Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-Seven –To Defend One’s Own  

 

 

All hell was breaking loose in Mississippi in 1964 after they found those boys, those civil rights worker boys over in some ditch in Philadelphia (hell was breaking out before and after too but that year got everybody’s attention North and South, abolitionist and redneck, because a  showdown was coming no question). Even Jacob Block knew some hard-ass stuff was coming down as isolated as he was from white folks (and other black folk too) on his poor excuse of a share crop farm about fifty miles outside of Hattiesburg. As he thought about it afterwards, after all hell had broken loose in his little world and its environs, he should have known it would come to that, come to a confrontation with Mister, or Mister’s rednecks acting in his name. Hell, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Ezra Bond, had jumped his plantation over near Savannah, Georgia, to walk down and join Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers and raise some hell with the boys in grey. And later some cousin had been lynched right in broad daylight down near Biloxi, a big feisty rabid white crowd watching on, watching on with glee from what he had heard just because that cousin had tried, shotgun in hand, to defense his woman when some white rascal got his lust habits on. Yes, he should have known, known it was in the blood that when the deal went down he had to do something, had to defend his own, his sweet Martha, and the little ones.                      

Jacob did not know how he had first found out they were coming, about the redneck rampage, maybe something overheard in Otis Junction when he went to get his monthly provisions, maybe from somebody at the Lord’s Worship Baptist Church over in Oxbridge that time he went for Jim Jackson’s daughter’s wedding. But no question either that they were coming, coming to throw the worst fear into every last “nigger” (their term, always their term even when directly speaking to a negro, just one more way to put the black man behind the eight ball) within one hundred miles of Hattiesburg once they heard that some blacks were going right to the farms to get other blacks, farmers and small town dwellers alike, to register to vote, to exercise their American-given right to have a say in things. He had never voted, never cared if he voted, and never even really tried once he had gotten wise to Mister Jim Crow and his ways even though he could, mother taught, read and write as well as any white man in the county, hell, maybe in the state of Mississippi. He wanted no trouble, wanted no part of Mister, no part of confronting Mister Jim Crow and just wanted to be left alone. And that was that.     

That was that until he heard about those Philadelphia boys, and until he had heard that they had, that white trash that had been put up to it by Mister and his damn White Citizens Councils, burned down Jack Lewis’ place, his beautiful little shack that he had spent half a life time trying to fix up, when he decided to lead his fellow church people to Hattiesburg to register to vote. Jacob still did not care whether he voted or not, registered or not, but since he was, the way things were going, to be targeted anyway just for being black, poor and nothing but a sharecropper well that was enough. Enough to get him and a few fellows, young bucks, sons of farmers he had met over the years although he did not know them or their sons well, and get ready to defend their land, come hell or high water, defend the land like some avenging angels arms in hand like they were heeding some ghost call from that old black abolitionist rabble-rouser Frederick Douglass with his call “to arms, sable warriors, to arms, the hour is at hand” to fight for freedom one more time. 

Yah, it had come to that, come to simple black manhood time, time to either keep that lifetime head bent down, or walk on two black feet. And when it came to that showdown they were ready as Ebby Johnson’s son, William, a veteran of Korea, showed them how to use their shotguns to effect. And that knowledge came in handy one night, one night when they heard that a gang of whites was heading up Traversville Road about ten miles from Jacob’s land in three cars shooting and slowly setting fires at random and watching their handiwork. Probably drunk too Jacob (and William) figured. So they set an ambush around Tyler Road, dark, with high ground and easy escape. And that night, whether it ever got recorded, reported, or noted, a small cadre of black men, black avenging angels (no niggers, nigras, or even negroes now) sent a fusillade of shotgun fire down at the three cars coming up that black night Mississippi road. And, you know, no marauding rednecks ever came within twenty miles of Jacob Block’s land again. And while he never took the time to register to vote when that became easier later he was always at pains to tell  everybody he knew that one sweaty fearful night he had  done all the voting he needed to do…         

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]

 

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

 

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

 

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

 

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

 

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

 

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

 

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

 

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

 

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

 

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

 

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

 

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

 

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

 

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 

We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 

Peace & Planet Conference Registration & Info: Eve of NPT Review April 24-25

  

Friends,
This note is addressed to those of you who have expressed interest in our Peace & Planet organizing in the early stages of our organizing for this April’s NPT Revew events. The response to our announcements urging organizational endorsements three days ago was exceptional. Our Peace & Planet mobilizing is now running on something like all cylinders.
I am writing to let you know that our web page is now ready to process registrations for the International Peace & Planet Conference, April 24-25, which will be held at the Cooper Union. You can find the Conference Program on our web page.
About half of our plenary speakers (hailing from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States – including leading figures in the nuclear abolition, peace, justice and environmental movements, Hibakusha, scholars, and political figures) are now confirmed. We’ll be adding to this list in the coming weeks as we hear back from leading activists, organizers, and U.N. and allied governmental figures.
The Cooper Union’s Great Hall seats just over 800 people, and we expect to have a full house. To provide priority access to the Conference to our Coordinating and Advisory Committee organizations and those in New York playing key roles in the Mobilization, you are receiving this announcement two weeks before we began advertising Conference Registration to the wider public.
Please click here to register for the Peace & Planet Conference.
We also encourage your organization to (co-)sponsor a workshop at the Conference. To propose a workshop, please click here. And, if you have not already (and are in a position to do so), please consider adding any organizations you work with to our list of Endorsers.
Building together for a nuclear free, peaceful, just and sustainable world,
Joseph Gerson
Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter!
http://www.PeaceAndPlanet.org
info@peaceandplanet.org

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

A Guy Who Knew All The Angles- James Cagney’s The Roaring Twenties

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Roaring Twenties, starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart

Yeah, Eddie Barrett bought the ticket, took the ride, and in the end wound up dead, very dead, on some forsaken dark bloodied New York stoop, unmourns or unloved. Well, that last part is not exactly true, since over the hill flame Panama, Panama of the easy street times, easy dough and booze flowing times when their ships were rising, and easy virtue shed when a few street tricks kept them from the depths of skid row, shed a few tears when he punched his ticket. See Eddie knew all the angles just like a lot of guys who grew up hard, grew up with those never-ending “from hunger” wanting habits that the swells laughed off while eating their caviar and bonded liquor, grew up on the mean streets, had “street smarts.”  While not every guy who grew up hard on the mean Five Point streets (or name your hard streets) had to use all the angles at their disposal Eddie did, Eddie just couldn’t temperamentally lay off testing the fate sisters and hence a few wrong turns toward the end sealed his fate, brought him face to face with that stony death and those few Panama tears. Eddie is played in the film under review, The Roaring Twenties, by James Cagney who build his early career on this fare but the role could have been played by half a dozen hard-nosed guys, hard-nosed actors, then and now, like Bogie, George Raft, Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, hell, a few of my growing up in Carver corner boys like Billy Bradley and Red Riley could have given a  good account of themselves, because what Eddie had, how Eddie survived for a while in the world is something a lot of guys, and not just actors, would know how to do, know without the script.   

Here’s the lay of the land and you judge whether Eddie did right, or maybe got himself too tied up in the angles bit. Maybe though you cerebral types, social workers or arm-chair philosophers, will think that our boy just got waylaid by circumstances, you know, a combination of things that just proved too much to overcome. Eddie like a lot of street guys started out straight enough, had small New York, Bronx, Queens, or Flatbush dreams around the early part of the 20^th century when dreams were plentiful and prospects to do okay were not outlandish. See Eddie, well, Eddie was a grease monkey, a guy pretty handy around cars, worked for a guy for a while and then figured if everything went okay would open his own shop since even back then America was in love with the automobile, loved the idea of the open road, of breezing across the land in something fast and sleek, and guys who could fix cars were aces all around.

But here is where those of you who want to discuss that “victim of circumstances” stuff could have a field day. Just as Eddie was coming to serious manhood, to be able to breathe a little on his own, the troubles in Europe, you know, World War I spilled over into America and Eddie would up in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Don’t get me wrong Eddie  joined up for the fight with both hands, did his fair share of fighting on the trench-filled fronts, made a couple of buddies, and came home safe and sound. But that is when it all started to come undone. He came back, came back late after his division drew extra time in Europe make sure things were cooled off, came back like in a lot of wars of late not to a hero’s welcome, but to no job, no prospects, and no liquor, no liquor because of the Volstead Act which prohibited the sale of legal liquor all through those Roaring Twenties. The free-wielding Jazz Age that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about but which not everybody got a chance to dive into.

So no job, no dough, no prospects Eddie Barrett faced a turning point after a hack (cab-driver) friend let him go in on his cab business and while doing that work got into trouble for delivering some illegal booze to sweet hustler Panama’s speakeasy. He took the bust like a man keeping her out of it but also got wise to the ways of the world that if he was going to take a tumble he wanted to go big. Being a street smart guy Eddies figured to ride the wave, the free and easy booze wave (here he was smart too unlike some guys then who drank up the profits and some guys later who snorted the cocaine profits, he didn’t drink, not at first anyway). So our boy moved up the food chain, the dog eat dog crime food chain which showed no mercy for the weak or the dumb, and looked to be a guy who would survive the cut in the survival of the fittest struggle.

Two things got in his way though, well, two things but really one thing, a dame, a frail, a frill or whatever they called a woman in their neighborhoods in those days, a torch singer too, who was looking to make it in the bright lights of the city.  This young woman though, Jean (played by virginal good-girl Priscilla Lane) was all wrong for rough and tumble street smart Eddie, Eddie from the wrong side of the tracks, since she was a clean-cut girl next door-type whatever her singing aspirations, a woman made for satin sheets and easy rolls. Panama, old standby through thick and thin Panama, was more Eddie’s speed, could have “curled his toes” and done him some good. But when a guy gets gone on a woman, well, you know almost anything can happen, street smart guy or not. So Eddie took the tumble, figured to keep Jean in clover so that he had to move more quickly up the food chain. And that is where problem number two came in. There were already guys ahead of him in line in that food chain, and so Eddie had to get rough, get pushy with the next guy up. In the process his ran into an old war buddy, George (played by a young Humphrey Bogart), who was also street smart and who was working for the next guy up the chain. They decided, uneasily, to join forces, and for a while they were making money hand over fist, were living on easy streets.

Here is where fate, the furious fate sisters, played Eddie wrong. First off despite the dough that virginal Jean did not go for Eddie but had eyes for, what did they call it, one of her own kind, another Eddie war buddy, a lawyer and so Eddie was out in the cold on that front. I will say he took that defeat like a man and let her go. Here though is where you never know what is going to happen. The Great Depression came along and wise investment stock-heavy Eddie went under, had to sell out to George, cheaply, for dimes and doughnuts, which stuck in his craw. Then that old war buddy lawyer, Jean’s honey man, working for the District Attorney got involved in trying to smash the crime rackets and while Eddie was down on cheap street our friend George had moved up the chain. Naturally a guy who has moved up the chain even if he has stalled out will take umbrage if the coppers try to squeeze his action and so, for Jean’s sake, yeah, Eddie was still carrying the torch for her despite everything, had that final confrontation with George and his boys and wound up on those tear-stained bloody steps for his efforts.  Eddie knew all the angles, was a smart guy, but you know when a dame is involved all bets are off. Yeah, buy the ticket, take the ride.                 

In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind

 

Several years ago Sam Lowell, the locally well-known lawyer from the town of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, wrote some small pieces about the old days in the town, the old (painful) days when he attended the then newly built Myles Standish Junior High School (such places are now almost universally called middle schools) where he and his fellow class- mates were the first to go through. In that piece he mentioned that he was not adverse, hell, he depended on “cribbing” words, phrases and sentences from many sources. One such “crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and feeling.       

Prior to writing those pieces he had contacted through the marvels of modern technology, through the Internet, Google and Facebook a number of the surviving members of that Myles Standish Class of 1962 to get their take on what they remembered, what search that might be interested in undertaking to “understand what the hell happened back then and why” (his expression, okay). He got a number of responses   from people speaking of where they lived now, what they had done with their lives and so forth who also once Sam brought the matter up wanted to think back to those days. One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, after they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method (oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put out by Myles Standish in 1987 commemorating the  25^th anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in the art class photograph was of him.        

