In Honor of Sacco and Vanzetti-From The Archives Of "Women And
Revolution"-Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the
Heritage of the International Labor Defense
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an
archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter-Spring, 1996, that
may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps,
and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social
questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a
Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the
vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the
back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month
and periodically throughout the year.
******************
Class- Struggle Defense Work In The
U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense
We print below an edited speech by
Deborah Mackson, executive director of the Partisan Defense Committee, prepared
for April 7995 regional educationals in New York, Chicago and Oakland as part
of a series of meetings and rallies sponsored by the PDC to mobilize support
for Mum/a Abu-Jamal and the fight against the racist death penalty.
Mumia Abu-Jamal describes his current
conditions of incarceration on death row at the State Correctional Institution
at Greene County, Pennsylvania as "high-tech hell." When Governor Tom
Ridge assaults all of the working people and minorities of this country by
initiating the first execution of a political prisoner in America since the
Rosenbergs, he must hear a resounding "No!" from coast to coast.
Because Jamal is an articulate voice for the oppressed, this racist and rotting
capitalist state wants to silence him forever. He is indeed dangerous. He is
indeed a symbol. He is, indeed, innocent. Hear his powerful words, and you will
begin to understand the hatred and fear which inspires the vendetta against
this courageous fighter:
"Over many long years, over
mountains of fears, through rivers of repression, from the depths of the valley
of the shadow of death, I survive to greet you, in the continuing spirit of
rebellion.... As America's ruling classes rush backwards into a new Dark Age,
the weight of repression comes easier with each passing hour. But as repression
increases, so too must resistance.... Like our forefathers, our fore-mothers,
our kith and kin, we must fight for every inch of ground gained. The repressive
wave sweeping this country will not stop by good wishes, but only by a
counterwave of committed people firm in their focus."
We of the Partisan Defense Committee,
the Spartacist League and the Labor Black Leagues are committed to a campaign
to free this former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and supporter of
the controversial MOVE organization who was framed for the 1981 killing of a
Philadelphia policeman. Our aim is to effect an international campaign of
protest and publicity like that which ultimately saved the nine Scottsboro
Boys, framed for rape in Alabama in 1931, from the electric chair. We must
mobilize the working class and all the oppressed in the fight to free this
class-war prisoner framed by the government's murderous vendetta.
As Marxists, we are opposed to the
death penalty on principle. We say that this state does not have the right to
decide who lives and who dies. Capital punishment is part of the vast arsenal
of terror at the hands of this state, which exists to defend the capitalist system
of exploitation and oppression. America's courts are an instrument of the
bourgeoisie's war on the working people and the poor; they are neither neutral
nor by any stretch of the imagination "color blind."
To us, the defense of America's
class-war prisoners— whatever their individual political views may be—is a
responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard party which must champion all
causes in the interest of the proletariat. The Partisan Defense Committee was
initiated by the Spartacist League in 1974 in the tradition of the
working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense, under its
founder and first secretary from 1925 to 1928, James P. Cannon. Today, I want
to talk to you about how that tradition was built in this country by the best
militants of the past 100 years—the leaders of class-struggle organizations
like the pre-World War I Industrial Workers of the World, the early Socialist
and Communist parties and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
The Roots of Black Oppression
To forge a future, one has to
understand the past. The modern American death penalty is the barbaric
inheritance of a barbaric system of production: chattel slavery. Like the
capitalists who hold state power today, the slavocracy used the instruments of
their power, special bodies of armed men and the "justice" system—
the laws, courts and prisons—to control people for profit. Directly descendant
from the slavocracy's tradition of property in black people is the death
penalty. A trail through history illustrates this truth. The "slave
codes" codified a series of offenses for which slaves could be killed but
for which whites would receive a lesser sentence. In Virginia, the death
penalty was mandatory for both slaves and free blacks for any crime for which a
white could be imprisoned for three years or more. In Georgia, a black man
convicted of raping a white woman faced the death penalty; a white man got two
years for the same crime, and punishment was "discretionary" if the
victim was black. Slaves could not own property, bear arms, assemble or testify
against whites in courts of law. Marriage between slaves was not recognized;
families were sold apart; it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write.
Slaves were not second- or third-class citizens—they were not human, but
legally "personal, movable property," chattel.
William Styron in The Confessions of
Nat Turner has the fictional character T.R. Gray explain the slaveowners'
rationale to Turner:
"The point is that you are animate
chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth.
You ain't a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and
spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law
provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's
how come you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy. "He paused, then said
softly without emotion: 'And hung by the neck until dead'."
While the slave codes were a Southern
institution, legal and extralegal terror were never exclusive to the South. As
early as 1793, fugitive slave laws were on the federal books. The 1850 Fugitive
Slave Law was passed in response to the growing abolitionist influence which
had inspired several Northern states to pass "personal liberty laws,"
giving some protection to slaves who had successfully negotiated the
Underground Railroad. The 1850 law, seeking to protect the private property of
slaveholders, put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no
legal power to prove their freedom—no right to habeas corpus, no right to a
jury trial, no right even to testify on their own behalf.
