Sunday, September 14, 2014

From The Front Lines Of The Social Struggle-Ferguson, Missouri   



Workers Vanguard No. 1051
5 September 2014
 
Spartacist Leaflet, August 20
Cops, National Guard Out Now!
Ferguson: The Real Face of Racist Capitalist America
 
Every cop in America knows that a badge is a license to kill black people. Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, was executed by a white cop in broad daylight for the “crime” of walking in the street after being told to move onto the sidewalk. Shot six times, including twice in the head, he was left exposed in the street for hours, his lifeless body treated with less respect than a stray dog. As always, the police have since tried to tarnish the victim as the criminal. Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the formal abolition of Jim Crow segregation, this is what it still means to be black in America.
Ferguson, Missouri, is at a flash point. Tired of being told to “get to the back of the bus”—that is, shut up, get out of the street and get home before curfew—protesters have come out in defiant opposition to cop terror and racist injustice, which are inherent in this capitalist system. In this majority black St. Louis suburb, protesters continue to brave an army of mostly white cops firing tear gas, wooden and rubber bullets and stun grenades. One uniformed police thug was caught on video screaming: “Bring it, all you fucking animals!” Now Ferguson is up against a deployment of National Guardsmen, an army of occupation. We demand: Cops, National Guard out now! Free the arrested protesters and drop all charges now!
The National Guard are the reserve Army troops used to put down labor, black people and leftists who dare challenge the powers that be, from defending segregation in Little Rock in 1957 and smashing the 1965 Watts uprising to mobilizing against striking Teamsters in Ohio and killing Vietnam antiwar student protesters at Kent State in 1970. The police, who have always used every means at their disposal to enforce capitalist “law and order,” in recent years have gotten their hands on war matériel left over from U.S. imperialism’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The same U.S. ruling class that wreaks terror on its neocolonial victims abroad also brutally grinds down the working class, black masses and immigrants at home. The message is: submit or else.
Aghast at the scenes of armored vehicles and cops pointing M-16 assault rifles at residents in the Ferguson war zone (where journalists have been among those treated like enemies, tear-gassed and arrested), liberals complain about “excessive” force. And with more farsighted elements in the government expressing concern that their own guard dogs had slipped the leash, a black highway patrol officer and local resident was put in charge to pacify the crowds. But it makes no difference whether the cops are black, white or Latino, local, state or federal—they serve and protect a system built on a bedrock of racist oppression, from chattel slavery to wage slavery. The job of all police is to protect capitalist property and the rule of the few who profit from the exploitation of the many.
What occurred in Ferguson is no aberration. The proliferation of SWAT teams, the cop occupations of barrios and ghettos across America and the mass incarceration fueled by the “war on drugs” have for decades been part of daily life for black people. Over the same period, the capitalists increasingly deindustrialized the economy, abandoning the auto and steel plants that used to provide jobs, further sealing in the desperation of the ghetto wastelands. In their drive for profit, they have driven society to ruin and made everyone else pay for it. With no jobs on offer for working-class and minority youth, the capitalists don’t see much need to spend money on educating them, much less on providing any social programs. What is on offer is unbridled state repression.
Defying the odds, Michael Brown managed to stay outside the maw of the prison system, graduated from high school and was about to start college. His mother spoke the bitter truth: “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. ‘They’re going to try to take me out anyway’.” This U.S. racist hellhole consigned Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant and countless others to a similar fate.
Echoing racist Southern sheriffs who denounced Northern freedom riders, the government and bourgeois media mouth off about “outside agitators” in Ferguson. Meanwhile, from Obama’s White House on down, black Democrats and preachers keep telling protesters to simmer down, stay away from the “lawless elements” and get on home. This time around, many protesters aren’t going for it.
The killing of Michael Brown hit a nerve among those who are unwilling to silently witness one more cop killing of a black person. They are fed up with the empty promises of “hope” and “change,” fed up with the paternalistic advice to pull up their pants and their bootstraps, fed up with being blamed for the ills of society, fed up with the illusion of equality wrapped around the core reality of systematic racist oppression. One Howard University student remarked: “This issue is about the fact that this country is not post-racial, this country is not just, this country is not free.”
The authorities want to herd the mass outrage back into the ballot box, while Democratic Party politico Al Sharpton chimes in to scold Ferguson residents for low voter turnout. There should be no illusions in the Democrats or the federal government, which oversees this rotten system that the cops “serve and protect.” The notion that the Feds will rein in racist local law enforcement is a lie. FBI agents have been embedded in the Ku Klux Klan and involved in heinous crimes, such as the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the 1979 Greensboro massacre of leftists and union organizers. With many in Ferguson seeking redress from a Department of Justice investigation, we warn that Attorney General Eric Holder & Co. are the top cops who step in to get people off the streets with the promise that justice may come in the sweet by-and-by, at best enacting cosmetic reforms.
The spontaneous displays of anger by the working people and dispossessed in Ferguson are justified and essential. But unless the labor movement actively mobilizes in defense of the oppressed, such atomized outbursts will remain powerless against the capitalists and their repressive forces, leading to more despair. Significantly, some unions in New York City are calling their members into the street to join an August 23 protest in solidarity with victims of police brutality, like Eric Garner, killed by the cops last month. But Sharpton’s purpose in organizing this protest is to push for federal intervention to bring “justice.”
Organized labor’s most powerful weapons—its numbers, multiracial composition and capacity to halt the wheels of production-for-profit—are squandered by union tops who politically chain workers to the class enemy. The labor misleaders are slavishly loyal to the Democratic Party and push the lie that the government can be pressured to promote the interests of workers and the poor. The same capitalist state that terrorizes black people will go after the working class when it engages in militant struggle. Labor rights and black rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. For labor to flex its muscle in defense of itself and all the oppressed, a new, class-struggle leadership must be forged that doesn’t play by the bosses’ rules.
We do not suggest that this will be an easy road, particularly when the labor movement has been losing a one-sided class war waged by the bosses. But it is the only way forward. There will be no black liberation in this society short of a socialist revolution that breaks the shackles of racist American capitalism. And there will be no socialist revolution that does not emblazon the fight for black freedom on its banners.
Missouri was a slave state, and Ferguson lies just north of heavily segregated St. Louis. In 1857, the infamous Dred Scott decision that a black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” sanctioned the reach of the Southern slaveowners into the North. The grave of the former slave Dred Scott on West Florissant Avenue is just a few miles down from where the Ferguson protests have riveted world attention.
It took a Civil War, the second American revolution, to smash the slave system. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed by an alliance of Northern capital with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of black freedmen. It will take a third American revolution, a proletarian socialist revolution, to finish the Civil War, eradicate racist capitalist oppression and establish an egalitarian socialist society. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building the multiracial revolutionary workers party that is necessary to achieve this purpose.
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From The Front Lines Of The Social Struggle-Ferguson, Missouri   


