***On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Voting Rights Act-Blowing In The Wind - With Bob Dylan And The Generation Of ‘68 In Mind

 

 

 

Scene: Girls’ Lounge, North Clintondale High School, Monday morning before school, late September, 1962. Additional information for those who know not of girls lounges, for whatever reason. The North Clintondale High School girls’ lounge was reserved strictly for junior and senior girls, no sophomore girls and, most decidedly, no freshmen girls need come within twenty feet of the place for any reason, particularly by accident, under penalty of tumult. It was placed there for the “elect” to use before school, during lunch, after school, and during the day if the need arise for bathroom breaks, but that last was well down on the prerogatives list since any girl can use any other “lav” in the school. No queen, no lioness ever guarded her territory as fiercely as the junior and senior girls of any year, not just 1962, guarded the aura of their lounge.

Needless to say the place was strictly off-limits to boys, although there had been recent talk, 1962 talk, if talk it was, about some girls thinking, or maybe better, wishing, that boys could enter that hallowed ground, after school enter. Unlike the cigarette rumor this one while persistent never seemed to have gone anywhere. Moreover after school most junior or senior girls were either working part-time jobs, heading home to help mother take of younger children, playing lady-like intramural sports far away from boy eyes, or, most likely already with some boy in his latest homemade automobile after a quick run over to North Adamsville Beach. Still that boy rumor possibility was much more likely than entry by those forlorn sophomore and freshman girls, lost or not.

Now the reasoning behind this special girls’ lounge, at least according to Clintondale public school authority wisdom established so far back no one remembered who started it, although a good guess was sometime in the Jazz Age, the time of the “lost generation,” was that junior and senior girls needed some space to attend to their toilet and to adjust to the other rigors of the girl school day and, apparently, that fact was not true for the younger girls. So for that “as far back as can be remembered” junior and senior girls have been using the lounge for their physical, spiritual, demonic, and other intrigue needs.

Certainly it was not the décor that they were fierce about. Now the physical set- up of the place, by 1962 anyway, was that of a rather run-down throne-ante room. Your standard school, heck, for that matter any public building Ladies’ restroom (remember as well this was situated in a public school so erase any thoughts of some elegant woman’s lounge in some fancy downtown Clintondale hotel, some Ritz-ish place); stalls, three, three sinks complete with oversized mirrors for proper preening, several paper towel dispensers and a couple of throw away waste paper baskets (and of course a place to dispense with those monthly napkins) all set off in public building colors.

Beyond that though was the lounge area maybe twice the size of the bathroom area which this year as almost any of the previous ten years contained two old time sofas, a couple of easy chairs, three end tables filled with magazines, mainly girl-fashion related magazines from various years and a couple more waste paper baskets. On one long green wall photographs of previous years of junior and senior girls who were privileged to sit in this very area. On the other providing some fresh air in season three very large glass windows with latch opening for ease of use. (Those windows rumored but only rumored to allow an errant young woman or seven to puff cigarettes and blow the smoke out into the airs. If the school authorities ever discovered that such practices went, of if they did, did anything about it is unclear however those rumors persisted until long after 1962.)        

The “charm” of the place was thus in its exclusivity not its appearance. Come Monday morning, any school day Monday morning, the ones that counted after hard social weekend of fending, or not fending off some sidewalk Lothario, and the place was sure to be jam-packed with every girl with a story to tell, re-tell, or discount as the case may be. If this had been a Catholic school rather than public it would have required the full-time services of a senior cleric to absolve all the lies told on any given Monday morning. Also needless to say, and it took no modern sociologist, no sociologist of youth culture, post-World War II youth culture, no one studied in the tribal norms, in the angsts and alienation, to figure it out in even such an elitist democratic lounge which apparently took it model from ancient Greek civic life except ruled by young women rather than old men certain pecking order, or more aptly cliques aplenty.

The most vocal one, although the smallest, was composed of the “bad” girls, mainly working class, or lower, mostly Irish and Italian, fathers working in the local shipyard or the factories that dotted the river, cigarette-smoking, blowing the smoke out the window this September day as the weather was still good enough to have open windows. As if the nervous, quick-puff stale smells of the cigarettes were not permanently etched on the stained walls already, taking no bloodhound to figure out the No Smoking rule was being violated, violated daily. (Again no action by school authorities was ever taken while a junior or senior girl was in this sanctuary.) Oh yes, and those “bad” girls just then were chewing gum, chewing Wrigley’s double-mint gum, although that ubiquitous habit was not confined to bad girls, as if that act would take the smell of the cigarette away from their breathes. One girl, Anna, a usually dour pretty girl, was animatedly talking, without a seeming hint of embarrassment or concern that others would hear about how her new boyfriend, a biker from Adamsville who to hear her tell it was an A- Number One stud, and she “did it” on the Adamsville beach (she put it more graphically, much more graphically, but the reader can figure that out). And her listeners, previously somewhat sullen, perked up as she went into the details, and they started, Monday morning or not, to get a certain glean in their eyes thinking about the response when they told their own boyfriends about this one. If they did.

Less vocal, but certainly not more careful in their weekend doings talk, were the, for lack of a better term, the pom-pom girls, the school social leaders, the ones who planned the school dances and such, and put the events together in order to, no, not to show their superior organizing skills for future resumes as one might think, but to lure boys, the jock and social boys, into their own Adamsville beach traps. And not, like Anna and her biker, on any smelly, sandy, clamshell-filled, stone-wretched beach, blanket-less for chrissakes. Leave that for the “bad” girls. They, to a girl, were comfortably snuggled up, according to their whispered stories, in the back seat of a boss ’57 Chevy or other prestige car, with their honeys and putting it more gingerly than Anna (and less graphically) “doing it.”

And, lastly, was the group around Peggy Kelly, not that she was the leader of this group for it had no leader, or any particular organized form either, but because when we get out of the smoke-filled, sex talk-filled, hot-air Monday morning before school North Clintondale junior and senior girls’ lounge we will be following her around. This group, almost all Irish girls, Irish Catholic girls if that additional description is needed, of varying respectabilities, was actually there to attend to their toilet and prepare for the rigors of the girl school day. Oh yes, after all what is the point of being in this exclusive, if democratic, lounge anyway, they too were talking in very, very, very quiet tones discussing their weekend doings, their mainly sexless weekend doings, although at least one, Dora, was speaking just a bit too cryptically, and with just a little too much of a glean in her eyes to pass churchly muster.

And what of Peggy? Well Peggy had her story to tell, if she decided to tell it which she had no intention of doing that day. She was bothered, with an unfocused bother, but no question a bother about other aspects of her life, about what she was going to after high school, about her place in the world than to speak of sex. It was not that Peggy didn’t like sex, or rather more truthfully, the idea of sex, or maybe better put on her less confused days, the idea of the idea of sex. Just this past weekend, Saturday night, although it was a book sealed with seven seals that she was determined not to speak of, girls’ lounge or not, she had let Pete Rizzo “feel her up,” put his hands on her breast. No, not skin on skin, jesus no, but through her buttoned-up blouse. And she liked it. And moreover, she thought that night, that tossing and turning night, “when she was ready” she was would be no prude about it. When she was ready, and that is why she insisted that the idea of the idea of sex was something that would fall into place. When she was ready.

But as she listened to the other Irish girls and their half-lies about their weekends, or drifted off into her own thoughts sex, good idea or not, was not high on her list of activities just then. Certainly not with Pete. Pete was a boy that she had met when she was walking at “the meadows,” For those not familiar with the Clintondale meadows this was a well-manicured and preserved former pasture area that the town fathers had designated as park, replete with picnic tables, outdoor barbecue pits, a small playground area and a small restroom (a facility that made the girls’ lounge at Clintondale High look like one in a downtown hotel by comparison). The idea was to preserve a little of old-time farm country Clintondale in the face of all the building going on in town. But for Peggy the best part was that on any given day no one was using the space, preferring the more gaudy, raucous and, well, fun-filled Gloversville Amusement Park, a couple of towns over. So she could roam there freely, and that seemed be Pete’s idea, as well one day. And that meeting really set up what was bothering Peggy these days.

Pete was a freshman at the small local Gloversville College. Although it was small and had been, according to Pete, one of those colleges founded by religious dissidents, Protestant religious dissidents from the mainstream Protestantism of their day, it was well-regarded academically (also courtesy of Pete). And that was Pete’s attraction for Peggy, his ideas and how he expressed them. They fit right in with what Peggy had been bothered by for a while. Things that could not be spoken of in girls’ lounge, or maybe even thought of there. Things like what to do about the black civil rights struggle that was burning up the television every night. Pete was “heading south” next summer he said. (That term of youthful political art signifying that he would be taking a bus, or maybe as part of a carload, and head for hellish Alabama or goddam Mississippi to aid the besieged black civil rights fighters in one of the programs drawn up by one of the increasingly active Northern campus activist coalitions.) They also as youth will talked of things like were we going to last until next week if the Russians came at us, or we went after the Russians.

Also things though like why was she worried every day about her appearance and why she, like an addiction, always, always, made her way to the girls’ lounge to “make her face” as part of the rigors of the girl school day. And that whole sex thing that was coming, and she was glad of it, just not with Pete, Pete who after all was just too serious, too much like those commissars over in Russia, although she liked the way he placed his hands on her. And she was still thinking hard on these subjects as she excused herself from the group as she put the final touches of lipstick on. Just then the bell rang for first period, and she was off into the girl day.

