*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!    

 

 

 

 

***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now! 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized like the mass of autoworkers into unions) and others like Deportee (in serious need of a renewed hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal out of this system, it ain’t pretty), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations that has not happened again in the long “night of the long knives” since the 1970s), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart’s imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom  come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “economic royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name even one musical one today in America carrying that designation unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.”

Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new lifestyle  that could not have been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not now ) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (Markin, is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

 I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with go through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always only in our dope-flamed moments either.)

Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common when things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla America (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston and hence Maine radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil, in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was as evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.

In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Six- Chicago 1919

In Honor Of The 98^h Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Six- Chicago 1919           

 

William Z. Foster (nobody ever called him Bill, not even his closest drinking companions) was his angel idol. Yes, ever since Jim Gladstone had started working for William Z. he had hung on his every word, whether that word was right, or wrong. And he had to pinch himself  because there he was sitting in same room as William Z. planning out strategy for the next steps in the strike struggles that William Z. was organizing in Chicago just that 1919 year, just that year when the hellish war over in Europe was over and working men could go back  to work, and go back to work for better pay now that everybody had done his or her patriotic duty by not squawking when the bosses keep piling up the dough and the workingman had barely enough to live on. But William Z., one smart cookie, and one hell of an organizer would put things straight. Hell he had even got the white guys down the steel plants and meat butchery places to stick up for the “colored” workers, for a while anyway.

Yes, one smart cookie and Jim Gladstone was glad that he had hitched his star to William Z’s. Moreover William Z. had been smart, smart as hell, to keep clear of guys like that Socialist Debs and their ranting and raving about President Wilson getting America all gummed up in that European war. All it got Debs was some serious jail time and no chance to work the tide sweeping working man America looking for a little more in their pot and some respect. Yes, Jim Gladstone had it all figured, workingman figured. Out of the nasty Chicago cold water tenements, out of that twenty languages yakking ethnic squalor and onto easy street with a nice cushy job in some union office and who knows maybe more. His mother, mother of nine, and without a rolling stone father’s help (father last heard from out in Eureka in California looking for gold or something, more likely women and whiskey from his track record), was proud of him, proud that he was making something of himself although she would have been just as happy if he had steady work over at the steel mill. Jesus, mothers sometimes. No sweat and grime for him, him and Anna whom he intended to marry just as soon as the strike was settled and he became a permanent union official.

Then something happened, something that not even the smart as a cookie William Z. could have figured on. The bosses dug in their heels, dug them deep, started to call everybody reds and anarchists, started bringing the coppers in, and before long the rank and file, those squawking twenty languages, were ready to throw in the towel and the deal went down, went down badly. William Z. thereafter went about his business without one Jim Gladstone.

But here is the funny part, although there was nothing funny about the circumstances. Jim had in the aftermath of  the strike defeat done a certain amount of soul-searching since he, ah, had plenty of  time to walk Division Street and other haunts of the Windy City. He contacted a friend, a friend who had left from Chicago and gone to New York and had joined up with some radicals in Greenwich Village.

His friend and his radical friends were all huffed up about what had been going on in Russia since the war was over and the Bolsheviks were still fighting a civil war against the White Guards and needed help, and about the new organization that the Bolsheviks, the government in Russia was forming with kindred spirits throughout the world, a new international they called it (although truth to tell Jim didn’t know there was an old one needing replacement), the Communist International. And they were going to need trade union organizers to help organize the unions to fight for power everywhere. Jim perked up when he heard this news and got in direct contain with William Z. (or rather his assistant) to tell him of this new opportunity. William Z. nixed the idea, didn’t want to publicly get involved with reds and that was that. But Jim Gladstone still in need of a job, still in need of showing his love for his Anna by a little marriage and a white picket fence house got himself a train ticket for New York…

*****International Women's Day, 1916; From The Archives Of Women And Revolution

*****International Women's Day, 1916;A From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

-Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

 

 

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


****
International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

We reprint below a statement of greetings from the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women, an internationalist oppositional grouping within the French social democracy, on International Women's Day 1916. It is translated from the version published by the Gruppe Internationale, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches, in the illegal Spartacusbriefe (No. 17, 30 March 1916).


