingual education and what remains of the threadbare social “safety net.” No deportations! Free the detainees!
As Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on an alternative immigration policy, which would mean accepting the constraints of a system based on exploitation and oppression. Our fight is to unite the working class, at the head of all the oppressed, in the struggle for a proletarian revolution to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class and begin the socialist reconstruction of this society. In this effort, immigrant workers, who represent a living link to class and social struggles in their home countries, will be embraced as comrades.
The “Reform” Swindle
We would welcome any measure providing some actual relief from anti-immigrant oppression. But the various “reform” bills being hashed out in Congress offer no such amelioration, only a swindle. The centerpiece of these efforts is Senate Bill 744 (S. 744), Obama’s brainchild, which promises a “path to citizenship” that resembles a walkway through the eerie Black Forest of old fairy tales. Strewn with all but insurmountable legal and financial obstacles, the 13-year journey would offer the eleven million undocumented immigrants only a slim chance of a reprieve at the end of their ordeal.
With Obama boasting about his putting “more boots on the ground on the southern border than at any time in our history,” the bill mandates $40 billion for another 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 700 more miles of fencing along that border, promising yet more detentions and prosecutions of those crossing illegally. The effect would be to again shift the perilous routes taken by desperately impoverished Mexicans and Central Americans in crossing over, leading to ever more deaths from drowning, dehydration and exhaustion as well as killings by the Border Patrol.
Apologists for Obama’s Democrats sell his adoption of a good part of the racist Tea Party yahoos’ border control program as a bargaining chip in the game of bipartisan legislative “reform.” Last month, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi filed a “discharge petition” to force a vote on S. 744, which passed the Senate last June but has been squelched by the House Republican leadership. With no chance of success, Pelosi’s gambit was intended to reinforce the false image of the Democrats as immigrant-friendly by highlighting the overt racist xenophobia of their Republican opponents. Such lesser-evil politics worked well for the Democrats in 2012 when Obama, who stomped on the Latino masses (and not only them) in his first administration, nevertheless won 71 percent of their votes.
Now, having already taken a hit with the botched rollout of Obamacare, the Democrats see a need to cynically appeal to the growing, and in some places potentially decisive, Latino vote. But as anger over deportations mounts, the press reports that many pro-Democratic Party Latinos are planning to sit out the November Congressional elections. For their part, many in the Republican Party leadership express the need to further their electoral fortunes by spitting a bit less venom at immigrants. At the same time, Republican state governments have increasingly adopted anti-immigrant measures as well as “voter fraud” laws that would disproportionately strike at Latinos’ as well as black people’s voting rights.
A series of protests in dozens of cities across the country on April 5 highlighted the disillusionment among Latinos with Obama’s anti-immigrant policies. The protests had an all-in-the-family character focused on pressuring the president to live up to his promises. A central demand was the call on Obama to use his executive power to stop deportations. Some protest organizers have also demanded that the president extend more broadly the temporary reprieve from deportations given to “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before turning 16. To qualify, the Dreamers had to be either enrolled in school or serving in the military. In fact, in ramping up repression against immigrants, the current White House occupant is simply doing his job as the chief executive of capitalist America. Notably, Obama took office in the early stages of a deep recession, when the bourgeoisie’s need to bring in cheap labor had receded.
Calling on the president to defer some deportations, a New York Times (5 April) editorial titled “Yes He Can, on Immigration” essentially advised Obama to carry out elements of the stalled “reform” package by executive order. What many of the Dreamers have gotten is a taste of the American nightmare. For more than 40 percent of them, work permits did not lead to new jobs, and only 45 percent reported any pay increases. Many of these individuals lack a college degree or even a high school diploma. Even many of those with degrees were forced to work under the table because they lacked any job history. But Obama has made clear that even the tiny bit of redress given the Dreamers is off the table for others, saying that his “hands are tied” by his Republican Congressional adversaries.
Labor Must Champion Immigrant Rights
The central focus of current legislative proposals is on creating a large pool of completely vulnerable immigrants made to pay large sums of money for the privilege of working for a pittance with no job protection, no assured immigration status, no democratic rights and no right to any kind of welfare. While much of the ruling class wants to preserve the cheap and vulnerable immigrant labor pool, the better to depress wage levels for workers as a whole, the bourgeoisie’s more nativist wing rants that “American culture”—that is, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture—is being overrun by those from south of the border. In the first instance, they mean Mexico, which had one-half of its land, including Texas, stolen by the U.S. in the 19th century. Such raw bigotry allows Obama and the Democrats to dress themselves up as friends of immigrants.