Many blacks were caught in the clutches
of this infamous law, which had no bounds. For example, a man in southern
Indiana was arrested and returned to an owner’ who claimed he had run away 79
years before. The law knew no pretense. A magistrate's fee doubled if he judged
an unfortunate black before the bench a runaway slave instead of a tree man.
And fugitives were pursued with vigor. In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James
McPherson recounts the story of Anthony Burns, a slave who stowed away from
Virginia to Boston in 1854. The feds spent the equivalent of $2.3 million in
current dollars to return him to his "owner." That is approximately
equal to what an average death penalty case costs today.
Any hope that "blind justice"
could be sought from the U.S. Supreme Court was dashed with the 1856 Dred Scott
decision. Chief Justice Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was
adopted, Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as
beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which a
white man was bound to respect."
While slavery itself was overthrown in
the Civil War and Reconstruction, the needs of the American capitalists for
compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. A new, semi-capitalistic
mode of agriculture developed, in which the semi-slave condition of the freed
blacks was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relations of
slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.
After the Civil War the slave codes
became the "black codes," a separate set of rules defining crime and
punishment for blacks and limiting their civil rights. They were enforced by
the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan; in the last two decades of the 19th
century, lynching vastly outnumbered legal executions. As W.E.B. Du Bois said
of lynching:
"It is not simply the Klu Klux
Klan; it is not simply weak officials; it is not simply inadequate, unenforced
law. It is deeper, far deeper than all this: it is the in-grained spirit of mob
and murder, the despising of women and the capitalization of children born of
400 years of Negro slavery and 4,000 years of government for private
profit."
The promise of Radical Reconstruction,
equality, could only be fulfilled by attacking the problem at its very root:
private property in the means of production. Neither Northern capitalists nor
Southern planters could abide that revolution, so they made a deal, the
Compromise of 1877, in their common interest. That's why we call on American
workers, black and white, to finish the Civil War—to complete, through
socialist revolution, the unfinished tasks of the Second American Revolution!
In the wake of the Compromise of 1877,
the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Civil Rights Acts of the
Reconstruction period. One landmark decision was Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896,
which permitted "separate but equal" treatment of black and white in
public facilities. But separate is never equal. This was simply the legal cover
for the transformation of the "black codes" into "Jim
Crow"—the "grandfather clause," poll tax, literacy test, all
designed to deny blacks the vote, and the institution of separate facilities
from schools to cemeteries. This legal and practical segregation, instituted in
the South and transported North, was a tool to divide and rule.
America's Racist Death Penalty
The death penalty was applied at will
until 1972. From 1930 to 1967 the U.S. averaged 100 or more executions per
year. In 1972, following a decade of civil rights protests, the Supreme Court
ruled the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" because of
its arbitrary and capricious application. But the hiatus lasted only four
years.
In 1976-the Supreme Court reinstated
the death penalty and has been expanding it ever since. In 1986 the court ruled
it unconstitutional to execute the insane, but gave no criteria for defining
insanity; in 1988 it approved the execution of 16-year-olds; in 1989 it ruled
for the execution of retarded persons. Since 1976, 276 people have been
executed in this country. Between January and April of 1995, 17 were killed.
And innocence is no barrier, as the Supreme Court recently decreed in the case
of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, executed in Texas in January 1995 after the
prosecution submitted that he had not committed the crime for which he had been
sentenced. The Supreme Court said it didn't matter, he'd had a "fair
trial." What an abomination!
Perhaps the most telling case in recent
history was the 1987 McCleskey decision. The evidence submitted to the courts
illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism ruled the application of
the death penalty. Overall, a black person convicted of killing a white person
is 22 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is black.
When the McCleskey case went to court, liberals across the country hoped for a
Brown v. Board of Education decision in regard to the death penalty. The
evidence of racial bias was clear and overwhelming. But while the Supreme Court
accepted the accuracy of the evidence, it said it doesn't matter. The court
showed the real intention of the death penalty when it stated that McCleskey's
claim "throws into serious question the principles that underlie our
entire criminal justice system" and "the validity of capital
punishment in our multi-racial society." Or as a Southern planter wrote in
defense of the slave codes, "We have to rely more and more on the power of
fear.... We are determined to continue masters" (quoted in Kenneth Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution).
Let's take a look for a moment at
"our multi-racial society." The U.S. has the highest rate of
incarceration in the world: 344 per 100,000. It is one of the two
"advanced" industrial countries left in the world which employs
capital punishment. As of January 1995, 2,976 men, women and children occupied
America's death rows; 48 are women, 37 are juveniles. According to the latest
census, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, yet 51 percent of the
people awaiting execution are minorities and 40 percent are black.
Eighty-four percent of all capital
cases involve white victims even though 50 percent of murder victims in America
are black. Of a total of 75 people executed for interracial murders, three
involved a black victim and a white defendant, 72 involved a white victim and a
black defendant. The death penalty is truly an impulse to genocide against the
black population for whom the ruling class no longer sees any need in its
profit-grabbing calculations.