Following the definitive betrayal by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the outbreak of World War I, when its entire Reichstag fraction (initially including even such revolutionists as Karl Liebknecht, who misguidedly yielded to considerations of party "discipline" and "unity") voted the war credits demanded by the government, the minority of revolutionary -internationalists within the party were reduced to tiny, isolated propaganda groups without a party press or a party apparatus.

"Without an organization," said Lenin, "the masses are deprived of the sole expression of their will." The task, then, which the left radicals in the German social democracy faced, was the creation of an organization that might begin to overcome the atomization of the working class. This task had to be accomplished under conditions of illegality and against the old party leadership which, in its fear of such attempts to reach the masses of disfranchised party members, had imposed a moratorium on all discussion and criticism of the "official" line and refused to hold the yearly party congresses required by SPD statutes.

Coinciding with the increasing class collaboration of the party executive from 1910 onward had been a cessation in the growth of party membership (indeed, membership would have dropped, for the first time ever, had it not been for disproportionate recruitment of women). The large masses of non-organized workers were unwilling to take risks for a party whose timidity had emboldened employers to ever harsher attacks on their living standards.

The SPD section for work among women led by Clara Zetkin constituted a laudable exception to the party's general drift to the right (see "Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy," Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9, Spring and Summer; 1975). While subscriptions to the central party press were falling off, Zetkin's Die Gleichheit ("Equality") was able to chalk up a large increase in subscribers; similarly, it was undoubtedly Zetkin's activizing radicalism which in large measure accounted for the growth in women members—an indication that the SPD's capitulation to national chauvinism was not an expression of the "will of the masses" but rather of the revisionist leadership's default of socialist principle.

But Zetkin was able to carry on her fight for socialist international working-class solidarity in the forum of Die Gleichheit only for a short time longer; with the collaboration of the Prussian authorities the party leadership was able to gain control, install a compliant editor and proceed to run the journal into the ground. Circulation fell off sharply, and soon Die Gleichheit was suspended.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee is of interest not merely for its uncompromising interna¬tional proletarian solidarity in the midst of the chauvinist hysteria of the imperialist holocaust but also for the solutions it advances to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Revolted by the quiescence and then by the outright betrayal of the party leadership and correctly viewing the masses as far more revolutionary than this petty-bourgeoisified leadership, many revolutionists over¬reacted by adopting a theory of mass revolutionary initiative exemplified by the "spontaneism" of Rosa Luxemburg. According to this view, the party was to be primarily an educational organization, providing leadership when the masses did decide on their own to initiate the final collapse of capitalism.

Such glorification of the masses' undirected revolutionary will led the social-democratic lefts to downplay the role of proletarian leadership. Thus, Luxemburg could write in 1910, when the SPD party executive was throttling mass demonstrations in favor of electoral reform: "If the mass of party comrades comprehends and truly feels this [the need for militant struggle], then our leaders will also be found at their posts. 'It's the masses that are decisive'."

Similarly, in the Paris Action Committee's statement, there is the belief that the old social democracy will somehow be revived and reconstituted "from below." A complementary error was the divided left social-democrats' neglect of the crucial need for organiza¬tional unity achieved on a firm programmatic basis.

