AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

From The Archives Of The American Left History Blog (2006) -On The Question Of One Bernie Sanders-Socialist

From The Archives Of The American Left History Blog (2006) which says it all about the current Sanders campaign in the heart of the Democratic Party:

NO VOTE FOR "INDEPENDENT" BERNIE SANDERS FOR UNITED SENATOR FROM VERMONT ON NOVEMBER 7TH

IF HE WALKS LIKE A DEMOCRAT-IF HE TALKS LIKE A DEMOCRAT-IF HE TAKES HIS ASSIGNMENTS FROM THE DEMOCRATS-ISN’T HE A DEMOCRAT?

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

NOTE: This blog was originally written prior to the Vermont Democratic primaries this summer. I have republished it here as a reminder. Since that time Mr. Sanders has build up a commanding lead over his Republican and “Democratic” and other third party challengers. As a recent Boston Globe article pointed out this self-proclaimed socialist would be the first such avowed socialist elected since the late, unlamented Wisconsin American Socialist Party Congressman Victor Berger did so in the 1920’s. The article also pointed out that Mr. Sanders has a picture of socialist icon Eugene V. Debs hanging on a wall in his office. Every militant cherishes the memory of Debs, however, his party- the Socialist party in the 1920’s and thereafter turned into something very different from the militant anti-war, anti-capitalist party that Debs did so much to make a militant organization of the working class and its allies. Other forces, notably the American Communist Party inherited that tradition. That the Communist Party thereafter lost its authority in the working class does not negate the fact that it gathered the best militants around it. I note further that apparently Mr. Sanders has no picture of the likes of revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood gracing his office.
Now that would, indeed, impress me.

All the above information is presented to point out that we are a long, very long way away from the old, militant traditions. Mr. Sanders represents the more insipid parliamentary road to socialism. We just do not have the centuries necessary to wait for that strategy to unfold, assuming it was the right strategy. But, for the sake of consistency, I point out to Mr. Sander’s supporters as I did last summer’s blog, re-posted below, the overarching question of the times. On the war in Iraq- Will you next year break the unanimous logjam for approval and vote against the war budget. YES OR NO. That is the only parliamentary maneuver against the war that means anything. I will invoke the shades of Debs here. He ran for President of the United States on the Socialist ticket from the Atlanta Penitentiary. Why? He was serving time for opposition to World War I. Against that courageous act is a simple parliamentary vote so difficult? JULY 13, 2006Is nothing sacred anymore? Picking on poor old Bernie Sanders the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist’’ Independent Congressman from Vermont who is running for the United States Senate. He is attempting to fill the seat of the retiring former Republican, now ‘Independent’ Jim Jeffords. Must be something in the Vermont milk that drives this independent thing. Okay, sure we did appreciate that Sanders (as an elementary act of political hygiene) voted against the Iraq War and all, but come to find out his voting record looks like a carbon copy of Ted Kennedy’s, the OTHER United States Senator from Massachusetts. And Kennedy is MR. DEMOCRAT. Which makes this writer wonder if Bernie walks like a Democrat, if he talks like a Democrat, if he takes his assignments from the Congressional Democrats-isn’t he a Democrat? Especially since the Vermont Democratic party is stepping all over itself NOT to run a Democratic candidate in the fall elections against Sanders. They even offered to put him on their party line. Bernie, however, is a little coquettish and insists on running as an ‘Independent’. I put this down to a personality quirk, though.

In any case, Congressman Sanders is a textbook example of why the so-called parliamentary road to socialism is utopian. As if the history of the international left, at least since 1914, hasn’t hammered militants over the head with the hard fact that unless you change the form of government the capitalists win every time. They have had a long time and much experience in the ways of keeping power. They are damn good at it. Remember that.

Make no mistake; militants use the parliamentary system, especially elections, to get their message out. We also use legislative office as a tribunal to talk over the heads of the politicians. But when the deal goes down we need our own governmental forms to get the things working people need. Bernie may have known that long ago when he started out but lost it somewhere along the way. Maybe it is that milk?

For those militants who insist on voting for Sanders anyway I pose a challenge. Make Congressman Sanders answer this simple question- Will he vote, YES or NO, against the Iraqi War budget next year, if elected? Forget those ‘softball’ non-binding ‘sense of the Congress’ resolutions on Immediate Withdrawal. On the parliamentary level that is the only vote that counts now in the fight against the war. Ask.

THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD
A WORKERS PARTY!

A View From The British Left -Irish Taaffeites Back Call for Cop “Union”

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

Irish Taaffeites Back Call for Cop “Union”

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 231 (Summer 2015), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

On 30 April, a vote took place in Dail Eireann (the Irish parliament) on the “Industrial Relations (Members of An Garda Siochana and the Defence Forces) Bill 2015.” The bill was proposed by Labour Party TD (member of parliament) Michael McNamara. It aimed to allow the Garda (Irish police) to join the trade-union movement—something which is effectively prohibited by law—and to grant them the “right to strike.” In the upshot, the McNamara proposal was defeated in parliament by a combination of the two governmental parties—the bourgeois Fine Gael and the social-democratic Labour Party—with the main bourgeois opposition party Fianna Fail.

The McNamara bill did receive the support of 24 deputies—an odd mix of some that are regularly on the receiving end of cop violence and those that would welcome moves towards a police state. The bloc was composed of an assortment of self-styled leftists (including former supporters of the now defunct United Left Alliance), the [Irish nationalist] Republicans of Sinn Fein and a coterie of right-wing elements. The latter included a new party, Renua Ireland, an anti-abortion split from Fine Gael. Joining them all in support of the cops was the TD Paul Murphy of the Socialist Party, Irish affiliate of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) [whose U.S. section is Socialist Alternative].