That set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take art in school and outside as well unlike today when he had been informed that due to school budget cuts art is no longer offered to each student but is tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center, when Mrs. Robert’s encouraged him to become an artist, thought he had talent (later at Carver High Mr. Henry thought the same thing and was prepared to recommend him to his alma mater the Massachusetts School of Art in the Back Bay of Boston).

Art for Sam had always been a way for him to express what he could not put in words, could not easily put in words anyway and he was always crazy to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see some artwork by real professionals, especially the abstract expressionists that he was visually drawn to (and would leave after viewing feeling like he at best would be an inspired amateur). The big reason that he did not pursue that art career had a lot to do with coming up “from hunger,” coming up the hard way and when he broached the subject to his parents, mainly his mother, she vigorously emphasized the hard life of the average artist and told him that a manly profession (her term) was better for a boy who had come up from the dust of society. He wondered about that after seeing the photograph, wondered about the fact that after a lifetime of working the manly profession of the law all he could conclude was that there were a million good lawyers but far fewer good artists and maybe he could have at least had his fifteen minutes of fame in that field. He resolved to search for some old artwork stored he did not know where to see if that path would have made sense.     

Sam had had to laugh after looking at the other photograph, the one of the music room, where he spotted his old friend Ralph Morse who went on in the 1960s to some small fame in the Greater Boston area as a member of the rock group The Rockin’ Ramrods. That look too set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take music in school and outside as well like with art classes unlike today when he had been informed that due to school budget cuts music is no longer offered to each student but is also tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center. However unlike with his art teachers Mr. Dasher the music teacher often went out of his way to tell Sam to keep his voice down since it was gravelly, and off-key to boot. At the time Sam did not think much about it, did not feel bad about having no musical sense. Later though once he heard folk music, the blues and some other roots music he felt bad that Mister Dasher had put a damper on his musical sensibilities. Not that he would have gone on to some career like Ralph, at least Ralph had his fifteen minutes of fame, but he would have avoided that life-long habit of singing low, singing in the shower, singing up in the isolated third floor where no one would hear him. The search for memory goes on….  

Gays and the 1984-85 British Miners Strike-Pride: A Celebration of Solidarity-A Review by Len Michelson Workers Vanguard No. 1061	6 February 2015

Gays and the 1984-85 British Miners Strike-Pride: A Celebration of Solidarity

A Review by Len Michelson

 

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 229 (Winter 2014-15), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

 

The new movie Pride has been met, deservedly, by a raft of rave reviews. Released 30 years after the launch of the heroic 1984-85 miners strike, Pride offers an exhilarating glimpse at what remains one of the most combative expressions of the class struggle in Britain and at the electrifying impact it had on broad layers of the oppressed. For those, especially younger people, who know only the occasional one- or two-day token strike in response to the incessant and unrelenting attacks by the bourgeoisie against wages and living conditions and the onslaught of racist, anti-immigrant and “family values” reaction, this film is a reminder that another world is, indeed, possible.

The year-long struggle led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) exposed the threadbare social fabric of decrepit British capitalism. Intent on taming and destroying the most powerful union in the land, the Tory [Conservative] government of Margaret Thatcher provoked a torrent of class-struggle opposition that nearly brought the union-busting, anti-Communist “Iron Lady” to her knees. In building mass pickets and defying an army of scab-herding cops that flooded the coalfields, the miners inspired tens of thousands of railway and transport workers and other unionists to risk their jobs by engaging in concrete acts of labour solidarity. The NUM’s struggle against the despised Thatcher also galvanised the support and solidarity of the oppressed black and Asian communities, Irish Republicans and others chafing under the heel of the capitalist ruling class and its state, first and foremost the miners wives’ and women’s support groups that sprang up in every pit locality. In turn, this upwelling of support, and their own experience in struggle, dramatically changed the consciousness of the strikers and their families.

Pride focuses on an organisation of one such layer of the oppressed, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). The film begins with the June 1984 Gay Pride parade in London, where the central figure, Mark Ashton (played by Ben Schnetzer), encourages his friends from Gay’s the Word bookshop to carry collection buckets for the strike. A raucous meeting follows where Ashton, joined by a handful of other gay men and a sole lesbian, Steph (Faye Marsay), founded LGSM in the face of narrow gay sectoralist concerns and hostility to the working class (derived in part from memories of beatings by backward workers). The LGSM activists are then confronted by prejudice from the other side, as one pit after another turns down support from an openly gay group. Finally, after a series of comic misunderstandings, Dai Donovan (Paddy Considine), a strike leader from the Dulais Valley in South Wales, comes to London to meet them. Donovan’s quiet and sober demeanor contrasts sharply with the ostentatious gay lifestylism flaunted by some of the LGSM.

The theme of solidarity in struggle (and human warmth) creating bonds and understanding between seeming opposites weaves through the film. The flamboyant Jonathan (played by Dominic West, previously Detective McNulty in The Wire) becomes the hit of the mining village after disco-dancing on the tables in the miners welfare club and teaching some of the younger strikers to dance (“Welsh men don’t dance,” complains one local woman). The older women in the village insist on a tour of gay clubs (including the “rubber scene”) while visiting London for a strike benefit. The venerable Welsh village elder (played by Bill Nighy) confesses before the film’s end that he has been in the closet all these years.

Feel-good Hollywood cliché and schmaltz abound, but they speak to a deeper truth about the strike. As we noted repeatedly in our press at the time, as the strike went on it began to break down longstanding sexual, racial, regional and national barriers. Dai speaks for the many strikers who became powerful public speakers in the course of the struggle. The fiery women portrayed in the film did become among the most intransigent and articulate fighters for a strike victory after breaking down the resistance of their husbands and sons to women playing a full part in the struggle. Women not only participated in running the communal kitchens and dining halls but also joined the picket lines and spoke publicly to motivate support for the strike at meetings and rallies. More than one of the thousands of miners who came to London to collect donations confessed to knowing “friends” who had been racist until they encountered resounding support for their struggle within the black and Asian communities. These miners were welcomed into the homes of strike supporters, just as supporters who visited the pit communities were welcomed into the homes of strikers.