But the theoretical/organizational failings of the social-democratic left opposition display a deeper inadequacy: a failure to come to grips with the changed conditions generated by the dominance of imperialism by the turn of the century. In foreign affairs imperialism had meant an unprecedented aggressiveness of the major capitalist powers, posing an imminent threat of world imperialist conflict. Internally, the dominance of monopoly cartels interpenetrated with bank capital found reflection within the German Second Reich in a closing of ranks by the capitalist exploiters and an unparalleled intransigence toward the labor move¬ment. Now, for example, lockouts were financed by a joint fund set up by all significant German industry. This hard-nosed stance of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the social-democratic threat found expression politi¬cally in a strengthening of the reactionary bloc between industry and the East Elbran junkers with the aim of excluding the SPD from parliament. Within the labor movement itself, imperialism was accompanied by increasing divisions within the working class—not only industrialist-fostered "yellow unionism" but also what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" of relatively well-paid workers.

In the face of this challenge, the German social democracy remained tied to its old policy of verbal militancy and practical impotence. In particular, the entire left still clung to the Kautskyan theory of the "party of the entire class," i.e., including both those backward, reactionary layers which had not even achieved trade-union consciousness and a labor aristocracy whose relatively, elevated status made it prone to accept the status quo. Proponents of proletarian "unity" overlooked the fact that backward and non-revolutionary layers in the party would certainly generate spokesmen for their views within the party leadership.

While the Gruppe Internationale, which published this greeting, consisted of uncompromising revolution¬ists who were to found the German Communist Party, in failing to lend an organizational form to their views, they could offer no real solution to the social-democratic betrayal of the SPD leadership. It was only in the codification of Bolshevik practice in the early Comintern (particularly in the "Theses on Tactics" and "Guidelines on Organization") that the division between maximum and minimum program, enunciat¬ed in the Erfurt Program of 1891, was to be transcended in the creation of a party of a new type, the Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, in which a conscious leadership of professional revolutionaries would be able to intervene decisively at crucial world-historical junctures precisely because it rested on an alert, class-conscious rank and file. Not Kautskyan "unity"-mongering, but such tactics as the united front simultaneously unmasked the old social-democratic misleaders and achieved working-class unity around the achievement of particular shared, strictly limited goals.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women reprinted below is thus essentially a backward-looking document, harking back to the great traditions of the Second International and attempting to preserve a synthesis—"the great socialist family"— that had been first eroded and then dissolved by a triumphant imperialism. But the Second International had died in an act of definitive class-collaborationist betrayal. It was the Third International which was to continue the fight for international proletarian revolu¬tion through the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war directed against the international bourgeoisie under the leadership of an effective and disciplined international party of the working class.

To socialist and proletarian women of all countries the Committee sends an expression of its warmest sympathy on International Women's Day. From the ' bottom of its heart it hopes and desires that a great many socialist women's organizations will succeed— more freely and openly than it has itself been able to— in calling upon women everywhere to express their dearest wish, the wish for an immediate end to the frightful struggle that for 19 months now has been inundating the world in blood, and in uttering in numerous mass meetings with a clear voice the, word "peace" tabooed in our country.

We feel ourselves in solidarity with the socialist proletarians of the so-called enemy nations, with the proletarians whom we no more confuse with their exploiters than we would be confused with our own hangmen. We feel this solidarity the more strongly the more zealously our own, our true enemies, the capitalists, strive to incite us against foreign proletari¬ans. Thus under the present conditions it is particularly to the socialist and proletarian women of countries at war with us and especially to the proletarian women of Germany that we offer the assurance of our most heartfelt, warmest sympathy, and above all to Clara Zetkin and all the women comrades who, heroically and inspired with glowing conviction, are struggling for socialism and for peace without counting the costs to themselves.

The Committee renews the vow of proletarian solidarity made by its members at the time of their entry into the great socialist family. To each and every one it sends fraternal greetings, sad, painful greetings, but greetings supported by the unshakable belief in the future of the proletariat.