Understanding this and understanding
the broader importance of the black question in America, we take up Jamal's
case as a concrete task in our struggle for black freedom and for proletarian
revolution in the interests of the liberation of all of humanity.
Early History of Class-Struggle Defense
From the beginning of the communist
movement, a commitment to those persecuted by the ruling classes, whether
"on the inside" or out, has been recognized as an integral part of
the class struggle. Marx and Engels spent years defending and supporting the
refugees of-the Paris Commune.
As Trotskyists, we feel this
responsibility keenly because we inherited some of the finest principles for
class-struggle defense from James R Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism.
The traditions which inspired the International Labor Defense (ILD) were forged
in hard class struggle, dating back to the rise of the labor movement after the
Civil War. One of the first acts of the Republican government following the
Compromise of 1877 was to pull its troops from the South and send them to quell
the railway strikes that had broken out throughout the Northern states. The federal
strikebreakers tipped the scales in the hard-fought battles of the time, many
of which escalated into general strikes, and the workers were driven back in
defeat. But united struggle against the bosses had been launched, and less than
a decade later the workers movement had taken up the fight for an eight-hour
day.
In the course of this struggle, workers
in Chicago amassed at Haymarket Square in early May of 1886. The protest was
just winding down when a bomb went off, likely planted by a provocateur. The
cops opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding many. The
government’s response was to frame up eight workers, who were sympathetic to
anarchist views, on charges of murder. They were tried and convicted, not for
the bombing but for their agitation against the employers. Four were hanged,
one committed suicide, three were finally pardoned in 1891.
The period from the turn of the century
to America's entry into World War I was one of intense social struggle;
militant strikes were more numerous than at any time since. The Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) led union organizing drives,
anti-lynching campaigns and a free speech movement. The level of struggle meant
more frequent arrests, which gave rise to the need for defense of the class and
individuals. The left and most labor currents and organizations rallied to the
defense of victims of the class war. Non-sectarian defense was the rule of the
day. The Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all," was
taken to heart by the vast majority of the workers.
This was Cannon's training ground. One
of his heroes was Big Bill Haywood, who conceived the ILD with Cannon in Moscow
in 1925. As Cannon said, the history of the ILD is "the story of the
projection of Bill Haywood's influence—through me and my associates—into the
movement from which he was exiled, an influence for simple honesty and good
will and genuine non-partisan solidarity toward all the prisoners of the class
war in America."
Big Bill Haywood came from the Western
Federation of Miners, one of the most combative unions this country has ever
produced. The preamble to their constitution was a series of six points,
beginning, "We hold that there is a class struggle in society and that
this struggle is caused by economic conditions." It goes on to note,
"We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is
recognized as the sole master of his product," and it asserts that the
working class and it alone can and must achieve its own emancipation. It ends,
"we, the wage slaves...have associated in the Western Federation of
Miners."
Not all labor organizations of the time
had this class-struggle perspective. Contrast the tract of Samuel Rompers'
American Federation of Labor (AFL), "Labor's Bill of Grievances,"
which he sent to the president and Congress in 1908:
"We present these grievances to
your attention because we have long, patiently and in vain waited for redress.
There is not any matter of which we
have complained but for which we nave in an honorable and lawful manner
submitted remedies. The remedies for these grievances proposed by labor are in
line with fundamental law, and with progress and development made necessary by
changed industrial conditions."
The IWW, whose constitution began,
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,"
was founded in 1905. Haywood was an initiator and one of its most aggressive
and influential organizers. As a result of that and his open socialist beliefs,
in 1906 he, along with George Pettibone and Charles Moyer, were arrested for
the bombing murder of ex-governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho (the nemesis of
the combative Coeur d'Alene miners). The three were kidnapped from Colorado,
put on a military train and taken to Idaho.
The Western Federation of Miners and
the IWW launched a tremendous defense movement for the three during the 18
months they were waiting to be tried for their lives. Everyone from the
anarchists to the AFL participated. Demonstrations of 50,000 and more were
organized all across the country. It was this case that brought James Cannon to
political consciousness.
The case was important internationally,
too. While they were in jail, Maxim Gorky came to New York and sent a telegram
to the three with greetings from the Russian workers. Haywood wired back that
their imprisonment was an expression of the class struggle which was the same
in America as in Russia and in all other capitalist countries.
On a less friendly note, Teddy
Roosevelt, then president of America, publicly declared the three "undesirable
citizens." Haywood responded that the laws of the country held they were
innocent until proven guilty and that a man in Roosevelt's position should be
the last to judge them until the case was decided in court.
The Socialist Party (founded in 1901)
also rallied to the defense. While in jail, Haywood was nominated as the
party's candidate for governor of Colorado and got 16,000 votes. The leader of
the SP, Eugene Debs, wrote his famous "Arouse, Ye Slaves" for the
SP's Appeal to Reason:
"If they attempt to murder Moyer,
Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them
with guns.... Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in
this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution....