Workers Vanguard No. 1051
5 September 2014
 
Ferguson: The Real Face of Racist Capitalist America
Break with the Democrats!
Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!
 
The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by cop Darren Wilson on August 9 was met with demonstrations of anger in cities across the country. The utter racist contempt in which the cops hold black people was evident to everyone who saw the events in Ferguson. Everything the cops did was a calculated provocation. The young man’s body was left to lie in the hot sun for hours, not unlike the bodies of lynching victims left to hang from trees. When Brown’s friends and family left flowers and candles at the spot where he was killed, the cops tried to drive mourners away. One cop let his dog piss on the makeshift memorial, which police vehicles later drove over.
When people took to the town streets in protest, cops pointed guns in their faces and fired volleys of tear gas and wooden and rubber bullets. Hundreds of people from the broader St. Louis area and across the country piled in to Ferguson to express their outrage and their solidarity with the besieged community. Imposing a curfew and whipping up hysteria over “outside agitators” allowed the police to further ramp up the repression. Over 200 were arrested, most for failing to disperse, and many were injured. Meanwhile, Brown’s killer remains suspended with pay, i.e., on a paid vacation.
“It’s either stand up or die.” This statement by one protester gave voice to the fury over the daily reality of cop terror faced especially by black people in racist capitalist America. Just the most recent victims of police killings include: Eric Garner, killed by a police choke hold in Staten Island on July 17; John Crawford, gunned down on August 5 in an Ohio Wal-Mart because he was holding an air gun he had picked up off a shelf; Ezell Ford, shot dead by the LAPD on August 11 while complying with police instructions to lie on the ground; Dillon Delbert Taylor, an unarmed 20-year-old white man, gunned down by a Salt Lake City cop on the same day; Kajieme Powell, a mentally disturbed black man killed by St. Louis cops in a hail of a dozen bullets on August 19. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement produced a report last year listing 313 black people killed in 2012 by cops, security guards or vigilantes like George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin. That works out to one life snuffed out every 28 hours.
Reporters from Workers Vanguard attended an August 22 press conference in St. Louis, where young activists who had been participating in the Ferguson protests spoke of their bitter experiences with the cops, something shared by black youth throughout the country. If you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will be pulled over by the police and forced to “play Twister” on the hood of the car. You can be arrested or given a ticket for not showing your license or insurance fast enough. You can get hit with a warrant for outstanding tickets you never knew about.
Beneath the raw, bleeding abscess of police brutality, there is the slower destruction of the lives of black youth caused by capitalist economic decay. Having let industry rot while waging a one-sided class war against unions, the ruling class deems much of the black population to be surplus, no longer even needed as the “last hired, first fired.” If not gunned down in the streets, many are hauled off to prison. This mass incarceration is largely the result of the “war on drugs,” which Jesse Jackson and other black Democrats once fervently pushed.
The systematic oppression of black people, rooted in the economic foundations of American capitalism, is a legacy of slavery and the defeat of Reconstruction that followed the smashing of slavery in the Civil War. After the Great Migration that began during World War I, millions of black workers were integrated into the industrial economy in the Northern cities. However, the black population remained forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, constituting a race-color caste.
Despite widespread deindustrialization in recent decades, concentrations of organized labor, including a significant component of black workers, do exist. Those workers embody the possibility of fusing the power of labor with the anger of the dispossessed black masses. This requires breaking labor’s political chains to the capitalist Democratic Party, whose representatives came to Ferguson to douse the fires by urging a turn to the ballot box and preaching various empty “police reform” schemes.
The working class is the only force with the social power and class interest to do away with this rotten capitalist system and its racist police guard dogs. Because it is ingrained in the capitalist economy and every social institution in this country, racial oppression cannot be smashed without a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. In turn, the fight for black freedom must be emblazoned on labor’s banner if the working class is ever going to emancipate itself.
Democrats Move In
Working to defuse the situation in Ferguson, Barack Obama promised that Attorney General Eric Holder would head up an investigation into Michael Brown’s death. One young speaker at the August 22 press conference observed that the black president and attorney general only took notice of Ferguson after hearing about “the looting and the rioting.” Many who participated in the protests hope the federal investigation will be more than a whitewash, but also know that’s likely what it’s going to be. In fact, the whole purpose of any investigation is to refurbish the illusion that the capitalist government gives a damn about black people.
Earlier, black Democratic Party politicos like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had arrived in Ferguson to put a lid on the protests. Sharpton, the featured speaker at Michael Brown’s funeral, used his sermon to attack the protesters and black youth in general. Bellowing, “we are not anti-police, we respect police,” Sharpton blamed black people for their own oppression, with bigoted claptrap about not being “a gangster or a thug” or engaging in “ghetto pity parties”!
Protesters from Ferguson made clear that they were fed up with being treated like animals by the lily-white police force and city administration. A “solution” Sharpton favors is hiring more black cops—as has been done in many cities in order to improve the effectiveness of the police in repressing the black population. So the authorities brought in black Missouri highway patrol captain Ron Johnson to be the “good cop.” But after hugging protesters and retailing anecdotes about his own son with tattoos and sagging pants, he enforced the city curfew and set the scene for the arrival of the National Guard.
Not everyone is buying the snake oil from Sharpton. But the same bourgeois reform politics have been served up by others in a different guise. One of the groups organizing black youth around the protests in the St. Louis area was the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS). While the OBS pays lip service to “the creation of a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression,” its activity has centered on appeals to the White House to conduct a thorough investigation of the local police. Such pressure politics end up channeling black anger right back into the fold of the Democratic Party.
Another group active in the Ferguson protests was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), whose members posture as more militant and were gone after by the cops. But the August 18 statement issued by the RCP neatly illustrates the contradiction between their anti-system verbiage and the actual content of their demands. It declaims: “We stand with the angry ones, the rebellious ones, the ones who will not take it.” Fine, but what do they propose? The RCP writes that Darren Wilson, “this murdering pig, must be charged and taken into custody. NOW!”