Scene: Boys’ “Lav,” Second Floor, Clintondale High School, Monday morning before school, September, 1962. (Not necessarily the same Monday morning as the scene above but some Monday after the first Monday, Labor Day, in September. In any case even if it was the same Monday as the one above that coincidence does not drive this story, other more ethereal factors do.) Additional information for those who know not of boys’ lavs, for whatever reason. The Clintondale High School boys’ rest rooms, unlike the girls’ lounge mentioned above at North, or where a similar rule applied to the girls’ lounge at Clintondale, was open to any boy in need of its facilities, even lowly, pimply freshmen as long as they could take the gaffe. Apparently Clintondale high school boys, unlike the upperclassmen girls needed no special consideration for their grooming needs in order to face the schoolboy day.

Well, strictly speaking that statement about a truly democratic boys’ lav universe was not true. The first floor boys’ lav down by the woodworking shop was most strictly off limits, and had been as far back as anyone could remember, maybe Neanderthal times, to any but biker boys, badass corner boys, guys with big chips on their shoulders and the wherewithal to keep them there , and assorted other toughs. No geeks, dweebs, nerds, guys in plaid shirts and loafers with or without pennies inserted in them, or wannabe toughs, wannabe toughs who did not have that wherewithal to maintain that chip status need apply. And none did, none at least since legendary corner boy king (Benny’s Variety Store version), “Slash” Larkin, threw some misdirected freshman through a work-working shop window for his mistake. Ever since every boy in the school, every non-biker, non-corner boy, or non-tough had not gone within fifty yards of that lav, even if they took shop classes in the area. And a “comic” aspect of every year’s freshman orientation was a guided finger to point out which lav NOT to use, and that window where that freshman learned the error of his ways. No king, no lion ever guarded his territory as fiercely as the “bad” boys did. Except, maybe, those junior and senior Clintondale girls of any year, and not just 1962, as they guarded their lounge lair.

That left the boys’ rooms on the second floor, the third floor, the one as you entered the gymnasium, and the one outside of the cafeteria for every other boy’s use. A description, a short description, of these lavs is in order. One description fits all will suffice; a small room, with stalls, sinks, mirrors, etc the same as found in any rest room in any public building in the country. Additionally, naturally, several somewhat grimy, stained (from the “misses”) urinals. What draws our attention to the second floor boys’ room this day are two facts. First, this rest room is in the back of the floor away from snooping teachers’ eyes, ears and noses and has been known, again for an indeterminate time, as the place where guys could cadge a smoke, a few quick puffs anyway, on a cigarette and blow the smoke out the back window, rain or shine, cold or hot weather. So any guy of any class who needed his fix found his way there. And secondly, today, as he had done almost every Monday before school since freshman year John Prescott and friends have held forth there to speak solemnly of the weekend’s doing, or not doings. To speak of sex, non-sex, and more often than seemed possible, of the girl who got away, damn it.

Of course, egalitarian democratic or not, even such drab places as schoolboy rest rooms have their pecking orders, and the second floor back tended to eliminate non-smoking underclassmen, non-smokers in general, serious intellectual types, non-jocks, non-social butterflies, and non-plaid shirt and loafer boys. And Johnny Prescott, if nothing else was the epitome of the plaid shirt and loafer crowd. And just like at that up-scale North Clintondale girls’ lounge come Monday morning, any school day Monday morning, the ones that count, and the place was sure to be jam-packed with every plaid-shirted, penny-loafered boy with a story to tell, re-tell, or discount as the case may be. Also needless to say, and it took no modern sociologist, no sociologist of youth culture, post-World War II youth culture, to figure it out in even such a smoky democratic setting there was a certain standardized routine-ness to these Monday mornings. And that routine-ness, the very fact of it, is why John Prescott draws our attention on this day.

And if Johnny was the king of his clique for no other reason than he was smart, but not too smart, not intellectual smart, or showing it any way, that he was first to wear plaid and loafers and not be laughed at, and he had no trouble dating girls, many notched girls, which was the real sign of distinction in second floor lav, he was nevertheless a troubled plaid-ist.

No, not big troubled, but, no question, troubled. Troubled about this sex thing, and about having to have the notches to prove it, whether, to keep up appearances, you had to lie about it or not when you struck out as happened to Johnny more times than he let on (and as he found out later happened to more guys more often than not). Troubled about political stuff like what was going on down in the South with those black kids taking an awful beating every day as he saw on television every freaking night. And right next store in Adamsville where some kids, admittedly some intellectual goof kids, were picketing Woolworth’s every Saturday to let black people, not in Adamsville because there were no blacks in Adamsville, or Clintondale for that matter, but down in Georgia, eat a cheese sandwich in peace at a lunch counter and he thought he should do something about that too, except those intellectual goofs might goof on him.

And big, big issues like whether we were going to live out our lives as anything but mutants on this planet what with the Russian threatening us everywhere with big bombs, and big communist one-size-fits- all ideas. Worst, though were the dizzying thoughts of his place in the sun and how big it would be. Worse, right now worse though was to finish this third morning cigarette and tell his girl, his third new girl in two months, Julie James, that he needed some time this weekend to just go off by himself, “the meadows” maybe, and think about the stuff he had on his mind.

*******

Scene: Clintondale Meadows, late September 1962. The features of the place already described above, including its underutilization. Enter Johnny Prescott from the north, plaid shirt, brown loafers, no pennies on this pair, black un-cuffed chinos, and against the winds of late September this year his Clintondale High white and blue sports jacket won for his athletic prowess in sophomore year. Theodore White’s The Making Of A President-1960 in hand. Enter from the south Peggy Kelly radiant in her cashmere sweater, her just so full skirt, and her black patent leather shoes with her additional against the chill winds red and black North Clintondale varsity club supporter sweater. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain in hand. Johnny spied Peggy first, makes an initial approach as he did to most every girl every chance he got, but noticed, noticed at a time when such things were important in Clintondale teen high school live the telltale red and black sweater, and immediately backed off. Peggy noticing Johnny’s reaction puts her head down. A chance encounter goes for not.

****

That is not the end of the story though. Johnny and Peggy will “meet” again, by chance, in the Port Authority Bus Station in New York City in the early summer of 1964 as they, along with other recent high school graduates and current college students- “head south.”

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

On The 75^th Anniversary Year Of The Defeat Of The Spanish Revolution- The Lessons Learned-75 Years Later, the Lessons of Guernica-by Amy Goodman 

Click Image to view detail.

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

In July 1936 General Franco led a military uprising against the legally elected Popular Front government in Spain which set off three years of war, set off the Spanish Civil War, which proved to be a prelude, a “dress rehearsal” for World War II. That uprising, the initial massively popular fight against it by the leftist workers and peasants, and the ultimate victory by Franco’s forces and a forty year “night of the long knives” reign of terror in 1939 is filled with lessons for leftists today. Therefore it seems fitting to me that while we are sadly commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the defeat I can pass on some lessons that others have drawn from that experience both while the events were unfolding and later.  

*********
Thursday, July 19, 2012

Published on Thursday, July 19, 2012 by TruthDig.com

75 Years Later, the Lessons of Guernica-by Amy Goodman
Seventy-five years ago, the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed into rubble. The brutal act propelled one of the world’s greatest artists into a three-week painting frenzy. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” starkly depicts the horrors of war, etched into the faces of the people and the animals on the 20-by-30-foot canvas. It would not prove to be the worst attack during the Spanish Civil War, but it became the most famous, through the power of art. The impact of the thousands of bombs dropped on Guernica, of the aircraft machine guns strafing civilians trying to flee the inferno, is still felt to this day—by the elderly survivors, who will eagerly share their vivid memories, as well as by Guernica’s youth, who are struggling to forge a future for their town out of its painful history.

The German Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion did the bombing at the request of Gen. Francisco Franco, who led a military rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected government. Franco enlisted the help of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were eager to practice modern techniques of warfare on the defenseless citizens of Spain. The bombing of Guernica was the first complete destruction by aerial bombardment of a civilian city in European history. While homes and shops were destroyed, several arms-manufacturing facilities, along with a key bridge and the rail line, were left intact.

Spry and alert at 89, Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea sat down with me in the offices of Gernika Gogoratuz, which means “Remembering Gernika” in the Basque language. Basque is an ancient language and is central to the fierce independence of Basque-speaking people, who have lived for millennia in the region that straddles the border of Spain and France.

Luis was 14 and working as an assistant at a local bank when Guernica was bombed. It was market day, so the town was full, the market square packed with people and animals. The bombing started at 4:30 p.m. on April 26, 1937. Luis recalled: “It went on and on for three and a half hours. When the bombing ended, I left the shelter and I saw all of the town burning. Everything was on fire.”

Luis and others fled uphill to the nearby village of Lumo, where, as night fell, they saw their hometown burning, saw their homes collapse in the flames. They were given space to sleep in a barn. Luis continued: “I don’t remember if it was at midnight or at another time, as I did not own a watch at the time. I heard someone calling me. ... In the background, you could see Guernica on fire, and thanks to the light of the fire, I realized that it was my mother. She had found my other three siblings. I was the last one to be found.” Luis and his family were war refugees for many years, eventually returning to Guernica, where he still lives and works—as did Picasso in Paris—as a painter.

Luis took me to his studio, its walls covered with paintings. Most prominent was the one he painted of that moment in Lumo when his mother found him. I asked him how he felt at that moment. His eyes welled. He apologized and said he couldn’t speak of it. Just blocks away stands one of the arms factories that avoided destruction. It was the plant where chemical weapons and pistols were made. It is called the Astra building. While Astra has moved away, the weapons company maintains its connection to the town by naming is various automatic weapons the “Guernica,” designed “by warriors, for warriors.”

Several years ago, young people occupied the vacant plant, demanding it be turned into a cultural center. Oier Plaza is a young activist from Guernica who told me, “At first the police threw us out, and then we occupied it again, and finally, the town hall bought the building, then we started this process to recover the building and to create the Astra project.”

The aim of the Astra project is to convert this weapons plant into a cultural center with classes in art, video and other media production. “We have to look to the past to understand the present, to create a better future, and I think Astra is part of that process. It is the past, it is the present, and it is the future of this town.”

