***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood- The Ghost Classmate

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A few years ago, I guess it is about five years ago, yes, it has to be about five years now because I was writing about the old days at North Adamsville High School in the early 1960s when I went to school there and I noted that we had passed the forty-five year milestone and since this year of our lord, 2014, marks the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation from that hallowed, now hallowed, institution that must be about right. By the way I don’t usually comment on such odd-ball anniversaries as the forty-fifth but as time is precious for our graduation generation I made an exception in that case. Moreover that forty-fifth represented a personal milestone in my life since I had for many years been extremely alienated, alienated to the point of distraction, from the old school, from the old Irish-soaked neighborhoods where I grew up, and from the town which after graduation I could not get away from quickly enough.

The details of that alienation need not detain us here although as I tell my tale some of that will come out and give the reader an idea of why I had to get the dust of that old town off my shoes. The main point then though was that I had finally come to a calm with that old alienated past and was ready to write some short sketches about the old days. That idea had been additionally prompted by some questions that a member of the Class of 1964 who had set up a website to aid in communication among former classmates had asked me about my impressions of the old school, of the old town, and of any fellow classmates that I might have remembered. Among the latter I thought (and wrote) about a guy, one of the very few from North Adamsville after graduation, who I had run across as I wandered this land and who I had run with for a while.      

So today I am mercifully not interested in the minutia of the details of one Frank Jackman’s teenage alienations. No, I am driven once again by thoughts of that fellow classmate, a classmate who did not graduate from high school with us back in 1964 but who followed a very different path, a path that I for one came close to following, the path of the ghost classmate.        

****

Not everyone who went through our old high school survived to tell the tale, and by this I do not mean the ravishes of mortality that has cut short too many lives from our class according to the grim reaper statistics provide on our class website as we come to commemorative our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from the place. That old high school that today from a recent trip back in its façade anyway looks as daunting as the first day that I strode two steps at a time up those grey granite-etched stairs to enter North as a freshman in 1960. Those grey granite steps representing not just an old time notion about stability and grandeur like the way banks used to be built of stone so as to project solidness before the one-size-fits-all of ATMs and supermarket banking but also reflecting the old time and forgotten granite quarries that was the main industry of the town before they were depleted and before shipbuilding subsequently dominated the town economy.

No, what I mean is that in those days it was as likely as not that one, or more, members of a family who started out in the freshman class would not make it through to graduation, would drop out, drop out for a hundred different reasons. (Early pregnancy for young women, then called “going to Aunt Sally’s” around our town, getting a full time job to help support the family economy, and just plain not interested in being a student come quickly to mind.) And while the notion today of dropping out of high school seems suicidal back then the percentages of drop outs were pretty high although the graduations rates in the 1960s still represented a dramatic increase over our parents’ generation where the need for high school diplomas in a factory-driven world had not been as great. So some classmates, like the ghost classmate here, would never be able to tell the full tale of their survival of the rigors of high school.         

So would not be able to tell the tale the way it was supposed to be told anyway coming out of the 1960s scene. A scene that went roughly something like this. In freshman year you would gravitate toward certain classmates who would stick with you more or less in your niche in the pecking order until graduation (you would go everywhere, do everything, be everything within that cliché and only foray out among the other clichés at your peril), you would lean toward learning a trade or a further schooling as the case may be and settle in to the rigors of either routine fretting over some hot automobile motor or a book that seemed to be sealed with seven seals). More importantly, you would have access to high school sports, clubs, those occasional school dances and proms, plays and the million other things that high schools then and now provide to keep the young occupied and out of trouble. Of course you could also find trouble, Saturday night down at the beach trouble, girl and boy trouble, he said, she said trouble by the gallons and totally righteously teenage angst and alienation trouble but you needed to stay the course to get the full effect of that program. Get that dust off your shoes get out of town and don’t look prize for carrying through until the end. (And I will add here get to throw your precious yearbook, the Magnet, out into the Neptune River as you blow the burg.)

Or maybe, and these are legion, how they wanted it told. Told not by the numbers on the school transcript, not by the resume-in-waiting under your class photograph in the Magnet, but rather simply to be recognized as having gone through some process, gone through the accumulated messes that were high school and came out not too badly, thank you. But to have that story told, told as honestly as could be. 

 

Of course the number is also legion who had some relationship to the Class of 1964 at North and as I continually find now that we are long enough in the tooth to have accumulated a growing list of causalities, of the wounded and broken, of the beaten down and disheveled and who did not get their stories told, good or bad. Got lost in the shuffle in school like the ghost classmate, after he or she left school in the tenth grade, and in life. This sketch is going to be about one of our classmates who got lost in the shuffle somehow and it only here, and only by me, that he gets his life-long struggles voiced. And by that, my friends I will think that I have done some good in this wicked old world.

I will not mention his name, this ghost classmate, for you may have sat across from him in class. Strangely he started out high school any way in the upper classes and as an honor student so it was not lack of intelligence that held him back or forced him to figure that he was wasting his time in a school house and that time could be better spend working some job, learning to fix automobiles, in a life of crime like my old friend Josh Breslin’s brother any other combinations. Such things happened and filled up the unacknowledged pages of any school registry. No, he, hell let’s call him, GC and made things easy, had a streak that just could not be satisfied in school, some wanderlust over the next hill thing that gnawed at him from inside and that wanting habit could not sit still four years, or maybe for four minutes.

Maybe, if you were a guy, you gave him what passed for the “nod” in those days, that slight tilt of the head forward with eyes straight at the intended party and then back quickly. The nod recognizing that a guy was okay, was cool except for some reason he was not in your social circle, or maybe you only knew him through sports (GC had been a good athlete in junior high and in ninth grade as well) and that automatically got a nod from fellow athletes, or maybe you knew him outside school from the corner (he hung around Harry’s over near the Young Field and so knew some tough boys for all his smarts). But he was a guy if you knew him then that one would “nod,” no question.  Maybe if you were a girl you had something of a 'crush' on him because from pictures of him taken back then that he showed me later he certainly had that “something” physically all the girls were swooning over.  A smidgen of Elvis all black-haired, slicked back as was the style among a certain group of guys as you can readily see if you looked at class photos in the Magnet (I tended toward vanilla boy’s regular from Tony the barber in contrast), a build somewhat like his too except not as rangy as Elvis. But what probably set the girls’ heart a-flutter was that sneer, that look that said you had better watch out because I am a dangerous man. And whole bevies of young women at school who had grown tired of Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin, Bobby Vinton and a million other safe, non-sneering Bobby vanilla heart-throbs were just waiting to be the one to take that sneer off his face, and knew how to keep it off too. So you can see why I will not use his real name, there is just a little too much memory rush and gush for that.           

Now I will surprise you, I think. I did not know GC in our school days; at least I have no recollection of him from that time. I did not play sports (although I tried football in seventh grade but easily grew tired of being pushed around like an old rag on every play and also tried track but gave that up when a girlfriend beat me in the 100 yard dash), I did not hang with the guys who cared overwhelming about young women (although I was secretly as obsessed with them as any heathen), and did not have him in any of my classes. I don’t recall him at North Adamsville Junior High either, although my brother later told me that he knew him, “nod” knew him, from track where he was a whizz (and so was my brother).  I met him, or rather he met me, when we were in our early thirties in the 1970s in front one of the skid row run-down "hotels" that dotted the low rent (then) streets of the waterfront of San Francisco near the Embarcadero (you know lower Mission, Third, Bay the places that a guy like Jack Kerouac hit when he was on the slide.  I was doing my own version of that slide in those days). My reason for being there is a tale for another day, after all this is GC's story, but rest assured I was not in that locale on vacation like some tourist slumming the sights around Fisherman’s Wharf, nor was he. Ironically, at our first meeting we were both in the process of pan-handling in the same area when the light of recognition hit him. He said at first he thought I was my brother, Lenny, since he had known him, had had a nodding acquaintance with him in junior high where they both ran track and my brother and I had a few common characteristics until he noticed I had brown hair as he drew closer and Lenny was a red-head. Then he said he had seen me around the school lunchroom where he told me that he hung for all three lunches to avoid some class (not for the bill of fare, Christ no, some Sally [Salvation Army] stuff was better, a lot better so no I will not disrespect GC that way). 

While we were both on the skids we were at the stage where we were well dressed enough, sober enough, and hungry enough to work the panhandle which is an art form not for stone cold bums (I always considered myself a hobo then, he just called himself a grifter, guy who was up for any hustle as long as he did not have to any heavy lifting, work that is). We exchanged the usual exchange of personal information, none too personal, and assorted other lies. At that time I told GC I had been running from a cocaine addiction that had me tied down and in its grip and left my story at that. The really was that I had also run out on every friend that I had after grabbing whatever cash they would give me, or I could steal, and was in up to my elbows to a dealer over in Oakland who gave me credit and was looking for me to pay up so the whole point of being on skid row aside from being broke was that the rich kid dealer(or rather his associates) would not look for me there (and he never did and I of course never went back to Oakland). GC say he was running from a dope deal as well, although he left it at that. (Later, once he trusted me a little years later he told me that the busted drug deal happened in Mexico when he and his partner who was sniffing the stuff more than selling it tried to free-lance a kilo of coke and somehow the partner flim-flammed something and wound up very dead on some Tia Juana back street. GC headed norte with the stolen kilo as fast as he could because, you see, those amigos down south are ready to look harder than some upscale drug dealer in Oakland when the deal goes down. A lot harder. 

We decided then after checking in at the Seamen’s flop we were better off together since we actually hit it off from the beginning (you don’t actually have to be a sailor to flop there by the way although as it turned out we had both done slave work on a merchant ship). So we went to working some quick grifts (grabbing dough from charities, a little three-card Monte with the rubes) and we spent some weeks together doing, as they say, the best we could. That “best we could” involved getting a stake via some intense pan-handling (I will tell you more about that art and its lore some other time and how it saved my life later when I hitched back to Boston and I worked the streets after I busted out in the West) and buying a small amount of cocaine to “step on” out in the streets. I was getting over that strong desire for coke, for my nose candy, although it would take a couple of later tumbles downward before I got clean.

But right then I was tired of skid row, worse of having had to spent some nights under the Golden Gate Bridge and so I sobered up for a bit. We were going along nicely keeping a very low profile mainly connecting with kids around Golden Gate Park with stuff we had stepped on so much you could hardly call it coke but the kids really wanted to try it then and if they got any high then they were happy. In any case they were not going to complain, complain to who. We were making enough for room rent, some food and liquor, a few bucks for cigarettes and odds and ends. We had also built up a small stash of dough because we both agreed that just then the West was not a good place to be and we decided that we would head back east, Boston probably. Then, one night, he split taking all his, and my, worldly possessions.

Fast forward.

A few years later, the early 1980s, when I was in significantly better circumstances (had dried out and was working and going to school a little), if not exactly in the clover, I was walking down Beacon Street in Boston when someone across the street on the Common side started to yell my name. Well, the long and short of it, was that it was old GC, looking significantly more disheveled than when I had last seen him. Like I said that time in Frisco when we ran together we were a shade above stone cold bums, meaning only that we kept our Sally clothes in not bad order, took showers regularly, not something serious down and outers worry about, and whatever inner demons were eating at us were kept well enough intact to pan-handle and not be dismissed out of hand and to be able to negotiate those drug deals without falling apart. To the workaday eye though bum or hobo would be the word used. So GC had gone down from that, meaning to me without having to say word one that times had been hard on him the previous few years. After an exchange of personal data and other details I bought him some dinner and afterward gave him a few bucks. The important thing to know, however, is that from that day until very recently I had always been in touch with the man as he has descended further and further into the depths of the skid row ethos. But enough of the rough out-line, let me get to the heart of the matter.

I have left GC's circumstances deliberated vague until now. The reader might assume, given the circumstances of our first meeting, GC to be a man driven to the edge by alcohol, or drugs or any of the other common maladies that break a man's body, or his spirit. Those we can relate to, if not fully understand. No, GC was broken by his own almost psychotically-driven need to succeed, and in the process constantly failing. (Remember I mentioned that he had been an honor student until he dropped out of school, dropped out in part because he kept pressuring himself to get on the high honor roll and could not take the pressure from the other smart kids to keep up with them.) He had been, a number of times, diagnosed as clinically depressed. (The first time in sixth grade, or so he said.) I am not sure I can convey, this side of a psychiatrist's couch that condition in language the reader could comprehend. All that I can say is this man was so inside himself with the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, the “not bad” thing, that he never could do any of those. While we had never talked about how he left me high and dry in Frisco that time with not even room rent so I had to hit the Sallys (and eventually get back in the grip of the snow princess) when he explained all this depression business (and I would add a layman’s feeling that he suffered at least a little from what they today call a bipolar disorder) I could “understand” (although not forget or forgive) what drove him that night in question. What a terrible rock to have to keep rolling up the mountain.

Here, however, to my mind is the real tragic part of this story, and the one point that I hope you will take away from this narration. GC and I talked many times about our youthful dreams back in Frisco and later when I would run into him in the streets of Boston, about how we were going to conquer this or that "mountain" and go on to the next one, how we would right this or that grievous wrong in the world, and about the need, to borrow the English revolutionary and poet John Milton's words, to discover the "paradise within, happier far." Over the years though GC's dreams have gotten measurably smaller and smaller, and then smaller still until there are no more dreams, only existence. Only getting from one day to the next, one meal to the next. That, my friends, is the stuff of tragedy, not conjured up Shakespearean tragedy, but real tragedy.

Hobo's Lullaby
by Goebel Reeves

Go to sleep you weary hobo

Let the towns drift slowly by

Can't you hear the steel rail humming

That's a hobo's lullaby

Do not think about tomorrow

Let tomorrow come and go

Tonight you're in a nice warm boxcar

Safe from all the wind and snow

I know the police cause you trouble

They cause trouble everywhere

But when you die and go to heaven

You won't find no policemen there

I know your clothes are torn and ragged

And your hair is turning grey

Lift your head and smile at trouble

You'll find happiness some day

So go to sleep you weary hobo

Let the towns drift slowly by

Don't you feel the steel rail humming

That's a hobo's lullaby

©1961,1962 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc. (BMI)

All Rights Reserved.

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Poets   

 

German War Poetry

Self-portrait as a Soldier of 1914 by Otto Dix

Contributed by James Nechtman (Landsturm@gnn.com)

See also: The Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth Italian War Poetry

Here's some German war poetry in German. These are not the verse of polished poets, that is to say "poets turned soldiers", these poems are the work of front line soldiers, "soldiers turned poets". There's quite a difference between the two art forms. These poems were the soldier's way of coping by expressing their feelings about such topics as fallen comrades and the homeland, which in once sense was so close, but in another, was a million miles away. They may be considered rough by some and lacking in form or content by others, but they do manage to capture the everyday thoughts of the soldier and the mood of the trenches. If anyone out there is more comfortable in their mastery of the German language than I am and would like to translate any of these works, I would be more than happy to create an English language version of this page.

Click here for the English translations. Note: Page is under construction. Gedichte des Bayerischen Infanterie-Leib-Regiments Die "Leiber" bei Badonviller (12. August 1914). Noch hat der Morgen seine Purpurrosen Kaum ausgestreut, da sieht die Kompagnie, Die sechste ist's, sich plötzlich überfallen, Ein Kugelregen überschüttet sie. An Zahl weit überlegen sind die Feinde, Doch ein Zurück! gibt es für Leiber nicht: Hurra, ihr Bayern! Halten fest zusammen, Wir weichen nicht, wir kennen uns're Pflicht! Und Schuß auf Schuß erkracht, es stürzt getroffen So mancher Tapfere und die Bunde brennt: Doch schaut, ihr Brüder, wir sind nicht verlassen, Zu Hilfe kommt das ganze Regiment! Nun heißt es kämpfen, Leiber, wohl auch sterben, Was liegt daran? Wenn nur der Sieg uns winkt! Und vorwärts stürmen sie, die Bayernsöhne, Kein Klagelaut - wer auch zu Boden sinkt! Der Ort, die Höhe muß genommen werden, Im Sturmeslauf stürzt vor das Regiment: Granaten und Schrapnells krepieren zischend, Bald hier, bald ein Haus, ein Stadel brennt. Doch welch ein Kampf? Nicht offen, Aug' im Auge, Kann man sich schau'n, versteckt, aus jedem Haus, Aus Kellern, Dachesluten, Bodenkammern Speit tücklich das Gewehr Verderben aus. Wie Löwen schlagen sich die braven Leiber, Mann stürzt an Mann, Soldat und Offizier, - Doch vorwärts, Leute, laßt uns nicht verzagen, Sieg oder Tod! Nichts anders kennen wir! Da fällt Graf Armansperg, von Feury, Euler, Der Helden Führer, er auch stürzt dahin! Vom Kuppelturme - land blieb es verborgen - Kracht Schuß auf Schuß und jeder bringt Gewinn. Der listige Feind! Von sicherer Höhe nieder Entsendet man so leicht das Todesblei: Doch jetzt wird er entdeckt und die Granate Schlägt wohlgezielt den halben Turm entzwei. Nur wird es still auf der zerspellten Kuppel, Doch wütet unten noch der gleiche Kampf: Das Bajonett blitzt in dem Eisenhagel, Blitzt unter Flammen, Rauch und Pulverdampf. Der Oberst führt des Prinzen Arnulf Degen, Der einst das Regiment hat kommandiert: Er führt mit Ehren ihn, bis daß getötet Das treue Pferd ihm unterm Leibe wird. Dem Führer aus der Hand, - im Augenblick Da gleitet wohl im Sturz die teure Waffe Bemerkt er den Verlust, im Kugelregen Kehrt er gelassen an den Ort zurück. Und unterm Körper des gefallenen Tieres Zieht unversehrt den Säbel er hervor: Des Prinzen Arnulf Säbel, und begeistert Hält ihn der Leiber-Oberst hoch empor. Da weicht der Gegner Sieger sind die Bayern, Obgleich sie kämpfen gegen Uebermacht: Doch solche Helden schreckt nicht Zahl noch Tücke, Sie siegen oder sterben in der Schlacht!

Veterans Group in Response to President Obama’s Plan to Confront ISIL Says They are Disappointed But Not Surprised.

 

 

76  51  8 Google +3  1  0  13 Veterans For Peace has released a response to President Obama’s strategy to confront ISIL calling on the president to use diplomacy and to follow his own advice that there is not a military solution to the problems in Iraq. The organization of veterans, spanning from WWII to the current string of U.S. wars,warns that the president’s plan continues to make the U.S. the “greatest purveyor of violence” on earth and places service members in harm’s way when there are other solutions. They call on the president to take six non-military actions to avoid the slippery slope of sending troops to Iraq as well as to stop sending weapons that fuel all sides of the conflict. The group calls for diplomacy to be the number one priority and to include Iran as a partner to help pressure the Iraqi government to be more inclusive of Sunni leaders. Veterans For Peace points out that there cannot be success in confronting ISIL in Iraq without Sunni help and that bombing these communities, who up to now are supporting ISIL because of bad relations with the central government in Baghdad, will not help mend fences. Veterans For Peace President Patrick McCann commented, “We are disappointed because President Obama’s so called plan is more of the same. Nothing really different than waging war like the U.S. has done for thirteen years. Never mind that according to a State Department report, global terrorism has increased by 43% in 2014.” He went on to say, “Who really benefits from these failed policies? Clearly not the American people who pay for it in money and blood.” “We are not surprised by the president’s military solution because for the past thirteen years our political leaders have not put forward any other kind of solution. It seems all they know is war and have no concept of how to work for peace,” states Michael McPhearson, Interim Executive Director. “Just as meeting violence with violence in our communities here at home does not solve economic and social problems, more violence in Syria and Iraq will not solve the conflicts or diminish the political challenges there.” Veterans For Peace response to the president’s plan states, in part: President Obama outlined a strategy no different from what the U.S. has done for the past thirteen years. It is not a plan for success, it is a gamble that war will work this time when it has spectacularly failed thus far. We at Veterans For Peace challenge the American people to ask whose interests does endless war serve?  Who is paying for these wars, whose children are dying in these wars and who is getting paid to finance and provide weapons for these wars? We the people are being driven by manipulated fear to support polices that are not in our interest. Peace is harder than war, but it is cheaper in blood and treasure. After thirteen years it is time to take another path, the path of peace.

Download VFP Handout:  Six Ways to Confront ISIL Short of War Handout by clicking image below

From The Labor History Archives -In The 80^th 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 lessons of 1934

October 6, 2009 | Issue 707

The year 1934 marked a turning point for the working-class struggle during the Great Depression, with three strikes in three cities--Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis--that showed workers could fight back and win.
Here, Sharon Smith, author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, explains the factors that shaped the victories--and defeats--for the class struggle in 1934.

ILWU strikers escort a scab off the docks during the 1934 San Francisco general strike
THE ACHIEVEMENTS of the U.S. working class during the Great Depression provide a source of inspiration for all those seeking to rebuild the labor movement from the bottom up today. During that tumultuous era, labor successfully used the strike weapon to shift the balance of class forces in favor of workers for the first time in U.S. history.
There is often a false impression, however, that the working class took the offensive immediately after the 1929 stock market crash that signaled the onset of economic crisis. In reality, the class struggle took years to advance after the Depression began.
There were certainly many early strikes and struggles, including unemployed protests and neighborhood fights against evictions. All of these trained many of the activists who later played a key role in building the union movement. But these early struggles took place primarily on a small scale--city by city, or even neighborhood by neighborhood--and were of a temporary character, with a constantly revolving door of participating activists. Perhaps most importantly, many ended in defeat.
The level of strikes did not begin to rise significantly until 1933, several years into the depression. Conditions of mass unemployment do not immediately lead to mass resistance. On the contrary, high unemployment can often lead to a sense of helplessness in the first instance--even for those workers who still have jobs but fear that they will be fired and replaced by someone from the growing ranks of the unemployed. Desperation alone does not typically drive workers to struggle. There must be some sense of confidence that it is possible to win--and that sense of confidence most often does not occur until at least some sections of the economy begin to pick up and begin hiring again.

Series: The strikes of 1934

SocialistWorker.org marks the 75th anniversary of a red-letter year for American labor with a four-part series on the struggles of 1934.

• Labor's breakthrough in Toledo
• The battle for the docks
• The rebellion in Minneapolis
• The lessons of 1934

To be sure, the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 brought hope to millions of working-class families facing hunger and unemployment. But Roosevelt did not immediately bring the kind of change that would put food on the table for destitute families. On the contrary, Roosevelt conducted a delicate balancing act (with obvious parallels to the early Obama administration): offering sympathetic rhetoric to workers while offering material relief only to big business.
Even the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act's clause 7(a) acknowledging workers' right to unionize was so vaguely worded that it could be--and often was--interpreted by companies as establishing the "rights" of employers to establish company unions in their workplaces.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Turning point
The year 1934 marked the turning point in the class struggle of the Great Depression, when workers finally scored their first significant union victories against the corporate class. There were four key strikes that took place in 1934: the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the San Francisco General Strike, the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and also the textile workers' strike up and down the East Coast.
Three of these strikes ended in victory, but one of them, the textile strike, ended in one of the bloodiest defeats in U.S. history. Discussions of the 1934 strikes usually focus only on the victories, but the textile workers' defeat is equally important in understanding the dynamics of class struggle.

What else to read

Sharon Smith's Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States offers an invaluable survey of the U.S. labor movement, with a section on 1934 and its importance for future labor struggles.
The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs by Sidney Lens provides a history and analysis of the U.S.'s most significant labor struggles, including the 1934 strike in Minneapolis.
Farrell Dobbs' brilliant Teamster Rebellion is the classic account of the Minneapolis strike, told by one of its leading participants.
Also see Art Preis' Labor's Giant Step for its focus on Minneapolis. Irving Bernstein's The Turbulent Years, now out of print, but soon to be reissued by Haymarket Books, is a crucial history.

The historical reality is that patterns of class struggle do not neatly fit into a phase of defeats followed by a turning point, after which the working-class movement then experiences one success after another until its final victory. Indeed, the textile workers' defeat of 1934 occurred in the autumn, just after the first three previous strikes ended in victory.
But the 1934 strike victories gave ever-greater numbers of working-class people the confidence to begin to fight for better working conditions. Every week, newsreels ran in movie theaters across the country with footage of the three strikes as they unfolded. Working-class audiences cheered for the strikers, just as they would cheer for their team in a sports match.
With his reelection campaign looming, Roosevelt at last began to feel real pressure to grant some significant reforms to workers in order to get out the working-class vote in 1936. To this end, in 1935, Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act, finally making it illegal for employers to refuse to negotiate with unions, and established Social Security--i.e., the major reforms that are popularly associated with the New Deal.
A full appreciation of the importance of the 1934 strike victories requires a clear understanding of the context in which they occurred. First, Corporate America typically responded to strikes by unleashing a torrent of violence against them. And if workers began to score their first victories in 1934, this wasn't because U.S. corporations had become any less violent. In the early 1930s, the Ford Motor Company, for example, employed the largest private army in the entire world.[1]
Companies continued to enjoy the full support of their local police departments, which happily and immediately upon a company's request would deputize hundreds of anti-union citizens, handing them a badge and a gun so that they could officially attack striking workers in the name of "law enforcement." Likewise, if it looked as if the strikers might still win, other government agencies could be called upon to send in an endless supply of state troopers, national guard troops and even the U.S. Army, if need be.
Secondly, the 1934 strike victories pre-dated the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which was founded the following year. So the unions involved in these strikes were all from the conservative craft union federation, the American Federation of Labor (AFL). And the AFL leadership was as hostile to the idea of organizing unskilled workers as it was to the notion of class struggle. When workers from an AFL union did go out on strike, the federation leaders generally did everything in their power to stop it--and also typically supported court injunctions and troops sent out on behalf of the corporations to attack the strikers from their own unions.[2]
It is also the case that the AFL all but refused to organize Black workers into its unions. In 1924, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued an open letter to the AFL requesting the formation of an interracial workers commission against racial discrimination in the unions. The NAACP repeated this request in 1929. In both cases, the AFL did not even bother to respond.[3]
The three 1934 strike victories were led not by crusty and conservative AFL bureaucrats but rather by strike leaders who emerged from below--in each case, radicals dedicated not only to class struggle and class solidarity, but also to rank-and-file democracy. As historian Sidney Lens put it, "One or two leftists among a thousand workers was enough to give the group direction and stimulus, and there were plenty of young leftists around. A new generation, active at first in the battles of the unemployed, and then in he plants, talked openly of revolution as if it were the first order of business on the historical agenda."[4]
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The Toledo Auto-Lite strike
The Toledo Auto-Lite strike was the first major strike of 1934, starting on February 23, when workers voted to go out on strike. Unfortunately, their AFL union charter did not allow them the right to vote to go on strike, since they had been placed into one of the AFL's so-called "federated" locals, specially created for unskilled workers, placing them under the firm control of the national union leadership. AFL President William Green, not surprisingly, ordered them all to return to work immediately. They did so, and the company, not surprisingly, continued to refuse to recognize the union.
A couple months later, 4,000 Auto-Lite workers went out on strike, again demanding union recognition. But their strike began on very weak footing. The 4,000 strikers represented less than half of the total workforce at Auto-Lite. Moreover, fully one-third of all Toledo workers were unemployed at the time. Under these conditions, the strike could easily have been doomed, since unemployed workers might have been expected to rush to take the strikers' jobs in desperation.
Instead, the unemployed played a key role in winning this strike, thanks to an ingenious strategy advocated by the radical pacifist A.J. Muste, an organizer from the American Workers Party. Although courts had prohibited solidarity picketing, Muste's Lucas County Unemployed League pledged to bring large numbers of unemployed workers to the picket line.
On the first day, 1,000 unemployed came out; the next day, 4,000; and the following day, 6,000. When the police moved in on the picket line, the picketers fought back. When the National Guard was sent in to help the police, its troops fired on the picketers, killing one and injuring many. But the picketers kept fighting back in a standoff that lasted six days--until the company finally agreed to close down production at the plant and troops were removed on May 31. The following day, 40,000 workers protested against the arrest of 200 strikers, and 98 of the city's 99 unions pledged to call a general strike in sympathy.
The company finally surrendered on June 4, agreeing to recognize the union and to rehire all of the strikers to their old jobs--in a complete victory.
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The San Francisco General Strike
By then, more protracted struggles were already well underway in Minneapolis and San Francisco. Like the Toledo strike, the San Francisco longshoremen defied their union leaders when they called a West Coast strike in May. Unbeknownst to union members, their leaders from the International Longshoremen's Association had already secretly negotiated an agreement with the companies when the San Francisco longshoremen voted unanimously to go out on strike.
By May 11, 14,000 longshoremen were on strike from Seattle to San Diego. Their most important demand was a union-controlled hiring hall to replace the system by which company foremen simply picked their favorites, often workers who made payoffs and bribes to supervisors.
From the beginning, the longshoremen held daily mass meetings and round-the-clock pickets at the docks. The San Francisco workers formed a strike committee that elected communist Harry Bridges as its leader. The size and strength of the 1,000 burly longshore pickets certainly helped keep away strikebreakers. As Sidney Lens said, "No sensible person would have tried to cross that picket line without a few squads of police to shepherd them through, and even then, they might not have made it."[5]
But the picketers also personally appealed to the rank-and-file truckers who hauled the cargo away from the dock, who in turn pressured their own leaders from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to call a sympathy strike. So no cargo got carried away. Likewise, the strikers appealed to the merchant marines from the ships that brought in the cargo, and 25,000 maritime workers up and down the West Coast joined the strike within a week.
AFL President Green, keeping with longstanding AFL tradition, denounced the strikers as "communists." But Green miscalculated the popular mood. His angry denunciations only helped to gain sympathy for the San Francisco strike. And when union leaders tried to force through an agreement without a union hiring hall, the strikers booed them off the stage.
A wave of police and employer violence soon followed--launched on July 5, a day that became known as "Bloody Thursday"--when the city's entire police force opened fie on a crowd of strikers and supporters. Four workers were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Yet the police violence, which was intended to crush the strike, only encouraged other workers to come out to the picket lines to help fight the police. The San Francisco strike committee decided to call on other unions to go on strike in sympathy, and by July 15, 115 local unions had voted to go out on a general strike in support.
A general strike is the last thing that any AFL leader wanted, of course. But the union leadership did want to regain control over the strike, so the Central Labor Council joined the call for a general strike--with the aim of winding the whole thing down as rapidly as possible. Still, the first day brought 130,000 workers out on strike in San Francisco, in what could only have been a magnificent display of the power of class solidarity.
Unfortunately, once it had effectively seized leadership from the strike committee, the Central Labor Council systematically dismantled the strike. AFL President Green again denounced the strike, and the Central Labor Council on the third day began to wind it down. On the fourth day, the strike committee decided in a very close vote to end the strike. They had won union recognition, but not the union hiring hall that was their key demand. It was a partial victory, but a significant advance in the class struggle nevertheless.
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The Minneapolis Teamsters' strike
The Minneapolis Teamsters strike also began in February, but it took place in three waves: a truckers' strike in February; an expanded strike that included warehouse workers in May; and a victorious conclusion in July.
The Teamsters union was then headed by Daniel Tobin, a cantankerous reactionary who denounced the strikers as "radicals and communists" in the Teamsters' magazine. Once again, the strike leaders were radicals, this time Trotskyists: Karl Skoglund and brothers Vincent, Miles and Grant Dunne, while another strike leader, Farrell Dobbs, joined the Trotskyists in the course of the strike. Dobbs went on to write the classic Teamster Rebellion, which has served as a manual for generations of union militants ever since, demonstrating how to conduct a strike democratically in the face of massive police repression--and win through rank-and-file solidarity.
But the Teamsters nationally had only about 95,000 members in 1934, so President Tobin's relentless hostility to the strike played virtually no role in it. In fact, Tobin's letter refusing to give his permission to the Minneapolis local to strike came two days after the first phase of the strike ended in February. As the local president, Bill Brown, told it, "By that time, we'd won and had signed our first contract with increased pay."[6]
In May, the 5,000 truckers from Teamsters Local 574 went out again, and this time, 35,000 building workers and all of the city's taxi workers joined them. Even the Minneapolis Central Labor Council endorsed the strike.
Every step of the way, the strike was run by a 75-member strike committee, made up not of union officials but of rank-and-file workers, which held nightly mass meetings with all striking workers. They put out a daily strike newspaper with a circulation that reached 10,000. The strikers organized their own hospital and their own kitchen that operated out of strike headquarters, which fed up to 10,000 workers every day.
But the Minneapolis strikers' trademark tactic was their version of "flying pickets" in which trucks loaded with picketers roamed the city in search of strikebreakers. The flying pickets phoned into headquarters every ten minutes to report in and to request help if needed, saying for example, "Truck attempting to move load of produce from Berman Fruit, under police convoy. Have only ten pickets, send help."[7]
The strikers' tactics proved nothing short of ingenious. Once they outsmarted the cops by driving trucks full of picketers into their midst, thereby preventing the police from shooting because they might hit other cops, and thereby forcing them to engage in hand-to-hand combat. In another victorious battle, the Minneapolis police arrived on May 22, with 1,500 police and "deputies" who had quickly been sworn in to attack a gathering of 20,000 strikers. The Trotskyist historian Art Preis described the ease with which the strikers got rid of the attackers:

Soon, even the bystanders were getting their licks in support of the strikers. Finding themselves mousetrapped, many deputies dropped their clubs and ripped off their badges, trying with little success to seek anonymity in the hostile crowd...The scene of the battle spread as cops and deputies alike were driven from the market...In less than an hour after the battle started, there wasn't a cop to be seen in the market, and pickets were directing traffic.

The strikers named that battle the "Battle of Deputies' Run"--for reasons that should be obvious. On May 25, the employers settled with the strikers.
At the start of the strike, Minnesota Gov. Floyd B. Olson, from the Farmer-Labor Party, declared his support, proclaiming, "I am not a liberal--I am a radical!"[8] The governor even pledged $500 to support the strike. But as the months dragged on, Olson became increasingly impatient with the intransigence of the strikers.
On July 16, the strike resumed in full force after the employers reneged on their agreement. City police carried out a murderous attack on the strikers on July 20, killing two and injuring more than 55 in a day known as "Bloody Friday"--all the while blaming the strikers for the violence. At that point, the once "radical" Gov. Olsen sent in 3,700 National Guard troops, who raided union headquarters and arrested all the strike leaders. Eventually, the number of troops was almost as high as the number of strikers.
But all taxis and ice, beer and gasoline drivers responded by joining the strike. The authorities were forced to release the strike leaders when a protest of 40,000 angry workers demanded it. The employers finally caved in on August 22, granting the union's main demands. The radical and communists so despised by Daniel Tobin had just won the Teamsters union its first major victory of the 1930s.
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Lessons of the Textile Strike
Just over a week later, the textile strike began, when a meeting of delegates from the United Textile Workers of America called a strike for union recognition. The workers formed flying pickets, traveling from one mill town to the next, calling workers out of the mills to join the strike. With almost 400,000 workers out on strike up and down the East Coast, the textile strike looked promising at first. Yet three weeks later, it went down in a crushing defeat.
The textile workers were defeated in 1934 not because they were any less courageous than other strikers that year. On the contrary, the New York Times noted, "The growing mass character of the picketing operations is rapidly assuming the appearance of military efficiency and precision and is something entirely new in the history of American labor struggles."[9] And those who assume women tend to take a backseat in labor struggles should also note that the Times added, "Women were taking an increasingly active part in picketing...apparently prepared to stop at nothing to obtain their objectives."[10]
The National Guard was called in to occupy states throughout New England, routinely firing with machine guns into groups of strikers. In Gastonia, N.C., National Guardsmen, as always joined by deputized armed strikebreakers, were ordered to "shoot to kill" unarmed strikers, which they did. In Burlington, N.C., troops bayoneted five picketers, all of them wearing buttons that said, "peaceful picket."[11] Rhode Island's Democratic governor declared a state of insurrection at what he called a "communist uprising."[12]
The strikers had tremendous support among other workers in every locality. In Hazleton, Pa., for example, 25,000 workers went on a general strike in sympathy on September 11. But once again, AFL leaders joined business interests in denouncing the strikers. Rhode Island union leader Frank Gorman blamed the violence on communists and refused to sanction the flying pickets. After three weeks, the union leadership declared the strike a "victory" and workers were sent back into the mills, with nothing gained.
It is certainly possible that the level of violence and repression directed at the textile workers was impossible to overcome. But the lessons of this defeat shed light on why the other three 1934 strikes were so successful.
Most importantly, the textile strikers were not able to seize democratic control of their strike, thereby allowing their union leaders instead to determine the strike strategy--in their case, the AFL, which betrayed the strikers.
It is worth mentioning however, that even the defeat of the textile strike succeeded in further radicalizing the labor movement. Even Gorman, who had betrayed the Rhode Island strikers, became radicalized in the strike's aftermath. As he said later, "Many of us did not understand what we do now. We know now that we are naïve to depend on the forces of the government to protect us."[13] Gorman went on to dedicate himself to fighting for the formation of a labor party independent of the two capitalist parties.
The lessons of this defeat as well as the victories of 1934 should be obvious for all of us today seeking to rebuild a fighting labor movement in the worst recession since the Great Depression.
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Notes
1. Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3-4.
2. See Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 102-152 for an overview of the class struggle during the Depression era.
3. Daniel Guérin, 100 Years of Labor in the USA (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979), 152.
4. Sidney Lens, Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 262.
5. Lens, 250.
6. Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 25.
7. Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1972) 162. Lens, 268.
8. Brecher, 166.
9. Ibid, 172.
10. Ibid.
11. Lens, 262.
12. Brecher, 174-75.
13. Eric Leif Davin, "Defeat of the Labor Party Idea," in We Are All Leaders: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 126-29.

U.S. Out of Iraq! No Intervention in Syria! Down With Imperialist Airstrikes Against ISIS Reactionaries!   Workers Vanguard No. 1051	5 September 2014

U.S. Out of Iraq! No Intervention in Syria!

Down With Imperialist Airstrikes Against ISIS Reactionaries!

 

Since early August, President Obama has shifted the basis for his attacks on ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) from a supposed campaign to prevent genocide to a war against a cancer that not only has the temerity to murder American civilians in that region but also poses a substantial threat to citizens in the U.S. The “humanitarian” cloak that Obama donned as he ordered the first strikes against ISIS in northern Iraq was useful for imperialist propaganda purposes. But what hit closer to home was the fate of thousands of imperiled American residents and ExxonMobil representatives in the city of Erbil.

While the bulk of the American populace remains war-weary, the president seems to have seized the script for the second Gulf War co-authored by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney and simply replaced all references to the evil Saddam Hussein with references to the evil ISIS. To date, these ultra-reactionary Islamists, currently numbering about 15,000 fighters, have not been accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction. In fact, ISIS—whose method of rooting out “apostates” like the Christians and Yazidis as well as Turkmen and other Shi’ites amounts to mass butchery—is the spawn of Al Qaeda in Iraq, itself a product of the U.S. occupation. The founding elements of Al Qaeda, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of its Iraqi affiliate, were trained and funded by the CIA as it assembled a reactionary horde to oppose the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Once again, a coalition of U.S. imperialism’s allies is to be assembled, including not only Britain and Australia but also Saudi Arabia and Qatar—both of which have funded ISIS or other Al Qaeda types—as well as jihadist forces opposed to ISIS. This is to be buttressed by a newly constituted and hardly nonsectarian regime in Baghdad, which commands armed forces bathed in communal blood. On the Syrian front, the arms provided to the relatively impotent “democratic” opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime will be upgraded.

The Kurdish pesh merga forces, which have been shielded by the U.S. for years as part of Washington’s effort to secure oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan as its client, may receive a similar upgrade. This, however, is more problematic, as the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), which heads the regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan, angles for the foundation of a Kurdish state, an outcome totally unacceptable to the Turkish and Iraqi governments. Then, there is the not small matter that both the KDP and the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan remain on the U.S. terrorism list, albeit on a lower tier of evil.

Obama has ordered more regular surveillance flights over Syria to assess the feasibility of airstrikes on ISIS-controlled areas in that country. Attacks are supposed to be conducted in a manner that does not benefit the enemy Assad regime—an impossibility exposed by Assad’s offer to support such strikes if the U.S. requests Syrian permission. This was a clever riposte, but it may well backfire given that the U.S. maintains its opposition to Assad’s rule. We oppose any and all U.S. interventions against whatever forces in Syria.

As we pointed out in “Iraq in Flames: Legacy of U.S. Occupation” (WV No. 1049, 11 July), it is the American imperialists who triggered and continue to fuel the reactionary, mainly Sunni-Shi’ite communal conflicts in Iraq and beyond, conflicts in which the world’s toilers have no side. This template also fits Libya’s descent into sheer chaos. And it is U.S. imperialism that is the bloodiest enemy of the world’s working people, as most graphically illustrated by the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered in the service of its quest for dominance in the region. Any force, however unsavory, that attacks, repels or otherwise impedes U.S. forces strikes a blow in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed.

Washington Moots “Stupid Shit”

It is now acknowledged by many bourgeois spokesmen that the U.S. created the “mess” in Iraq. This is normally followed by the injunction that it is Washington’s job to fix it. Obama’s current and patently farcical plan for a fix is tantamount to attempting to cure cholera by infecting the patient with Ebola. It is coming from a president who, a few months ago, intoned that U.S. foreign policy should be informed by the concept “Don’t do stupid shit.” At about the same time, Dick Cheney and neocon Bill Kristol received much media coverage for their claims that the weak-kneed Obama was conciliating the enemies of the U.S. in the Near East and Russia, thereby squandering the fruits of the American “victories” in Iraq and Afghanistan. This received a humorous savaging on The Daily Show.

Congressional Republicans quickly endorsed the Cheney-Kristol refrain. None, however, have been so bold as to push legislation for an increased U.S. military presence, as they are facing midterm elections with a populace not currently disposed to go there. From the president to John McCain, none have dared suggest the reintroduction of American “boots on the ground.” Meanwhile, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has waded in to accuse Obama of abandoning the Syrian resistance while denouncing his do-nothing-stupid posture, piously intoning that “great nations need organizing principles” (The Atlantic, 10 August).

These accusations are the purest hogwash. Barack Obama is the imperialist chief executive who upped the ante in Afghanistan, the president who has pushed the NSA monitoring of all Americans, the architect of the assassination-by-drone program targeting purportedly turncoat U.S. citizens in obvious violation of their constitutional right to a trial. It is Obama who awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Madeleine Albright, who, as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, notoriously defended the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children during the U.S.-sponsored embargo of Iraq as “worth it.”

Several of the liberal talk show hosts at MSNBC have expressed concern over Hillary and Barack’s bellicosity, although they have become perhaps more positively disposed toward such following the video of journalist James Foley’s beheading by ISIS. Front-line journalism is a hazardous profession, more so when the reporters are perceived, frequently with good reason, as PR men for the enemy.

Washington’s stated policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists is itself a blatantly apparent lie. Sergeant Bergdahl was not returned to this country via Federal Express, nor were the five Taliban prisoners released from the Guantánamo hellhole to Qatari custody the benefactors of a special forces operation led by the Haqqani network. The U.S. could have simply made the deal proposed by ISIS for Foley’s return. It preferred trying to spring him through a (failed) Special Ops mission in Syria. And now the imperialists have the figure of the slain American journalist to try to rally public sentiment behind military action.

The War at Home

Why has there been this “enemy at the door” furor? In fact, the U.S. rulers constantly play this card to poison the working class with “one nation indivisible” patriotism. Since the end of World War II, apologists for U.S. imperialism across the political spectrum have argued that it is the only power with the resources—overweening military power, money, size, a large and trusting population, geographic isolation from potential invaders, etc.—necessary to assure the perpetuation of a liberal, stable and peaceful world order. And if Americans forsake this burdensome responsibility, then it is claimed that liberty, stability and peace on the planet will be forfeited. (A recent exposition of this worldview, titled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” by the neocon Robert Kagan appeared in the May 26 issue of the New Republic.)

The reality has been a virtually unending series of wars since WWII, most frequently initiated when the Democratic Party has been in power. In the quest to maintain and extend its world dominance, U.S. imperialism has produced some ten million corpses of those who stood in its way. Apologists for the U.S.-dominated world order see the overthrow of the degenerated workers state in the USSR in 1991-92 as its crowning achievement. That counterrevolution has led to the increased ravaging of the world’s toiling masses by their profit-bloated capitalist masters. It is that historic defeat for the international working class that has resulted in the political disarming of many of its advanced layers by erasing their belief in the superiority of socialism and, thus, of the possibility of an alternative to capitalist exploitation and oppression. An atmosphere of freedom and wellbeing may pervade the think tanks of the bourgeoisie, but it is not to be found in the world where most working people reside—not anywhere and certainly not here.

The declining economic strength of the American empire is an objective obstacle to its aspirations. The constricted economy that has emerged in the supposed aftermath of the Great Recession has for the nonce regained its capacity to produce profits but not jobs. Not even the optimists see the possibility of any significant economic expansion. This economic reality has necessitated a paring down of the defense budget, although to be sure any cuts there will hardly alter the balance of military power in the world, where the U.S. has unrivaled supremacy. The diminished prospects that face most working people have led to a generalized disdain for those holding or running for elected office, who are viewed with justice as do-nothings, indifferent to the plight of the common man, and as self-seeking predators.

Those who might vote in the November elections see the prospect of further military involvements as further threat to the little that remains of their ability to sustain any semblance of a life. Currently, about 59 percent of the population is employed, a level that has persisted since the onset of the Great Recession. If the employment-population ratio had returned to prior levels, an additional nine million people would now be working. About one-fifth of those currently employed hold part-time jobs, and median income levels are 6 percent less than before the recession. These material parameters of persistent misery and despair are especially acute in black communities across the nation. An economically deprived, dispirited and distrustful population can create difficulties for a ruling class seeking to maintain world domination.

Such discontents constitute an explosive mixture. The bourgeoisie recognizes this fact, which helps explain its attempts to constantly strengthen and extend the reach of its police forces and prison system, even though widespread social rebellion is clearly not now on the agenda in this country. The working class—the only social force with the objective interest and power necessary to overturn the capitalist system—finds its struggles blocked by a union bureaucracy whose loyalty to their capitalist masters is such that it currently eclipses their concern for the very survival of the trade unions as a meaningful force.

The Democrats, the party of bourgeois rule that masquerades as the friend of working people, rescued the bankers and fat cats at the onset of the Great Recession. Since then, they have offered nothing to America’s working and poor people other than the prospect of peanut-sized raises in the minimum wage accompanied by watermelon-sized exceptions to such raises. The reformist left continues its dead-end attempts to force the Democrats to the left while frequently sharing an appreciation for U.S. imperialism’s enemies list. Particularly blatant is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which cheered capitalist counterrevolution in the then-USSR and in recent years has made common cause with the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime, although not with ISIS.

In “Obama’s New War in Iraq” (socialistworker.org, 28 August), the ISO’s Ashley Smith observes that ISIS and its ilk were nurtured by the U.S. and its client states “to combat secular nationalism and Communism.” The article notes that “Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan both collaborated with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back the fundamentalist Mujahideen during the popular uprising against the USSR invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.”

Smith refrains from recounting how the ISO was among the foremost “left” cheerleaders for the Islamic reactionaries, whose resistance included throwing acid in the face of women teachers and committing unspeakable barbarities against Soviet soldiers and any supporters of the modernizing nationalist regime that requested Soviet intervention. In the sharpest contrast, we declared: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” and “Extend social gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!” We said that it was better to fight the forces of counterrevolution there than to fight them in Berlin and Moscow.

On at least a superficial level, many working people in the U.S. perceive that the hardships they endure here are not unrelated to their rulers’ exploitation and oppression abroad. The truth is that the arterial bleeding caused by the stagnant and decaying capitalist system will not be stanched by reformist Band-Aids. While the reformists plead for “butter not guns,” we Marxists aim to win the most conscious layers of the working class to the understanding that what is necessary is the overturn of the U.S. imperialist order through socialist revolution. It is vitally necessary to fight to forge an international revolutionary working-class party committed to that end.

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.