"Get ready, comrades, for
action!... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat...would be in
order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered
and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising."
Haywood's trial began in May of 1907.
It was Clarence Darrow for the defense and the infamous Senator William E.
Borah for the frame-up (prosecution). That this was a political trial was clear
to everybody. The prosecution, for example, introduced into evidence issues of
the anarchist journal Alarm from 1886, when Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons was
its editor. Haywood thought that Dar-row's summary to the jury in his case was
the best effort Darrow ever made in the courtroom. But Haywood also got a bit
exasperated with his lawyer. In his autobiography, he tells the story of Darrow
coming to jail depressed and worried. The defendants would always try to get
him to lighten up. Finally Pettibone got tired of this and told Darrow they
knew it would be really hard on him to lose this great case with all its
national and international attention, but, hey! he said, "You know it's us
fellows that have to be hanged!"
Every day of the trial the defense
committee packed the courtroom with what Haywood called "a labor jury of
Socialists and union men." This is a practice we proudly follow today. On
the stand, Haywood told the story of the Western Federation of Miners and its
battles against the bosses, putting them on trial. He refused to be intimidated
by Senator Borah. When Borah asked whether Haywood had said that Governor
Steunenberg should be exterminated, Haywood replied that to the best of his
remembrance, he said he should be "eliminated."
On June 28 Haywood was acquitted. Soon
thereafter, so were his comrades. At a Chicago rally organized to greet him
upon his release, he told the crowd of 200,000, "We owe our lives to your
solidarity." Haywood knew that innocence was not enough. It is that kind
of solidarity we are seeking to mobilize today for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Labor Movement and World War I
Haywood was elected to the National
Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1908, during its most left-wing
period. In 1910, he was one of the party's delegates to the Socialist Congress
of the Second International in Copenhagen. Shortly after, the SP moved to the
right, and in 1912 (the year Debs polled nearly a million votes in his campaign
for president) a number of leftists, including the young Jim Cannon, left the
Socialist Party. A year later, when Haywood was purged from the executive
board, there was another mass exodus.
The IWW, in which Haywood and Cannon
remained active, expanded the scope of its activities. This was the period of
the free speech movement and anti-lynching ' campaigns. One Wobbly pamphlet,
"Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It," discusses the question of
integrated struggle and how to stop lynchings:
"The workers of every race and
nationality must join in one common group against their one common enemy—the
employers—so as to be "able to defend themselves and one another.
Protection for the working class lies in complete solidarity of the workers,
without regard to race, creed, sex or color. 'One Enemy—One Union!' must be
their watchword."
They almost got it right: as
syndicalists, they didn't understand the need for a vanguard party to fight for
a revolutionary program.
With the beginning of World War I and
preparations for U.S. involvement, the government declared political war on the
IWW and the left. Thousands of Wobblies were imprisoned under "criminal
syndicalism" laws—100 in San Quentin and Folsom alone. In response, the
IWW adopted the slogan, "Fill the jails." It was a misguided tactic,
but unlike many so-called socialists today, the Wobbliest had a principled
position where it counted: they'd go to jail before they'd cross a picket line.
1917 was the year of the Russian
Revolution. A month after that world-historic event, Haywood was back on trial
in Chicago with some 18 other Wobblies. He was convicted and sentenced to 20
years in Leaven worth prison. In 1919 he was released on bail pending appeal
and devoted his time to the IWW's General Defense Committee, launching a
campaign to raise bail money for those in prison. When the Red Scare and the
Palmer Raids began, Haywood learned that he was a primary target. So, as his
appeal went to the Supreme Court, he sailed for the Soviet Union. A student of
history, he had no illusions in "blind justice."
Cannon was also heavily influenced by
the case of California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. In 1916,
as America was preparing to go to war, Mooney and Billings were framed up for a
bombing at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco. The Preparedness
Movement was a bourgeois movement of "open shop" chamber of commerce,
right-wing vigilante groups, who were very serious about getting the U.S. into
World War I. They went into Mexico to fight Pancho Villa as practice. The
Preparedness Movement was opposed by labor, and in fact two days before the
bombing there had been a 5,000-strong labor demonstration in San Francisco.
Mooney and Billings were convicted.
Mooney was sentenced to hang, Billings got a life sentence. At first, their
case was taken up only by the anarchists. The official AFL labor movement took
a hands-off position. But when it became clear that they had been framed with
perjured testimony, a "Mooney movement" swept the country.
The Mooney case had a big impact on
Russian immigrant workers, among others. Thus the Mooney case was carried back
to Russia, and in April of 1917 the Russian anarchists led a Mooney defense
demonstration in Petrograd at the American consulate. Worried about Russia
pulling out of World War I at that point, Woodrow Wilson personally interceded
on behalf of Mooney and Billings. It didn't get them out of jail, but the effect
of international pressure was not lost on Cannon.