The cops in Ireland are generally despised and resented by the working class. For class-conscious workers it is a simple fact of life under capitalism that the police are their enemies. As far back as 1913, when the working class was confronted with murderous cop violence during the Dublin Lockout, revolutionary syndicalist workers’ leader James Connolly called for an armed workers militia. The workers of Dublin, both men and women, responded and the Irish Citizens Army was founded to defend the working class against attacks by the police.

Yet numerous times in the intervening decades, pro-capitalist misleaders of the working class have peddled the pernicious notion that police and prison guards are part of the workers movement, and that their demands for “unionisation” must be supported. This myth is partly a reflection of the low level of class struggle—itself a product of the wilful treachery of the trade-union bureaucracy. Sharp trade-union battles, so desperately needed to fight government austerity on both sides of the Irish Sea, would quickly destroy any idea that the cops can be won over to the side of the trade-union movement.

When it comes to keeping alive the hoary myth that the police are “workers in uniform,” the efforts of the CWI and its national sections are unsurpassed. This organisation routinely supports strikes by cops and prison guards. Indeed in Britain the CWI in 2009 grotesquely welcomed the then leader of the Prison Officers Association (POA) into its own ranks. In Ireland it advocates rights for airport security guards. The Socialist Party’s touching faith in the capitalist state would be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerously stupid. Speaking at Leader’s Questions in the Dail on 17 February, Ruth Coppinger, another of the party’s TDs, read out a letter from a garda who complained that the government was bringing the police into disrepute by sending them against water charges protesters. Coppinger complained that the Garda and the courts were “being used to defend corporate interests and the establishment.” Cops defending the interests of the capitalists? Well fancy that!

The Socialist Party’s call for “a police force that should be answerable to working class people and communities” (socialistparty.ie, 6 December 2014) is classic social-democratic reformism. The cops are not part of the workers movement but its irreconcilable enemy. The police force, prisons and courts constitute the core of the capitalist state, the bosses’ apparatus of repression which exists to ensure that the capitalists can go about their business in relative peace, reaping enormous profits off the backs of the working class. One of the tasks of the International Communist League as Marxist revolutionaries is to instil into the working class the understanding that the capitalist state is not some neutral arbiter between the interests of the different classes but exists to enforce the will of the bosses. The job of the cops includes breaking strikes and terrorising the oppressed. Our call is: Cops and prison guards out of the unions! The same applies to security guards, who are private cops acting as auxiliaries to the bosses and their state.

Police “Strikes”: Threat to Workers/Minorities

Within the Garda ranks there exists an ominous organisation—the Garda Representative Association (GRA)—which seeks the very legal changes that the McNamara bill and the Socialist Party support. The GRA has been campaigning for years for the right to strike. We warn that any move for police “unionisation” or the “right to strike” is not a development in the direction of trade-union consciousness. Quite the opposite. Such moves express the bonapartist appetites of the police to break free from the fetters of bourgeois democracy and to act as judge, jury and executioner, unhindered by the courts or by parliament and its laws.

While the forms of bourgeois democracy—free elections to a sovereign parliament, etc.—serve to camouflage the reality that capitalist rule is based on armed force, the ability of the cops to operate without the constraints of formal democracy is clearly a heightened danger to all the oppressed. In a country where most cops do not carry guns, the GRA’s current campaigns provide a flavour of what a strike by the Garda would demand. Not only do they want more cops and higher salaries, they are running a campaign to have the Uzi submachine gun restored to the armed response units. They have welcomed the provision of pepper spray to the rank and file, but feel it doesn’t go far enough and call for all cops to be armed with Taser stun guns. Also, they want better armour protection for their members and the issuance of leg restraints!

A successful police strike, whether for more pay, for weaponry or for more autonomous powers, can only mean enhancing the confidence and the ability of the cops to carry out their task of repression. What do Paul Murphy and his fellow “socialists” think a stronger, better-organised police force would be used for? In Ireland the Garda regularly carry out arrests, harassment and detention of dissident Republicans, as well as brutal violence against the homeless and evictions of tenants from their homes. In 2013 the cops were involved in a spate of state-sponsored kidnappings of Roma (Gypsy) children. Most recently the Irish state has been targeting the anti-water charges protests. Across Ireland there have been mass protests against the introduction of a regressive charge on domestic water. This tax, borne largely by the poor and by the working class, was dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the EU, and has been implemented by the utterly servile Irish government. In order to get the EU diktat through, the Irish state has resorted to using police violence, the courts and the prison system. Many of the protests have been at the community level and have been met with brutal cop assaults. A number of protesters have been thrown into prison. Many more have been arrested, among them one Paul Murphy TD, the same “socialist” now supporting a call that would give the cops more power!

The Socialist Party’s solicitude for the cops is integral to its social-democratic programme of electing a government that will nationalise industry, while leaving the capitalist state intact. As opposed to the CWI’s traditions, the revolutionary parties the ICL seeks to build will be guided by Marx’s understanding, drawn from the lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871—the first time in history that workers seized power—that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (The Civil War in France, 1871). As regards which class the police represent, we stand with Friedrich Engels who wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845): “Because the English bourgeois finds himself reflected in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman’s truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working man quite otherwise!”