From Picasso’s “Guernica” to Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea’s self-portrait with his mother, to the efforts of Oier Plaza and his young friends, the power of art to turn swords into plowshares, to resist war, is perennially renewed.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2012 Amy Goodman



Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Approaches -Lenin On The Tasks Of Social-Democrats 

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

World War I and the Betrayal by Social Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

At the outbreak of World War I on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party voted to fund the war effort of its “own” ruling class. This historic betrayal of the proletariat by the largest party of the Second International was repeated by “socialists” in almost all other combatant countries. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to break revolutionaries away from the social chauvinists of the Second International and regroup them around a proletarian internationalist program, as expressed in the excerpt below. This sharp fight, which hammered on the need to turn the interimperialist slaughter into civil war pitting the proletariat against the capitalists, was essential in preparing the Bolshevik Party to lead the working class to power in the socialist revolution of October 1917 in Russia.

 

It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price”! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”.... The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.

 

The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”...but of opportunism as well.

The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!

 

—V.I. Lenin, “The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International” (November 1914), Collected Works, Vol. 21

 

From the Archives of Spartacist-25th Anniversary

“International Communist League Launched”-Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989

Markin comment-some of this material is obviously time-specific and dated but  some of it reads like today's headlines- Let's get going here and move onto socialism-fight the capitalist beasts.

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

From the Archives of Spartacist-25th Anniversary

“International Communist League Launched”-Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989

To mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), we reprint the following article from the organ of the ICL’s International Executive Committee.

It is with pride tempered by a sober assessment of our responsibilities that we announce the founding of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), previously the international Spartacist tendency. The International Executive Committee took this step on 13 May 1989.

Fifty years ago, Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s companion in arms and founder of the Red Army, proclaimed the creation of a new International to carry forward the authentic Leninist program abandoned and besmirched by the Communist International under the sway of J.V. Stalin and his anti-revolutionary bureaucratic clique. The ICL today fights to reforge the Fourth International.

In the shadow of the approaching second imperialist world war, Trotsky observed with increasing urgency that the objective preconditions for world proletarian revolution were overripe, but what was lacking to uproot decadent capitalism on the world scale and establish a socialist world order was an authentic revolutionary leadership at the head of the proletariat. The spread of the barbarism of fascism and the oncoming world war were not the only deadly dangers confronting the workers of the world at that crucial moment; posed also was the question of the very survival of the Soviet Union and the remaining gains of October.

Today once again, those who struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation in what is unquestionably a period preparatory to war still confront that same excruciating crisis of leadership, but in a different situation. The contradictions of Soviet society and the problems of the Chinese revolutionary struggle, both brilliantly analyzed by Trotsky, have exploded with pent-up force. In the capitalist countries, the working class certainly lacks the level of socialist consciousness and organization it possessed in the 1920s and 1930s. The legacy of Stalin’s reign of terror inside the Soviet Union, and of the repetitive betrayals of crucial revolutionary opportunities, has been the massacre of pro-Communist militants from China to Spain to Greece to Chile to Iran. Stalinism has created millions of anti-Communists and the general level of identification of human progress with the idea of communism stands at a relative low point. Yet as the workings of capitalist imperialism create millions of new subjective communists across the globe, the absence of genuinely communist leadership is acutely felt by many and the program of Leninist internationalism can be put forward with great impact.

The Homeland of October Is in Grave Danger— All Power to Workers Soviets!

Under Gorbachev we have witnessed an attempt to “restructure” the Soviet economy in the direction of encouraging powerful forces toward capitalist restoration, combined with a “diplomacy” of apparently limitless appeasement of imperialism which is being paid for in blood in Afghanistan (although the mujahedin siege of Jalalabad has evidently been thrown back, much to the dismay of American policymakers and the Pakistani annexationists), and which has devastating implications as well for the working people from Nicaragua to Southern Africa to Indochina. Now within the USSR, national antagonisms—spurred by the recent “reforms” termed “market socialism” which encourage the richer republics to seek greater autonomy from their poorer neighbors, but also nourished by decades of the bureaucracy’s Great Russian chauvinism—threaten to dismember the homeland of the October Revolution. The slogan of “free elections” and the agitation for “national independence,” particularly in the Baltic states, in this context can be nothing but a transparent cover for the program of capitalist restoration. Should nationalist unrest spread to the Ukraine, this would be extremely ominous. The anti-Semites of the Russian nativist “Pamyat” fascists have grown dangerously, protected by elements of the bureaucracy. Today, the continued existence of the bureaucratic caste, the heirs of Stalin, constitutes a more immediate and direct threat to the conquests of October than ever before: what is posed is nothing less than civil war. Only through the return to the working people of their state, through the rule of soviets (councils of workers and soldiers), can the egalitarian consciousness (the idea that nobody should live off the exploitation of the labor of others) which remains deeply ingrained in sections of the Soviet working masses be mobilized in decisive struggle to uphold the gains of October.

The effects of what is termed “market socialism” are clearly shown in Eastern Europe. In Poland, the Stalinist bureaucracy’s gross economic mismanagement and heavy-handed repressiveness opened the road for workers’ grievances to be channeled into a reactionary-clericalist company union on behalf of the “free trade union” CIA along with the Western bankers and the Vatican. Every leader of Solidarność is and has been since 1981 a traitor to the working class on behalf of NATO imperialism. Today the Polish regime and Solidarność are selling the country to the IMF and are prepared to allow the historic centers of the proletariat—the Lenin Shipyard workers, the miners of Upper Silesia—to be dismembered. The Stalinist schema of “national autarky” has come home to roost—Down with the Stalinist nationalists in Moscow and East Berlin who allow the imperialist world market to regulate the terms of trade between “fraternal socialist” trading partners; reforge the historic link between the German and Polish proletariats through proletarian political revolution!

In China, the mass outpouring of defiance in early June heralded the Chinese proletarian political revolution against the corrupt and despised Stalinist bureaucracy. What began as a student upheaval around vague demands for greater democracy was embraced by the working people of Beijing who came out into the streets seeking by their massive numbers to block the unleashing of troops against the demonstrators. Some units fraternized with the crowds, other units were brought in to shoot down the people. For the moment the Deng regime has arrested the momentum of the Beijing spring with a wave of repression which has struck first and hardest at the working class. But tremendous resentment has built up among the salaried people against the beneficiaries of “building socialism with capitalist methods”—a full-fledged NEP [New Economic Policy]. The decrepit bureaucratic caste which has opened the doors of China to massive capitalist encroachment and shamelessly allied itself with U.S. imperialism can be shattered. The urgent task which stands before the Chinese workers is the forging of an authentic communist party, an internationalist vanguard, which can lead the struggle for the unity of China under workers leadership.

Stalin and Mao and all the pygmy Stalins and Maos have done everything they could to make “communism” a code word for murdering your own people and trying to get little concessions from imperialism by being its cat’s paw, as the Chinese have been America’s agent militarily against Vietnam. In part, illusions in “Western democracy” among the Chinese students stem from the misidentification of militant communism with Maoism—i.e., economic primitivism and “barracks socialism,” the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, the student protesters are singing the Internationale.

Decadent Imperialism Has Been Given a Breathing Space

Today the capitalist world remains marked by the decomposition of the short-lived “American Century”: having emerged as the dominant capitalist power after the devastation of Europe and Japan in World War II, Washington’s “new world order” quickly unraveled, beginning with the Chinese Revolution and America’s consequent embrace of its former enemy, Japan, as a bulwark against the spread of revolution in Asia, continuing with the Cuban Revolution and underlined by the dirty, losing war against the peasants and workers of Vietnam. Now beset by sharp trade rivalry with Japan and the demands of resurgent German imperialism to assume its “rightful” place as the leader of capitalist Europe, American capitalism has become the world’s biggest debtor nation; its essential industrial plant decays while its exports increasingly center on raw materials and agricultural products. At the same time this wounded capitalist colossus maintains its ambition to police the world from Latin America to the Persian Gulf, while possessing a nuclear arsenal which could destroy the world a hundred times over.

The resurgent bourgeois anti-Sovietism of the 1980s, inaugurated by Jimmy Carter’s hypocritical “human rights” crusade and escalated under the unashamed Cold Warriors of Reagan/Bush/Thatcher, highlighted the timidity and demoralization of the “left.” Also standing out sharply are the criminal passivity of the trade-union “leaders” who, confronted by sharp attacks on the workers’ living standards and working conditions, continue seeking to eschew the traditions of mass militant struggle which built the unions; the craven subservience of the “black elected officials” to the racist ruling-class establishment whose only program for jobless black youth, welfare mothers, the homeless amounts to genocide; and the bankruptcy of the “liberals” who have largely abandoned the pretense of concern for the workers and poor. Today the communists, whose aim is the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new basis, are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of bourgeois revolution: the right to bear arms; the separation of church and state—against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; against censorship, whether by “creationists” seeking to ban the teaching of evolution or “anti-pornography” feminists or the burning of Salman Rushdie’s “blasphemous” novel; against the racist death penalty; for the liberation of women. In Britain, where the bourgeois revolution was early and uncompleted, we say: Down with the monarchy, the aristocracy, the established churches—For a voluntary association of workers republics in the British Isles! In Japan, where the bourgeois revolution came late and from the top down, we demand the abolition of the emperor system—For a Japanese workers republic!