In the U.S., the cops broke up Mooney
defense meetings and arrested those present. The class-struggle nature of the
defense movement, involving such actions as one-day strikes, was a felt threat
to the ruling class, especially in the face of a war. In a conscious effort to
dissipate this movement, the state commuted Mooney's death sentence to life in
prison. In combination with the domestic repression following the war, this
took the life out of the Mooney movement. Mooney and Billings stayed in prison
for 22 years. They were released in 1939, and Mooney spent two and a half of
the next three years in the hospital and then-died.
In his eulogy "Good-by Tom
Mooney!" Cannon wrote:
"They imprisoned Mooney—as they
imprisoned Debs and Haywood and hundreds of others—in order to clear the road
of militant labor opposition to the First World War, and they kept him in
prison for revenge and for a warning to others."
As World War II began, Cannon would
find himself in the same position.
The Tradition of International Labor
Defense
The parties of the Second International
backed their own ruling classes in World War I, and the Bolsheviks fought for a
new international party committed to the Marxist movement's call, "Workers
of the World Unite!" In 1919, the leaders of the Russian Revolution
founded the Third International, the Comintern, to build revolutionary parties
which could take up the struggle against capitalist rule. 1919 was also a year
of massive strike activity in the U.S. This wave of class struggle swelled the
ranks of the Socialist Party, which then split in September. The most left-wing
workers regrouped, giving birth to the American Communist movement, and Cannon
was among them.
America in the 1920s was not a nice
place to be. Warren Harding was elected in a landslide victory on the slogan of
"Return to Normalcy." And "normal" was racist and
repressive. His attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a war on the
left inspired by fear of the Russian Revolution, which resulted in massive
deportations of leftists and jailing of American radicals. The young Communist
Party went underground. 1920 saw more lynchings and anti-black pogroms than any
time in recent memory. The Klan grew like wildfire, and the government passed
anti-immigration legislation that would give Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson wet
dreams.
When it was clear that the IWW was for
all practical purposes broken, many of its jailed members, including Eugene
Debs, were pardoned. The Communists, however, remained in jail. The union
movement took it on the chops as well, and by the end of the 1920s only 13
percent of the workforce of this country was unionized.
The 1921 Third Congress of the
Comintern was held under the watchword "To the Masses." In the U.S.,
the newly formed party had been underground and could hardly make a turn to the
masses. At the Comintern's urging, the Workers (Communist) Party emerged in
December of 1921 with Cannon as its first chairman and main public spokesman.
By the time of the Fourth Congress of
the Comintern in 1922, the tactic of the united front had been defined; the
Fourth Congress detailed its application. The need for the united front grew
out of the post-World War I ebbing of the revolutionary tide following the Russian
Revolution. The offensive by the capitalists against the proletariat and its
parties was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and
defensive struggles to save their very lives.
The slogan "march separately,
strike together" encapsulated the two aims of the united-front tactic:
class unity and the political fight for a communist program. The Comintern
sought both to achieve the maximum unity of the working masses in their
defensive struggles and to expose in action the hesitancy of the leadership of
the reformist organizations of the Second International to act in the interests
of the proletariat and the inability of its program to win against the ruling
class.
The united front is a tactic we use
today. Our call for labor/black mobilizations to stop the execution of Mumia
Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty has brought together many
different organizations and individuals to save Jamal's life. At these rallies
and demonstrations, we
have insisted on the right to argue for
our program to put an end to racist injustice and capitalist exploitation
through socialist revolution.
In line with the policies hashed out at
the Third and Fourth Congresses, the Communist International founded an
international defense organization, the International Red Aid. These events had
a substantial effect on the young American party, and one of the direct results
was the foundation in 1925 of the International Labor Defense (ILD).
Cannon's goal was to make the ILD the
defense arm of the labor movement. Cannon wrote to Debs on the occasion of his
endorsement of the ILD:
"The main problem as I see it is
to construct the ILD on the broadest possible basis. To conduct the work in a
non-partisan and non-sectarian manner and finally establish the impression by
our deeds that the ILD is the defender of every worker persecuted for his
activities in the class struggle, without any exceptions and without regard to
his affiliations."
From 1925 to 1928, the ILD was pretty
successful in achieving that goal. It established principles to which we adhere
today:
• United-front defense: The ILD
campaigns were organized to allow for the broadest possible participation.
• Class-struggle defense: The ILD
sought to mobilize the working class in protest on a national and international
scale, relying on the class movement of the workers and
placing no faith in the justice of the
capitalist courts, while using every legal avenue open to them.
• Non-sectarian defense: When it was
founded, the ILD immediately adopted 106 prisoners, instituting the practice of
financially assisting these prisoners and their
families. Many had been jailed as a
result of the "criminal syndicalism" laws; some were Wobblies, some
were anarchists, some were strike leaders. Not one was a member of the
Communist Party. The ILD launched the first Holiday Appeal. Of course, the ILD
also vigorously defended its own, understanding the vital importance of the
legal rights of the Communist Party to exist and organize.