A View From The Left- Reformist Left Plays in Bernie’s Sandbox

************

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

Reformist Left Plays in Bernie’s Sandbox

Oscar Wilde’s description of British upper-class fox hunting—“the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible”—is an apt summation of the spectacle of reformist “socialists” hotly debating whether or not to support Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president. Socialist Alternative (SAlt) kicked off that debate more than a year ago. Flush with excitement over the 2013 election of its supporter Kshama Sawant to Seattle’s city council, SAlt announced: “There has not been a more propitious time in modern American history to begin to build a pro-working class political force” (socialistalternative.org, 16 April 2014). SAlt then began to churn out articles pleading with Sanders to make a run for president as an independent rather than as a Democrat. Finding this offer one he could easily refuse, Sanders announced his run for the Democratic Party nomination as well as his intention to support whichever candidate the Democrats nominate, presumably Hillary Clinton.

Thus rebuffed, SAlt rallied with Pepe Le Pew-like doggedness to Plan B: its members will work in the Sanders primary campaign while not advocating a vote to him (as a Democrat) in order to pressure him to run in the general election as an independent. Belaboring the obvious, SAlt acknowledged that Sanders’ campaign could “be used as a convenient ‘left flank’ by Clinton to draw in support from union members and activists who are fed up with corporate politics” (socialistalternative.org, 9 May). Wringing its hands, SAlt opines: “It would be tragic if Sanders’ campaign ends up playing this role,” as if it could be anything other than a vehicle to rope the disaffected back into the Democratic Party fold. Indeed, despite his rare and completely nominal claims to being an “independent socialist,” for the past 25 years Sanders has been a member of the Democratic Party congressional caucuses.

In this capacity, the Vermont Senator’s record of service to U.S. imperialism has been nearly impeccable. In the 1990s, he supported the NATO war against Serbia instigated by Democratic Party president Bill Clinton as well as the UN starvation sanctions that killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis. Over the years, he has generally backed every U.S. military intervention abroad, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2001, Sanders voted in favor of the “Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” which launched U.S. imperialism’s war and occupation of Afghanistan and later Iraq. More recently, he backed a Senate resolution supporting the 2014 Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

On the home front, Sanders enlisted in the “war against crime” (read: black people), supporting Clinton’s 1994 “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act,” which vastly expanded the crimes punishable by death at the hands of the federal government, poured 100,000 more cops onto the streets to patrol the inner cities and provided billions more in funding for prisons. It is small wonder that Sanders’ response to the explosion of outrage in black Baltimore against racist cop terror was to comment: “Being a cop is a hard job.”

With such a background, Sanders has even elicited some criticism from the inveterate opportunists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), who are engaged in a debate with SAlt over the probity of the latter’s tactics in supporting the candidate. Arguing that “his record should lead socialists to question” Sanders’ purported “independence” is none other than ISO leader Todd Chretien, himself an experienced participant in bourgeois electoralism. In 2006, Chretien ran for the small-time capitalist Green Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in California. For years, the Green Party has served as a stopover for disgruntled liberals on the road back to the Democratic Party.

All the ISO’s current hypocritical lectures on “independence” are designed to mask their own capitulation to the Democrats mediated through the likes of the Greens. Moreover, news of the large crowds Sanders has attracted with his verbiage about “political revolution against the billionaires” exerts the kind of pull that the ISO cannot resist: numbers. Chretien promises that the ISO will not be “stuck on the sidelines”:

“Not at all. The Sanders’ campaign gives us an opportunity to debate socialist politics. If Sanders wants to bring movement and union activists into the Democratic Party through its left entrance, we should try to get them back out that door and into the streets. We can engage on political issues with People for Bernie groups and encourage them to take part in activism outside the electoral arena.”

—socialistworker.org, 20 May

In short, the ISO proposes to redirect the energies of campaigners for “Bernie” to putatively more promising tasks—like maybe re-hydrating the desiccated remains of the Occupy movement or some other vehicle designed to pressure the capitalist Democratic Party to “serve the people.”

To this end, the ISO trots out Howie Hawkins, a leader of the Green Party who won nearly 5 percent of the vote in his 2014 New York gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Andrew Cuomo. In an article titled “Bernie Sanders Is No Eugene Debs” (socialistworker.org, 26 May), Hawkins argues, “Too many self-proclaimed socialists in the U.S. have abandoned the socialist principle of independent political action.” He should know! From the Peace & Freedom Party in the late 1960s to the Greens today, Hawkins is a veteran of capitalist “third parties” whose purpose is to channel social discontent into the ballot box. After some grandiose misuse of longtime Socialist Party leader Debs and also of Karl Marx, Hawkins gets down to business: “From an independent socialist point of view, all the money and time going into Sanders’ handoff to Clinton is time and money that could be going into getting Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy on every ballot in the country.”

The independence of the working class from all the parties—the Greens included—that represent the interests of the capitalist exploiters is the elementary precondition for struggle against this system of wage slavery. It was well over 150 years ago, following the failed bourgeois revolutions of 1848, that Marx and Engels grasped that any support to or mixing of banners with the parties of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie was anathema to the workers’ fight. Against calls for support to the German Democratic Party of the time, Marx argued in his 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”:

“It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world—that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.”

In Defense of Debs

The reformist riders in the third-party clown car at the Democratic Party rodeo invoke the heritage of Eugene V. Debs. Such fondness is not for the Debs who campaigned for the overthrow of the capitalist order by the revolutionary proletariat but rather for the early Socialist Party, which included both fighters for workers revolution and outright racists and apologists for the American imperialist order. SAlt positively salivates: “For all the faults of the Socialist Party in the first few decades of the 20th Century, it would be an excellent development if we had today a similar ‘socialist’ organization of tens of thousands of people with dozens of elected officials” (socialistalternative.org, 7 July).