In motivating gay support for the strike, Ashton declaims that Thatcher hates the miners as much as she hates gays and that the cops have now found someone else to “pick on.” In our articles on the strike we, too, made the point that the miners were being subjected to the same brutality the bosses’ state had long meted out to more vulnerable layers of the oppressed. But there was a more fundamental reason why blacks and Asians, women, gays and Irish Catholics rallied behind the miners cause. The miners had social power, a power derived from the workers’ organisation and their ability to stop the wheels of the capitalist profit system from turning. Many saw the NUM, which had brought down the Tory Heath government in 1974, as the vanguard of the trade union movement and looked to the miners to bring down the universally hated Thatcher and open the road to a better future.

But to achieve victory the solidarity the miners needed most was not money and friendship. From the outset of the struggle, we said: “Miners must not stand alone!” The only way to defeat the full might of the capitalist state arrayed against the NUM was to bring out other unions in struggle on the picket lines. With the Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock and the TUC [Trades Union Congress] under Norman Willis openly hostile to the strike, we pointed to the urgent need to draw the left-led unions, whose leaders claimed to support the miners struggle, out on strike alongside the NUM. When two brief dock strikes in the summer of 1984 threatened to bring the economy to a standstill (plunging the pound sterling to an all-time low), we agitated for a fighting Triple Alliance to shut down the country through joint strike action of miners and rail and other transport workers around a series of demands in the interests of the whole trade union movement. This would have amounted to a general strike, posing the question of a struggle for power. And this is what frightened the Labour and TUC tops, “left” as well as right, more than anything else.

While tens of thousands of miners and other workers showed their contempt for Kinnock and Willis (including by lowering a noose in front of the podium when Willis appeared in Wales in 1984), [NUM leader Arthur] Scargill and prominent Labour “left” Tony Benn did not challenge these scabherders, nor did they criticise their “left” TUC allies for refusing to bring out their unions. As we wrote at the end of the strike, “In the final analysis, it was not the cops and courts that defeated the NUM; it was the fifth column in labour’s ranks” (Workers Hammer No. 67, March 1985). The scene depicted in Pride of the Dulais miners marching back to work, heads unbowed, was repeated in pit villages around the country, and inspired our headline: “Thatcher Vindictive in Victory—Miners Defiant in Defeat.” We drew a balance sheet of the strike:

“The NUM leadership under Arthur Scargill took the strike about as far as it could go within a perspective of militant trade union reformism, and still it lost. Why? Because militancy alone is not enough. From day one it was clear that the NUM was up against the full power of the capitalist state. What was needed was a party of revolutionary activists rooted in the trade unions which fought tooth and nail to mobilise other unions in strike action alongside the NUM. But all Arthur Scargill had was the Labour Party, and it would rather see the NUM dead than organise to take on the bosses’ state in struggle.”

Pride makes no mention of the broader social and political questions at stake in the strike, aside from a seemingly jocular exclamation by Steph when the LGSM is founded: “Terrific—let’s bring down the government!” The film does not indicate that Mark Ashton was actually a leading figure in the Young Communist League. Yet, as Ray Goodspeed, one of the founding members of LGSM, told [the left group] rs21 (21 September 2014): “Of the eleven people who started LGSM, we were all either Trotskyists, communists or very close friends of communists.” Goodspeed was then a longtime member of the Militant group, which was buried deep inside Kinnock’s Labour Party. Goodspeed acknowledges that Militant “had a very dismissive position on gay rights.” One wing of the divided Communist Party openly braintrusted for Kinnock (and later [Tony] Blair) while the other acted as “left” apologists for the Labour/TUC tops. Many groups on the left shared Thatcher’s visceral hatred for the Soviet Union and/or joined her in calling for a strikebreaking “ballot” after the strike was already underway.

Sectoralism—be it feminism, nationalism or gay lifestylism—accommodates the divisions fostered by the capitalist ruling class and undermines the struggle against special oppression. The closing scene of Pride, as hundreds of Welsh miners and their families pour out of coaches to proudly place themselves, marching bands and all, at the head of the 1985 Gay Pride parade in London, points symbolically to another alternative: that of the organised working class standing at the head of all the oppressed. That sort of unity can be achieved only under the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party that acts as a Leninist tribune of the people, championing the rights of gays, women, ethnic and national minorities and all the exploited and oppressed as part of the struggle for workers revolution.

A View From The Left-From the Archives of Marxism-On Federal Troops in Little Rock 1957)

Workers Vanguard No. 1061	6 February 2015

From the Archives of Marxism

On Federal Troops in Little Rock

 

To commemorate Black History Month, we reprint a 10 October 1957 letter by Richard S. Fraser to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) Political Committee opposing the party’s craven support to the dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas. In the wake of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, Dixiecrat Democratic Party politicians unleashed the forces of “law and order” as well as extra-legal terror by KKK-infested lynch mobs to attack black people fighting for equal rights across the South. The crisis reverberated internationally, chipping away at the U.S. government’s democratic veneer and posture as top cop of freedom at the very height of the Cold War.

A flash point came in September 1957 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the state militia to draw guns on nine black students who attempted to enter Little Rock’s Central High School. Howling racist mobs surrounded the students and threatened to lynch them. Later that month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne. The big lie that has been accepted as official history is that the federal government stepped in to defend the helpless local black people. The true story is that Eisenhower sent in the troops to crush a local upheaval that included the organization of black self-defense against racist terror. As the Amsterdam News (28 September 1957), a New York black newspaper, headlined: “Ike Moves as Negroes Hit Back.”