Social Defense and Union Struggle
The ILD's most well-known case was the
defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The frame-up for murder and robbery of these two
immigrant anarchist workers, who were sent to their deaths by the state of
Massachusetts in 1927, grew directly out of the "red scare" of the
early '20s. The ILD applied with alacrity the main lines of its program: unity
of all working-class forces and reliance on the class movement of the workers.
Thousands of workers rallied to their cause, and unions around the country
contributed to a defense fund set up by Italian workers in the Boston area. But
the level of class struggle is key to the outcome of defense cases, and the
ILD's exemplary campaign proved insufficient to save the lives of Sacco and
Vanzetti.
As the case drew to a close, one of the
feints used by the state was to start rumors that Sacco and Vanzetti's death
penalty sentence would be commuted to life without parole. This was designed to
dissipate the Sacco and Vanzetti movement and prepare their execution. Cannon
rang the alarm bells from the pages of the Labor Defender, rallying ILD
supporters to mass demonstrations and warning them of the devious and two-faced
nature of the bourgeoisie. Cannon had not forgotten the demobilization of the
Mooney movement after his sentence had been commuted nor the living death that
Mooney and Billings were enduring in their 22 years of internment.
This has significance for us today as
we fight against the threatened execution of Jamal. Life in prison is hell.
Think about the "life" of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another former
Panther, jailed for a quarter of a century for a crime the state knows he did
not commit. While some call upon Pennsylvania governor Ridge to convert Jamal's
sentence to life without parole, we demand the freedom of both these innocent
men.
The ILD also worked in defense of the
class as a whole. In 1926, about 16,000 textile workers hit the bricks in
Passaic, New Jersey. Their strike was eventually defeated, but it drew sharp
lessons on the role of the state and demonstrated for Cannon the absolute
necessity for a permanent, organized and always ready non-partisan labor
defense organization. Cannon wrote in the Labor Defender:
"Our I.L.D. is on the job at
Passaic. Not a single striker went into court without our lawyer to defend him.
There was not a single conviction that was not appealed. Nobody had to remain
in jail more than a few days for lack of bail.... A great wave of protest
spread thru the labor movement and even the most conservative labor leaders
were compelled to give expression to it."
In 1928, the Trotskyist Left Opposition
(including Cannon) was expelled from the Communist Party. The ILD remained
under the control of the Communist Party and thus became subject to the zigzags
of Stalinist policies throughout the 1930s, including the perversion of the
united front from a tactic for class unity into an instrument for class
collaboration and counterrevolution.
In 1929, Stalin declared the
"Third Period," an ultraleft shift, the main tactic of which was to
smash the Social Democratic and other leftist parties by creating what the
Stalinists called "united fronts from below." The Comintern charged
the reformists with "social fascism"; the real fascists were to be
dealt with secondarily. In Germany, this policy contributed to Adolph Hitler's
seizure of power— there was no united fight against fascism by the workers in
the mass Communist and Social Democratic parties. This policy had an effect on
the U.S. party and its defense work.
Legal Lynching in the American South
One result of the stock market crash of
1929 and the ensuing Depression was that 200,000people made the rails their
home as they moved from place to place looking for work. On 25 March 1931, nine
black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, were riding the Memphis to
Chattanooga freight train. Two young white women, fearful of being jailed for
hoboing when the train was stopped after reports that there had been a fight
with some white boys, accused the blacks of rape. Among the nine were Olen
Montgomery—blind in one eye and with 10 percent vision in the other—headed for
Memphis hoping to earn enough money to buy a pair of glasses; Willie Roberson,
debilitated by years-long untreated syphilis and gonorrhea—which is important
if you're going to be talking about a rape case; and Eugene Williams and Roy
Wright, both 13 years old.
The group were nearly lynched on the
spot. The trial began in Scottsboro, Alabama on April 6. Four days later,
despite medical evidence that no rape had occurred—not to mention gross
violations of due process—eight were sentenced to death and one of the
13-year-olds to life in prison. The Communist Party issued a statement
condemning the trial as a "legal" lynching. That night, the campaign
to free the Scottsboro Boys began.
Freedom was a long time coming. A
series of trials and appeals all went badly for the defendants. In 1933, one of
the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but it wasn't until
1937 that four of the defendants were freed. Three more were paroled in the
1940s, and in 1948 Haywood Patterson escaped from Angola prison to Michigan,
where the governor refused to extradite him. The last, Andy Wright, who had had
his 1944 parole revoked, was finally released in 1950. The nine had spent 104
years in jail for a "crime" that never happened.
The ILD made the word
"Scottsboro" synonymous, nationally and internationally, with
Southern racism, repression and injustice. Their campaign was responsible for
saving the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair. As Haywood Patterson's father
wrote in a letter to his son, "You will burn sure if you don't let them
preachers alone and trust in the International Labor Defense to handle the
case."
The CP's publicity was massive and
moving. They organized demonstrations in Harlem and across the country,
appealing to the masses to put no confidence in the capitalist courts and to
see the struggle for the freedom of these youths as part of the larger class
struggle. Young Communists in Dresden, Germany marched on the American
consulate, and, when officials refused to accept their petition, hurled bottles
through windows. Inside each was the note: "Down with American murder and
Imperialism. For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians. An end
to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers."