So the “revolutionary” RCP is fighting for...a good prosecutor to get rid of the bad cop! With this rehash of what Sharpton has to say about “bad apples” on the police force, the RCP sows dangerous illusions in the armed bodies at the core of the capitalist state. The truth is that murderous brutality is inherent to the job of the cops, which is to defend the ruling class by suppressing workers, blacks, immigrants and all other victims of capitalism’s ravages. And with greater social inequality that violence is all the more pronounced.
In Ferguson, police trained laser sights on activists and rolled out heavy hardware to intimidate protesters. As local musician Tef Poe put it: “I never imagined that a neighborhood I drove up and down as a teenager would resemble Gaza.” And in fact, the display of military-grade equipment presented the government with an image problem.
An article in the London Economist (23 August) set out the view that “smarter policing” would make “rioting” less likely. It continued: “A Pentagon programme that gives surplus military hardware to local law-enforcement agencies can make them seem like occupying armies rather than public servants. That is both costly and counterproductive.” Even this organ of finance capital recognizes that there is something irrational in such an arrangement. So now Commander-in-Chief Obama piously laments the blurring of the lines between “our military and our local law enforcement,” undoubtedly with the midterm elections in mind.
Many liberal reformers are demanding an end to the Pentagon program providing weaponry to the cops, instead preferring old-school police methods. Let’s be clear: the cops didn’t need special weapons to kill Michael Brown, just as the NYPD didn’t need any when they choked Eric Garner to death. As it happens, the Ferguson police department purchased its assault rifles and other weapons without recourse to the Pentagon program. The bourgeoisie will always ensure that its hired guns get what they need to crush “unrest,” including backup from the National Guard and ultimately the Army if necessary. The cops have acted and will act like an army of occupation in minority and poor communities, until workers seize power and sweep away the entire apparatus of the capitalist state.
Labor Must Fight Racial Oppression
The St. Louis area is a crossroads between North and South. Majority black Ferguson is one of a myriad of suburban hamlets a few miles from downtown St. Louis. Whites and more middle-class blacks live on its west side, while the population of the east side is more black and working-class, all ruled over by a white local government.
Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers, and many trade unionists participated in the Ferguson protests as individuals. The St. Louis Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and SEIU health care workers marched with union banners. However, these contingents were mobilized in lockstep with the Democrats and preachers who sought to divert protest into avenues acceptable to the capitalist rulers.
This country’s history has shown over and over again that the struggles of black people and labor go forward together or fall back separately. This was illustrated in the building of the industrial unions in the 1930s. To overcome the crippling ethnic and craft divisions among workers and the exclusion of most unskilled workers from the unions, it was necessary to wage war against the color bar. Trotskyists, Communists and other reds led several of the key class battles that forged the CIO industrial unions (see “Then and Now,” page 6). As part of the CIO organizing drive, thousands of workers in St. Louis joined the UE electrical workers union. In 1937, a 53-day sitdown strike at Emerson Electric was victorious, sparking strikes involving black and white workers at several other factories. These strikes drew on multiracial support from the broader community, including a campaign that forced the St. Louis relief board to pay relief (welfare) to the strikers.
The notion of workers collectively engaging in hard struggle in their own interests, much less in those of the black masses, may come off as fantastical today. Responsibility for this lies mainly with the conservative bureaucrats atop the labor movement, who have sapped workers’ fighting spirit by allowing the unions to be eviscerated while barely lifting a finger in defense of minorities. The whole perspective of the labor tops is predicated on the lie that the working class and the owners of industry share a common interest in the profitability of American capitalism. By refusing to actively fight against anti-black racism, repression and anti-immigrant bigotry, labor misleaders have criminally aided the rulers in weakening and dividing the working class. With a class-struggle leadership, the unions could become battalions of labor, fighting for jobs for all and against every manifestation of oppression.
The Fight for Black Liberation
Liberals and Democratic politicians are fond of urging young people today to take the path of the 1950s-’60s civil rights movement, by which they mean respect for bourgeois law and its enforcers and the strategy of operating within the system, especially through the ballot box. The black middle-class leadership of the civil rights movement, epitomized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., subordinated the fight for black rights to Democratic Party liberalism. The mass struggles succeeded in dismantling the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and passing voting rights legislation (today under steady attack). The smug racist and anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s was broken down, and the door opened for the protests against the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam.
But in the North, the liberal formula for equal rights under the law provided no answers to the miserable conditions of black life entrenched in American capitalist society: joblessness, crumbling homes, overcrowded schools, racist cop terror, etc. Following the elemental ghetto rebellions that exploded in the 1960s, a slew of black mayors and other officeholders were elected in order to more effectively enforce poverty and repression. The upheavals also convinced the rulers to fund more social programs to pacify the ghettos, before going on to slash such programs in subsequent decades.
Today, those who aspire to be new liberal civil rights leaders have no better answers than their forebears. Special prosecutors, police review boards, investigations by Holder, a “review” by Obama of police weaponry and training are all about cleaning up the image of U.S. capitalism’s racist machinery of repression. The Democrats only want to mobilize black people as voting cattle for the umpteenth time. Tellingly, the NAACP has announced a door-to-door voter registration campaign, with the macabre slogan: “Mike Brown Can’t Vote, But I Can.”
The Democratic Party is a political vehicle for the tiny elite that profits from the exploitation of workers and lords over the oppression of blacks. What is required is a new party based on the needs of working people, a revolutionary workers party. Fighting to build such a party, our organization stands on the program of revolutionary integrationism, which means combating all aspects of racial oppression as part of the fight for an egalitarian socialist order—the only way to achieve real equality. For black liberation through socialist revolution!
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UFPJ Urgent UPDATE: Bombing Iraq and Syria – A Delusion, Not A Solution