The issue of looking to the federal government to defend the oppressed black masses was hotly debated inside the then-Trotskyist SWP. The party and its newspaper, the Militant, had first called on the federal government to send troops to Mississippi two years earlier. Dick Fraser opposed that call and, in a 1956 document titled “Contribution to the Discussion on the Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’,” noted presciently that “the most probable condition under which the Federal Government will send troops to the South will be that the Negroes hold the initiative in the struggle.... When the Negroes take the initiative it is a ‘race riot’ and the public security is threatened and an excellent reason is given to the government to intervene.”

In the early civil rights movement, the SWP tailed the middle-class preachers like Martin Luther King Jr., who opposed black self-defense and sought to contain the struggle within the framework of reliance on the federal government. King sent a telegram to Eisenhower “to express my sincere support for the stand you have taken to restore law and order in Little Rock.” The call for federal troops was an important signpost in the SWP’s degeneration to centrism (revolutionary in words, reformist in deeds) and later abject reformism and explicit junking of a Trotskyist program.

Dick Fraser was a veteran Trotskyist and tenacious fighter who illuminated a program of revolutionary integration: the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. Fraser’s lifetime of revolutionary scholarship on the black question sprang from his conviction that to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the institutions of racial oppression in the U.S. Fraser showed that the systematic subjugation of black people is too inextricably bound up with the historical development and economic, social and political reality of the American capitalist system to permit a reformist solution or separation of the struggle for black freedom from emancipating the working class as a whole.

Although we had political differences with Dick Fraser, we credit him as our teacher on the nature of racial oppression in the U.S. More of his writings can be found in “In Memoriam, Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work” (Prometheus Research Series No. 3, 1990) and in “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question,” (Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism”).

*   *   *

The editorial on the action by the Federal government in sending troops to Little Rock, published on the front page of the Militant of September 20th, brings the dispute over this question into sharp focus.

This episode has posed the fundamental question point-blank: shall the struggle in the South be waged in abject dependence upon the government, or independently by the masses?

The entire Negro community of Little Rock, numbering 25,000, was poised and ready for action. Their eagerness to participate in the struggle at times overflowed in dramatic eruptions, as testified to by the Negro press. Moreover, this mass eagerness occurred within a favorable relationship of forces.

The Negro middle class leaders refused the masses any part in the struggle, demanding that they cease aspiring to act and to accept a passive role meekly. Having betrayed the masses’ desire for action, the leadership appealed instead to the government to solve the crisis.

The demand for Federal Troops to the South is revealed in action, not as an adjunct to but as a substitute for the organized action of the masses and is counterposed directly to it.

The editorial sees in this situation a “Valuable Precedent”—“For the use of federal troops in Little Rock constitutes a precedent for the Negro people that the capitalist politicians—much as they will squirm and try to weasel out of—will never be able to get away from. At each crucial stage in the fight for the enforcement of the rights they now possess on paper, the Negro people will be in a position to demand federal intervention if they need it....”

If they need it? Who is to determine if they need it? The editors of the Militant seem quite willing to take the word of the middle class leadership whether the Negro people need Federal soldiers—and this leadership will continue to prefer governmental action to mass action, as has been their tradition.

This perspective for the struggle is justified by the Militant in the following manner: “The resulting political pressure...can blow the Republican-Democratic political monopoly sky high.” Such a formula provides a political justification for continued dependence on the government and for perpetuation of the policy of no organization of the masses.

Spokesmen for the P.C. [Political Committee] convention resolution have repeatedly claimed that one of its central points was the question of mass action vs. dependence on the government. The editorial in question, however, illustrates the contradictory character of the resolution which at one and the same time calls for a class struggle policy in the Negro movement, but also endorses parts of the consciously collaborationist and anti-revolutionary program of the middle class leadership.

I request that this letter be circulated to the N.C. [National Committee] as soon as possible.  

A View From The Left- Ferguson and the Feds-Another Whitewash of Cop Terror Workers Vanguard No. 1061	6 February 2015

Ferguson and the Feds

Another Whitewash of Cop Terror

 

Two days after Martin Luther King Day, the Feds put out the word: Justice Department lawyers would recommend that no charges be brought against the cop Darren Wilson for gunning down unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. The FBI investigation found “no evidence” that Brown’s civil rights had been violated! Although the Justice Department has not yet closed the case, the message is clear: a cop’s badge is a license to kill in capitalist America.

When Ferguson erupted in protest last summer, President Barack Obama sent his attorney general Eric Holder to cool things down with promises of a “rigorous and independent” civil rights investigation into Brown’s killing as well as a review of the town’s police department. The preachers, black Democrats and trade-union misleaders got on board, pushing illusions that federal oversight would clean up the Ferguson police. Ferguson activists in Hands Up United raised the demand for “Eric Holder to use the full resources and power of the Department of Justice to implement a nationwide investigation of systematic police brutality and harassment in black and brown communities.”

We warned in a leaflet issued soon after Brown’s killing:

“There should be no illusions in the Democrats or the federal government, which oversees this rotten system that the cops ‘serve and protect.’ The notion that the Feds will rein in racist local law enforcement is a lie. FBI agents have been embedded in the Ku Klux Klan and involved in heinous crimes, such as the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the 1979 Greensboro massacre of leftists and union organizers. With many in Ferguson seeking redress from a Department of Justice investigation, we warn that Attorney General Eric Holder & Co. are the top cops who step in to get people off the streets with the promise that justice may come in the sweet by-and-by, at best enacting cosmetic reforms.”

— “Ferguson: The Real Face of Racist Capitalist America,” reprinted in WV No. 1051, 5 September 2014

The purpose of federal investigations of the police has never been to rein in racist cop terror, which is a daily part of life for the black and Latino masses whether or not the Feds have been in town. In Cleveland, Ohio, last year, cops gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played in a park and then threw his 14-year-old sister to the ground and cuffed her. This after two previous federal investigations of the city’s police. Indeed, the very purpose of a federal investigation is to defuse anger over police atrocities and prevent social explosions, keeping the system of capitalist exploitation running smoothly.

