Sunday, May 10, 2015
hour in Seattle,
GIVE
WAR A CHANCE?
Unprecedented:
151 Reps Support Iran Framework Deal
151
members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama commending the political
framework reached between the P5+1 countries and Iran and pressing for continued
diplomatic efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement… The letter cautions
that "if the United States were to abandon negotiations or cause their collapse,
not only would we fail to peacefully prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, we would make
that outcome more likely." The signatories include Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,
the third-ranked House Democrat Rep. James Clyburn, and the Chair of the House
Democratic Caucus Rep. Xavier Becerra. The signatories represent more than three
quarters of the House Democratic Caucus, and the majority of House Democrats
serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee and the
Appropriations Committee. More
ALL
9 House members from Massachusetts signed the letter – thank
them!
The
text and signers can be viewed here:
“We
must pursue diplomatic means to their fullest and allow the negotiations to run
their course – especially now that the parties have announced a strong framework
– and continue working to craft a robust and verifiable Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action by June 30. We must allow our negotiating team the space and time
necessary to build on the progress made in the political framework and turn it
into a long-term, verifiable agreement”
Overwhelming
US Public Approval of Iran Talks gives Momentum to Peace Deal
Despite
the fury of the war party, momentum today is clearly in favor of the diplomacy
between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus
Germany (P5+1) that would render war moot. Once again, the Republicans and many
Democrats have seriously misjudged majority sentiment in America or
intentionally ignore it…
Last week Quinnipiac reported that 77% of Americans prefer a negotiated
settlement over military intervention. Last month, the Economist reported more
than 60% of Americans support negotiations. An NBC poll reporting 54% trust the
Obama Administration over Congressional Republicans to ‘handle an agreement with
Iran’ offers a vivid confirmation of the trend. More
The
Nuclear Crisis Nobody Mentions
Those
congressmen beating the war drums against Iran have reached new heights of
hypocrisy considering their total disregard for the more dangerous, more
immediate problems created by Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal… As a count of its
nuclear arsenal edges toward several hundred, and as it increasingly deploys
tactical nuclear weapons near its border, Pakistan’s government faces
extraordinary challenges of command and control… Since the early 1990s–for more
than two decades–hawks have been talking
up a war against Iran. Meanwhile, barely a word is said about Pakistan.
More
*
* * *
WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
*
* * *
Over
the course of 24 hours, which would see economically devastated parts of
Baltimore erupt in open rebellion, city and state police would deploy
everything from a drone and a “military counter attack vehicle” known as a
Bearcat to SWAT teams armed with assault rifles, shotguns loaded with lead
pellets, barricade projectiles filled with tear gas, and military-style smoke
grenades. The BPD also came equipped with “Hailstorm” or “Stingray” technology, developed in America’s distant war zones
to conduct wireless surveillance of enemy communications. This would allow
officers to force cell phones to connect to it, to collect mobile data, and to
jam cell signals within a one-mile radius… It is, in fact, no longer unusual but
predictable for peacefully protesting citizens to face military-grade weaponry
and paramilitary-style tactics, as the counterinsurgency school of protest
policing has become the new normal in our homeland security state.
More
You
Will Be Surprised Who the Outside Agitators Really Are in
Baltimore
According
to data posted on the city of Baltimore’s OpenBaltimore website in
2012, over 70 percent of Baltimore Police Department officers live outside
city limits, with at least 10 percent living over state lines, in places as far
away as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. By contrast, almost all of those arrested
in ongoing protests sparked by the police killing of the unarmed Baltimorean
Freddie Gray reside firmly within the city. These facts were apparently lost on
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake when she blamed “outside forces” for all the looting of local
businesses and attacks on cops.. More
Chicago
Passes Ordinance Granting Reparations to Police Torture Survivors
Over
a period of nearly 20 years, Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his "midnight
crew" allegedly tortured at least 119 people, forcing them to make confessions.