For the Committee: Louise Saumoneau, Paris

 

 

 

The Aafia Movement-An Update

Background of Case Dr Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani mother of three , a brilliant scholar, PhD doctor of cognitive neuroscience Majoring in learning and imitation , improving efficacy of learning in children,  An educationist with a dream a dream to revolutionise the educational system in Pakistan,  one that would create a generation Of enlightened and intellectual youth in a country that needed it more than others.  Dr. Aafia earned her bachelor’s degree  from MIT and earned her doctorate from Brandeis University. Her doctoral thesis was “Learning through Imitation” in which she included her research on improving learning techniques for children. She was totally dedicated to her children and her academic studies revolved around how children learn. Unfortunately, Dr. Aafia became a victim of domestic violence during her marriage. In 2002, Dr. Aafia’s husband moved the family to Pakistan and soon divorced her while she was pregnant with the couple’s third child.  In 2003, Dr Aafia became a victim of a rendition operation was kidnapped along with her little kids.  Dr. Aafia is now 43 years old, a mother of three children (2 are US citizens), and is a Pakistani citizen. With no other citizenship Currently languishing in a US jail at FMC Carswell military base where her life is in constant threat.    Circumstances Surrounding the Case Briefly, here are some of the basic circumstances of Dr. Aafia’s case: In March 2003, Dr. Aafia and her three children, Ahmad (boy), six years old and an American citizen, Maryum (girl), four years old and also an American citizen, and baby Suleman (boy), six months old, kidnapped by unknown authorities in Karachi, Pakistan. On March 31, 2003 it was reported by the Pakistani media that Dr. Aafia had been arrested and turned over to representatives of the United States. In early April, this was confirmed on NBC Nightly News, among other media outlets. There was communication to the mother of Dr. Aafia from purported “agencies” that the family members should be quiet if they want to see Aafia returned alive. By the year 2008, many believed that after five years of being disappeared Dr. Aafia and her three children were most likely dead as was the case with thousands That were sold and victims of rendition operations by a dictator ruling Pakistan (his biography "in the line of fire") Then, in July of 2008,  three events occurred: 1. British human-rights reporter, Yvonne Ridley and former Bagram detainee and British citizen, Moazem Begg,  publicly spoke about a woman in Bagram screaming, a woman whom they named the “Grey Lady of Bagram” 2. A petition for habeas corpus was filed with the Pakistan High Court in Islamabad requesting that the court order the Pakistani government to free Dr. Aafia or to even admit that they were then detaining her. 3.  A wave of International out rage emerged as evidence of illegal detainees in bagram and other secret detention centres Began piling up. A request from the House of Lords in UK to inspect the Bagram facility and a meeting With prisoner 650 was sent by various human rights activists world wide echoed. It was in the midst of this whole scenario that a disoriented Aafia is found in Afghanistan and shot - a sinister Plot that makes one shudder. What Evidence , Investigation has uncovered? That Dr. Aafia was (and is) an innocent person who was abducted for money or based on false allegations or false conclusions derived from an unknown source. That, unfortunately, all evidence required for her defense and establishing legal proof of her detention would require full cooperation by the U.S. and Pakistani governments, and intelligence agencies, a cooperation that seems impossible. However the Person who kidnapped her has finally come forward And confessed to the heinous crime on the behest of her ex husband and the regime that stripped pakistan Off its dignity by selling its own citizens. That documents incriminating Dr. Aafia are either false documents or produced under torture or threat of harm to her children. That the Afghan police were looking for Dr. Aafia and her son based on a description given by an anonymous tip with a shoot on sight Order on the day she was detained in Ghazni. That had Dr. Aafia  been shot on sight on suspicion of being suicide bombers, this would have led to a convenient closure of the case of Aafia Siddiqui at a time when a massive outcry from international community and a petition for habeas corpus was pending in the High Court of Pakistan in Islamabad. Note that this court had been asked to order then-President Musharraf and the Pakistani government  (which would include anyone working with them) to release her or to reveal her whereabouts. That Dr. Aafia, who spoke no local language in Ghazni, was dressed so conspicuously in a manner to be easily identified and shoot on sight as a (falsely-accused) suicide bomber as a part of someone else’s plan. The forensic and scientific evidence presented during the trial in New York proved that Dr. Aafia could not have committed the crimes for which she was charged, still the the judges closing arguments jury disregarded the evidence and chose to agree with the prosecution due to fear and prejudice.   