War and Revolution

Lenin, in his work on imperialism as the epoch of capitalist decay, showed that the system of class relations had now become (as Marx had analyzed) a barrier to the development of the productive forces, leading to interimperialist rivalry and war to redivide the world’s spoils. The first imperialist world war brought unprecedented suffering and mass slaughter of the working people and revealed most of the Socialists of the Second International to be cowardly chauvinist tails on the imperialist ambitions of their “own” ruling classes. But defeat in war can be the mother of revolution, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had built up a hard revolutionary party and broken sharply from the social-patriots, were able to transcend their own inadequate theoretical formulas (which had denied the possibility of proletarian revolution in backward Russia) and thereby to lead the small but militant Russian working class to the taking of state power, on the basis of an internationalist program. This historic conquest on behalf of the workers of the world led straight to the foundation of the Third (Communist) International, which was able to expose the “socialist” pretensions of the respectable reformist gentlemen of the Second International and win the allegiance of advanced workers and subjectively revolutionary militants on every continent.

But the international revolutionary wave which swept up the working masses from Germany to Bulgaria receded and was thrown back; the failure to extend the Russian Revolution, particularly the failure of revolution in Germany with its powerful working class, left the young Soviet workers state isolated. Trotsky summed up the causes and future implications of the playing out of that cycle of revolutionary struggle in his Lessons of October.

In the USSR, under conditions of extreme poverty and demoralization, with the working class decimated and exhausted by the Civil War, the way was open for a conservative bureaucracy to arise as a parasitic excrescence upon the working class. By 1924, this bureaucratic caste had acquired self-consciousness and a program: the self-contradictory dogma of “Socialism in One Country”—the antithesis of the Leninist outlook of internationalism which had animated the revolution. Predicated on the illusion that it was possible for an isolated Soviet workers state to survive and coexist with capitalist imperialism over an extended period, this program in Stalin’s hands meant the destruction of the Communist International as an instrument of revolution and ultimately led straight to the murder of all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. In place of soviet democracy was created a monstrous apparatus of bureaucratic control: first by the Stalinized party, then by the Stalin faction, and finally by Stalin backed up by a small handful of cronies, after the purge trials wiping out all the Bolshevik Old Guard.

Beginning with Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” and carried forward with new momentum under Gorbachev’s glasnost, the heirs of Stalin in the Kremlin have been forced increasingly to acknowledge the crimes of Stalin: the brutality of forced collectivization, the deportations and executions of oppositionists, the purge of the Red Army on the eve of World War II. In part a reflection of the emergence of a new generation of Soviet leaders lacking personal responsibility for Stalin’s dirty deeds, and of the growth of a new layer of Soviet academics and bureaucrats embarrassed by the transparent mendacity of official Soviet history, Gorbachev’s glasnost is mainly a response to the intractable problems of the Soviet economy. The call for “openness” in political discussion is centrally intended as an adjunct to perestroika, or “restructuring” of the economy in line with market forces, and much of the debate has as its not-so-secret agenda the refurbishing of the reputation of Nikolai Bukharin and the economic program of the Right Opposition.

Yet the Gorbachevites have been unable to prevent the raising in the discussion of the archetypical “blank space” of Soviet history: the figure of Leon Trotsky. Even as Stalin’s heirs seek to replace their discredited lies with new and different distortions, the question of Trotsky is potentially explosive, for—unlike Bukharin, Stalin’s bloc partner until 1929—Trotsky led a fight against Stalin and the epigones, aimed at restoring the domestic and international policies pursued by Soviet Russia to a Leninist course. The policies which Trotsky fought for from 1923 until his murder by Stalin’s assassin represented the Leninist alternative to Stalin, the “gravedigger of revolution.” Today Trotsky’s road is the only means for the survival of the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1923, Trotsky and his supporters of the Left opposition sought to address the problems of the devastated Soviet economy through policies aimed at reconstituting an industrial proletariat and overcoming the divisions between city and countryside through a perspective of industrial growth. They predicted that Bukharin’s program of “socialism at a snail’s pace,” implemented by Stalin, would enormously strengthen forces toward capitalist restoration, eventually compelling the ruling clique to adopt measures proposed by the Left. This is what happened, but instead of the Left’s policy (voluntary collectivization with the incentive of mechanization of agriculture), Stalin’s version was the now-infamous brutal forced collectivization.

It is unquestionable that, even under bureaucratic leadership, the Soviet planned economy made tremendous progress and a modern country was forged in formerly backward Russia. Nonetheless, even after 50 years Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of the Soviet economy and society in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) remains the touchstone for understanding Russia today. Only the Trotskyist perspective of proletarian political revolution to reverse the political dispossession of the working class by the privileged bureaucratic caste can unleash the creativity and productivity of the Soviet working people and regulate the problems (e.g., heavy industrial investment vs. consumer goods, egalitarianism vs. “material incentives,” centralized planning vs. local control, and the problem of quality) which have bedeviled the Soviet economy recurringly and have re-emerged in sharpened form today.

Rejecting the suicidal dogma of “Socialism in One Country,” the Left oppositionists in the 1920s struggled to reassert the perspective of international extension of the revolution as the only effective answer to the isolation and capitalist encirclement of the first workers state. Events in China, where Stalin’s opportunistic subordination of the Communists to the treacherous bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek led to the beheading of a powerful revolutionary struggle, confirmed Trotsky’s warnings. But while some of Trotsky’s cothinkers believed this vindication would lead to gains for the Left, Trotsky observed that whereas a successful Chinese revolution would have increased the class consciousness and confidence of the Russian and international proletariat, the setback of revolutionary struggle would only strengthen Stalin’s hold.

The International Left Opposition, constituted in 1930, after Trotsky had been exiled from the USSR, considered itself a forcibly externalized faction fighting to return the Third International to a revolutionary course. But when Hitler’s Nazis were coming to power in Germany in 1933—based on the bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution by the powerful, pro-socialist German working class—the Stalinists refused to fight. Nor did this disaster precipitate any fundamental struggle within the Communist Parties internationally. The Trotskyists declared that the Third International could not be reformed. Especially with the promulgation in 1935 of the “People’s Front” policy—the systematic perspective of an alliance with the parties of so-called “democratic” imperialism—the conclusion was inescapable: there was no place for revolutionists in the Stalinist Communist Parties. In place of Lenin’s revolutionary International had been consolidated a powerful anti-revolutionary apparatus as a new obstacle to revolution, more disciplined and effective than the old Social Democracy. The false identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism provided Stalin with dedicated political agents throughout the world; only Stalin and perhaps a half-dozen cronies (who these were changed over time) knew what it was all about. Millions who loyally carried out his dictates, up to and including the murder of Trotskyists, believed all the while that they were fighting for socialism.

In 1933, the Trotskyists constituted themselves as the International Communist League (Bolshevik-Leninist) in recognition of the imperative need for an authentically communist new International, the Fourth International. Trotsky rightly foresaw that the menace of German fascism would lead in a straight line to war against the Soviet Union. As the interimperialist rivalries and alignments of the upcoming war took shape, the Trotskyists struggled against time to break the Stalinists’ hold over the advanced workers. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 on the basis of the document, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (the Transitional Program), and the perspective put forward in “War and the Fourth International” (1934) of uncompromising revolutionary defeatism toward all imperialist combatants, including those aligned with the USSR, combined with revolutionary defensism of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

The launching of the Fourth International was opposed by some, like Isaac Deutscher, who argued it was premature. Trotsky insisted that, on the contrary, the second imperialist world war would, like the first, provoke social convulsion throughout the capitalist world and a new wave of international revolutionary struggles. And he predicted that the brittle system of Stalinist rule in the USSR, which had arisen as an accommodation to the breathing space for the imperialist world order secured by the failure of the post-WWI revolutionary wave, would itself crack under the impact of the new world war or soon thereafter.

The validity of Trotsky’s predictions was in fact confirmed by the Red Army’s initial collapse in the face of Hitler’s invasion, as well as by the turbulent social conditions in Western Europe at the war’s end. In Italy and Greece, naked treachery by the Stalinists was needed to militarily and politically disarm the leftist Resistance forces and hand power back to the capitalist class (however, Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia refused to commit suicide—they led a peasant-based indigenous revolution to victory and established a bureaucratically deformed workers state). In France the Stalinists endorsed “national reconstruction” to re-establish a stable bourgeois regime. Trotsky’s insistence on the need for revolutionary leadership was tragically confirmed by the results of its absence: the Stalinists, who emerged stronger than before in Italy and France based on their resistance to the Nazis, were successful in deflecting revolutionary struggle.

Central to that outcome was Stalin’s success in putting over the lie that World War II in the Allied imperialist nations was a struggle of liberation—that it was a great battle against fascism and for a better world. In the context of the mass popular revulsion against fascism, Stalin’s policy of the Popular Front—the alliance with “democratic” imperialism—prevented the growth of mass antiwar sentiment paralleling the massive radicalization of World War I. The lie was successful; a war fought so that U.S. imperialism could emerge as the predominant imperialist power, the capitalist “world policeman” which rained death down on Vietnam for two decades after Dien Bien Phu, was popularly accepted as a war of the people against fascism.

Nonetheless the victory of the Anglo-American imperialist bloc was conditional. It was the Red Army which had smashed Hitler’s Wehrmacht; moreover, Hitler’s East European puppets had all made a mad dash for the nearest American headquarters, leaving behind a power vacuum which the occupying Soviet army quickly filled. The victorious imperialists had to divide Europe with Stalin.

The war devastated the small forces of the Fourth International—having geared up for battle against fascism and war, they were in effect militarily defeated. The physical obliteration of the Left Opposition in the USSR was completed by the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Large numbers of Trotskyist cadre in Europe and Asia were wiped out by war and repression. The decimation of the most promising young Trotskyist leaders was a factor in the emergence of a revisionist current within the FI in the early 1950s. So was the passivity of the American Socialist Workers Party, a relatively strong party nourished by close collaboration with Trotsky, and located in a country insulated from the real carnage of the world war.