The law establishing the guidelines for federal civil rights investigations into local police departments was cooked up in 1991 after the sadistic beating of black motorist Rodney King by a gang of Los Angeles cops was broadcast on national television. In April 1992, a jury in state court acquitted the four officers who had actually gone to trial, and L.A. exploded. The federal government dispatched military troops, federal agents and Border Patrol officers against poor, black and Latino Los Angeles. Months later, the Feds also “investigated” whether King’s civil rights had been violated. Only two of the more than a dozen cops involved were convicted and they served short sentences.

It’s no accident that Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder, Brooklyn federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch, flaunts her tough-on-crime credentials under the catchphrase “Nana’s going to jail.” The function of the Department of Justice—which includes the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons—is to spy on political activists, enforce the racist “war on drugs,” victimize militant trade unionists and run prisons. Calling on the top overseer of the whole plantation to protect black people from his local subordinates is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

For protesters who have taken to the streets across the country, the unrelenting cop killings have posed the question: which way forward? Given that federal oversight, civilian review boards and body cameras have made no difference, some express frustration with the Obama administration. But these activists then argue for more militant tactics…to pressure the government to clean up the police and enact other reforms to alleviate the desperate conditions of black people in America. Militancy in pursuit of the same reformist program is no answer. It is necessary to break with the strategy of pressure politics. To end police brutality and racial oppression in America requires a class-struggle fight for socialist revolution.

Activists at “Reclaim MLK” protests around the King holiday were motivated by the belief that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been co-opted by the political establishment. In reality, King was always a part of that establishment, a figure whose entire political career was based on brokering reforms from the Democratic Party of Kennedy and Johnson. King was the best representative of the petty-bourgeois black leaders who advocated a program of reliance on federal intervention against the Jim Crow South. This strategy reflected fear and loathing of the poor and more militant black masses, who were beginning to organize self-defense against racist terror as part of the struggle against segregation in all spheres of life: schools, transportation, lunch counters, housing (see “On Federal Troops in Little Rock,” page 2).

MLK pushed a pacifist, turn-the-other-cheek solution to corral those working-class blacks and courageous youth whose militancy was starting to escape the bounds of impotent pressure politics. And in response to the unorganized upheavals of the ghetto masses against police terror, such as occurred in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965, King proclaimed: “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them.” King’s utility to the Feds was immeasurable as an authoritative black leader whose message was to disarm, go slow, and love and trust the forces of capitalist state repression. (For more on King, see “Selma: The Movie and the Real Story,” WV No. 1060, 23 January.)

It is necessary to junk the myth pushed by liberals in the current anti-police brutality protests that there was a golden age of good neighborhood policing, which could be restored today through civilian review boards and federal oversight. Those good old days existed precisely never. In an article titled “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” (lawcha.org, 29 December 2014), Sam Mitrani, author of the book The Rise of the Chicago Police Department, describes how “the police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice.” Emerging out of the bloody battles between cops and strikers in the mid-to-late 19th century, police forces were created to protect capitalism “from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.” In the antebellum South, the predecessors of modern police forces were the slave patrols.

Nonetheless, Mitrani retails the liberal absurdity that “a democratic police system is imaginable—one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol.” The fact is that the cops’ job is to defend the capitalist order through the violent repression of those capitalism exploits and oppresses. In the U.S., where capitalism had its roots in the system of chattel slavery, this violence is especially directed at black people. The cops cannot be reformed or gotten rid of short of a socialist revolution that shatters the system of wage slavery that police forces were created to defend.

The International Socialist Organization and other reformist groups were movers and shakers behind “The Gathering,” an anti-police brutality conference in New York City on January 30, where the issue of police accountability got a lot of play. A Spartacist supporter argued from the floor at the conference plenary: “All this talk about community control or having negotiations with the cops or dialogue is defeatist and won’t go anywhere. The point is that there is a social force in society that can actually bring change, and that is the working class.” The union movement in this country was built through hard-fought strikes in which workers had to fend off cop attacks. The potential power is there. And black workers, with their ties to the ghetto masses, will form an important link between the struggle against wage slavery and the fight for black freedom.

Today, as black youth continue to fall victim to racist cop brutality across the country, the labor movement is on its knees, failing to defend the jobs and wages of its own members, much less champion the causes of the oppressed. Responsibility in no small part lies with the existing leadership of the unions, which has undermined labor’s struggles and sped its decline by pledging loyalty to the profit system and tying the unions to the capitalist Democratic Party. To turn this situation around requires a political struggle against all the forces that build illusions in the agencies of the capitalist government and bourgeois politicians. We seek to win militant youth and workers away from the dead end of pressure politics, to a revolutionary proletarian perspective.

A View From The Left-U.S. Rulers Fuel East Ukraine Slaughter-Down With Imperialist Sanctions Against Russia!-For the Right of Self-Rule in Donetsk, Luhansk!

Workers Vanguard No. 1061	6 February 2015

U.S. Rulers Fuel East Ukraine Slaughter

Down With Imperialist Sanctions Against Russia!

For the Right of Self-Rule in Donetsk, Luhansk!

 

FEBRUARY 3—Since the start of the year, there has been a dramatic increase in fighting between the Ukrainian government and forces of the breakaway People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk that are backed by Russia. The civil war in eastern Ukraine, in which over 5,300 people have been killed and 1.5 million displaced, is the direct result of U.S. imperialist machinations. In building up a client state on Russia’s border, Washington aims to spike the influence of Moscow, a potential rival, in countries of the former Soviet Union.

To that end, the Pentagon has also launched Operation Atlantic Resolve under which it has strengthened its air, ground and naval presence in East Europe and conducted a series of expanded military exercises in Poland and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Washington plans to send an additional 100 armored vehicles and 3,000 troops to Europe as well as advisers to train the fascist-infested Ukrainian National Guard. U.S. Navy ships regularly patrol the Black Sea with the Ukrainian navy.

Every few days, another report emerges of dozens killed in artillery or rocket barrages that have damaged homes, schools and hospitals in numerous cities and towns across the Donbass (Donets basin). Last October, Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, both pro-imperialist mouthpieces, reported that the Ukrainian army had fired cluster munitions at civilian targets. These weapons are designed to kill indiscriminately over a wide area and children often pick up unexploded bomblets. In the rebel-held territory, the Kiev government has ceased the payment of pensions and cut off virtually all banking services. The population of the Donbass has been saved from starvation only by a series of humanitarian aid convoys from Russia that have delivered some 15,000 tons of food, medicine and building materials. Across Ukraine, economic dislocation caused by the war has brought greater hardship to working people, the poor and the elderly.