 

 
President Obama may prefer the term “counter-terrorism,” but it is clear from last night’s speech that he is taking the United States into another war.
 
His long-term plan for bombing Iraq and Syria, for placing U.S. troops on the ground as “trainers,” and for assistance to allied fighters, is opening another tragic chapter in the failed “war on terrorism,” initiated by President Bush and rejected by the voters in 2008.  
 
We deplore the brutality and violence of ISIS, but we do not believe that U.S. air strikes will solve the problem, even if there are short-term military gains. Despite the President’s many references to “a coalition,” in reality the United States will be intervening unilaterally in two civil wars, each of which has multiple factions and complex roots.
 
Time to learn from experience:
 
The U.S. invasion of Iraq tore the lid off of a Pandora’s box that has wreaked havoc with the lives of millions of people over the past dozen years. It is that invasion, which gave rise to ISIS and “terrorism,” in places where it had not existed.
 
U.S. air-strikes –whether in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan or Afghanistan- have never had the precision that is claimed. Thousands of civilians have been killed, with the result that America’s enemies multiplied.  
 
The “new strategy” the President just unveiled isn’t new. It was tried by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan, where it failed, creating a Washington demand for tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops. These troops have added to the instability of the country, while failing to defeat the Taliban.
 
We believe there are better choices:
 
*Make diplomacy and humanitarian assistance the priority
*Seek improved relations with Iran to end the fighting in the region
*Work through United Nations to halt the flow of financing and weapons to ISIS
*Re-start UN-directed negotiations to end the civil war in Syria
*Mobilize to solve the real problems in the region- poverty, hunger, drought, joblessness
 
Our Voices are Needed Now…The White House and Members of Congress are Paying Close Attention to Public Opinion.
 
  Call the White House
  Comments: 202.456.1111; Switchboard: 202-456-1414
 
Call your Senators and Congressional Representatives
Capitol Switchboard: 202- 224-3121
 
Let them know, you strongly oppose perpetual war in the Middle East. Emphasize that U.S. bombing of two countries will bring more suffering and violence, and that there is no realistic alternative to diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
 
Ask your member of Congress to speak out now in opposition to US military intervention in Iraq and Syria.
 
Please make a donation to UFPJ so that we can continue to keep our member groups and dedicated activists linked together for effective action and impact.
Help us continue to do this critical work: Make a donation to UFPJ today.
UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org

To subscribe, visit www.unitedforpeace.org/email
 
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Large Majority of Americans Lack Confidence in Obama Mission to Destroy ISIS, Poll Shows...

As Obama Beats The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- No Intervention In Syria! Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!  Stop The Bombings! –Stop The Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, orders more air bombing strikes in the north, sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq

***

Here is something to think about:  

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.





Large Majority of Americans Lack Confidence in Obama Mission to Destroy ISIS, Poll Shows



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“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938

 


 
Markin comment (repost from September 2010 slightly edited):

Several years ago, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call issued during the presidency of the late Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must have been something in the air at the time (maybe caused by these global climatic changes that are hazarding our collective future) because I had  also seen a spade of then recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looked very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course in the 21st century, after over one hundred and fifty years of attempts to create adequate international working-class organizations, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) was appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward. 
 **************

Founding Conference of the

Fourth International

1938

On The Greek Question

On the basis of the December 1937 resolution of the IS and of previous resolutions concerning the movement of the Fourth International in Greece, the International Conference states:
1. That the unification of the United Internationalist Communist Organization with the International Communist League is necessary because the divergences which at present separate these two groups (the present situation in Greece, the question of Archio-Marxism), while they require a serious discussion before the international organization, do not justify continuing the separation.
2. The unification should be brought about on the basis of acceptance of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International, and of its statutes.
3. The two groups shall fuse immediately, combining themselves in a new organization under the name “Revolutionary Socialist Organization (Greek Section of the Fourth International).”
4. The new organization will have a new newspaper under a new title.
5. A provisional leadership, on a basis of parity, shall be formed, its composition to be sanctioned by the IS.
6. Those members of the two groups who are abroad shall constitute a commission whose role shall be to aid the Greek section politically and materially.
7. This commission, together with the leadership in Greece, shall prepare, with the least possible delay, a convention of the new organization, preceded by a discussion before the international organization. This convention will draw up the political line of the organization within the framework of the principles of the Fourth International, and shall elect the new leadership on a proportional basis.
8. Until the national convention, in case of divergences about what policy to support, the IS shall decide.
9. An international bulletin on the Greek question shall be brought out by the Greek Commission abroad, with all the documents of both tendencies.
This resolution, presented by the representatives of the two organizations after a preliminary agreement between them, and after the labors of the Greek Commission, was unanimously adopted by the International Conference.