The police officers beat the victims, burned them with lit cigarettes and
handcuffed them to hot radiators. They tied plastic bags over their heads and
nearly suffocated them. They put cattle prods on their genitals and in their
mouths and electrocuted them… On Wednesday, the City Council approved an
ordinance to compensate Burge's victims, most of them African-American men, and
their families. The reparations ordinance is the first of its kind in the
country to address police abuse. The measure draws from the United
Nations Convention against Torture and human rights practices around the
world, especially in nations that overcame the legacy of violent, repressive
regimes. More
Long
Before ISIS, a Man Was Barbarically Burned Alive -- in America
The
victim’s name was Jesse Washington. The year was 1916. America would soon go to
war in Europe “to make the world safe for democracy…
Not a heretic burned at the stake by some ecclesiastical authority in the
Old World. This was Texas, and the white people in that photograph were farmers,
laborers, shopkeepers, some of them respectable congregants from local churches
in and around the growing town of Waco… Jesse Washington was just one black man
to die horribly at the hands of white death squads. Between 1882 and 1968 —
1968! — there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US. More
Israeli-trained
police invade Baltimore in crackdown on Black Lives Matter
The
similarities in suppression tactics employed by Baltimore and Israeli security
forces are no coincidence. Under the cover of counterterrorism training,
nearly every major police agency in the United States has traveled to Israel for
lessons in occupation enforcement, including many of the agencies active in
Baltimore last week. In 2002, Baltimore city police officers went to Israel on
a junket organized by the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA), where they studied Israeli occupation tactics used against
Palestinians, including “crowd control, and coordination with the media,”
according to a JINSA press release. “Participants resolved to begin the process of
sharing ‘lessons learned’ in Israel with their law enforcement colleagues in the
United States,” boasted JINSA.
Baltimore
city police returned to Israel for more occupation training in a 2009 trip
arranged by the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange.
More
Baltimore,
not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public
policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black
population. A legacy of these policies is the rioting we have seen in Baltimore…
Certainly, African American citizens of Baltimore were provoked by aggressive,
hostile, even murderous policing, but Spiro Agnew had it right. Without suburban
integration, something barely on today’s public policy agenda, ghetto conditions
will persist, giving rise to aggressive policing and the riots that inevitably
ensue. Like Ferguson before it, Baltimore will not be the last such
conflagration the nation needlessly experiences. More
ROBERT
REICH: The Political Roots of Widening Inequality
A
deeper understanding of what has happened to American incomes over the last 25
years requires an examination of changes in the organization of the market.
These changes stem from a dramatic increase in the political power of large
corporations and Wall Street to change the rules of the market in ways that have
enhanced their profitability, while reducing the share of economic gains going
to the majority of Americans. This transformation has amounted to a
redistribution upward, but not as “redistribution” is normally defined. The
government did not tax the middle class and poor and transfer a portion of their
incomes to the rich. The government undertook the upward redistribution by
altering the rules of the game… The changes in the organization of the economy
have been reinforcing and cumulative: As more of the nation’s income flows to
large corporations and Wall Street and to those whose earnings and wealth derive
directly from them, the greater is their political influence over the rules of
the market, which in turn enlarges their share of total income.
More
KRUGMAN:
Race, Class and Neglect
The
point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of
poverty in America. Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values
is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need
more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic
opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from
training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t
have to be as unjust as they are.
More
Legal
Theory for Dragnet Surveillance Programs Invalidated by Federal Appeals Court
Decision
When
a federal appeals court ruled that the United States government’s telephone
metadata program was illegal, it did not only call attention to how Congress had
not authorized the massive surveillance program exposed by NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden. It also acknowledged that the legal theory the government relied
upon to defend the program is significantly flawed. In doing so, it invalidated
the government’s rationale for maintaining any and all of its dragnet
surveillance programs in the “war on terrorism.” More
CHELSEA
MANNING: We Have the Right to Criticize Government without Fear
When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … After 9/11, a dedicated office of lawyers specializing in novel applications of law for national security issues, the National Security Division (NSD), was created and now, with a small caseload and an enormous amount of resources, this division of the Department of Justice has been waging a quiet war against the media, their sources and the right to free speech and a free press, using the growing national security and surveillance apparatus to prosecute various cases and, occasionally, target the media… The US needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government. More
When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … After 9/11, a dedicated office of lawyers specializing in novel applications of law for national security issues, the National Security Division (NSD), was created and now, with a small caseload and an enormous amount of resources, this division of the Department of Justice has been waging a quiet war against the media, their sources and the right to free speech and a free press, using the growing national security and surveillance apparatus to prosecute various cases and, occasionally, target the media… The US needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government. More
The US
From Abroad: Still Seen as a Strange Liberator
The
perception of the US as a hypocritical power is reinforced by the gap between
deed and creed. The world is not culturally globalized, but information is, and
since Western (mostly US) media dominate the world, information about the US
spreads instantaneously. The world knows more about the US than the US knows
about the world… If propaganda does not work, and if the rhetoric of "freedom
and democracy" does not win "the hearts and minds" of people, the question then
remains: Why does the US stick to it? In advertising, a bad campaign is usually
scrapped. The answer to this apparent conundrum lies in the real target audience
of this rhetoric: It is actually Americans themselves who are the target of this
international propaganda… A plutocratic United States promoting "democracy" may
be a form of global chutzpah, but domestically, it serves to change the
conversation from touchy topics and reinforce national beliefs about American
exceptionalism. More
Coddling
the Rich
Question:
How much did Congress save taxpayers last year when it cut food stamp benefits
for 16 million poor children?