The recent upsurge in fighting was effectively instigated by the U.S. government. In December, President Barack Obama signed the Ukraine Freedom Support Act authorizing an additional $350 million in military aid to Ukraine over the next three years and further economic sanctions against Russia. The sanctions aim not only to force Russia to back down in regard to Ukraine but also to head off Russian support to separatists in Georgia and Moldova (as well as to the Syrian government). The legislation, which sailed unopposed through a Congress known for its partisan deadlock, also bolsters attempts to undermine the Vladimir Putin regime in Moscow in the guise of “support for Russian democracy.” Some $30 million per year was allocated for increased broadcasts by Cold War relics like the Voice of America and the mobilization of the CIA-linked U.S. Agency for International Development and National Endowment for Democracy.

Thus encouraged by its masters in Washington, Kiev launched an offensive against Donetsk on January 18. After repulsing the government forces, the Donbass militias launched a counteroffensive, capturing the Donetsk city airport, advancing on Mariupol and threatening to encircle thousands of Ukrainian troops in Debaltseve, a strategic town on the railroad connecting Donetsk and Luhansk. With the latest battlefield defeats for Kiev, the White House and NATO generals are now mooting the supply of additional arms to Ukraine. Down with the imperialist sanctions! No U.S. military aid to Ukraine!

We presently have a military side with the insurgents against the imperialist-backed Kiev government. At the same time, we give no political support to the Great Russian chauvinist rebel leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk, nor to Putin’s capitalist regime. We are implacable opponents of not only Ukrainian but also Russian nationalism. On this score, we support independence for Chechnya and defended the Chechen people against the brutal Russian military campaigns waged by Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

Kiev Government, Made in USA

Last February, Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovich, was toppled by a fascist-spearheaded coup arising out of the Maidan protests engineered by Washington with the able assistance of the European Union (EU) imperialists. The post-coup government, which included fascists of the Svoboda party, quickly moved to ban the official use of the Russian language. (The proposed ban was tabled to accommodate imperialist discomfort with this too-frank expression of reactionary nationalism.) That and other moves by the Kiev government sparked justified fears among Russian-speaking people, who launched protests throughout the country.

With the overwhelming support of the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, historically part of Russia, Putin moved to reclaim the peninsula and secure the longstanding base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, militants took up arms in the face of government and fascist attacks. The Ukrainian government’s first two attempts to mount military offensives in eastern Ukraine last spring directly followed visits to Kiev by CIA chief John Brennan and Vice President Joe Biden. At the time, Obama pontificated: “The Ukrainian government has the right and responsibility to uphold law and order within its territory.”

The leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics held a referendum last May that resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of self-rule, which could mean autonomy within a federated Ukraine or independence or unification with Russia. After the vote, we wrote: “We defend the democratic right of the population in these areas to conduct the referendum and act on the vote for self-rule” (“U.S. Imperialism Behind Bloody Repression in Ukraine,” WV No. 1046, 16 May 2014). This position is an expression of our support for the democratic right of national self-determination, i.e., the right of peoples to amalgamate or to separate. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underlined, the recognition of the right of self-determination is essential to combating national antagonisms and creating conditions where working people of different nations are able to see that the real enemy is their respective capitalist exploiters, not each other.

The imperialists blather on about “Russian aggression” to mask their own predatory appetites. A compliant U.S. capitalist media has done its part, parroting claims that the Russian army is engaged in combat in Ukraine while all but disappearing the presence of American mercenaries and neo-Nazis from West Europe fighting alongside the Ukrainian army. In truth, Putin has been quite restrained in the face of repeated provocations by the Kiev government and its imperialist patrons. There is little indication that Moscow has annexationist appetites toward the eastern Ukrainian provinces.

Those in Kiev pressing the military conflict are desperate for whatever imperialist assistance they can get. The Ukrainian army recently launched its fourth conscription drive since last March, and has plans for two more drafts, which will sweep up mainly working-class and poor people. There have been numerous protests against conscription, mostly led by women furious that their sons and husbands are being made cannon fodder. Many potential conscripts are hiding in forests and fleeing the country to avoid the draft. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced at the end of January that nearly 7,500 people are facing criminal charges for draft evasion.

The real shock troops of the Ukrainian army are fascist-dominated volunteer units accused of carrying out rape, kidnapping and murder across the Donbass. Among these are the Aidar and Azov battalions, the latter of which sports insignia based on the Black Sun and the Wolf’s Hook (Wolfsangel) emblems of the Nazi SS. When the Kiev government announced a “rebranding” of the Aidar battalion at the end of January, the fascists attempted to storm the Ministry of Defense in protest. These scum, politically represented by the Right Sector and Svoboda, trace their lineage back to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of Stepan Bandera that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The UPA is notorious for its mass murders of Jews, Communists, Soviet soldiers and Poles. In a salute to the fascists, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko established a national holiday, the Day of Ukraine’s Defenders, on October 14—the anniversary of the UPA’s founding.

Imperialist Sanctions and Unintended Consequences

In cutting off access to international capital, the imperialist sanctions have compounded the damage done by the collapse in oil prices to the Russian economy, which is heavily dependent on oil and natural gas exports. Oil is fetching less than half the price it did a year ago due in no small part to increased production in the U.S. and continuing high production in Saudi Arabia. The value of the ruble against the dollar plummeted by 46 percent last year and another 17 percent in January, while inflation has soared to 13 percent. With the costs of food and medicine in particular skyrocketing, working people and retirees are scrambling to get by.

Differences are growing, especially in the EU, over continuing the sanctions. At the beginning of the year, French president François Hollande expressed a desire to ease sanctions if some basis for compromise could be found. In echoing this sentiment, German Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, vice chancellor in Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led government, expressed concern that some want the sanctions to “cripple” Russia.