In the South, the defense effort faced
not only the racist system but the homegrown fascists of the Ku Klux Klan as
well, which launched a campaign under the slogan "The Klan Rides Again to
Stamp Out Communism."
The ILD's success in rallying the masses
to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys happened despite their sectarian
"Third Period" tactics. The ILD denounced the NAACP, the ACLU and
most of the trade-union movement as "social fascists" and threw the
"Trotskyite" likes of Jim Cannon out of Scottsboro defense meetings.
But fascism was on the rise in Europe, and, seeking now to make as many allies
as he could, in 1935 Stalin' declared the "Third Period" at an end. A
Comintern resolution urged the Communist parties to form "popular fronts"
with any and all for progressive ends. In the U.S. this meant supporting
Roosevelt and abandoning the struggle to link the defense of black people with
the fight against the capitalist system. You can imagine the surprise of the
NAACP, who were now greeted warmly by the ILD as "comrades"! This
comradeship did not extend to the Trotskyists. The Scottsboro Defense Committee
was formed, and a lot of the life went out of the movement as the case dragged
on.
Cannon and his party, the Communist
League of America, supported the efforts of the ILD to free the Scottsboro
Boys. The Trotskyists insisted on the importance of an integrated movement to
fight in their defense. Cannon pointed out that it was wrong to view the
Scottsboro case solely as a "Negro issue" and agitated in the pages
of the Militant for the organization of white workers around the case.
When Clarence Darrow refused to work on
the case unless the ILD withdrew because he didn't like its agitation methods,
Cannon wrote:
"The ILD was absolutely right in
rejecting the presumptuous demands of Darrow and Hays, and the Scottsboro
prisoners showed wisdom in supporting the stand of their defense organization.
Any other course would have signified an end to the fight to organize the
protest of the masses against the legal lynching; and with that would have
ended any real hope to save the boys and restore their freedom."
Darrow's big argument was: "You
can't mix politics with a law case." Cannon replied:
"That is a reactionary lie. It is
father to the poisonous doctrine that a labor case is a purely legal relation
between the lawyer and client and the court.... It was the influence of this
idea over the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which paralyzed the protest mass
movement at every step and thereby contributed to the final tragic outcome. Not
to the courts alone, and not primarily there, but to the masses must the appeal
of the persecuted of class and race be taken. There is the power and there is
the justice."
Communists on Trial
During the time that the Scottsboro
Boys were languishing in their Southern jails, World War II began in Europe.
The American workers had gone through the experience of one of the biggest
union organizing drives in the history of the country, resulting in the
formation of the CIO, and many of the new industrial unions had won significant
victories. Communists, including the Trotskyists, Jim Cannon and the Socialist
Workers Party, had participated in and led many of these struggles. War is
great for capitalist economies—the destruction creates constant demand, and if
you win, you get new markets to exploit. But to go to war, you have to regiment
the population at home, and that begins with the suspension of civil liberties.
On the eve of America's entry into
World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring the fingerprinting and
registering of all aliens residing in the United States and making it a crime
to advocate or teach the "violent overthrow of the United States
government" or to belong to a group advocating or teaching it.
For public consumption, this act was
billed as an antifascist measure, but the Socialist Workers Party (successor to
the Communist League of America) and Minneapolis Teamsters were the first
victims of the Smith Act prosecutions. Why did the head of the Teamsters Union,
Daniel J. Tobin, the U.S. attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the president
of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, conspire to take away the First
Amendment rights of a small Trotskyist party, a party with maybe a couple
thousand members and influence in one local of one union?
Part of the answer is that the SWP was
effective. The party had led some hard class struggle; it was their comrades
who had provided the leadership for the Minneapolis strike of 1934 which led to
the formation of Teamsters Local 544. Another part of the answer is politics:
the SWP was forthright in its opposition to the coming war. This was a
calculated government attack designed to cripple the SWP where it had the most
influence in the proletariat as America girded for imperialist war.
In the courtroom, the SWP's goal was to
put the capitalist system on trial, a tradition we carry forward in our own
cases. On the stand, Cannon pedagogically explained the positions of the SWP on
the questions of the day and Marxism in general. But the Minneapolis defendants
went to jail for 16 months—sentenced on the same day that Congress voted to
enter the war. The ruling class hoped that the party would be leaderless and
pass from the stage. But at that time the SWP was still a revolutionary party
with a revolutionary program and a collective leadership—so that hope was, in
the main, dashed.
A number of CIO unions issued
statements in defense of the Minneapolis defendants, as did numerous black
organizations. The American Communist Party, however, issued the following
statement: "The Communist Party has always exposed, fought against and
today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite fifth column from the life
of our nation." In line with their support for Roosevelt and the war, the
CP aided the government in the Smith Act prosecution of the SWP and aided the
FBI in their persecution of the Trotskyists in the trade unions. The CP's
disgusting collaboration did not prevent them from being prosecuted under the
very same Smith Act, beginning in 1948. The Trotskyists, of course, defended
the CP unequivocally against the government prosecution while criticizing the
CP's Stalinist politics.