 

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One Year After Her Trial-Free Chelsea Manning!



Workers Vanguard No. 1051
 


















5 September 2014
 
Free Chelsea Manning!
 
One year ago, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking military documents and diplomatic cables that exposed the U.S. government’s global war crimes and sinister machinations. With Obama ramping up aerial bombardments in Iraq while presiding over a wave of racist cop terror at home, the international workers movement must mark this anniversary of Manning’s sentencing with renewed resolve to fight for her freedom. (For more information about her case, see WV Nos. 1026 and 1028, 14 June and 9 August 2013.)
Prosecuted under the Espionage Act, Manning was nobody’s spy. She revealed information she had access to as a military analyst in Iraq so that the whole world could see the horror covered up by the capitalist media’s embedded reporters. Her motive was to force a public debate on U.S. policy based on the facts. She continues this fight today from her prison cell. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times (14 June), Manning wrote: “As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.”
We hail Manning’s courageous acts. Her disclosures document the truth: beneath the cloak of “democracy,” the U.S. government is the biggest terrorist force on the planet.
Financial contributions are urgently needed to sustain a legal appeal of Manning’s conviction and also challenge the inhumane conditions of her imprisonment. Jailed in the all-male Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Manning is being denied the hormone treatments she has requested, which even the military’s own doctors deem medically necessary. While a new legal team prepares the appeal of Manning’s conviction, her original trial attorney and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed official notice of their intent to sue the military for cruel and unusual punishment if Manning is not given proper medical treatment.
The Partisan Defense Committee has donated to Manning’s legal defense and urges readers of Workers Vanguard to do likewise. To donate by check or money order, please make payable to: Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland, CA 94610. Note “Manning Defense” on the memo line. Write to Manning at: Chelsea E. Manning 89289, 1300 North Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304.
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No War In Iraq- Stop Sending Arms Shipments 

 
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In Light Of Ferguson The Beginning Of Wisdom  

 
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- See more at: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/our-work/position-statements/veterans-group-response-president-obamas-plan-confront-isil-says-they-are-disappointed-not-surprised/#sthash.nT55iIg6.dpuf
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From The Labor History Archives -In The 80th Anniversary Year Of The Great San Francisco, Minneapolis And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The History Of Class Struggle 

From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Some Lessons of the Toledo Strike

Frank Jackman comment:

Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”

On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.

Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendants of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.

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The Communist Party and socialists during the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike

The Communist Party and socialists during the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike
A passage about radicals involvement in the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, from The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions by Roger Keeran.
During the Toledo auto strike of 1934, Communists and Musteites (members of A.J. Muste's American Workers Party1 played a major part in turning a rout of the workers into a partial victory. The conflict began on April 11, when Federal Local Union 183842began a strike that within several days involved workers in three interlocked auto parts companies, the Electric Auto Lite Company, Bingham Stamping and Tool Company and Logan Gear Company. The walkout occurred after the three firms failed to fulfill a promise to reach an agreement with the local by April 1. Among other demands, the union sought a 20 percent wage increase and a promise of union security. Only a small minority of the workers in the three plants joined the walkout, and the companies continued to run production in spite of the strike. William Green, president of the AFL, believed that the strike was ill-advised and offered no assistance. Within a couple of weeks the strike looked helpless. These circumstances probably accounted for the local's reliance on radical assistance, and for the radicals ability to achieve the influence they did.3
From the beginning of the walkout Communists and Musteites offered their support and joined strikers on the picket lines. But Communist denunciations of the Musteites as "'left' social fascists" and Musteite suspicions of the Communists prevented effective cooperation between the two. Of the two groups, the Musteites had the larger following in Toledo and exercised greater influence during the walkout. The Communists had only a small following in Cleveland. According to Ohio district organizer, John Williamson, only three or four party members worked in the Auto Lite plant, and they were old, foreign-born workers. The party suffered from a "complete isolation from organized contact with the strikers prior to the strike." Similarly, the "very small and inactive" Auto Workers Union4 "played no role during the strike". The Communists did, however, have an active Unemployed Council in Toledo, and through its activity the party carried on considerable agitation and supplied volunteers for the picket line.5
The radicals aided the strikers by helping organize the walkout and by generating strike support. Early in the walkout, after Thomas Ramsey, the local AFL organizer, had warned the strikers to have nothing to do with Communists and had failed to establish picket lines, about 30 workers from the Bingham and Auto Lite plants sought advice at the Communist Party office. Williamson and the local party organizer, Kenneth Eggert, gave the workers "some idea on how to take the situation into their own hands". Bob Travis, a leftist in the Toledo Chevrolet plant, helped the Auto Lite strikers arrange picketing, and party women established a soup kitchen. To build support for the walkout, the Communists also issued 16 different leaflets (a total of 105,000 copies) and held seven shop gate meetings as well as perhaps a dozen other strike support rallies at which Earl Browder, William Patterson, William Weinstone and other party leaders spoke.6
The radicals' major contribution was their defiance of court injunctions. On April17, in response to an application by Auto Lite and Bingham, Common Pleas Judge Roy Staurt issued a restraining order that limited picketing to 25 persons at the two Auto Lite gates and at the Bingham gate and that prohibited picketing by the Lucas County Unemployed League, the Lucas County Unemployed Council, and all other nonunion people. Judge Stuart followed this act with a similarly worded temporary injunction on May 14 and a permanent injunction on May 15. To enforce the injunction, Lucas County Sheriff David Krieger appointed 150 special deputies, paid by Auto Lite and Bingham. On May 5, in a letter to Judge Stuart, Sam Pollock of the Unemployed League condemned the initial restraining order as a curtailment of "the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket peacefully" and promised that the league would "deliberately and specifically" violate the order. The Musteites and Communists then mobilized their followers among the unemployed to bolster the picket lines. Roy W. Howard of the Scripps-Howard newspapers noted with amazement that the unemployed "appeared on the picket lines to help striking employees win a strike, though you would expect their interest would lie the other way - that is, in going in and getting their jobs the other men had laid down".7
Defiance of the restraining order rescued the walkout from certain defeat. On May 15, deputies arrested 107 strikers for violating the May 14 injunction. The next day 46 were arrested. On May 17, over 200 strikers and sympathizers stormed the jail; the following day a similar crowd demonstrated in the corridors of the courthouse as Judge Stuart opened hearings on the contempt charges. After this, the picket lines grew. On Monday, May 21, 1,000 picketers demonstrated at Auto Lite. They stoned several carloads of scabs leaving the plant and scuffled with strike breakers. On Tuesday, 4,000 picketers and spectators appeared, and on Wednesday, 6,000. That day tensions rose. A bolt thrown from a window in the Auto Lite plant struck a young girl on the head. Deputies "unmercifully" beat up an old man. Then, after strikebreakers turned a hose on the picketers, a major riot broke out between the strikers and the scabs, police, and deputies caught inside the plant. A Toledo Communist described the scene: "The police and Deputy Sheriffs were helpless. The entire neighborhood was seized by the workers. The Communist Party and the Young Communist League members played an active part in organizing squads in different streets around the plant and charged the police and the plant and when necessary retreated in an organized way. Hand to hand fighting with police took place, with the workers getting the upper hand. The economic struggle developed into a political struggle, into class war".8