Answer:
Less than the windfall Congress is trying to bestow on a few of the richest
American families by ending the federal estate tax. The House has already
approved a bill to do this, and the Senate is poised to follow suit.
More
With
Banks 'Still Too Big to Fail,' Another Financial Meltdown Looms
Titled
Still Too Big to Fail (pdf), Thursday's report charges that
since the meltdown began in 2008, regulators have failed to make sufficient
progress on key components of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer
Protection Act, or to boost transparency in political spending. According to
the CRC, which is made up of more than 75 good governance, organized labor, and
environmental groups, action on both these fronts is necessary in order to
prevent another financial disaster. "The top six bank holding companies are
considerably larger than before, and are still permitted to borrow excessively
relative to the assets they hold," the report states. "They are dangerously
interconnected and remain vulnerable to sudden runs, because they borrow
billions of dollars from wholesale lenders who can often demand their cash back
each and every day." More
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InviteFrom The Marxist Archives-From the Archives of Workers Vanguard-Vietnam 40 Years Ago: U.S. Imperialism Defeated, Capitalist Rule Smashed
Workers Vanguard No. 1067
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1 May 2015
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From the Archives of Workers Vanguard
Vietnam 40 Years Ago:
U.S. Imperialism Defeated, Capitalist Rule Smashed
April 30 was the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, marking the defeat of U.S. imperialism and its South Vietnamese puppet forces. The heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants fought not just for national liberation but also for social revolution. Soon after, Pathet Lao guerrilla insurgents in Laos gained state power as well, establishing a regime there based on proletarian property forms in conjunction with Vietnam, its more advanced neighbor. These social overturns in the former French colony of Indochina humiliated the American imperialists and were a victory for the exploited and oppressed around the world.
The brutal, decades-long war in Vietnam led to massive discontent and protest in the U.S. and radicalized a whole generation of youth. Self-described socialists and ex-radicals nostalgic for the massive demonstrations of the Vietnam War era peddle the myth that the antiwar movement ended the war. But it was the tenacity of the Vietnamese fighters on the battlefield that broke the imperialists’ will and drove them out of the country.
It remains the duty of revolutionaries to unconditionally defend Vietnam, Laos and the other deformed workers states—China, Cuba and North Korea—against imperialist attack and domestic counterrevolution. The main target of U.S. imperialism in the region is China, the largest and most powerful of the remaining countries where capitalist rule has been overthrown.
The Stalinist nationalist regime in Vietnam has in recent years criminally lined up with the U.S. imperialists’ campaign to encircle China. This diplomatic rapprochement with the U.S. reflects Vietnam’s isolation following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, as well as the continuing pressures of poverty and the historic mutual animosity between Vietnam and its larger and stronger Chinese neighbor. The Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution—the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracies and the establishment of governments based on workers, peasants and soldiers councils—is linked to the strategy of socialist revolutions worldwide, not least in the U.S., to put an end to the imperialist order.
We reprint below an article published in WV No. 68 (9 May 1975) headlined “Take Vientiane—For Political Revolution in Hanoi, Saigon, Phnom Penh—All Indochina Must Go Communist! Capitalist Class Rule Smashed in Vietnam, Cambodia!” The article reflects our initial characterization that Cambodia was also a deformed workers state. However, we later noted that Cambodia under the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which decimated the tiny proletariat and depopulated whole cities, was “a barbaric nightmare which was not even a hideously deformed version of a workers state” (“U.S., China Arm Pol Pot Butchers,” WV No. 493, 12 January 1990).