The revisionist current, led by the impressionist Michel Pablo, abandoned the perspective of workers revolutions in order to become for a time entrists into and political tails of the CPs. Worshipping the accomplished fact of Stalinism’s continued existence, they had decided it would endure perhaps for “centuries” and they therefore decided that a “new world reality” would compel it to play a “roughly revolutionary” role, obviating the need for Trotskyist parties. Within a couple of years, Russian tanks were crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Today it is very clear that the CPs play no such revolutionary role in the world, while the bureaucratic caste of Stalin and his heirs has brought the Soviet Union itself to the threat of civil war, and an incipient political revolution was provoked in China. Trotsky’s expectation of a terminal crisis of Stalinism is as alive as today’s headlines.

Today the representatives of the revisionist current—having passed through a period of vicarious guerrillaist/pro-Stalinist enthusiasm which included hailing the massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, then having gone for “Eurocommunism” and Soviet dissidents, and in a big way for the Solidarność devotees of Marshal Pilsudski (the bonapartist founder of modern capitalist Poland)—are in a position to do some harm as vociferous apologists of those demanding “national liberation” for the Baltic republics. In their mouth, “Trotskyism” is made out to be some kind of latter-day left social democracy.

The bourgeoisie is celebrating in anticipation of the “end of Communism.” The Stalinist bureaucracies have indeed reached the point of terminal crisis. But their crisis is because they are opposed to everything communism stands for. The national antagonisms in the Soviet Union, the revolt in China, arise in response to “market socialist” policies that are counterposed to centralized socialist planning. The bureaucratic stranglehold over political and cultural life, the appeasement that has emboldened imperialism—these are not communism, but its antithesis.

An International Program Mandates International Organization

“By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it rests on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not on its historical tasks. Opportunists find international control intolerable and they reduce their international ties as much as possible to harmless formalities...on the proviso that each group does not hinder the others from conducting an opportunist policy to its own national taste.... International unity is not a decorative facade for us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our policy” (Leon Trotsky, “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition,” 7 September 1929).

From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party of the United States in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. We stand proudly on our record of 25 years of struggle for authentic Trotskyism and are working on documenting it archivally and historically. In January 1974 an interim Conference centered on European work and perspectives, with participation of comrades from seven countries, was held in Germany. The document which formed the programmatic basis for the Conference accepted the “responsibility to struggle actively for the constitution as soon as possible of a democratic-centralist international Spartacist tendency.”

In July 1974 the “Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency” announced the constitution of a nucleus for the early crystallization of the international Spartacist tendency, to be governed under the principle of international democratic centralism. The document sharply attacked the federalist practices of competitors claiming the mantle of Trotskyism, noting that Pablo’s political heirs of the “United Secretariat” and the Healyite “International Committee” “have chronically mocked the principles of internationalism and of Bolshevik democratic centralism as their different national groups or nationally-based factions have gone their own way—ultimately in response to the pressures of their own ruling classes.”

American Revisionists and the Voorhis Act

In particular the “Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency” noted the revisionists’ invocation of the U.S. government’s Voorhis Act as a convenient excuse for anti-internationalism. The Voorhis Act, passed in 1940, sought to massively inhibit international political affiliation through “registration” requirements intended to paralyze political organizations. Already in 1953, when the SWP was still adhering to “orthodox Trotskyism” but shrinking from waging an aggressive international fight against Pablo, they cited the Voorhis Act to justify their passivity in the international arena which had facilitated the rise of impatient young impressionists like Pablo: in his May 1953 speech, “Internationalism and the SWP,” the party’s leader, James P. Cannon, said that after 1940 “We no longer belonged to the Fourth International because the Voorhis law outlawed international connections. Our role, therefore, could only be advisory and consultative” (Speeches to the Party).

Our 1974 “Declaration” charged: “The ‘Voorhis Act’ with its patently unconstitutional and contradictory provisions has never been used by the government—only the revisionists.” We cited the United Secretariat’s evasion of our appeal against expulsion from the Socialist Workers Party: the USec’s Pierre Frank replied to us on 28 May 1965: “...we call your attention first of all to the fact that the Fourth International has no organizational connection with the Socialist Workers party and consequently has no jurisdiction in a problem such as you raise.”

Our 1974 “Declaration” also quoted, from a 1974 SWP internal bulletin, a particularly explicit SWP formula for nationally limited political responsibility:

“The Socialist Workers Party proclaims its fraternal solidarity with the Fourth International but is prevented by reactionary legislation from affiliating to it. All political activities of members of the SWP are decided upon by the democratically elected national leadership bodies of the SWP and by the local and branch units of the party.... There are no other bodies whose decisions are binding on the SWP or its members.”

Our document cited as well the assertion of national autonomy by the sinister “International Committee” of Gerry Healy, whose American publicist, Tim Wohlforth, wrote in his 1972 pamphlet, “Revisionism in Crisis”:

“With the passing of the Voorhis Act in 1940 the SWP was barred from membership in the Fourth International by law. Ever since that time the SWP has not been able to be an affiliate of the Fourth International. So today its relationship to the United Secretariat is one of political solidarity just as the Workers’ League stands in political solidarity with the International Committee.”

And we quoted our response to Healy in 1966 when he sought to suppress an opponent’s pamphlet by claiming it would render his U.S. supporters as well as ourselves vulnerable to the Voorhis Act:

“The Voorhis Act is a paper tiger—never used against anyone and patently unconstitutional. For the Justice Department to start proceedings against a small group like ours...would make the government a laughing stock, and Healy knows this. He is aware that for years the SWP has hidden behind this very act to defend its own federalist idea of an International.”

The first delegated international conference of the international Spartacist tendency was held in Britain in 1979. Over the following decade, the development of the sections, particularly in Europe, and their cohering of leaderships has become an increasingly important component in shaping the international tendency. Now looking back at the pressures to which a decade of Reaganite bourgeois reaction has subjected our American organization, we must believe that if our tendency had not achieved significant international extension, the SL/U.S. would have become an eccentric and disintegrating American sect.

For Revolutionary Regroupments— For Lenin’s Communism!

Today, our small forces confront very high stakes. The achievements of the international Spartacist tendency, now the ICL, are modest: our militant labor/black mobilizations against fascist provocations in the United States—an expression of our consistent understanding that the fight against racial oppression is key to the American workers revolution—have been warmly greeted, as have other legal and social defense initiatives of the Partisan Defense Committee and cothinkers internationally; we have protested every move by U.S. imperialism against the Latin American masses, and raised funds for Nicaragua; among some layers of the Communist movement in West Europe we have become known as “the Trotskyists who defend the Soviet Union”; our forthright championing of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, under the slogan, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples,” was grudgingly admired by elements of the Western CPs which were seeking to resist the “Eurocommunist” drift toward greater social-democratic accommodation with one’s “own” ruling class. Recently, our offer of an international brigade to fight the CIA’s mujahedin “holy warriors” after Gorbachev’s cowardly withdrawal and, when that offer was declined, our publicity and fund-raising campaign for the civilian victims of Jalalabad met with surprising support from women and from Muslim immigrants and other minorities in many countries, as well as among Stalinist milieus. Our defense of the program of “permanent revolution” for those vast areas of the world deformed by imperialist domination—i.e., that the proletariat, independent of the weak and cowardly bourgeoisie and counterposing a vision of social emancipation to the ideologies of nationalism (particularly the nationalism of the majority), must take power to achieve even those democratic tasks formerly associated with bourgeois revolutions—has won us a hearing among oppressed national minorities.

Revolutionary regroupments on the program of Leninist internationalism are the means to resolve the disproportion between our small forces and our task. The heirs of Stalin manifestly lack the capacity to defend the Soviet power, of which they have been simultaneously the parasitic defender and the counterrevolutionary disorganizer for 65 years. Yet to the same measure that they have brought “communism” into disrepute thanks to the crimes they have committed in its name, they have also reduced their ability to manipulate the allegiance of dedicated pro-Communist workers throughout the world. No longer can a Stalin and his half-dozen conscious accomplices wield “monolithic” parties as instruments of class-collaborationist treason in the name of “building socialism.”

We take our stand on the authentic communist tradition of the Bolsheviks who made the Russian Revolution. We choose the communism that had Lenin as its greatest teacher in the imperialist epoch. We choose the communism of Lenin’s comrade Trotsky, who beginning as early as 1923 understood the main lines of what needed to be done. We choose the communism that Stalin utterly betrayed as he deliberately destroyed the Third International. We choose the communism of a new Fourth International that will do away once and for all with the exploitation of man by man and establish a socialist society based on a new vision of the continual expansion of human freedom in all spheres: in politics, economics, culture and in every aspect of personal life.

We must believe that, failing sudden working-class upsurge against the conditions of capitalist decay, the reforging of a communist Fourth International, built of authentic communist parties on every continent, will be arduous and often dangerous. But this is the only road forward for all of humanity. Yet as we seek to bring this program to bear among the world’s workers and oppressed, we must recognize that the possession of the technology of nuclear holocaust by an irrational imperialist ruling class foreshortens the possibilities: we probably do not have much time.

But experience, not least bitter negative experience, can also be a powerful and accelerating teacher. We had better follow the precepts and practices of such comrades as Lenin and Trotsky. Thus we could cut short by months or years the time required for the necessary rearmament of the communist movement.

 

Victory for South African Platinum Miners

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

Victory for South African Platinum Miners

 

JOHANNESBURG—A bitterly fought, five-month strike by 70,000 platinum miners organised by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) has ended in victory for the workers. In what would become the longest strike in the history of South Africa, the miners walked out on January 23 to fight for a living wage and against the “apartheid wage gap” inherited from the former white-supremacist regime. The workers achieved a 1,000 rand ($93) basic monthly wage increase, backdated to July 2013, for the first two years of the contract and R950 for the third year. The combined cost to Anglo American Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin—the world’s top three platinum producers—is estimated at R24 billion.