Such statements reflect the worries of sections of Europe’s capitalist rulers that the more effective the sanctions are, the more they could threaten their own beleaguered economies. Several countries in the EU, notably its dominant power Germany, have extensive trade links with Russia and rely on fossil fuel imports from that country. Furthermore, the continued fall in the value of the ruble raises the prospect that Russia could default on its debts, which would be yet another blow to Europe’s struggling banks.

The recent election victory of the petty-bourgeois Syriza party in Greece also briefly raised the prospect of a speed bump for the EU sanctions regimen. Elected on promises to roll back the grinding EU-enforced austerity that has impoverished Greece and driven unemployment to over 25 percent (around 50 percent among youth), Syriza had also expressed opposition to sanctions against Russia. But just three days after its formation, the capitalist government led by Syriza joined the rest of the EU in unanimously agreeing to extend the existing sanctions for another six months and to prepare a list of other individual Russians to target.

Syriza’s denunciation of the austerity diktats (and sanctions on Russia) is shown to be so much hot air by its support to the imperialist EU. Originally established as an economic battering ram against the Soviet Union, the EU remains the vehicle by which the European capitalists jointly exploit the European workers. Its weaker states like Greece are lorded over by its more powerful imperialist members, who also gain competitive advantage from the EU trade bloc at the expense of their imperialist rivals, the U.S. and Japan. In the Greek elections, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece called for “no vote to Syriza” and gave critical support to the Communist Party, which stood in opposition to the EU and all pro-EU parties, including Syriza. Down with the EU! For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Russia is not now imperialist, although it has the potential to become so (however remote that prospect appears today). A regional power, Russia has significant military might, especially its nuclear arsenal, making it harder for the U.S. to push around. But Moscow does not play a role in the carve-up of the world on a global scale. The efforts of the existing imperialists, led by the U.S., to keep Russia out of their club have stymied its imperialist ambitions. Washington’s increased bellicosity toward Russia comes in the context of its so-called pivot to Asia, strengthening ties with India and other maneuvers aimed at containing the Chinese deformed workers state. Such moves reflect the overriding concern of the U.S. imperialists to effect a counterrevolution in China, where capitalism was overthrown following the 1949 Revolution, in order to reopen that country to untrammeled imperialist exploitation.

However, the attempts to isolate Russia have served to push it into China’s arms, an illustration of the U.S. rulers’ difficulties in pursuing their strategic interests around the world. Russia’s fossil fuels and high-grade military technology could both fill needs in China, which in turn has massive foreign exchange reserves. Russia’s vast land mass also provides a major route for China’s project of a New Silk Road for trade with Europe that avoids the threat of U.S. naval disruption of shipping lanes.

In contrast to Merkel’s Atlanticism, a wing of the German bourgeoisie favors an economic and political alliance with Russia (shades of Otto von Bismarck) as a counterweight to U.S. global hegemony. Meanwhile, trade between Germany and China has increased dramatically in recent years. The prospect of an Eurasian alliance was addressed by the rad-lib journalist Pepe Escobar in a December 16 article titled “Go West, Young Han” on tomdispatch.com: “One day, Germany may lead parts of Europe away from NATO’s ‘logic,’ since German business leaders and industrialists have an eye on their potentially lucrative commercial future in a new Eurasia. Strange as it might seem amid today’s war of words over Ukraine, the endgame could still prove to involve a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing alliance.”

Much of the reformist left in the U.S. and internationally went along with its own capitalist rulers in supporting the coup in Ukraine last year. Typical was the International Socialist Organization, which hailed the reactionary demonstrations in the Maidan as an “action from below.” Other groups, like the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), of which Socialist Alternative is the U.S. section, have gone to greater pains to strike a neutral posture between the imperialists and the Russian-backed rebels, but in fact also give left cover for the imperialists.

In a January 21 article titled “Facing a Turbulent 2015” on the CWI website (socialistworld.net), Rob Jones retails the imperialist lie that Russia is responsible for the fighting in Ukraine. Writing that “Russia, in words, claims to want a settlement but continues to support the rebels” while all but disappearing the role of the U.S. and EU, Jones draws an equal sign between supposed “Russian imperialism” and the real imperialists of NATO. The CWI, like all reformists, has always been at peace with imperialism, which found its greatest expression when it lined up on the side of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. CWI members in Moscow were literally standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the barricades with Boris Yeltsin’s capitalist-restorationist forces when he grabbed power in August 1991.

At every level, what is going on in Ukraine is the product of the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state and ravaged the economies and peoples of the former Soviet republics. The Ukrainian economy, which had been integrated into an all-Union economic division of labor, was dealt a severe blow as living standards plummeted. We in the International Communist League fought politically tooth and nail to defend the Soviet Union against capitalist counterrevolution. Despite its degeneration under the misrule of the Stalinist bureaucracy that had usurped political power in 1923-24, the USSR embodied the social gains of the 1917 October Revolution led by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

The seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia was a beacon pointing the way to a future free of exploitation and oppression. All that the imperialist system offers for the masses is greater poverty and misery, with increasing conflicts among nations and peoples who hope to better their prospects at others’ cost. It is necessary to build revolutionary workers parties internationally, sections of a reforged Fourth International, to make the working class conscious of the need to combat the depredations of its own bourgeoisie. Such parties will lead the proletariat in fierce struggle against all manifestations of national and religious bigotry and great power chauvinism in the fight to overturn capitalist rule through international socialist revolution.

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

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 the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), 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 gazebo 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, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. 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, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as the marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, and like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong. Jesus what a blasted nigh that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out 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 ….      

 

 

 

 

Heartbreak House

by George Bernard Shaw, David Hare (Introduction), Dan H. Laurence (Editor)

Heartbreak House 3.76 of 5 stars 3.76  ·  rating details  ·  1,269 ratings  ·  52 reviews

Entertaining allegory examines apathy, confusion and lack of purpose as causes of major world problems.

One of the distinguished comic dramatist's more somber plays, this entertaining allegory examines apathy, confusion and lack of purpose as causes of major world problems, with larger-than-life characters representing the evils of the modern world.