* * *
MAY 4—On April 30 the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) rode triumphantly into Saigon as leaders of the defeated puppet regime and the South Vietnamese bourgeoisie fled the country by every available means. The military victory of the DRV/NLF marks the end of 30 years of civil war against colonialism and imperialism and their local allies. It means the overthrow of capitalist rule in South Vietnam, a historic conquest for the working people of the entire world and one which must be unconditionally defended by class-conscious workers against imperialist attack.
We hail this stunning defeat of U.S. imperialism, the first in a major war during this century, and greet the victory of our class brothers and sisters in Indochina with internationalist proletarian solidarity. The struggle against the imperialists’ Vietnam war has also been a major task of socialists in the imperialist centers, dominating the political experience of a whole generation of young aspiring revolutionaries. And it is as fellow combatants in the international class struggle that we warn the Indochinese masses that they must place no confidence in their Stalinist leaders.
The victory in Vietnam, like that in Cambodia two weeks earlier when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, belongs to the heroic worker and peasant fighters in Indochina who have struggled resourcefully and tenaciously for decades in order to break the grip of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation on the peninsula. But while a victorious social revolution has occurred, the struggle to establish revolutionary and internationalist workers states in the region is far from over. A phantom coalition with venal rightist generals and a playboy “neutralist” continues to “rule” in Vientiane [the capital of Laos], although it is clear to all that it could be quickly eliminated by a resolute offensive of the Pathet Lao.
Meanwhile, in Cambodia and Vietnam (both North and South) political power is not in the hands of the working masses, expressed by democratic rule through Soviets (workers councils) as was achieved by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nor is there in Indochina today a Bolshevik party which could lead the revolutionary struggle forward by extending it internationally to the centers of world capitalism. The new Stalinist rulers in Phnom Penh and Saigon are as committed to the treacherous policy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism as those in Moscow and Peking, or Hanoi and Havana.
Instead, what has been created in South Vietnam and Cambodia are deformed workers states, qualitatively equivalent to the degenerated workers state which emerged in Russia with the consolidation of the Stalin-led bureaucracy. The ruling bureaucracies of the deformed workers states are narrowly nationalist in outlook, attempting to balance precariously between imperialism and the working class. Based on the property forms of a workers state, they occasionally put up a limited and distorted defense of the social conquests achieved by the overthrow of capitalism in order to preserve their own privileged position.
But because their rule is based on the political expropriation of the working class, these petty-bourgeois bureaucratic castes are incapable of mobilizing the proletarian masses for an international revolutionary assault on the bastions of world capitalism, since it would simultaneously mean their own demise. The Stalinist rulers in Hanoi, Saigon and Phnom Penh must be overthrown by a workers’ political revolution led by a Trotskyist party in order to establish the organs of proletarian democracy and open the road to socialism. All Indochina Must Go Communist!
Military Victory and Social Revolution
The cost of these momentous victories in terms of human suffering by the toilers of Vietnam has been tremendous. The barbarous policies of the cynical mass murderers of U.S. imperialism and French colonialism—the “free fire zones” subjected to saturation bombing by B-52’s, the “pacification programs” consisting of the assassination of all political opponents of the puppet regimes, the “strategic hamlets” which sought to eliminate the insurgents’ popular support by locking up peasants in concentration camps—have produced millions of dead and maimed.
But still the Indochinese workers and peasants fought on, driven by a burning desire not only to be rid of the pimps and butchers who sat in air-conditioned offices in Saigon, but also to remove the daily oppression inexorably caused by capitalist exploitation. At a tremendous disadvantage in terms of firepower and sophisticated weaponry—the result of the refusal of the USSR and China to deliver adequate military supplies—they were able to militarily defeat the cream of the French army, the largest U.S. expeditionary forces since World War II (over 500,000 American military personnel in Vietnam at one point), and the most mechanized army in Asia.
However, the program of the bureaucracies in Hanoi, Peking and Moscow who led, controlled and supplied the insurgents was not to carry out a social revolution through defeating the bourgeoisie. Justifying their appetites for class collaboration by the Stalinist schema of “two-stage revolution,” they sought to achieve “democratic” (i.e., bourgeois) governments of national reconciliation of all classes save the imperialists and their most direct lackeys. This was expressed in programs (such as those of the South Vietnamese NLF and Cambodian FUNK) which called for popular-front coalition governments with the bourgeoisie, omitting demands for agrarian revolution and guaranteeing the “right” of capitalists to continue to exploit their wage slaves; and in repeated sellouts at the bargaining table (especially 1945 and 1954).
But while the Stalinist leaders remained committed to a strategy of betrayal and class collaboration, they were also confronted with fundamental historical and social realities. The extreme weakness of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie which prevented it from rebelling against French colonial and U.S. imperialist domination made that coterie of drug traffickers, rice merchants, rack-renting landlords, corrupt military mercenaries, textile sweatshop bosses, rubber plantation managers and Honda salesmen doubly afraid of any mobilization of the exploited masses. Although the NLF and FUNK continued to call for the formation of coalition governments until scant hours before they marched into their respective capitals, the fabled anti-imperialist national bourgeoisie never materialized. To the lasting benefit of the Indochinese laboring masses, the Paris “peace” accords were never implemented.
Though DRV/NLF military forces fought well and defeated the puppet troops in the only two real battles of the last six weeks (Ban Me Thuot and Xuan Loc), the fall of Saigon came not as a result of a successful insurgent offensive, properly speaking, but because of the complete collapse of the Thieu regime and army. A single defeat in the Central Highlands produced a panicked retreat that put DRV/NLF forces within 50 miles of the capital in two weeks, practically without firing a shot.
The scenes of this jumbled collapse dominated the news from Vietnam during the last days of the puppet government. The wild looting and chaotic terror unleashed in Da Nang by drunken bands of ARVN [South Vietnamese army] soldiers was succeeded by the desperate clawing of Saigon merchants and collaborators to get into the U.S. embassy and join the select circle of those who would get a ticket to America from President Ford. While Thieu and Lon Nol sent off a final shipment of $16 million in gold bullion to Switzerland, well-connected prostitutes and wives of military officers began arriving in Guam by the plane-load. The predominance of air force families among the early passengers was explained by a threat from Saigon fighter pilots to shoot down the C-130s if their relatives were not included.
Subsequent news reports are extremely sketchy. Some reports quoted official broadcasts from Saigon as “announcing the nationalization of banks and virtually all other business and industrial enterprises” (New York Times, 2 May); administrative authority was reportedly being exercised by the Saigon-Gia Dinh Military Management Committee. In any case, it is clear that the ignominious collapse of the U.S.’ puppet government, was accompanied by the flight of the bulk of the devastated bourgeoisie. The fall of Saigon was the fall of Vietnamese capitalism as a political force.
45 Years of Struggle Against Imperialism
The struggle of the Indochinese masses against colonial oppression and the yoke of capitalist exploitation goes back well past the end of World War II. The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was formed in 1930 and led an important peasant revolt in central Vietnam during the same year. During the late 1930’s, however, the Stalinist ICP faced considerable competition from two Trotskyist groups, particularly in southern Vietnam. One, the International Communist League (ICL) led by Ho Huu Tuong, was founded in 1931, while the second, larger, group around Ta Thu Thau was in a common front with the southern Stalinists from 1933 to 1937. As the ICP was obliged by Kremlin dictates and its program of class collaboration to give support to French colonialism during the period of the popular-front government in Paris, the Trotskyists were able to greatly expand their influence. In 1939 Thau’s group swamped the Stalinists in colonial elections, winning 80 percent of the votes, as the masses decisively rejected Ho Chi Minh’s support for “progressive” colonialism.
In August 1945 the Stalinists (now known as the Viet Minh) moved together with bourgeois nationalists to take over the French-Japanese colonial government apparatus as the Japanese surrender was announced. However, when British troops entered Saigon they were greeted by the Viet Minh, in line with Stalin’s policy of alliance with the Western “democratic” imperialists during World War II. In contrast, the Trotskyist ICL called for opposition to the imperialists, agrarian revolution, expropriation of the bourgeoisie and a workers and peasants government.
The ICL’s call did not remain simply on paper, but found a mass response as scores of “people’s committees” were formed in the Saigon area, the dominant influence in them being that of the Trotskyists. Although the Stalinist police succeeded in arresting and shooting most of the leaders, a working-class uprising broke out a few days later in response to British-French moves to take power from the popular-front “government.” While the Viet Minh negotiated, to no avail, the Trotskyist-led resistance went down fighting.
The Trotskyists had also been active in the north, but there the domination of the Viet Minh was unchallenged. As Ho was preparing to sign an agreement permitting the reintroduction of French troops in early 1946, the witchhunt against Trotskyists was intensified. Ta Thu Thau was murdered on orders from Stalinist leaders at that time, as were virtually all remaining Trotskyist cadre. Thus, if since 1946 the Stalinist leaders have been dominant in Vietnam, it is not because of a revolutionary line but rather because of the efficiency of their assassination squads.