As the strike wrapped up, a jubilant AMCU member told the Daily Maverick (23 June): “It was no longer about me and my colleagues, but also about all the mineworkers before and those that will come long after we are gone. We have levelled the pitch for everyone.” Although falling short of the union’s R12,500 demand for entry-level workers, the wage increase, as one miner remarked, was “the highest in the history of the mining industry in South Africa” (Johannesburg Star, 16 June). The lowest-paid workers got the highest percentage increase (13 percent), with 8 percent going to better-paid layers. While South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, the strike settlement is seen as a significant step in denting the apartheid wage gap, or at least putting it on the agenda again. In his recent state of the nation address, South African president Jacob Zuma of the African National Congress (ANC) acknowledged the need for his government to consider setting a minimum wage.

Starving strikers into submission was the main strategy of the mine bosses, who stockpiled enough platinum to last eight weeks. But showing iron determination, the workers held out longer, at a cost of huge personal suffering. AMCU appealed for unions in Brazil and the U.S. to refuse to handle South African platinum and set up a strike fund to help their members sustain themselves. We noted in “Victory to South African Platinum Miners!” (WV No. 1046, 16 May): “A crucial ally in any fight against the mine owners is the working class in the U.S. and Britain, where most of these mining companies are headquartered, as well as in Germany and other countries where platinum is used in auto production.”

The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organisation associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—and other of the ICL’s fraternal defense organisations participated in an international solidarity campaign, raising donations for the strike fund. Countries where unions were approached include the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and Greece. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 6 in San Francisco donated $1,000, as did the Bay Area’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, while the Australian Fire Brigade Employees’ Union contributed A$400 ($375).

A May 16 IBEW Local 6 solidarity letter noted that the union has “not forgotten” the cops’ slaughter of 34 striking Lonmin miners at Marikana in August 2012. It also denounced the bosses’ attempt to bypass AMCU and approach the miners directly to end the recent strike. Direct responsibility for the Marikana massacre lies with the Tripartite Alliance government—comprising the bourgeois-nationalist ANC, the Stalinist-derived South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)—which brutally enforces neo-apartheid capitalism 20 years after the end of legal apartheid. Most platinum miners left the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 2012 in protest against the betrayals committed by their leaders and joined AMCU.

In the face of AMCU members celebrating their hard-earned victory, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande lashed out, declaring: “The strike was disastrous, and workers will not recover from the five months lost” (The New Age, 3 July). As a spokesman for neo-apartheid capitalist rule, Nzimande’s worry is that the victory of the miners will help spur further class struggle, as in 2012. The week after the AMCU settlement, 220,000 members of the National Union of Metalworkers, a COSATU affiliate, went on strike in the steel and engineering sectors. In the platinum mines, the bosses’ threats of mechanisation to shed jobs, their attempt to get a no-strike guarantee from AMCU for the duration of the contract and their demand for a “productivity agreement” indicate that the fight is far from over.

The aspirations of the mainly black working class, and all the impoverished urban and rural masses, for freedom and equality cannot be fulfilled under capitalism but require workers revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and expropriate the bourgeoisie. The SSA fights to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party to lead the struggle for a black-centred workers government and a socialist federation of Southern Africa. Necessary to this perspective is to link up with workers revolutions in the imperialist centres, laying the basis for a world socialist economy.

Threat to Public-Sector Labor-Supreme Court Clobbers Home Health Care Workers Unions

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

Threat to Public-Sector Labor-Supreme Court Clobbers Home Health Care Workers Unions

 

The June 30 Supreme Court ruling in the case Harris v. Quinn is the latest blow in the capitalist state’s war against organized labor. In a five-to-four majority, the court overturned lower court decisions by excluding home health care workers from agency shop arrangements, in which workers who benefit from union representation but are not themselves members must pay fees to the union. The Illinois plaintiffs, including Pamela Harris, an in-home caregiver for her disabled son, were represented by the anti-union National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation bankrolled by the notoriously right-wing billionaire Koch brothers and the Walton family (of Wal-Mart).

The Supreme Court ruling singled out the union rights of an especially vulnerable section of the public-sector workforce as a wedge aimed at public workers unions in general. The nature of the caregivers’ work in private homes makes them particularly isolated, open to abuse by employers and difficult to organize into unions. These workers carry out demanding tasks: cooking, cleaning, administering medication, bathing patients and helping them in and out of bed. Together with nurses and workers in residential care centers, they have the highest rate of workplace injuries. Home health care workers, nearly 90 percent of whom are women, are disproportionately black, Latino and immigrant. While still among the lowest-paid workers in the public sector, home health care workers in Illinois saw their wages rise from less than $7 per hour to $13 after they joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Union membership not only benefits those workers but also, by providing more training and reducing staff turnover, benefits their patients.

To evade legal precedent protecting agency shops for public workers, the court ruled that while home health care workers are paid from public funds they are “not full-fledged public employees” because they may be hired and supervised by their clients. This fiction was concocted in order to ratify the plaintiffs’ bogus contention that their being forced to pay agency fees violated their First Amendment right, as individuals, to free speech. This red herring was dragged in to take aim squarely at the rights of labor. From the very existence of unions to the right to strike, labor rights were achieved through hard struggle against the capitalists and their state. At any rate, the only rights to which the bourgeoisie is unalterably committed are its own property rights.

While the backers of the Harris plaintiffs pushed the Supreme Court to also overturn the 1977 case Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which upheld the agency shop for public-sector workers, the court stopped short, at least for the moment. However, Justice Samuel Alito devoted much of the majority opinion to criticizing Abood, effectively inviting a frontal challenge to agency shops. Indeed, such cases are already wending their way through the lower courts. In Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, ten teachers backed by the right-wing Center for Individual Rights (CIR) are challenging the agency shop on grounds similar to Harris v. Quinn. The CIR lawyers admitted that their claims were barred by the Abood precedent, conceding defeat at the District Court level so that their appeals could proceed up the chain to the Supreme Court.

Twenty-six states have laws providing for the agency shop for public-sector workers, while open shop “right to work” states ban this arrangement. Marxists defend the agency shop against the bosses’ attacks. But what we are for is the closed shop, where workers must be members of the union before being hired. The closed shop, facilitating union control of hiring, was outlawed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which aimed at crippling labor by banning a range of militant strike tactics and opening up a red purge of the unions. While allowing union shops, where workers are required to join unions after being hired, the law also opened the door to the opt-out provisions of the agency shop.

What is needed are fighting unions that encompass all workers in a company or industry, uniting them in struggle against the bosses for improved pay, benefits and work conditions. It is precisely by playing workers off against one another that the capitalists divide and weaken the working class, often by exacerbating racial and ethnic divisions. Many “right to work” advocates hate unions not least because they are integrated. Strong unions, including the closed shop, were won through sharp class struggle involving often-illegal tactics like mass pickets, factory occupations and secondary boycotts.

For all their ritual denunciations of Taft-Hartley as a slave-labor act, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats have overwhelmingly bowed to its restrictions, helping grease the skids for the sharp decline of unions in the U.S. The more the union leaders limit workers’ struggles within the framework of what is permitted by bourgeois law, the more the capitalists further narrow proletarian rights by augmenting their arsenal of anti-union laws.

If the agency shop is eliminated for public-sector workers, it will be a serious blow for the working class as a whole. With the decline of unionized manufacturing jobs, public-sector workers make up a greater than ever proportion of organized labor, with the rate of unionization among public-sector workers more than five times that of private-sector workers. Unions like the SEIU and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) have recruited large numbers of home health care workers. However, many of the same unions include cops and prison guards. These guard dogs of capitalist rule are used to smash workers’ picket lines and enforce a reign of terror against black people and other minorities. Cops and prison guards out of the unions!

Labor Tops’ Subservience to Democrats

Opposition to Harris v. Quinn among bourgeois liberals stems from the fact that the decision upsets a mechanism to help maintain labor peace in the public sector. In her dissent on the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan expressed relief that the court did not completely overturn the agency shop, which she characterized as a key tool for state and local governments “in the management of their employees and programs.” The “bad news,” she wrote, was that Illinois can no longer use this “tool” in regard to home health care workers.

For the labor tops, the agency shop means more money for union coffers without having to do anything in the way of actual struggle. This setup is an example of their reliance on the state institutions of the capitalist rulers, as are various other arrangements, such as the system of dues checkoff, which puts the collection of a union’s money in the bosses’ hands. Central to the class-collaborationist outlook of the union bureaucracy is the lie that the capitalist state can be pressured to act in the interests of workers, at least when run by Democrats.

In Illinois, the SEIU signed up 20,000 home health care workers after then-governor Rod Blagojevich (whom the union helped elect, pouring $1.8 million into his 2002 and 2006 campaigns) issued an executive order designating them state employees. It is this designation that has now been overturned by the Supreme Court, demonstrating how easily reforms that benefit the working class can be reversed in the absence of class struggle.

The Democrats themselves have been carrying out attacks on unions, particularly in the public sector. The Obama administration has long pushed anti-union charter schools and hailed the recent California court ruling against teacher tenure laws, a direct blow to union seniority rights. Democratic Illinois governor Pat Quinn, the defendant in Harris v. Quinn, has signed a law gutting the pensions of public workers, a measure several unions are challenging in the courts. In a stark example of the labor bureaucracy’s servility, the Illinois Education Association is both suing Governor Quinn over his attacks on their pensions and endorsing his re-election in November!

Condemning the Harris decision, leaders of several unions representing public-sector workers, including the SEIU, AFSCME, the Communications Workers of America and the American Federation of Teachers, mouthed platitudes about fighting back. What they really meant was laid out by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who told the London Financial Times (2 July), “We’re going to work real hard to get pro-worker candidates elected,” i.e., once again getting out the vote for the Democrats in this year’s mid-term elections. This is the same dead-end electoral strategy that in recent years led to defeats in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, where “right to work” measures gutted union rights. In Wisconsin in 2011, thousands of union members had repeatedly mobilized in protests in Madison, the state capital. But the bureaucrats nixed any chance to use the strike weapon, diverting workers’ anger into Democratic Party electioneering.