The siege of the plant continued through the night until the next day, May 24, when Ohio Governor George White sent in the National Guard. The National Guard used bayonets, tear gas, vomiting gas, and bullets to disperse the crowd. Guardsmen's bullets killed two strike sympathizers. Fighting between the guard and demonstrators raged all that day. The next afternoon fighting again erupted between the guardsmen, who then numbered 1,350 (the largest peacetime mobilization in the state's history), and an estimated crowd of 20,000. On May 26, yet more fighting occurred. Strikers and their supporters pitted bottles and bricks against tear gas and bayonets. When the violence finally ebbed, radical condemnation of the "murderers" and calls for a general strike flowed. At a Communist-sponsored rally on Sunday, May 27, William Weinstone, who had recently replaced John Schmies as district organizer for Detroit, declared: "Only by establishing a rule of workers in place of a rule of the capitalists can prosperity and freedom for everybody be won." The rally raised two slogans: "You Can't Make Auto Parts With Soldiers" and "A General Strike to Support Auto-Lite Workers".9
By May 28, 95 of the 103 unions affiliated with the Toledo Central Labor Union had expressed a readiness to support a general strike. On that day, however, William Green informed Otto Brach, head of the Central Labor Union, that he did not believe it "necessary for the organized workers in Toledo to engage in a sympathetic strike". Though Green and local federation leaders ended the threat of a general strike, the picket line violence effectively closed the Auto Lite plant, provoked the intervention of Department of Labor mediators, and hastened a strike settlement. The written settlement on June 4 yielded a company promise not to discriminate against union members, a 5 percent wage increase in all three plants, as well as a unique preamble to the agreement repudiating "the tactics of Communists". While Brach called the agreement "a splendid victory", the Daily Worker stated: "The strikers victorious on the mass picket lines, were defeated by the maneuverings of the AFL leaders who succeeded in their strategy of splitting them up and blocking a general strike for their demands." Both appraisals contained some truth. Clear to all, however, was that in the most dramatic confrontation of the NIRA10 period, Auto Lite workers, defied the AFL no-strike policy, relied on outside radicals and won one of the few signed agreements in the industry and established one of the strongest auto locals in the AFL.11
From The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions by Roger Keeran, Indiana University Press,1980
Slightly edited with added footnotes to be a stand-alone article
  • 1. The AWP was a socialist organization that hoped to find an 'American approach' to Marxism. Headed by A.J. Muste, a former minister, the AWP only had a membership in the hundreds, but had significant influence through its Unemployed Leagues, whose membership dwarfed the party's. 9 months after the Toledo strike, the AWP merged with the Communist League of America, a Trotskyist group that played a role in that summer's Teamster strike in Minneapolis, to form the Workers Party of the United States. The WPUS eventually dissolved itself into the Socialist Party of America in 1936, later splitting to form the Socialist Workers Party, which still exists today. -juan
  • 2. 'Federal' unions were an AFL compromise on industrial unionism. They were preliminary locals that were supposed to eventually be separated by craft. - juan
  • 3. Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963) pp. 274-277
  • 4. Communist Party-organized industrial union - juan
  • 5. Fine, p. 276; Oral History of A.J. Muste (Columbia); Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 173-174; John Williamson, Dangerous Scot: the Life and Work of an American 'Undesirable' (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 104; Daily Worker (June 18, 1934)
  • 6. Williamson, pp. 104-105; John Burns, "The Lessons of the Auto-Parts Strike in Toledo," Daily Worker (June 18, 1934)
  • 7. Fine, pp. 277-278; Burns, 8-9; Pollock quoted by Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1964), pp. 21-22; Howard quoted by Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 221
  • 8. Fine, pp. 275-278; A.J. Muste, "The Battle of Toledo", Nation (June 6, 1934), 639-640; Louis F. Budenz, "Strikes Under the New Deal", in Alfred M. Bingham and Seldon Rodman, ed., Challenge to the New Deal (New York, Falcon, 1934), pp. 102-103; Daily Worker (May 24, 25, 26, 1934); Burns, 10-15.
  • 9. Fine, pp. 279-280; Daily Worker (May 28, 1934); Williamson, Dangerous Scot, p. 105
  • 10. National Industrial Recovery Act, a law passed in 1933, which aimed to regulate industry. It also established union organizing rights.
  • 11. Fine, pp. 280-283; William Green to Otto Brach (May 28, 1934) in AFL Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin); Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 226-229; Otto Brach to William Green (June 5, 1934) in AFL Papers; Daily Worker (June 6, 1934)
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Tell Elizabeth Warren ...It's not "Progressive" to Justify Israel's War Crimes in Gaza

