Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

 

A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists )performing The World Turned Upside Down.

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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low–end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obama-care reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

  

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

 

THE FOLLOWING IS A SONG BASED ON THE DIGGER EXPERIENCE IN 1650

If John Milton was the literary muse of the English Revolution then the Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, were the political muses.

The World Turned Upside Down

We will not worship the God they serve, a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

In 1649 to St. George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's

will

They defied the landlords, they defied the laws

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow

We come to work the lands in common and make the waste

ground grow

This earth divided we will make whole

So it may be a common treasury for all "**

The sin of property we do disdain

No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain

By theft and murder they took the land

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

They make the laws to chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell

We will not worship the God they serve,

a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve

We work and eat together, we need no swords

We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords

Still we are free, though we are poor

Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!

From the men of property the orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers'

claim

Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn

They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on

Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care

This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share

All things in common, all people one

They came in peace - the order came to cut them down

WORDS AND MUSIC BY LEON ROSSELSON, 1981

 

*A Communist Before His Time –Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Colonies in the English Revolution

 

DVD REVIEW

Winstanley, starring Miles Harriwell, directed by Kenneth Brownlow, 1975

The time of the English Revolution in the 1640's, Oliver Cromwell's time, as in all revolutionary times saw a profusion of ideas from all kinds of sources- religious, secular, the arcane, the fanciful and the merely misbegotten. A few of those ideas however, as here, bear study by modern left-wing militants. As the film under review exemplifies, True Leveler (a. k. a. Diggers) Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tracts from the 1640's, the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long, heroic, and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and, in a limited sense, still do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time, the 1600's, what Communist Manifesto represented for Kaarl Marx's time-and ours-the first clarion call for the new more equitable world order. And those with property, those who controlled and gained from the means of production, hated both men with the same amount of venom, in their respective times.

One of the great advances Marx had over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley, by the state of economic development of his times, was forced to do. Marx, moreover, unlike Winstanley, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controlled the means of production a point that all previous theorists had either failed to account for, dismissed out of hand, or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means of changing human lifestyles. Marx posed the question differently by centering on the creation of social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival would be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levelers' weaknesses of program and their improbabilities of success in the 1640's militants today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.

Notwithstanding the utopian nature of the experiment discussed above the filmmaker, Kenneth Brownlow, and his associates here have painstakingly, lovingly and with fidelity to the narrative and detail that are known from the researches of the likes of Christopher Hill and George Sabine, among others, that make for an excellent snapshot of what it might have been like up on Winstanley's St. George's Hill long ago. Two things add to that end.

First, the use of black and white highlights the bleak countryside (after all although the land was "common" it was waste that the landlord did not find it expedient to cultivate) and the pinched appearances of the "comrades" (especially the deeply-farrowed expressions of Miles Harriwell as Winstanley). Secondly, the director has used to the greatest extent possible Winstanley's own pamphlets that dealt with what was going on in Surrey and what his political purposes were (expressed as almost always in those days in religious terms- but taking land in common for use rather than profit is understandable in any language. I might add that the attempts to replicate the costumes of the period, the furnishings and the music round out a job well done.

Note: Part of this DVD contains a section on the hows and whys of the making of the film, including in-depth coverage of its making and commentary by Mr. Brownlow. You are getting this film for the Winstanley reenactment but this section is interesting if you are interested in filmmaking as well.

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists-Karl Liebknecht  

 

 

    

EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.

Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography

The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.

As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was imprisoned.

Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.

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Markin comment:

Karl Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior

This comment was originally  written in 2006 in the American Left History blog but the main points hold true today:

I recently (2006) have received a comment from someone whom I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s (and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was only the beginning of political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or her other politics were weak.  The commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what kind of politician would qualify for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians, Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht, the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts. Here is what I had to say in part about that revolutionary politician:   

"…I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had been a friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. That, my friends, is the kind of politician I can support. As for the rest-hold their feet to the fire.

"One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. (That photograph can be Googled.) That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "HE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR." Wilhelm would have been proud.

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

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

Wartime prose

Prose, particularly in the form of novels and memoirs, is often a vehicle for sustained reflection on an event long after it has taken place. Many accounts of the First World War, however, were written during the conflict. Nothing of Importance was penned shortly after the events it describes, long before the war reached its conclusion. Sometimes diaries, in their raw, unmediated form found an audience. Arthur Graeme West’s record of his service as an officer on the Western Front was published posthumously as The Diary of a Dead Officer in 1918. Despite his voluntary enlistment, the diary records West’s growing contempt for army life and his conversion to pacifism.

Men, Women, and Guns

Under the pseudonym ‘Sapper’, Herman Cyril McNeile wrote short stories about his experiences of war.

View images from this item  (10)

Free from known copyright restrictions

However, most popular works published during the war offered optimistic, patriotic portrayals. Ian Hay, in his novel The First Hundred Thousand (1915), provided a light-hearted and humorous account of life at the front. Writers like Escott Lynn in his adventure novels, and ‘Sapper’, in his various short stories, depicted war as a fulfilling and exciting endeavour.
But if these authors dealt their characters clubs and diamonds, the French author Henri Barbusse dealt his characters spades and hearts. In his novel Le Feu (Under Fire), published in French in 1916, translated into English in 1917), Barbusse provided a vehement denunciation of militarism. Known for his brutal realism, Barbusse captured in stark, graphic language the appalling horror of mechanical warfare. In this account, soldiers are not ‘adventurers or warriors’; rather they are ‘civilians uprooted’, who ‘await the signal for death or murder’.

- See more at: http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/prose-responses-to-world-war-one#sthash.nMsZT7A2.dpuf

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

 

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.”   

 

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website- And A Personal Appeal From The American Left History Blog - Remembering The Class-War Prisoners During The Holiday Appeal     

 

James P. Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.