While the White House issued a statement criticizing the Harris ruling, when it comes to unions actually engaging in struggle, it’s another matter for U.S. capitalism’s chief executive. On June 14, over 400 train engineers and electricians in the Philadelphia area went out on strike against SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority). At the request of the Pennsylvania governor, President Obama immediately signed an executive order under the Railway Labor Act forcing the strikers back to work. And when it comes to basic democratic rights, the Obama administration has managed to come out to the right of the utterly reactionary Supreme Court, which recently ruled against the government by banning warrantless searches of cell phones.

For Class-Struggle Leadership!

Today under unrelenting ruling-class attack, the gains achieved by unionized public workers were wrested through often fierce battles against the government. The Abood decision itself came near the end of a wave of organizing drives among public-sector workers during the 1970s.

American society, which had been polarized by the struggle for black rights and the counterrevolutionary U.S. war against Vietnam, experienced a rise in union struggles, fueled by the rapid erosion of wages due to inflation caused by the war. As part of a dramatic rise in rank-and-file militancy, the New York City branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers walked out in March 1970. This action was not only in defiance of their national leadership but also the law, which banned postal workers, like all federal workers, from striking. President Richard Nixon declared a national emergency and ordered 23,000 troops to occupy the post offices in New York.

But the wildcat strike spread throughout the country, mostly against the will of the union leadership. With young and black militants taking the lead, over 210,000 postal workers defied back-to-work court injunctions in the largest strike ever against the U.S. government. The Post Office was forced to concede wage increases and collective bargaining rights, with no reprisals. The postal wildcat helped spur the rapid growth of public-sector unions. However, strikes by federal workers remain banned, and union officials increasingly hide behind federal and state anti-strike laws, often including the threat of big fines and jail time for union leaders, as an excuse for shelving the strike weapon.

The potential of the Harris case to destroy the agency shop was characterized by AFSCME’s general counsel, Bill Lurye, as “an attempted kill shot aimed at public-sector unions.” If anything like this comes to pass, it will be due in no small part to the class collaborationism of the union misleaders, which has undermined labor as a fighting force and, consequently, eroded elementary union consciousness. After collective bargaining was abolished for state workers in Indiana, union membership plummeted by 90 percent. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation caused AFSCME’s revenues to drop 60 percent. Smelling blood, anti-labor forces are determined to challenge the very existence of unions, including by cutting the flow of funds.

Over the years, efforts by workers to win even the modest right to organize collectively have been met with vicious retaliation, from firings and arrests to murderous violence. It will take determined struggle to beat back the capitalist rulers’ war against labor. For the unions to effectively fight in the interests of workers, they must be freed from the shackles binding them to the Democratic Party and the capitalist state. This requires forging a new labor leadership based on the understanding that the interests of the working class are counterposed to those of the capitalist exploiters. The working class needs its own party, independent from and opposed to the Democratic and Republican parties of capitalist rule. For a workers party to fight for a workers America!

All U.S. Troops and Mercenaries Out Of Iraq Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

Iraq in Flames: Legacy of U.S. Occupation

All U.S. Forces Out Now!

 

JULY 6—As the fundamentalist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) extends its hold over vast stretches of western and northwestern Iraq, Barack Obama has ordered hundreds of U.S. forces back into that country. Since the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of the ISIS offensive in early June, the U.S. president has in three separate deployments mobilized a total of 775 troops, backed up by Apache attack helicopters and unmanned aircraft. Additional warships, including the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, were also dispatched to the Persian Gulf. Faced with strong public opposition to sending troops back into Iraq, Obama engaged in word games, calling the troops “advisers” who “will not be returning to combat” while at the same time evoking possible air strikes.

Washington is putting itself in a position to intervene militarily on the side of the Iraqi government in a communal civil war pitting the Shi’ite-dominated regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency that encompasses ISIS, tribal leaders and former B’ath Party officials. The infernal cycle of bloodletting is resulting in the effective breakup of the country, with the Shi’ites in control of the capital and southern Iraq. After Baghdad’s army abandoned Kirkuk amid the ISIS advance last month, Kurdish pesh merga military forces seized that hotly contested, oil-rich city. And Kurdish leaders have taken steps to further consolidate the autonomous Kurdish region in the north.

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

In a repeat of scenes from the U.S. occupation, since the beginning of this year more than one million Iraqis have been driven from their homes, victims of atrocities committed by both sides in this communal slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in the western Anbar province have fled the shelling and bombing of residential neighborhoods by the regime of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. In Baghdad, where tens of thousands died during the 2006-2007 explosion of Shi’ite-Sunni slaughter set off by the U.S. occupation, Shi’ite militias are again targeting the city’s remaining Sunni neighborhoods. Meanwhile, ISIS fighters overrunning Shi’ite villages in northern Iraq have carried out mass killings of the population, including women and children. The Christian population in northern Iraq, the remnant of a once substantial community, is fleeing by the thousands as ISIS bombards their villages.

The wave of communal bloodletting in Iraq was nourished by the devastating civil war in Syria, where sundry imperialist and regional powers have backed an insurgency dominated by reactionary forces, centrally from the majority Sunni Muslim population, directed against the murderous Ba’ath Party regime of Bashar al-Assad. Sunni fundamentalists, bolstered by support from U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states as well as Turkey, have increasingly dominated the revolt against Assad. In January, ISIS expanded its operations from Syria into Iraq in support of a rebellion launched by Sunni tribal leaders against Maliki in Falluja and Ramadi, Anbar province’s two largest cities. Harking back to the formation of Islamic states starting in the seventh century, ISIS celebrated its recent gains by proclaiming a “caliphate” extending from its bastion in northern Syria across the extensive tracts that it controls in Iraq.

The U.S. campaign to topple Assad has been driven in no small part by Washington’s longstanding hostility toward Iran, a key ally of Syria. Yet by installing a Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad, the U.S. occupiers ended up handing Iran great influence in Iraq. With the backing of Tehran, Maliki has turned a deaf ear to pleas from Washington that he cede power to a more “inclusive” government coalition. Nonetheless, across Syria’s increasingly meaningless border with Iraq, the U.S. finds itself supporting the same side as Damascus and Tehran. As ISIS forces approached Baghdad, Iran rushed daily arms shipments to the Maliki regime and deployed Revolutionary Guard forces to join the fight, while Syrian jets have bombed Sunni positions inside Iraq.

The civil wars in Syria and Iraq are hot spots in a years-long regional conflagration that threatens to keep widening, with ISIS vowing to extend its military operations into Lebanon and Jordan. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged support to Jordan if ISIS crossed into that country. Iran has massed troops on the Iran-Iraq border. Even Saudi Arabia deployed 30,000 troops to its border with Iraq, concerned that the caliphate declared by the Frankenstein’s monster that it helped create might find support among the tribes in its northern region, which have links to the areas of Syria and Iraq now controlled by ISIS.

The large-scale, ongoing bloodshed in the Near East, and the promise of more, has the bourgeois media in the U.S. pointing the finger at Islam’s centuries-old sectarian rifts. In reality, the main culprit is the history of imperialist divide and rule of Iraq and the rest of the region by the European powers and more recently the U.S. As we wrote at the time, the U.S. occupation threatened “the trisection of Iraq into Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish sectors, with battles to come over the possession of its oil wealth” (WV No. 882, 8 December 2006). With U.S. forces today still in Afghanistan, which is now considered the longest war in U.S. history, Washington is threatening to renew imperialist depredations in Iraq.

In opposition to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have repeatedly stressed the need for class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers at home in defense of those neocolonial countries. Our revolutionary perspective stands in stark contrast to that of the reformist left. These self-styled socialists aspired to build liberal antiwar coalitions designed to appeal to Democratic Party politicians who saw the Iraq quagmire as a losing proposition for U.S. imperialism. As such, the various coalitions refused to take a side in defense of Iraq and Afghanistan against imperialist attack and beat the drums for “Anybody but Bush!”

Democrats and Republicans may differ over which tactics are most effective in pursuing the interests of U.S. imperialism, but they are both bourgeois parties that defend the interests of the capitalist ruling class. The nightmare inflicted on the Iraqi peoples was a hallmark of successive administrations under both parties: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. As Hillary Clinton gears up for a possible 2016 presidential run, she has embraced neoconservatives like Robert Kagan who were instrumental in selling the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

By sowing the illusion that Democrats in office can be pressured to carry out a humanitarian foreign policy, the reformists act to retard the political consciousness of workers and radical-minded youth. The truth is that military depredations are part of the “normal” workings of imperialism, the profit-driven capitalist system in its epoch of decay in which the advanced industrial powers compete globally for control of markets, raw materials and access to cheap labor. As the leading capitalist power, the U.S. will persist in its efforts to dominate the Near East and act as the world’s “top cop.”

The ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad are reflected domestically in grinding poverty, racial oppression and intensified exploitation of labor by capital. The U.S. working class must be won to the understanding that it has the social power and interest to eradicate capitalist imperialism and the wars this system breeds. What is necessary is the forging of a revolutionary workers party that fights to overthrow the capitalist system through socialist revolution.