  Last month, when questioned by a constituent about civilian casualties from Israel's attack on Gaza, this is what Senator Warren had tosay:
“When Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools, they're using their civilian population to protect their military assets. And I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to defend itself."
 
We will be on hand when ELIZABETH WARREN speaks at Tufts University on
Monday, September 15

Meet at 11am to hold signs and distribute flyers to people entering the event
Cohen Auditorium, 40 Talbot Ave, Medford (location here)

(Public Transportation: Red Line to Davis Square and Bus numbers 94 or 96 to Talbot Ave)
 
Event 12:00 pm (entry by ticket-holders only)

Sign-making Saturday 3pm at MAPA office – 11 Garden St. near Harvard Sq.
 
Our message to Senator Warren:
IT’S NOT “PROGRESSIVE” TO JUSTIFY ISRAELI  WAR CRIMES IN GAZA!
 
 
This is not "Self-defense!"

This is not "Self-defense!"
​
Major international NGO's, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have called the disproportionate civilian casualties and the attacks on essential civilian infrastructure possible "war crimes"; not legitimate self-defense.
 
And as Congress reconvenes to consider its own military "solutions" in the Middle East, please contact
  • Senator Warren (202-224-4543),
  • Senator Edward Markey (202-224-2742), and your own
  • House Representative (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121)
TELL THEM to speak up for Israeli accountability, adherence to international law and compliance with existing statutes regarding the permissible uses of exported US weapons.  It’s long overdue to re-examine our policy of unconditionally supplying billions of dollars of arms to Israel every year!
The way to peace is not easy or obvious.  But occupation, siege, collective punishment and the mass killing of non-combatants will not take us there.  Please work with us to remind leaders like Elizabeth Warren of what ought to be obvious.
Thank you (and please feel free to share this message with your contacts),
The Palestine/Israel Working Group (pi@masspeaceaction.org)

United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice.
Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today.
info@justicewithpeace.org
 617-383-4857 www.justicewithpeace.org
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