After the reintroduction of colonial troops (with the assent of Ho Chi Minh), the Stalinists were forced to abandon the cities and retreat into guerrilla warfare. However, by 1954 they had been able to inflict a military defeat on the French army, not only in the north but throughout Indochina. While Russian and Chinese pressure was instrumental in inducing the Viet Minh negotiators at Geneva to abandon everything below the 17th parallel (as well as Laos and Cambodia), decisive victory was within reach. Thus Ho’s agreement to the Geneva deal was another sharp blow against the struggle of the Indochinese masses.
With the change in the imperialist paymasters from Paris to more affluent Washington the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was able to partially stabilize South Vietnam for a couple of years through the use of ruthless terror. Peasants were driven off their land, suspected Communists were “tried” by special tribunals and murdered by the hundreds. Sporadic resistance sprang up, often led by underground former Viet Minh cadre who had stayed behind. But not until 1960 when the National Liberation Front was formed did Hanoi give any appreciable aid to the southern rebels. Ho’s concern was above all to scrupulously respect the terms of the Geneva sellout, vainly hoping that the butcher Diem would allow “free elections”!
The subsequent intervention of large numbers of U.S. troops represented a major setback for the NLF and DRV. But with the massacre of several hundred thousand workers and peasants in Indonesia, accomplishing an important objective of imperialism in the area, and given the absence of any prospect of victory for the Saigon regime, and the active hostility to U.S. intervention among large sections of American youth and increasingly in the working class, the basis was laid for the development of widespread bourgeois defeatism. This was not confined to peace demonstrations or McCarthy/McGovern left liberals, but became the dominant position of decisive sections of the ruling class. As economic problems multiplied and the U.S.’ inability to continue playing the role of hegemonic world policeman became clearer, the Nixon regime moved toward negotiations finally resulting in the so-called Paris “peace” accords of 1973.
These accords did not lead to peace in Vietnam, and represented the extortion of concessions by the imperialists in return for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. While declaring “No Support to the Robbers’ Peace!” the Spartacist League also recognized an important difference from the 1954 sellout, the “ceasefire in-place,” i.e., the continued presence of large numbers of DRV/NLF troops in the south. We judged that the ceasefire “could well eventually lead to a Viet Cong victory in the South,” but pointed out that this was a gamble and did not represent a change in the Stalinists’ strategy of betrayal. When the NLF victory finally came, two years later, it was because of the military collapse of the puppet regime. Finding no substantial force with which to make a coalition government, the Stalinists finally were forced to take Saigon on their own.
Where Are the Two Stages?
Thus the history of the struggle in Vietnam, far from demonstrating the validity of Stalinist conceptions and “strategy” in fact reveals a series of attempts to sell out gains won on the battlefield in return for a compromise with imperialism. The recent events in Indochina fully confirm the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, which holds that in the backward countries even the democratic tasks of national emancipation and agrarian revolution can only be solved by the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry. The weak bourgeoisies of these areas, closely linked to domestic feudal reaction and imperialism, are incapable of carrying out a bourgeois revolution.
The Stalinists claim that their calls for coalition governments, popular fronts, a “bloc of four classes” and so on correspond to the first stage of “national-democratic,” “popular-democratic,” or “new democratic” revolution. Now they claim the victories in Vietnam and Cambodia as validation for their line. This is a fraud.
The NLF, for its part, was quite clear what it stood for. Wilfred Burchett, writing in the 2 April issue of the Maoist Guardian, reported an interview with PRG [Provisional Revolutionary Government] representatives in Paris: “Asked why the PRG did not aim at taking over completely in the South, in view of the wholesale collapse of Thieu’s armed forces, Dinh Ba Thi said, ‘We are for the strict implementation of the Paris Agreements which call for national reconciliation and coalition government’.” He added only that Thieu must go.
Thieu went. “Big Minh” was brought to the presidential palace, but there was no coalition government. And official announcements by the PRG no longer mention the Paris peace agreement. Where, then, are the two stages?
One group which believes there is some truth in the “two-stage” theory is the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. In a front-page National Committee statement in the Militant (9 May), the SWP hails “the victory of the Vietnamese rebels” and announces that “The objective conditions also exist for a social revolution to abolish the entire system of exploitation for private profit.”
This last sentence evidently means the SWP believes that a capitalist state still exists in South Vietnam. Not only does this ignore the powerful social revolution which has taken place, and the fact that capitalist rule can only be restored by a violent counterrevolution, but it fundamentally revises the Leninist theory of the state. Presumably if it decides next week or next month that nationalizations reportedly carried out by the PRG include the key sectors of the economy, then the SWP will declare South Vietnam to be some kind of a workers state. (It holds that China did not become a deformed workers state until the major nationalizations were carried out at the time of the Korean war.) But this amounts to a “peaceful transition” to a workers state!
The expropriation of the decisive sectors of the economy is indeed a key element of a workers state. But the state is at bottom an armed body of men committed to defending certain property forms. Thus Russia became a workers state in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power and established soviet rule. The nationalizations came later.
The situation is different when the leaders of the revolution are not a proletarian Marxist party but a Stalinist bureaucracy based on a peasant guerrilla army. Neither the peasantry as a class nor the Stalinists as a political force are committed to establishing a workers state. The NLF has stated as much, on many occasions, and given ample proof of its intentions. But having taken power alone, without an alliance with significant bourgeois forces, and faced with the massive exit of the South Vietnamese bourgeoisie, the Stalinists are forced to establish the property forms of a workers state in order to revive production and above all to defend their rule against imperialist attack.
Toward a Communist Indochina
The victory of the Cambodian and Vietnamese Stalinists and the overthrow of capitalist rule in those two countries have occurred under exceptional circumstances: extreme disorganization of the native bourgeoisie, economic and political difficulties of the imperialists which have prevented renewed U.S. intervention, and above all the absence of the working class organized to fight in its own interests.
The regime which they establish does not, and cannot, base itself on organs of proletarian democracy, but rather on the fiat of a bonapartist bureaucracy. The task of Marxists in Vietnam and Cambodia today is to take forward the revolutionary struggle by fighting for a workers’ political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy, demanding the creation of democratic workers councils as the basis for the new state apparatus, and freedom for all parties which defend the revolution against counterrevolutionary attack. Above all, the struggle to go forward to final victory over capitalism requires the construction of Trotskyist parties, in Indochina and throughout the world, as part of a reborn Fourth International.
• Immediate Recognition of the Khmer Rouge and NLF/PRG Governments in Cambodia and Vietnam!
• Immediate Withdrawal of All U.S. Forces from Southeast Asia!
• Extend the Soviet Nuclear Shield to Cover Hanoi, Saigon and Phnom Penh!
• Take Vientiane! For Political Revolution in Cambodia and Vietnam (North and South)! All Indochina Must Go Communist!
• For Trotskyist Parties in Indochina! Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
From The Marxist Archives- May Day Greetings! From The Communist International (1923)
And if one posts s that Claude McKay poem then you need to include this for May Day-Frank Jacknman
Workers Vanguard No. 1067
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1 May 2015
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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May Day Greetings!
(Quote of the Week)
Jamaican-born black poet Claude McKay was part of a wave of radicals who, inspired by the Russian working class’ conquest of power through the 1917 October Revolution, were recruited to Communism. He traveled to Soviet Russia in 1922 where he served as a special delegate at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. The last poem that he wrote in Russia, excerpted below, hailed the Soviet workers’ May Day celebration and was published in a monthly journal of the Communist Party of America.
The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal red,
Symbolic of the triumph and the rule
Of the new Power lifting high its head
Above the place where once a sceptered fool
Was mounted by the plunderers of men
To awe the plundered while they schemed and robbed.
The marchers shout again, again, again!
The stones where once the hearts of martyrs sobbed
Their blood are sweet unto their feet today
In celebration of the First of May.
[...]
Jerusalem is fading from men’s mind,
And Christmas from its universal thrall
Shall free the changing spirit of mankind:
The First of May the holy day for all!
And Petrograd, the proud, triumphant, city,
The gateway to the new awakening East—
Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity—
Against the powers of magnate, monarch, priest!
World Fort of Struggle! each day’s a First of May
To learn of thee to strive for Labor’s Day.
—Claude McKay, “Petrograd: May Day, 1923,” Liberator (August 1923)
And if one posts s that Claude McKay poem then you need to include this for May Day-Frank Jacknman
If We Must Die
Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
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