Bitter Fruit of Imperialist Divide and Rule

Once one of the more advanced countries in the Near East and a regional cultural center, Iraq was laid waste by over a decade of U.S.-dictated starvation sanctions, two devastating wars and the eight-year military occupation of that country. The arrogant American ruling class viewed its military superiority as a guarantee that it could defeat any conceivable enemy at any time. All that was needed to put Iraq directly under its thumb was enough firepower deployed with sufficient savagery. The U.S. and allied powers unleashed mass murder, indiscriminate terror and torture on a scale far exceeding that employed by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman they replaced. To buttress their rule, the U.S. imperialists systematically played off sectors of the Iraqi population against each other, playing divide and rule.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. occupiers moved quickly to purge former members of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from government jobs. That act largely removed Sunnis from the state administration and helped trigger a communal-based Sunni rebellion. The U.S. mobilized Shi’ite militias and the Kurdish pesh merga to help crush Sunni Arab insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as that city was leveled. Following elections in 2005, a communal-based system of power sharing was set up along the lines of the confessional arrangement in Lebanon. Under this unwritten agreement, the Iraqi prime minister is a Shi’ite, the largely ceremonial president is a Kurd, and the speaker of parliament is a Sunni. This served as a template for setting up puppet governments dominated by Shi’ite—and to a lesser extent Kurdish—parties at the expense of the minority Sunni Arabs.

In 2006, the U.S. occupation authorities installed Maliki as their quisling prime minister (and in 2010 would again support his bid for the office). He oversaw a wave of anti-Sunni terror carried out by the overwhelmingly Shi’ite army and police backed up by Shi’ite death squads. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in December 2011, the ongoing communal conflict that had been fostered under the occupation again escalated. Moves by Maliki against prominent Sunni political figures touched off widespread Sunni protests. In April 2013, government troops attacked a protest encampment in the northern city of Hawija, killing at least 44 people. Thousands of Sunni and Shi’ite civilians perished in the slaughter that followed. In January, Maliki’s troops launched an artillery onslaught against Falluja and Ramadi. The Sunni tribal chiefs, who during George W. Bush’s famous 2007 troop “surge” had sided with the U.S. against Al Qaeda, welcomed back those same fundamentalist forces, now based in Syria.

No longer an Al Qaeda affiliate, ISIS (which recently renamed itself the Islamic State) has posted a video on its website titled End of Sykes-Picot. This is a reference to the secret agreement by which Britain and France toward the end of World War I agreed to divide up the spoils of their impending victory over the Ottoman Empire. For the reactionaries of ISIS, the destruction of that Turkish empire marked the end of the last caliphate, a world to which they aspire to return. In fact, the colonial division of the Ottoman Empire, out of which Iraq issued, retains significance today precisely because it set the stage for the reactionary communal conflagration that is erupting across the Near East. In turn, the deepening sectarian bloodshed in Iraq underlines the fact that it is not a nation but rather a patchwork of different peoples and ethnicities—primarily Shi’ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

From the mid-19th century start of their direct intervention in the Levant region, the European powers set various nationalities, ethnic groups and sects against each other. France sought to profit from its amitié traditionnelle with the Christian Maronites, who originated in Syria in a seventh-century split from the Eastern church of Byzantium. The British posed as the benefactors of the Druze, a tenth-century offshoot of Shi’ism, and tsarist Russia extended protection to the Orthodox Christians. In 1860, a massive civil war between Maronites and Druze was sparked by a Maronite peasant rebellion in which the feudal estates were seized, the land distributed and a peasant commonwealth proclaimed. On the eve of French military intervention into that war, Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune (11 August 1860):

“The conspirators of Petersburg and Paris had, however, in case their temptations of Prussia should fail, kept in reserve the thrilling incident of the Syrian massacres, to be followed by a French intervention which...would open the back door of a general European war. In respect to England I will only add, that, in 1841 Lord Palmerston furnished the Druses with the arms they kept ever since, and that, in 1846, by a convention with the Czar Nicholas, he abolished, in point of fact, the Turkish sway that curbed the wild tribes of the Lebanon, and stipulated for them a quasi-independence which, in the run of time, and under the proper management of foreign plotters, could only beget a harvest of blood.”

Later, the “conspirators of Petersburg and Paris” combined with the British to carve up the Levant, as well as the rest of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, in the 1916 Skyes-Picot treaty. France took Syria (including modern Lebanon) for itself while Britain acquired Jordan and Palestine—all against the wishes of their inhabitants. The publication of the treaty by the newly established Soviet workers state in late 1917 exposed the imperialist intrigues and had an electrifying effect, helping to spark a series of national revolts and popular uprisings across the region.

In the French share of the dismembered Ottoman Empire, Paris created a “Greater Lebanon” by incorporating large Muslim areas together with traditional Maronite strongholds in the Mount Lebanon range. As a result, the Maronites and other, less numerous, Christian sects slightly outnumbered and dominated Muslims. In Syria, the imperialists promoted the Alawites to lord it over the predominantly Sunni Muslim population (see “Syrian Civil War: Legacy of Imperialist Divide-and-Rule,” WV No. 1009, 28 September 2012).

The Kurds were also promised their own state, albeit a truncated one, in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. But they never got even that deformed expression of national self-determination. By 1920, it was becoming clear that the former Ottoman vilayet (province) of Mosul, which had been assigned to France under the Sykes-Picot treaty, had much more oil than was originally thought. So Britain decided to keep southern Kurdistan by incorporating it into a newly created country called Iraq, which itself basically corresponded to the concessions of the British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company. The state functionaries and military officers of the majority Shi’ite country set up by the British colonialists were exclusively Sunni.

In 1919, the Kurds in northern Iraq rose in revolt against the British overseers. The British brutally crushed the rebellion. The following year, the Shi’ites of southern Iraq rebelled, killing or wounding some 2,500 troops deployed by the British before the revolt was drowned in blood. Anticipating by almost 70 years Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds, Winston Churchill, at the time British war secretary, clamored for dropping mustard gas bombs on the Iraqi rebels. It was decided instead to bombard them with poison-gas artillery shells.

Lessons of 1958 Iraqi Revolution

It is a sign of despair that the most prominent voices in the Near East calling to undo Sykes-Picot today are religious bigots who aim to crush those who do not worship their preferred deity in their prescribed way. That has not always been the case, and it will not remain so indefinitely.

We base ourselves programmatically on the experience of V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party that led the 1917 Russian Revolution, which had an enormous impact on the Near East. But well before mass Communist parties (CPs) were able to take root in the area, a conservative bureaucratic caste under Stalin had usurped political power in the Soviet workers state. This ruling bureaucracy repudiated the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution in favor of “building socialism in one country” and its corollary, “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. In the Near East as elsewhere in the colonial world, this outlook was expressed in the espousal of “two-stage revolution,” which meant support to a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie while indefinitely postponing the proletarian revolution.

Nonetheless, the large Stalinist Communist parties that emerged in the mid 1930s and ’40s in many Arab countries attracted the most class-conscious workers and radical intellectuals. Typically, these CPs were either founded by or based heavily on minorities. The various Egyptian communist groups were all formed by Egyptian Jews. The Iraqi CP had Kurds and Jews in its leadership (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000).

There is a rich tradition of working-class struggle in the Near East, whose highest point was the Iraqi revolution of 1958. That revolution was touched off by the overthrow of the monarchy by left-nationalist officers on Bastille Day 1958. The whole country rose up. As workers staged massive demonstrations in the cities, some numbering a million people, peasants staged insurrections throughout the countryside, killing landlords and seizing the land. The Iraqi CP had the overwhelming support of the multinational working class. It also had broad support among other layers of the population, including within the army and even some sections of the officer corps. It is clear that the Iraqi CP could have taken power. The U.S. sent the Marines into Lebanon to be ready for a possible invasion of Iraq. Socialist revolution was on the agenda.

Isaac Deutscher, the historian and biographer of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, wrote: “Most western observers on the spot agreed that Kassem [the nationalist in power who had the Iraqi CP’s support] could hardly hold his ground against an all-out communist offensive.” But in the interests of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S., the Soviet bureaucracy sold out the revolution, ordering the Iraqi CP to stand down. And under the sway of the program of “two-stage revolution,” the Iraqi CP went along, putting the brakes on the movement.

While riding the crest of the revolutionary wave, the CP continued to subordinate itself to the left-nationalist officer Kassem in a supposedly “anti-imperialist” revolution. Of course, the promised second stage of socialist revolution never came. Instead, Kassem turned on the CP. In 1963, the reactionary, nationalist Ba’ath party, which included Saddam Hussein (who was not yet a national leader), came to power and carried out a bloodbath of thousands of leftist workers using lists supplied by the CIA.

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

The Iraqi revolution held out enormous historic possibilities for workers of the Near East and for oppressed peoples like the Kurds. Today, spread across four countries—Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran—the people of Kurdistan still constitute the largest nation by area without a state. When Iraqi Kurdish leaders recently announced plans for a referendum on independence from Baghdad, the Obama administration let them know, in no uncertain terms, that Kurdish independence is not on Washington’s agenda.

The history of the Kurdish people’s national struggle is a litany of betrayals by their nationalist leaders, who systematically sought to gain advantage by currying favor with sundry capitalist powers. A case in point was provided by the Kurdish leaders in Iraq who actively collaborated with the 2003 U.S. invasion, offering their pesh merga as an auxiliary to U.S. military forces. The Kurdish masses must look to an alliance with the Arab, Persian and Turkish proletariat—which in turn must be won to championing Kurdish self-determination—in a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalist rule in the four countries that oppress them and establish a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan. (See “The Kurdish People and the U.S. Occupation of Iraq,” WV Nos. 804 and 805, 23 May and 6 June 2003.)

Iraq today is a shattered society. The future of the Iraqi masses as a whole is dependent on working-class struggle in nearby countries with strategic concentrations of proletarian power. We have no illusions that it will be an easy task to win workers of the Near East, ground down by their capitalist rulers and imperialist overlords, to the Marxist program of proletarian revolution. But there will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of shattering the capitalist order. That requires the forging of revolutionary working-class parties in opposition to all forms of bourgeois ideology, religious reaction and imperialism, as part of a genuine Trotskyist Fourth International, which would link the fight for a socialist federation of the Near East to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers.