President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.
• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.
• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.
• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.
 

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

 

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

********

Markin comments (Winter 2014):   

There is no question now that Chelsea Manning’s trial, if one can called what took place down in Fort Meade a trial in the summer of 2013 rather than a travesty, a year after her conviction on twenty plus counts and having received an outrageous thirty-five year sentence essentially for telling us the truth about American atrocities and nefarious actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the American government can stick its nose that her case has dropped from view. Although she occasionally gets an Op/Ed opportunity, including in the New York Times, a newspaper which while recoiling at the severity of the sentence in the immediate reaction did not question the justice of the conviction, and has several legal moves going from action to get the necessary hormonal treatments reflecting her real sexual identity (which the Army has stonewalled on and which even the New York Times has called for implementing) to now preparing the first appeal of her conviction to another military tribunal the popular uproar against her imprisonment has become a hush. While the appeals process may produce some results, perhaps a reduction in sentence, the short way home for her is a presidential pardon right now. I urge everybody to Google Amnesty International and sign on to the online petition to put the pressure on President Barack Obama for clemency.                   

I attended some of the sessions of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in the summer of 2013 and am often asked these days in speaking for her release about what she could expect from the various procedures going forward to try to “spring” her from the clutches of the American government, or as I say whenever I get the chance to “not leave our buddy behind” in the time-honored military parlance. I have usually answered depending on what stage her post-conviction case is in that her sentence was draconian by all standards for someone who did not, although they tried to pin this on her, “aid the enemy.” Certainly Judge Lind though she was being lenient with thirty-five years when the government wanted sixty (and originally much more before some of the counts were consolidated). The next step was to appeal, really now that I think about it, a pro forma appeal to the commanding general of the Washington, D.C. military district where the trial was held. There were plenty of grounds to reduce the sentence but General Buchanan backed up his trial judge in the winter of 2014. Leaving Chelsea supporters right now with only the prospect of a presidential pardon to fight for as the court appeals are put together which will take some time. This is how I put the matter at one meeting:

“No question since her trial, conviction, and draconian sentence of thirty-five years imposed by a vindictive American government heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning’s has fallen off the radar. The incessant news cycle which has a short life cycle covered her case sporadically, covered the verdict, covered the sentencing and with some snickers cover her announcement directly after the sentencing that she wanted to live as her true self, a woman. (A fact that her supporters were aware of prior to the announcement but agreed that the issue of her sexual identity should not get mixed up with her heroic actions during the pre-trial and trial periods.) Since then despite occasional public rallies and actions her case had tended, as most political prisoner cases do, to get caught up in the appeals process and that keeps it out of the limelight.”            

Over the past year or so Chelsea Manning has been honored and remembered by the Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade in Boston in such events as the VFP-led Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, the Memorial Day anti-war observance, the yearly Gay Pride Parade, the Rockport July 4^th parade, the VFP-led Veterans Day Peace Parade, and on December 17^th her birthday. We have marched with a banner calling for her freedom, distribute literature about her case and call on one and all to sign the pardon petitions. The banner has drawn applause and return shouts of “Free Chelsea.” The Smedley Butler Brigade continues to stand behind our sister. We will not leave her behind. We also urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition calling on President Obama to use his constitutional authority to pardon Chelsea Manning

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30  

Additional Markin comment on his reasons for supporting Chelsea Manning:

I got my start in working with anti-war GIs back in the early 1970s after my own military service was over. After my own service I had felt a compelling need to fight the monster from the outside after basically fruitless and difficult efforts inside once I got “religion” on the war issue first-hand. That work included helping create a couple of GI coffeehouses near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down at Fort Dix in New Jersey in order for GIs to have a “friendly” space in which to think through what they wanted to do in relationship to the military.

Some wanted help to apply for the then tough to get discharge for conscientious objection. Tough because once inside the military, at least this was the way things went then, the military argued against the depth of the applying soldier’s convictions and tended to dismiss such applications out of hand. Only after a few civil court cases opened up the application process later when the courts ruled that the military was acting arbitrarily and capriciously in rejecting such applications out of hand did things open up a little in that channel. Others wanted to know their rights against what they were told by their officers and NCOs. But most, the great majority, many who had already served in hell-hole Vietnam, wanted a place, a non-military place, a non-GI club, where they could get away from the smell, taste, and macho talk of war.

Although there are still a few places where the remnants of coffeehouses exist like the classic Oleo Strut down at Fort Hood in Texas the wars of the past decade or so has produced no great GI resistance like against the Vietnam War when half the Army in America and Vietnam seemed to be in mutiny against their officers, against their ugly tasks of killing every “gook” who crossed their path for no known reason except hubris, and against the stifling of their rights as citizens. At one point no anti-war march was worthy of the name if it did not have a contingent of soldiers in uniform leading the thing. There are many reasons for this difference in attitude, mainly the kind of volunteer the military accepts but probably a greater factor is that back then was the dominance of the citizen-soldier, the draftee, in stirring things up, stirring things up inside as a reflection of what was going on out on the streets and on the campuses. I still firmly believe that in the final analysis you have to get to the “cannon fodder,” the grunts, the private soldier if you want to stop the incessant war machine. Since we are commemorating, if that is the right word the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I check out what happened, for example, on the Russian front when the desperate soldiers left the trenches during 1917 after they got fed up with the Czar, with the trenches, with the landlords, and the whole senseless mess.

Everyone who has the least bit of sympathy for the anti-war struggles of the past decade should admire what Chelsea Manning has done by her actions releasing that treasure trove of information about American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere. She has certainly paid the price for her convictions with a draconian sentence. It is hard to judge how history will record any particular heroic action like hers but if the last real case with which her action can be compared with is a guide, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, she should find an honored spot. Moreover Chelsea took her actions while in the military which has its own peculiar justice system. Her action, unlike back in Vietnam War times, when the Army was half in mutiny was one of precious few this time out. Now that I think about she does not have to worry about her honored place in history. It is already assured. But just to be on the safe side let’s fight like hell for her freedom. We will not leave our sister Chelsea behind.              

 

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

 

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

Workers Vanguard No. 1058	12 December 2014

Police Reform Is a Hustle

Racist Cop Terror and the Fraud of Capitalist Democracy

 

Over 150 years later, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s 1857 ruling denying black slave Dred Scott’s petition for freedom echoes across America: black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Little more than a week after the cop who executed Michael Brown was given a free pass, a Staten Island grand jury decided that the New York City cop who killed Eric Garner had committed no crime. Among Garner’s last words were “it stops today.” But it didn’t, and it won’t short of getting rid of capitalism: an economic and social system rooted in brutal exploitation and racist oppression. It is this system, not “the people,” that the cops serve and protect.

Following the standard racist script, the St. Louis County prosecutor portrayed an unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, as a violent, lawless predator and his police killer as the victim. That wasn’t so easy in the killing of Garner. Countless millions saw the video of him pleading for his life while he was being strangled to death. Even some Republican Party leaders who usually revel in racist contempt for black people are now calling for a congressional investigation. Such is a measure of the difficulties the ruling class is having in preserving the narrative that the cops are defending society against dangerous “outlaws.”

This country’s rulers, a minuscule, ruthless class, are very well aware that they are sitting on top of a tinder pile of discontent that could be ignited by the spark of social protest. They own the banks and major industries, producing nothing themselves but reaping massive profits by further grinding down those still lucky enough to have a job while axing social programs for the rest. In order to keep in check the workers they exploit and the black people and other minorities they oppress, the capitalist class unleashes its repressive state apparatus—cops, courts, prisons and military—whose powers it is augmenting. Such is as clear as the assault rifles of the National Guard troops mobilized to put down protest in Ferguson. At the same time, the ruling class seeks to disguise what is the dictatorship of capital with the trappings of democracy and the illusion that the capitalist state is some kind of neutral body that represents everyone.

A popular protest slogan has been “black lives matter.” But not for the rulers of this class-divided society, built on a bedrock of racist oppression, from chattel slavery to wage slavery. Black people, forcibly segregated as a race-color caste at the bottom of society, have always been overrepresented in America’s reserve army of the unemployed, filling less desirable jobs when needed and cast aside in times of economic downturn. With the deindustrialization of much of the country, many black youth have simply been discarded as an expendable surplus population left to scramble to survive, to get gunned down by cops or to rot in America’s dungeons.

But there are still significant numbers of black workers in strategic industries who will be instrumental in any fight to put an end to this racist capitalist hell. The power of the working class is derived from its central role in production; by withholding their labor, workers can cut off the flow of profits, the capitalists’ lifeblood. The capitalist masters have long fomented racial antagonisms to divide workers and weaken their struggles against the bosses, not least by obscuring the fundamental class divide between labor as a whole and its exploiters.

Federal Investigations and Body Cameras

The Democratic Party, originally the party of the slavocracy, has for decades been the U.S. bourgeoisie’s preferred instrument for trying to douse the flames of protest and channel anger over cop terror back into the capitalist “justice” system. Now Attorney General Eric Holder claims to be carrying out a “rigorous and independent” civil rights investigation into the killing of Michael Brown. Truth be told, Holder & Co. reserve their true rigor for those who have exposed U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars, drone attacks and torture chambers filled with non-white people. Chelsea Manning is behind bars in a military prison for 35 years for this “crime.” Historically, the Feds have set up leftists and black militants for intimidation and terror, most notoriously through the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which killed 38 Black Panthers beginning in the late 1960s.

Those who put faith in Holder’s civil rights investigations into the Brown or Garner cases should consider the Department of Justice inquiry into the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin: No charges have been brought against George Zimmerman, the wannabe cop who stalked Martin and shot him dead. Or consider the fact that two federal investigations of the Cleveland police department in the last decade did nothing to prevent a cop from gunning down 12-year-old Tamir Rice last month. On the very rare occasion the Feds do bring charges against a killer cop and obtain a conviction, such as with the NYPD officer who took the life of Anthony Baez in 1994, the outcome is a relative slap on the wrist. The police then go on brutalizing those at the bottom of society.

After denouncing the “criminal” violence of the protesters in Ferguson two weeks ago, President Barack Obama hosted a carefully orchestrated White House summit meeting of black Democrats, preachers, cops and a select handful of young activists who have organized protests against racist cop terror. The purpose was to reinforce illusions that this brutal system and its police guard dogs can be reformed. To this end, the president announced the formation of a Task Force on 21st Century Policing to build “trust” between the police and the communities they daily terrorize.

Among the appointed leaders of this task force is the commissioner of the Philadelphia police department, one of the most notoriously racist and corrupt in the land. In 1985, the Philly cops dropped a bomb supplied by the FBI on the mainly black MOVE commune. Eleven black people, including five children, were killed and an entire black neighborhood burnt to the ground. Today, the Philadelphia police commissioner is a black man. So was the city’s Democratic mayor, Wilson Goode, at the time of the MOVE massacre.

A black man has sat in the Oval Office for the past six years and black life on the streets is as cheap as ever to the capitalist rulers. Obama’s sizable responsibility for this state of affairs is often excused by the claim that the Republicans in Congress have tied his hands. In fact, Obama has dutifully served Wall Street, acting as the black overseer for U.S. imperialism. Changing the skin color of the forces of state repression or their chief executives doesn’t change the class to which they are beholden.

Nor is the supply of Pentagon hand-me-downs from U.S. imperialism’s wars and occupations abroad to local police forces what makes the cops killers. To be sure, the armored personnel vehicles, helicopters and other high-tech weapons of war are deployed to intimidate and terrorize anyone “at home” perceived as stepping out of line. But like Michael Brown, most black people killed by cops are gunned down in the far more ordinary way, by a cop patrolling the neighborhood for “black suspects.” And Garner was strangled to death.

To quell the outrage over such blatant cop killings, NYC’s liberal Democratic Party mayor Bill de Blasio, working in coordination with the White House, promises to fast-track supplying the cops with body cameras. Why would anyone believe that such cameras will restrain the cops? A bystander videoing the police posse attacking Garner didn’t save his life, nor did it even lead to an indictment of the cop who choked him to death! But you can literally bet your life that the cops will have their cameras, and their guns, aimed right at you.

“A Nation of Laws”

The collective hypocritical howl against the “violence” of protesters emanating from bourgeois quarters after the Ferguson grand jury decision had Obama intoning, “We are a nation built on the rule of law.” The entire legal edifice of this country has always buttressed the rule of the property owners, including laws sanctifying chattel slavery. It took mass, militant struggle, more often than not met with violent resistance by the forces of capitalist repression, to smash such laws as the Jim Crow segregation codes and the bans on trade unions.

It took the Civil War—a revolutionary struggle in which 200,000 black troops, guns in hand, were crucial to turning the tide—to smash the rule of the slaveholders. The Northern capitalists, worried that the former slaves claiming even a small portion of the property of the plantations might give their wage slaves ideas, soon allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was scrapped, with political power in the Southern states restored to the major landowners.

The battles of the civil rights movement brought down the Jim Crow segregation laws in the South. This outcome was assisted by the Soviet Union’s exposures of the vicious racism in the South, which embarrassed a section of the U.S. bourgeoisie at a time when it claimed to be bringing democracy to black, brown and Asian peoples of the world. But while ending Jim Crow, the civil rights movement could not win black freedom because it never challenged the capitalist system to which black oppression is integral. In fact, liberal civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King looked to the representatives of this very system, particularly those in the Democratic Party, for redress.

From Harlem to Watts to Detroit, every ghetto upheaval in the 1960s provoked by police terror was an explosion of frustration and fury against relentless poverty, joblessness and dilapidated housing, schools and hospitals. Those conditions were and are interwoven into the economic and social structure of American capitalist society. There is no other road to eliminating the special oppression of black people than the victorious conquest of power by the U.S. proletariat. And there will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party.

As we wrote in a document adopted at our founding conference in September 1966:

“For the last three summers ghettoes across the country have been rocked by elemental, spontaneous, non-political upheavals against the prevailing property relations and against the forces of the state which protect these relations.... Yet despite the vast energies expended and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives.”

— “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist Supplement, May-June 1967 (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9)

Today again the mass outrage against the cops needs an organized political expression. Not one that strengthens the hand of the Democrats, but one that mobilizes the oppressed in opposition to the capitalist rulers and their parties. A revolutionary workers party must be built to weld the social power of the multiracial labor movement, with its strategic component of black workers, to the anger of the ghetto masses.

By uniting in organizations representing their class interests, workers have been able to wrest concessions from the employers. The mass industrial unions were built in the 1930s through pitched battles with the bosses’ security guards, the cops and the National Guard. Black workers, who had been kept out of the lily-white craft unions, were brought into these battles, many of which were led by avowed socialists. Fighting with courage and determination, they wrote a proud page in the history of labor and black struggle in this country.

But short of a revolutionary struggle by the working class to reclaim the fruits of its labor through expropriating the property of the capitalist enemy, these victories still only brought a brief respite in the ongoing class war between the workers and their exploiters. Given that labor has for decades taken a beating in that war, and been mobilized less and less in action, waging such a struggle will take a big leap in consciousness and organization. It will take a fight to replace the current misleaders of the unions who have, for so long now, chained workers to the profitability of American capitalism.

To Fight for a Future Requires Learning from the Past

In an inchoate way, the boos that greeted Jesse Jackson when he went to Ferguson in August to try to corral protesters behind calls to “get out the vote” in the November midterm elections were a recognition that only a thin layer of black people benefited from the civil rights movement. A lyric from St. Louis rapper Tef Poe, “This ain’t your daddy’s civil rights movement,” has been a refrain of some young black activists in Ferguson. But unless you learn the lessons of previous generations, including of those who challenged MLK’s “turn the other cheek” pacifism and Democratic Party liberalism, you can easily be doomed to the same political dead end.

The civil rights movement was far from homogeneous. Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initially accepted MLK’s strategy as good coin, its militant young activists were not committed to nonviolence as a principle. In 1966, after being arrested for the 27th time, the 24-year-old SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael defiantly said: “I ain’t going to jail no more.” Renouncing the credo of nonviolence, Carmichael raised the call for “black power.”

In its own way, this call reflected an attempt to grasp for solutions outside the framework of U.S. capitalist society. But as we warned in “Black and Red”: “The slogan ‘black power’ must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the ‘black power’ movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South.” This is exactly what happened. A case in point is Georgia’s longtime Democratic Congressman John Lewis, who was a radical SNCC leader in the 1960s.

The potential to co-opt these militants was recognized by Republican Richard Nixon, who in his 1968 presidential campaign defended the call for black power as an expression of wanting a seat at the table “as owners, as entrepreneurs—to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action.” Although black people never got any significant share of the wealth or the real power in this society, the Black Power movement ultimately became a ticket for propelling a few black faces into high places such as big city mayors, whose job was to keep the black masses down.

In the late ’60s, the Black Panthers courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. Both the Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and their rejection of the organized working class as the agent of black freedom and socialist revolution left them more vulnerable to murderous state repression. They ran up against a systematic government campaign of assassination, provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment aimed at beheading the black struggle. In the end, the Panthers could only alternate between heroic adventurism, with its bitter consequences, and appeals to the liberal establishment. Many of the Panthers who were not simply killed or locked away eventually made their way to the Democratic Party.

Unchain Labor/Black Power!

Among those invited to Obama’s recent summit on Ferguson and the police was Ashley Yates of Millenial Activists United, an organization of young black women who were on the frontlines of the Ferguson protests. She explained her views in an interview:

“We are the generation that was ignited by Trayvon Martin’s murder and placed our faith in a justice system that failed us in a very public and intentional manner. Most of us were raised by parents that inherited the fruits of labor from the Civil Rights movement. They were placated, in a sense, by the stories of a reality that no longer seemed an issue for them. So as we navigate a society where those realities of segregation and oppression are supposed to be far behind us, yet are more present than ever before in our lives, we say no more. We are the descendants of those who already fought for these freedoms and we will not let their sacrifices, blood, sweat and tears be swept away.”

—thefeministwire.com, 3 October

Such young activists, for all their defiance, are going down the same blind alleys: lobbying for a federal investigation, grasping at the illusion of making the police accountable to the community, getting out the vote. It is small wonder these activists see no alternative, as the only force that can actually provide a way forward, the integrated labor movement, has been shackled by its pro-capitalist misleaders.

At the September convention of the Missouri AFL-CIO, the labor federation’s president, Richard Trumka, delivered a sometimes eloquent speech on the need for the labor movement to address the reality of racism. Pointing to the 1917 anti-black riots in East St. Louis in which racist mobs killed up to 200 black people and drove black workers out of industry to make room for white World War I veterans, Trumka recalled the words of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs that the riots were “a foul blot upon the American labor movement.”

Today’s “foul blot” on organized labor is the fact that it includes the very racist killer cops who are taking black lives on a near-daily basis! Indeed, Trumka began his speech by decrying the tragedy that a union “brother”—that is, Ferguson cop Darren Wilson—killed a “sister’s son.” Michael Brown’s mother is a member of an AFL-CIO affiliate, the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Back in the days of the struggles that built the industrial unions, the police weren’t seen as “brothers.” On the contrary, they were correctly recognized as the armed enforcers of the bosses’ interests against the workers. The reason was obvious: the police were beating and shooting, often killing, strikers. Now, when unions even talk of participating in protests against police violence, their “union brothers” threaten retaliation. The NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association did so when the 1199SEIU union and the United Federation of Teachers said they were going to march in a Staten Island demonstration in August. In response, the SEIU tops distributed some signs that read: “Support NYPD. Stop Police Brutality.”

As is the case in many cities, the Greater St. Louis Labor Council has welcomed the local police “union” into its fold. Not surprisingly, far from taking up the fight against police terror, area unions have by and large not mobilized for the protests in Ferguson. The cops are sworn enemies of labor and have no place in the union movement. That the labor misleaders embrace the bosses’ thugs—the cops, prison guards and other armed security forces—is simply one of the more grotesque examples of their traitorous role as the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.

As we wrote in the 1978 preface to Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised) “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism”:

“Unlike chattel slavery, wage slavery has placed in the hands of black workers the objective conditions for successful revolt. But this revolt will be successful only if it takes as its target the system of class exploitation, the common enemy of black and white workers. The struggle to win black activists to a proletarian perspective is intimately linked to the fight for a new, multiracial class-struggle leadership of organized labor which can transform the trade unions into a key weapon in the battle against racial oppression. Such a leadership must break the grip of the Democratic Party upon both organized labor and the black masses through the fight for working-class political independence. As black workers, the most combative element within the U.S. working class, are won to the cause and party of proletarian revolution, they will be in the front ranks of this class-struggle leadership. And it will be these black proletarian fighters who will write the finest pages of ‘black history’—the struggle to smash racist, imperialist America and open the road to real freedom for all mankind.”

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

 

29th Annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal...The Struggle That Passes Through The Prisons-Free the Class-War Prisoners! Workers Vanguard No. 1057	28 November 2014

29th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

 

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

 

For nearly three decades, the Partisan Defense Committee has provided stipends to class-war prisoners—those behind bars for opposing varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC is now organizing our annual Holiday Appeal fundraisers on behalf of 16 such prisoners. We send them $50 monthly stipends and provide holiday gifts for them and their families. The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life.

 

The PDC’s stipend program is modeled on a tradition of the early Communist movement, specifically the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon, from 1925-28. The ILD sent monthly contributions to more than 100 people imprisoned for fighting in the interests of the working people and the oppressed. As Cannon observed: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one.... All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class” (“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926).

 

This past year, we added Albert Woodfox as a stipend recipient. Along with other Black Panther Party members known as the Angola Three, Woodfox stood up against the hideous racism at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. In retaliation, prison authorities have subjected him to more than four decades of solitary confinement.

 

Others who had received stipends are now outside prison walls. After months of medical neglect and with thousands demanding her release, Lynne Stewart was finally let out of federal prison last New Year’s Eve. Suffering serious complications from breast cancer, Stewart is undergoing special treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York City. She reports that she is struggling with drug side effects and is having difficulty walking. Other former PDC stipend recipients are the young anti-fascist activists known as the Tinley Park 5, who were released at various times over the last 12 months or so. They had been tossed into prison for heroically dispersing a Chicago-area meeting of fascists in May 2012.

 

As Cannon said, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Join us in this vital work of solidarity. The 16 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

 

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 70-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another ten years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

 

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 37th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

 

Albert Woodfox is the last of the Angola Three still incarcerated. Along with Herman Wallace and Robert King, Woodfox fought the vicious, racist and dehumanizing conditions in Louisiana’s Angola prison and courageously organized a Black Panther Party chapter at the prison. Authorities framed up Woodfox and Wallace for the fatal stabbing of a prison guard in 1972 and falsely convicted King of killing a fellow inmate a year later. For over 42 years, Woodfox has been locked down in Closed Cell Restricted (CCR) blocks, the longest stretch in solitary confinement ever in this country. His conviction has been overturned three times! According to his lawyers, he suffers from hypertension, heart disease, chronic renal insufficiency, diabetes, anxiety and insomnia—conditions no doubt caused and/or exacerbated by decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment.

 

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

 

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

 

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence after having finally been released from the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

 

Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-James P. Cannon

 Click below to link to the James Cannon Internet Archives 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/

Peter Paul Markin comment (2008):

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist Party and American Trotskyist leader  James P. Cannon.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

**********
BOOK REVIEW

SPEECHES FOR SOCIALISM- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.

This volume is a compendium of Cannon’s speeches over most of his active political life beginning with his leadership role in the early American Communist Party and his secondary role in the Communist International. Some of the selections are also available in other parts of the series mentioned above. I would also note here that in contrast to his "Notebook of an Agitator" (also reviewed in this space) the pieces here tend to be longer and based on more general socialist principles. The socialist movement has always emphasized two ways of getting its message out- propaganda and agitation. The selections here represent a more propagandistic approach to that message. Many of the presentations hold their own even today in 2006 as thoughtful expositions of the aims of socialism and how to struggle for it. I particularly draw the reader’s attention to "Sixty Years of American Radicalism" a speech given in 1959 in which Cannon draws a general overview of the ebbs and flows of the socialist movement from the turn of the 20th century until then. At that time Cannon also predicted a new radical upsurge which did occur shortly thereafter but unfortunately has long since ended.

Cannon’s speech correctly marks the great divide in the American socialist movement at World War I and the socialist response American participation in that war and subsequently to the Russian Revolution. Prior to that time socialist activity was a loose, federated affair driven by a more evolutionary approach to ultimate socialist success i.e. reformism. That trend was symbolized by the work of the great socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs. While that approach had many, ultimately, fatal flaws it did represent a solid attempt to draw a class struggle line for independent (from the capitalist parties) political action by the working class.

Drawing on those lessons the early Communist Party, basing itself on support of the Russian Revolution, became dominant on the American left by expanding on that concept. That is, until the mid-1930’s after it had already long been an agency under orders from Moscow in support, by one means or another, of the Rooseveltian Democratic Party, a capitalist party. That was fatal to long term prospects for independent working class political action and Cannon has harsh words for the party’s policy. He also noted that the next upsurge would have to right that policy by again demanding an independent political expression for the working class. Unfortunately, when that radical upsurge did occur in the 1960’s and early 1970’s the party that he formed, the Socialist Workers Party, essentially replicated in the anti-Vietnam War movement and elsewhere the Communist Party’s class collaborationist policy with the remnants of American liberalism. Obviously, as a man in his sixties Cannon was no longer able or willing to fight against that policy by the party that he had created. Thus, the third wave of radicalism also ebbed and the American Left declined. Nevertheless this speech is Cannon’s legacy to the youth today. A new upsurge, and it will come, must learn this lesson and fight tooth and nail for independent political expression for the working class to avoid another failure.
******************
The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers Government


These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.

I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]

For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.

That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.

Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.

Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.

The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).

Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)

So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).

America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.

Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.

[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]


Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.

And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.