Years later the attorney general,
Francis Biddle, apologized for prosecuting the Trotskyists. The bourgeoisie
sometimes apologizes when its crisis is safely over. Fifty years after the end
of World War II, the U.S. government "apologized" for the wartime
roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, offering a token compensation to
those whose homes were seized and livelihoods ruined. They say whatever
outrageous trampling of civil liberties occurred was an "excess" or
"wrong" and of course it will "never happen again." But the
Reagan government drew up plans to intern Arab Americans in concentration camps
in Louisiana after the bombing of Libya. Those camps are ready and waiting for
the next time the bourgeoisie feels its rule is substantially threatened.
Class-Struggle Defense Work
The Partisan Defense Committee was
initiated in 1974 by the Spartacist League with the goal of re-establishing in
the workers movement united-front, non-sectarian defense principles in the
tradition of Cannon's ILD.
This was not anticipated to be, nor has
it been, an easy task. Unlike the ILD, which inherited the rich and principled defense
traditions of the IWW and the personal authority of mass leaders like Cannon
and Haywood, we were the immediate inheritors of a tradition of Stalinist
perversion of defense work. In addition, the ILD was founded as a transitional
organization, seeking to organize the masses for class-struggle defense work
under the leadership of the party. By its second conference, the ILD had 20,000
individual members, a collective, affiliated membership of 75,000, and 156
branches across the country. The PDC attempts to conduct its work in a way that
will make the transformation to such an organization possible.
The PDC program of raising money for
monthly stipends for class-war prisoners is an example of an ILD practice to
which we adhere. We currently send stipends to 17 prisoners, including Jamal,
Geronimo ji Jaga and other former supporters of the Black Panther Party,
victims of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO frame-ups; Jerry Dale Lowe, a miner
condemned to eleven years in prison for defending his picket line; and members
of the MOVE organization locked up because they survived the racist cop
assaults on their homes and murder of their family. We also follow the ILD's
policy of strict accounting of finances and have modeled our journal,
Class-Struggle Defense Notes, on the ILD's Labor Defender.
We take to heart Cannon's point:
"The problem of organization is a
very significant one for labor defense as a school for the class struggle. We
must not get the idea that we are merely 'defense workers' collecting money for
lawyers. That is only a part of what we are doing. We are organizing workers on
issues which are directly related to the class struggle. The workers who take
part in the work of the ILD are drawn, step by step into the main stream of the
class struggle. The workers participating begin to learn the ABC of the labor
struggle."
Class-struggle defense is a broad
category. We are a small organization and must pick and choose our cases
carefully, with an eye to their exemplary nature. The case of Mario Munoz a Chilean
miners' leader condemned to death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta, is a
good example. This was the PDC's first major defense effort. Co-sponsored with
the Committee to Defend Workers and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, the
international campaign of protest by unions and civil libertarians won asylum
for Munoz and his family in France.
Some of our work has been in defense of
the revolutionary party. The Spartacist League takes its legality— the right to
exist and organize—very seriously, and has been quick to challenge every libel
and legal attack. The party successfully challenged the FBI's slanderous
description of the SL as "terrorists" who covertly advocate the
violent’ Overthrow of the government. A 1984 settlement forced them to describe
the SL as a "Marxist political organization."
The PDC takes up not only the cases but
the causes of the whole of the working people. We have initiated labor/black
mobilizations against the Klan from San Francisco to Atlanta to Philadelphia to
Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement
to join these efforts to stop the fascists from spewing their race hate.
In 1989, we broadened our thinking
about how the PDC could champion causes of the international proletariat and
offered to organize an international brigade to Afghanistan to fight alongside
the forces of the left-nationalist Kabul regime against the imperialist-backed,
anti-woman Islamic fundamentalists on the occasion of the withdrawal of Soviet
troops. When our offer of a brigade was declined, we launched a successful
campaign to raise money for the victims of the mullah-led assault on Jalalabad.
To reflect this, we expanded the definition of the PDC to one of a legal and
social defense organization. To carry out this campaign, it was necessary to
expand the PDC internationally. Sections of the International Communist League
initiated fraternal organizations in Australia, Britain, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy and Japan.
Currently we focus our efforts on Mumia
Abu-Jamal and the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. Our actions in the
Jamal case embody many of the principles of our defense work and the integral
relationship of that work to the Marxist program of the Spartacist League, in
this case particularly in regard to the fight for black liberation, which is
key to the American revolution. This is a political death penalty case which
illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its crudest, most vicious
form and lays bare the essence of the state.
Throughout the very difficult period
ahead, we will put all our faith in the mobilization of the working class and
none in the capitalist courts. We embark now on exhausting every legal avenue
open to Jamal, but we know the result hinges on the class struggle.
We hope you will join us in the fight to free Mumia
Abu-Jamal, to abolish the racist death penalty and finish the Civil War.
Forward to the third American revolution!