With an eye toward sharpening U.S. corporations’ competitive edge in the world market, the ruling class broadly agrees on the need to vastly expand the number of visas for technical professions. Silicon Valley and engineering firms in particular are clamoring for skilled personnel they cannot recruit domestically due largely to the woeful state of U.S. science and math education. Meanwhile, agribusiness conglomerates are up in arms over the government’s failure to expand “guest worker” programs, thus cutting off a source of viciously exploited labor and leaving their fruits literally dying on the vine. As noted recently by the New York Times in the article “California Farmers Short of Labor, and Patience” (29 March), many in this dyed-in-the-wool Republican constituency are considering dropping their financial support to the party due to the Republicans’ insistence on expelling the immigrant farm workforce and preventing more youthful immigrants from taking their place.
A report issued by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform decries that labor shortages prevent U.S. farmers from increasing production, hampering their ability to compete on the world market. The report attributes a yearly loss of $1.4 billion in farm income to lack of labor. Liberal talking heads ritually couch their support to legislation allowing immigrant farm workers to slave away here legally by claiming that these are jobs that nobody born in the U.S. will do. The reality is that this is skilled labor, which, while paid next to nothing, is not easily replaced.
While some unions, particularly in the service sector, have a large immigrant component, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy mainly sees foreign-born workers as a threat to remaining union jobs. Last spring, the labor tops and the Chamber of Commerce helped pave the way for the Senate bill by working out a program that pegs the number of visas to employment needs, up to a maximum of 200,000 annually. The heavily immigrant Service Employees International Union, the mainstay of the Change to Win trade-union federation, similarly calls for regulating work visas in line with “the needs of our economy.” AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka has also embraced the E-Verify program, a database of everyone legally permitted to work in the U.S. that has facilitated the mass firings of immigrants, including workers engaged in union organizing drives.
From the meatpacking plants and warehouses to construction and the fruit and vegetable farms, organizing foreign-born workers will be a crucial part of reviving the unions after decades of the capitalists’ one-sided war against labor. As we wrote 40 years ago in “Immigration and the Class Struggle” (WV No. 41, 29 March 1974):
“It is in the interests of the working class to back the fight of undocumented workers for their rights, because undocumented workers will otherwise continue to be used as a weapon against the rest of the working class. Those in desperate, illegal situations are more difficult to organize and must accept lower wages. Unfortunately, labor does not always see its real interests so clearly. It is led today by bureaucrats who not only accept, but actively enforce, the capitalist ‘rules of the game’ in which unemployment and high profits are automatically accepted as natural....
“In fact, as long as the labor movement accepts unemployment it will remain divided against itself. Instead of fighting for more jobs it will fight against those it sees as threatening the jobs it has. And the bosses will use this fight quite skillfully against the working class, breaking strikes and pushing down wages. The solution to the problems of both U.S.-born and immigrant workers lies in overthrowing the system which creates unemployment and perpetuates poverty.”
As with the fight against black oppression, which is embedded in American capitalism, the working class must actively combat the bosses’ efforts to pit the native-born against the foreign-born—a divide-and-rule tactic they have used since before the Civil War. The labor movement must fight every instance of wage and other discrimination against immigrants, oppose deportations and undertake concerted action to organize immigrant workers into the unions with full rights. Such struggles would go a long way toward promoting the understanding that the multiracial, multiethnic proletariat has distinct class interests—counterposed to those of the racist, chauvinist capitalist rulers—that must be politically expressed through their own class party, a revolutionary workers party that fights for workers power.
In
Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Irish Easter Uprising,
1916-Sean Flynn’s Fight-Take Three
Sean Flynn could still taste that acrid smell of smoke in his lungs long after the last flicker of battle, long after they had known that they had made major miscalculations about the enemy, about the savagery of dear Mother England when she wanted to keep her little child Ireland close to her bosom. He remembered the hard fighting, the loses of game comrades when the British pulled the hammer down, while the Dublin crowds in particular, watched in stony silence (or maybe and this is the insidious nature of the oppressor, the effect the oppressor has on the psyche of the oppressed, with some secret desire to see the “boyos” lose and return to normalcy). He would never forget his own flight to the north where he hid out for many days until the coast was clear. That escape had been a close thing since he had carried a small wound from the rear-guard fight around their, the British, General Post Office in Dublin (he would never call that institution, even after independence anything but their building). And he would never forget the lessons that he had learned about what a serious struggle for national liberation entailed.
A
word on the Easter Uprising
In the old Irish working-class
neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of
in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish
liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such
memories of heroic “boyos” (and “girlos”
not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful
analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the
time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood
infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish
Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect,
that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the
“shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from
the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which
sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which
the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main
force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed
to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and
tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the
leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any
opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy
on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the
theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national
liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the
your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any
positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the
future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish
national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later,
including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in
their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed
to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground
if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part
of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British
Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor
Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that
James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British
militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and
others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops
Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national
liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was
the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by
over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the
Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause.
Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were
prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such
organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently
socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political
independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish
cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous
Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin,
Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the
order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a
left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where
the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which
lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that
time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile
comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was
prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a
republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not
support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of
Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended
the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving
bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is
in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned
by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what
program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in
Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of
society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a
heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist
nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the
socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as
a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis
alone. Chocky Ar La.
******** Sean Flynn could still taste that acrid smell of smoke in his lungs long after the last flicker of battle, long after they had known that they had made major miscalculations about the enemy, about the savagery of dear Mother England when she wanted to keep her little child Ireland close to her bosom. He remembered the hard fighting, the loses of game comrades when the British pulled the hammer down, while the Dublin crowds in particular, watched in stony silence (or maybe and this is the insidious nature of the oppressor, the effect the oppressor has on the psyche of the oppressed, with some secret desire to see the “boyos” lose and return to normalcy). He would never forget his own flight to the north where he hid out for many days until the coast was clear. That escape had been a close thing since he had carried a small wound from the rear-guard fight around their, the British, General Post Office in Dublin (he would never call that institution, even after independence anything but their building). And he would never forget the lessons that he had learned about what a serious struggle for national liberation entailed.
Mostly though, and that smoke in his lungs was
constant reminder, he would always remember how the bloody British, the most
civilized nation on Earth to hear the paid historians tell the story, thought
nothing of burning down their jewel colonial capital city to the ground rather
than to let Ireland breath free and make its own mistakes. That had been the
major error in the thinking of the various leader even of the lost lamented
martyr James Connolly; thinking that the English the throes of war in Europe
would not scramble whatever was necessary to suppress the uprising including
that needless burning of the town. Surely there had been other miscalculations
and mistakes; not having a coordinated plan, not abandoning the uprising temporarily
when a serious consensus could not be met on the timing of the rising; of going
with a few, too few, men expecting the population to rise up once the spark had
been ignited, various tactical military blunders which only added to the tragic
outcome and so on. But in the end the biggest mistake was to underestimate the capacity
of the British to display the same kind of savagery and stupidity as they had
in trench-filled Europe or in previous places of native uprisings in Africa,
Asia and India.
Just then though Sean, a little cough in his throat,
maybe really a lump, thought about the brave lads that he had fought with then
who had gone to meet their maker, including his older brother Seamus who snuck
him into the Citizens’ Army to begin with when he was just a lad. There was Ian
O’Riley who fell early to an advanced British guard when they tried to storm the
front door by force, Seamus Barry killed by a sniper’s bullet, stout-hearted Liam
Murphy who faced down a British patrol and paid with his life for that deed,
and of course, his old friend Bucko Bailey who stayed behind drawing fire as
the last remnant, including one Sean Flynn, made their passage out of the
firestorm that had become Dublin. But most of all his missed the “Chief,” James
Connolly, who, wounded and all, was strapped to a chair and executed by those
bloody British bastards. They would long rue the day when they let Connolly
near lethal weapons which he learned how to handle when he was in their Army as
a lad, and they would longer still rue the day when they shot a brave man like
a dog. Chocky Ar La.
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Jobs Not Jails
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