James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the American Communist movement and later of American Trotskyism, was part of the left wing of the Socialist Party that exited that organization under the impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In his article “The Debs Centennial” (Fourth International, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1956), Cannon reviled those who “have discovered new virtues in the old Socialist Party, which polled so many votes in the time of Debs” for doing “an injustice to the memory of Debs.” He concluded: “The triumph of the cause he served so magnificently will require a different political instrument—a different kind of party—than the one he supported. The model for that is the party of Lenin.”

While the reformists pitch their respective tents in the camp of the parties of the capitalist class enemy, we in the SL struggle for a revolutionary workers party like Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks that aims for nothing other and nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule. Such a perspective is dismissed as at best a hopeless utopia by SAlt and the ISO, who preach that one must reach people “where they are at.” But the Bolshevik Revolution actually happened. And there were a good number of subsequent proletarian uprisings that failed due to both the lack of a revolutionary party to lead the workers to victory and the treachery of self-proclaimed “socialists” who defended the capitalist order.

The course charted by the ISO and SAlt—a progression of baby steps of reform through building “movements” that will pressure the capitalist state into enacting a decent social order—has never happened anywhere. Not in the 19th century, not in the 20th, nor will it ever. But as the current embodiment of social-democratic opposition to working-class struggle and socialist revolution, the ISO and SAlt have a bridge or two they are trying to sell in the current round of bourgeois elections in America.

A View From The Left -Pension Robbery-Bosses to Workers: Slave Away, Drop Dead

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

Pension Robbery-Bosses to Workers: Slave Away, Drop Dead

Last December, Congress and the Obama administration launched a stealth attack on pensions of workers covered by multiemployer plans in industries like mining, trucking and construction by passing and signing into law the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act (MPRA). The MPRA is a “reform” in the same sense that the guillotine reformed executions previously carried out by the rather more extended process of drawing and quartering. This measure came into being without a whisper of debate as an amendment to the omnibus budget legislation rushed through to provide the monies necessary to run the government.

The MPRA allows the bosses not just to whack the pensions of active workers but to decrease the pensions of retirees, an option that was blocked by existing legislation until the act was passed. It is estimated that 10 percent of multiemployer plans, covering about one million workers, are facing insolvency. The Treasury Department recently appointed a hatchet man, Kenneth Feinberg, to oversee the MPRA’s implementation, supposedly to block unwarranted employer attempts to curtail pensions, but more to the point, investing him with the power to slash benefits if cutbacks are rejected by workers and retirees.

In recent months, egregiously underfunded public employee retirement systems in several states, most notably Illinois and Pennsylvania, have been targeted for benefit slashing. Democrats and Republicans alike have sought ways to get around existing legislative roadblocks to such attacks. As the pension rollbacks in bankrupted Detroit demonstrate, in the absence of any meaningful social struggle by workers and retirees, the road to such cutbacks by the capitalist rulers will be cleared in one manner or another. Not surprisingly, given the scent of blood in the water, calls for the “reform” of Social Security have recently resurfaced, including the raising of the retirement age. With only 18 percent of private-sector workers covered by plans that guarantee specified benefits upon retirement (down from 35 percent in the early 1990s), state/government pensions, like Social Security itself, are the last major repository of such plans.

In Pennsylvania, the Republican-dominated state senate, with all-out support from many Democratic mayors throughout the state, recently passed a bill to end defined-benefit coverage for state workers by forcing them into 401(k) defined-contribution plans. Democratic governor Tom Wolf recently vetoed this rollback, preferring alternative strategies to screw the workers. The anarchic capitalist system is incapable of providing financial security for its subjects who face increasing immiseration in direct relation to the increasing wealth of the ruling class that owns the productive property. In the short run, however, the difference between defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans is significant. A defined-benefit plan pays out a guaranteed monthly amount, normally dependent on wages earned, upon retirement; a defined-contribution plan puts the onus on the individual, specifying what you must put into the fund, with generally lower payouts and no guarantee of anything upon retirement.

For decades now, American workers have been subjected to cutbacks to pension and health benefits. Indeed, such benefits are under similar attack in virtually every industrial society, especially of late Canada and Britain. Today in Greece, the dominant imperialist powers of the European Union (i.e., Germany and France) are committed to enforcing pension and other cutbacks that challenge the very capacity of people there to survive. In the 1980s, the union officialdom in the U.S. and Britain set the stage for the anti-labor offensive, signaling their prostration to their respective capitalist rulers by abandoning the PATCO air traffic controllers strike here as that union was being destroyed by Ronald Reagan and by sabotaging the militant British miners strike. Subsequently, the scope and intensity of these assaults were further fueled by the explosion of bourgeois triumphalism in the aftermath of the 1991-92 counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, disarming workers in the face of capitalist reaction.

In this country, the first major assault on pensions in the post-World War II period occurred in the early 1960s, the heyday of American capitalism, when thousands of auto workers found themselves without pensions after Studebaker went belly up. A decade later, the federal government launched the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) with the aim of covering pensions in the private sector that vanished when a corporation went bankrupt. With the financial bubbles and subsequent recessions in recent decades leading up to the massive 2008 economic implosion, countless pension plans evaporated (and IRAs and 401(k)s tanked with the market). As a result, it is now projected that the PBGC will run out of funds to cover abandoned pensions in the next decade. Meanwhile, lawmakers only pretended to put money into state-provided pensions, so that there are now almost one trillion dollars in unfunded obligations to workers covered by these plans.

In fact, the mechanisms used to disappear the benefits that had been funded by workers, normally by forgoing wage increases in exchange for a better-funded retirement, were simply outright theft. While Wall Street and private employers dipped into pension funds to fuel speculative ventures, state and other government pensions, including Social Security, were similarly looted to fund other projects by politicians who were loath to raise more tax revenues from a populace that from left to right correctly held them in low regard as predators solely devoted to feathering their own nests.

A special dishonorable mention must be given to the trade-union bureaucrats, who couple pious denunciations of the attacks on their members’ wages and benefits with hand-in-glove collaboration with the bosses and government officials in the ongoing anti-labor assault. Thus, it is virtually a ritual that each newly negotiated union contract, normally combining peanut-sized raises with benefit cuts, is crammed down the throats of reluctant union members as the bureaucrats whine: “This is the best we can hope to get.” In that spirit, Teamsters president James P. Hoffa hypocritically denounced the MPRA last month as “devastating for those least able to take such a hit to their living standards” (Detroit News, 15 July).

What Hoffa neglected to mention is that the union reps to the Central States Pension Fund, a combined employer/union board overseeing the pensions of about 275,000 working Teamsters, retirees and surviving spouses, had lobbied intensely for the MPRA bill because the Fund was running out of money. Or that seven years earlier in a sweetheart deal to expand union membership at United Parcel Service, the Teamsters tops had allowed the company to stop paying into that fund with predictable consequences for its liquidity. Recently, the same union bureaucracy began informing Teamsters members that pension cuts could be initiated as early as next year. Outraged union members are currently attempting to mobilize to beat back the pension-slashing attacks. The cutbacks should be scrapped. But it is not promising that a leading role in this effort is being played by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, an opposition grouping within the union notorious for both drafting and then helping implement the 1989 consent decree that led to government control over union elections and finances.

It must be remembered that the union benefits that are now being eaten away piecemeal were made possible by the hard class battles of the 1930s (see the new Spartacist pamphlet Then and Now), battles that were for the most part led by reds imbued with the understanding that workers share no common interests with their bosses. It will require similar battles led by militants so inspired to fend off today’s attacks as well as to replenish the ranks of the trade unions and regain the wages and benefits that make survival possible, not least retirement at full wages. As a start, the labor movement should demand that the federal government insure the full value of both public and private pension funds. Government-provided health care should be universally available at no cost at the point of delivery. In the absence of concerted class struggle, the ruling class will not provide these or any other necessities to the workers whose labor it exploits, much less retirees who add no value to capitalist production.

The unions remain the general organizations of the working class, which workers must defend when they are under attack. However, it must be recognized that the bureaucrats that head the unions today have not the stomach to engage in the battles necessary to advance workers’ class interests. As consummate labor lieutenants of capital, they seek to demonstrate their value to bourgeois rule by enforcing extortion from the working class, notably the gutting of wages and benefits. Recently, the labor tops have signaled their intent not to challenge low-wage standards by seeking to have their members excused from the latest minimum-wage increases.

Union officialdom, with its overwhelming fealty to the capitalist Democrats, has brought disaster on the American working class. It is imperative to replace these labor traitors with a leadership committed to the independence of the working class from all representatives of the class enemy. Leon Trotsky in Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (1940) charted the way forward:

“Does this mean that in the epoch of imperialism independent trade unions are generally impossible? It would be fundamentally incorrect to pose the question this way. Impossible are the independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions. Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions that not only are not stockholders of imperialist policy but that set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent they are conscious of being, in addition, the organs of proletarian revolution.”

To this end, it is crucially necessary to forge a party that is revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist.

A View From The Left -Sandra Bland’s Death-The Police Are Guilty

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

Sandra Bland’s Death-The Police Are Guilty

On July 13, the lifeless body of 28-year-old Sandra Bland was found hanging in a county jail cell in the town of Hempstead on the edge of East Texas. A Chicago native, Bland was political and outspoken, a black activist who wanted to end police terror and racism. Three days earlier, a Texas state trooper had pulled her over for not signaling a lane change. When she was less than cheerful and refused to put out her cigarette, the cop took her for “uppity.” Dashboard video captured him drawing his Taser, threatening, “I will light you up,” shortly before he forced Bland out of her car and off camera slammed her to the ground. She was then charged with assaulting a police officer.

Bland was stopped on the road to historically black Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater, founded during Reconstruction on the site of a former slave plantation. Cops make it their daily routine to patrol that road—part of an effort to keep black students, faculty and campus workers “in their place.” As recently as 2003, the local district attorney threatened to prosecute Prairie View students if they tried to vote, and in the ensuing years they have had to continue to battle local officials in the courts over exercising that right.

The official version of how Bland died in her Waller County jail cell is the dubious story that she committed suicide. Her family, friends and many activists have insisted that she would not have hurt herself and suspect foul play. Whatever the exact circumstances of her death, the police are guilty as hell. And Bland is hardly the only one. Last month, six black women were found dead in jails across the country, while some 4,200 people have died in Texas alone over the past decade during attempted arrests or once behind bars.

What happened to Bland is an all too familiar story in the states of the former Confederacy. Indeed, on the streets of the U.S., North and South, whether isolated backwaters or cosmopolitan centers, stopping, beating and shooting black men and women for “driving while black” is standard police procedure. A scant six days after Bland died, 43-year-old Samuel DuBose was blown away by a University of Cincinnati cop who stopped him because his front license plate was missing. The Washington Post has tallied over 570 fatal police shootings nationwide already this year (more than the FBI, which nominally tracks the statistic, has reported for every year since 1976). Black people were killed at three times the rate of whites.

At protests sparked by these killings, many ask: why does it keep happening? Black people in the U.S. constitute an oppressed race-color caste, stigmatized for the color of their skin regardless of class. The main enforcers of this social order are the cops, the thugs in blue at the core of the repressive state machinery by which one class, the ruling capitalists, holds down another, the workers. Cop terror against black people—whether down and out or up and coming—is not an “excess”; it’s a calculated program. It is the way U.S. capitalism, which is built on the bedrock of black oppression, resolves the contradiction between the assertion of some formal equal rights and the forcible segregation of the bulk of the black population at the bottom of society. Black oppression serves the capitalist rulers by keeping working people from uniting against the class enemy.

The racist killers were doing what they are hired, trained and paid to do, something that no amount of reform will change, including the “community involvement and oversight strategies” demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement. Waller County itself shows what “community control” of the cops looks like in Texas. As chief of police in Hempstead, Glenn Smith was so blatantly racist even by local standards that he got fired in 2008. He ran for sheriff later that year and was elected by a landslide. Smith is now in charge of the investigation of Bland’s death in the jail he oversees. But even where blacks are the majority, as in Baltimore, a city long run by black Democrats, “community control” and myriad other schemes to reform the police have proved to be the hoaxes that they are. The “rough ride” in a police van that broke Freddie Gray’s neck following his arrest by a gang of black and white cops is a chilling illustration.

Black Lives Matter also begs the federal Department of Justice to withhold funds from local police departments until discriminatory policing is ended. But as the saying goes, “The fish stinks from the head.” The federal government enforces the racist “war on drugs,” runs prisons and oversees the entire rotten system that the cops “serve and protect.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch might launch an investigation into Bland’s death because, in her words, “the black community is not handled with the same professionalism and courtesy” that other people get from the cops. How obscene! Black people are run roughshod over by a system that increasingly deems them an expendable population. And Lynch is its top cop. The role of the black Democrats is to channel the anger and frustration of the black masses back into prayer meetings and more schemes to “reform” the killers in uniform.

The aftermath of DuBose’s killing has reinforced illusions in the possibility of holding cops “accountable.” That coldblooded shooting was captured on the body camera worn by the cop, who now faces charges of voluntary manslaughter and murder. But truth is, from Rodney King to Eric Garner no video has saved anyone from the cop perpetrators of racist terror. On a rare occasion, a cop might face charges or even more rarely receive some punishment, usually a slap on the wrist, all for the purpose of heading off any potential unrest and refurbishing the image of the police in order to make it easier for them to go about their business of repression. Simply put, the capitalist state apparatus cannot be made to act on behalf of the workers and the oppressed.

There is a way out: the road of integrated class struggle that combats every manifestation of oppression and leads to workers revolution. The anger of black people must be linked to the social power of the multiracial working class mobilized in opposition to the capitalist state and all its political parties, not least the Democrats. The Confederate flag has come down from a pole in South Carolina, but it will take a socialist revolution to uproot the social and material basis of black oppression, the American capitalist system. The Spartacist League raises the demands: Finish the Civil War! For a workers America! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

From The Current Struggles In Greece-Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU!

Frank Jackman comment:

While this leaflet has been around for a while it is still relevant as a propaganda effort to intersect the boiling class struggle in Greece. The Syriza government has since resigned over its squalid capitulation to the “Troika” and a split has occurred in that left-wing parliamentary coalition due to that capitulation so the situation today is very fluid. Such situations, as the ominous signs from Golden Dawn attest to do not last long, so forward with the demands listed in the leaflet. Damn, isn’t the situation in Greece the clarion call for why socialism is necessary in this wicked old world at a time when we are still mired in a last throes of the ‘death of communism” ideology which has stumped our efforts for the past quarter of a century since the demise of the Soviet Union. Yeah, forward, forward fast.

Workers Vanguard No. 1072

7 August 2015

Greek Trotskyists Initiate Call

Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU!

ENOUGH!

The following call, which has been translated from Greek, was initiated by our comrades in the Trotskyist Group of Greece on July 17 and distributed in Athens and elsewhere in the country.

Repudiate Syriza’s sellout to the EU and the banks. The EU and its currency the euro have been a tragic trap of suffering for the great bulk of the Greek people. The EU and euro must be repudiated. Committees composed of workers from different tendencies and their allies—youth, unemployed, immigrants, pensioners—must be set up throughout the country to struggle for this and toward a government which will act in the interests of the working people and be subordinated to them. This battle cannot be won within a parliamentary framework. We also call upon all like-minded and class-conscious working people throughout the misnamed European Union to support us in our aims and to consider the implications for their own countries. Break with the Capitalists and their Banks!

Build workers action committees to fight for:

Cancel the debt! Down with the euro and the EU! Rip up the Third Memorandum!
For common class struggle of Greek, German and other European workers against Schäuble, Merkel, Hollande and all the EU criminals!
Workers defense guards to smash the fascist threat! Defend immigrants against racist attacks!
Abolish the VAT and all regressive taxes! Decent housing for all, no evictions! For workers control of food distribution and prices!
Abolish business and bank secrets—Open the books!
Expropriate the banks, utilities, transportation, ports and shipping industry! Industrialize Greece!
For decent pensions for all retirees pegged to the cost of living, now! Quality health care for all!
Fight unemployment—Jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay!

Mobilize now! Hand this leaflet out at your workplace, campuses, neighborhoods, etc.

Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

Frank Jackman comment on the labor Struggles of the 1930s:

Everybody, everybody who has been around for the last generation or two and has been breathing knows that the rich have gotten richer exponentially in the one-sided class war that they have so far successfully been pursuing here in America (and internationally). We really do not need to have the hard fact of class thrown in our faces one more time by any source from the dwindling band of brave leftists to the think tank crowd of craven sociologists and make-shift policy wonks who are always slightly behind whatever the current reality is and well behind on what the hell to do about it if they would dream of lowering themselves to such considerations. What we really need to have is some kind of guidance about how to fight back, how to get some room to breathe and figure out a strategy to win some class battles

So it is very good, and very necessary, that this informative and thought-provoking pamphlet goes back to the 1930s, the last serious prolonged struggle by the American working class as a class. Goes back and discusses those three very important class battles of 1934 –Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco all led centrally by “reds,” by those who had some sense that they were joining in episodes of the class struggle and were willing to take their lumps on that basis. It probably would have seemed crazy to those militants that over 75 years later that their battles would be touted as the last great struggles of the class and that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be looking over their exploits with a certain admiration (and maybe puzzlement too since they have not seem such uppity-ness, ever. It speaks volumes that today’s leadership of the organized working class is clueless, worse, consciously works to keep clueless about the battles that gave then their jobs. But that should not stop the rest of us from picking up some pointers. Read this one.

**********

Workers Vanguard No. 1072	7 August 2015

New Spartacist Pamphlet

Newly available for purchase is our publication Then and Now, which explains how class-struggle leadership made a key difference in three citywide strikes in 1934. We reprint below the pamphlet’s introduction describing its contents.

The “Then and Now” article in this pamphlet addresses the crucial political lessons of the 1934 strikes by Minneapolis truckers, maritime workers on the West Coast and Toledo auto parts workers. Waged amidst the all-sided destitution of the Great Depression, these strikes, like others that year, confronted the strikebreaking forces of the capitalist state. A key difference was that these strikes won. What made this outcome possible is that their leaders were, at the time, committed to a program of class struggle. Unlike other trade-union leaders of that day—and today—they did not buy into the notion that the workers had interests in common with the employers, their political parties or their state. Instead, these strikes were fought by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of the workers in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy.

The review of Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters provides a more in-depth study of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes, which were led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (CLA). Here they confronted the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, who commanded the allegiance of many workers with his often radical-sounding, friend-of-the-little-guy rhetoric. The FLP postured as a “third party” alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans, but it was no less a capitalist party.

This is effectively addressed in the 1930 article “The Minnesota F.L.P.” by Vincent Dunne, who went on to become a central leader of the truckers’ strikes. As Dunne makes clear, the two-class Farmer-Labor Party was based on the subordination of the workers’ struggles to farmers and other petty-bourgeois forces “whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order.” After an on-again, off-again alliance with the Democratic Party, the FLP finally merged with the Democrats in 1944.

Dunne and other CLA leaders of the Minneapolis strikes had been armed for battle against farmer-labor populism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who in the early 1920s had intervened to pull the young American communist movement back from giving political support to the capitalist “third party” candidacy of Robert La Follette, a maverick Republican Senator from Wisconsin. The excerpts from Trotsky’s introduction to his book, The First Five Years of the Communist International, summarize his opposition to this opportunist course which, if pursued, would have politically liquidated the fledgling Communist party.

Today, what remains of the gains that were won through the momentous class battles of the past continues to be ravaged in a one-sided class war enabled by trade-union misleaders, who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were founded. The working class, the poor, black people, immigrants and countless others at the bottom of this society have paid the price in busted unions, broken lives and all-sided misery.

To be sure, it is not easy for the workers to win in the face of the forces arrayed against them. Many strikes, even very militant ones, will lose. But as was demonstrated in the three 1934 strikes addressed in this pamphlet, when important working-class battles are won it can dramatically alter the situation. These victories inspired a huge labor upsurge later in the 1930s that built the mass industrial unions in this country.

Hard-fought strikes can provide an important school of battle for the workers in which they learn the power of their collective strength and organization and begin to understand the class nature not only of the capitalist system but of the government, laws and political parties that defend its rule. But while able to strike important blows against the conditions of the workers’ exploitation, trade-union struggle on its own cannot end that exploitation. To win that war there must be a struggle for working-class power under the leadership of a revolutionary party that can arm the workers with the understanding and consciousness of their class interests in the fight to emancipate labor and all of the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Yes, You Had Better Shake, Rattle And Roll That Thing-With Big Joe Turner In Mind

Yes, You Had Better Shake, Rattle And Roll That Thing-With Big Joe Turner In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

In the old days, the old days when the songs were just starting to be weaned off of the old time religion gospel high heaven savior thing and come down in the mud and of hard drinking, hard lovin’, hard woman on your mind, yeah, the old birth of the blues days, the blue being nothing but a good woman or man on your mind anyway, around the turn of the 20^th century and you can check this out if you want to and not take my word for it a black guy, a rascally black guy of no known home, a drifter, maybe a hobo for all I know, and who knows what else named Joe Turner would come around the share-cropper down South neighborhoods and steal whatever was not nailed down, including your woman which depending on how you were feeling might be a blessing and then leave and move on to the next settlement and go about his plundering way. Oh sure like lots of blues and old country music as it got passed on in the oral traditions there were as many versions of the saga as there were singers everybody adding their own touch. But for the most part the story line about old ne’er-do-well Joe Turner rang very similar over time. So Joe Turner got his grizzly self put into song out in the Saturday juke joints out in places like the Mississippi Delta where more legends were formed than you could shake a stick, got sanctified once old when Willie’s liquor, white lightning home-made liquor got to working, and some guy, maybe not the best singer if you asked around but a guy who could put words together to tell a story, a blues story, and that guy with a scratch guitar would put some verses together and the crowd would egg him on. Make the tale taller as the night went until everybody petered out and that song was left for the next guy to embellish.

By most accounts old Joe was bad man, a very bad man, bad mojo man, just short of as bad as Mister’s plantation foremen where those juke joint listeners worked sunup to sundown six days a week or the enforcers of Mister James Crow’s laws seven days a week. Yeah, Joe was bad alright once he got his wanting habits on, although I have heard at least one recording from the Lomaxes who went all over the South in the 1930s and 1940s trying to record everything they could out in the back country where Joe Turner was something like a combination Santa Claus and Robin Hood. Hell, maybe he was and some guy who lost his woman to wily Joe just got sore and bad mouthed him. Stranger things have happened. In any case the Joe Turner, make that Big Joe, Turner I want to mention here as far as I know only stole the show when he got up on the bandstand and played the role of “godfather” of rock and roll.

That is what I want to talk about, about how one song, and specifically the place of Big Joe and one song, Shake Rattle and Roll in the rock pantheon. No question Big Joe and his snapping beat has a place in the history of rhythm and blues which is one of the musical forbear strands of rock and roll. The question is whether Shake is also the first serious effort to define rock and roll. If you look at the YouTube version of Big Joe be-bopping away with his guitar player doing some flinty stuff and sax player searching for that high white note and Big Joe snapping away being very suggestive about who and what should shake you can make a very strong case for that place. Add in that Bill Haley, Jerry Lee, and Elvis among others in the rock pantheon covered the song successfully and that would seem to clinch the matter.

In 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Shake by Big Joe, there had been considerable talk and writing again by some knowledgeable rock critics about whether Shake was the foundational song of rock. That controversy brought back to my mind the arguments that me and my corner boys who hung out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston, had on some nothing better to do Friday nights during high school (meaning girl-less, dough-less or both). I was the primary guy who argued for Big Joe and Shake giving that be-bop guitar and that wailing sexy sax work as my reasoning while Jimmy Jenkins swore that Ike Turner’s frantic piano-driven and screeching sax Rocket 88 (done under an alias of the Delta Cats apparently for contract reasons a not uncommon practice when something good came up but you would not have been able to it under the label you were contracted to) was the be-bop beginning and Sam Lowell, odd-ball Sam Lowell dug deep into his record collection, really his parent’s record collection which was filled mainly with folk music and the blues edge played off that to find Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall. And the other corner boys like our leader Frankie Riley lined up accordingly (nobody else came up with any others so it was those three).

Funny thing Frankie and most everybody else except I think Fritz Taylor who sided with Jimmy Jenkins sided with me and Big Joe. The funny part being that several years ago with the advent of YouTube I started to listen to the old stuff as it became available on-line and now I firmly believe that Ike’s Rocket 88 beats out Shake for the honor. As for the old time Joe Turner, well, he will have to wait in line. What do you think of that?

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-Rosa Luxemburg-The Junius Pamphlet

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-Rosa Luxemburg-The Junius Pamphlet

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915 one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannon roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,” a new revolutionary international, would become the order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell), were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.

Rosa Luxemburg

The Junius Pamphlet

The Crisis of German Social Democracy

(1915)

Written: February–April 1915 (while in prison).
First Published: In Zurich, February 1916, and illegally distributed in Germany.
Source: Politische Schriften, pp.229-43, pp.357-72.
Translated: (from the German) by Dave Hollis.
Transcription/Markup: Dave Hollis, Brian Baggins, Einde O’Callaghan.
Copyleft: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1996, 1999, 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

The voting of war credits in August 1914 was a shattering moment in the life of individual socialists and of the socialist movement in Europe. Those who had worked for and wholly believed in the ability of organized labor to stand against war now saw the major social democratic parties of Germany, France, and England rush to the defense of their fatherlands. Worker solidarity had proved an impotent myth. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) had for years warned against the stultifying effects of the overly bureaucratized German Social Democratic Party and the anti-revolutionary tendencies of the trade unions that played such a large role in the party’s policy decisions. The abdication of 1914 had proved her right but had also dashed the revolutionary yearnings of a lifetime. While she was able to construct new hope from the revolutionary opportunities presented by the war, Luxemburg could not shake the knowledge that, whatever the outcome, the European working class would pay the greatest price in blood and suffering. Thrice handicapped – a woman, a Pole, and a Jew – Luxemburg was the most eloquent voice of the left wing of German Social Democracy, among the most lucid Marxists of her era, and a constant advocate of radical action. She spent much of the war in jail, where she wrote and then smuggled out the pamphlet excerpted below. Published under the name ‥Junius,” a pseudonym used by an influential English pamphleteer in the 18th century, but perhaps also a reference to Lucius Junius Brutus, a legendary republican hero of ancient Rome, the pamphlet became the guiding statement for the International Group, which became the Spartacus League and ultimately the Communist Party of Germany (January 1, 1919). Luxemburg was instrumental in these developments and, along with Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919), led the Spartacists until their assasination by the German government on January 15, 1919.

* * *

Note that Chapter 4 of this book is typically not published and is difficult to find. In 2003, MIA added Chapter 4 from the Junius Pamphlet printed by The Merlin Press, London 1967. There were no copyright notices on this pamphlet.