What Dr. Aafia’s detractors want? We are asked to believe that Dr. Aafia, a respectable Pakistani woman in all ways, has links to terrorists from Pakistan; (NO terrorism charges against her)was voluntarily hiding under cover with three children acting as a terror field operative while at the same time leaving her family to believe for five years that she and her three children were dead. We are asked to believe that Dr. Aafia arranged this just after her father died, after finding out her husband cheating on her marriage was disintegrating, and after leaving her widowed mother alone in Pakistan. It is absolutely not plausible and does not even fit the traditional profile by law enforcement of female or male terrorists from that part of the world.   Current Situation In February, 2010, Dr. Aafia was tried and convicted in a US Federal court on charges of attempted murder and assaulting US servicemen in Ghazni, Afghanistan.  The official charges against Dr. Aafia were that she assaulted U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with one of the servicemen’s own rifles, while she was in their custody, waiting to be interrogated by them. No US personnel were hurt but Dr. Aafia was shot and suffered serious injuries including brain damage. Dr Aafia categorically denies these charges. The forensic and physical evidence denies those charges There were NO terrorism charges against Dr. Aafia. According to several legal observers, the trial of Dr. Aafia was littered with many inconsistencies and defects, chief among them being 1.No jurisdiction to try the case in the US. This was a result of a rendition operation. 2. Many rulings by the judge that strongly favored the prosecution and prejudiced the case against the defense. 3.These ranged from allowing much hearsay evidence and jury instructions that favored the prosecution. 4. In addition, Dr. Aafia was not represented by lawyers of her choosing and faced constant innuendos of terrorism when she was not charged with any such offence. 5. As a result of Judge Richard Berman’s framing of the case in a negative light, Dr Aafia was convicted despite ALL physical and forensic evidence that showed that she could not have committed the acts she was charged with. 6. On September 23, 2010, Dr. Aafia was sentenced to 86 years in prison by Judge Richard Berman who overruled the jury’s determination that there was any pre-meditation. The judge also added enhancements that were not part of either the charges against Dr. Aafia nor part of the conviction. After her sentencing, Dr. Aafia aasked that people not take any revenge or get emotional.  She asked that those who have wronged her be forgiven as she forgave Judge Berman. Dr. Aafia remains imprisoned, now at the notorious Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas where she is kept in the Special housing unit (SHU) which is the most severe confinement category. She is still not allowed communication with anyone she trusts, including family members. 7. Being a Muslim her religious book the Quran is desecrated, her clothes stripped, food urinated Upon and what could be a worse form of human coercion than tearing away little children from their mother And then threaten the mother of her children's safety ?   Dr. Aafia’s Children Dr. Aafia’s oldest son, Ahmed, who is a U.S. citizen by birth, was found in an American detention Centre , Afghanistan after public pressure and, in late 2008, was reunited with Dr.Aafia’s  sister in Karachi, Pakistan. Dr. Aafia’s daughter, Maryum, also a US citizen by birth, was recovered in April 2010 and dropped off in Karachi after being missing for 7 íyears.  She was traumatized and spoke only American accented English. Dr. Aafia’s youngest child, Suleman, a boy who would now be about 12 years old, remains missing; and is feared dead.   What Supporters and Family Seek? Dr. Aafia, an MIT and Brandeis laureate, is now a broken and mere shell of her former self. Under these circumstances, Family and supporters are asking the U.S. government to repatriate Dr. Aafia back to her home in Pakistan. The Pakistani government has formally made this request as this matter has become a major public issue and has support across Pakistani political and social spectrums. Supporters and people of conscience should press government officials to get Dr. Aafia reunited with her family as soon as possible. Aafia and her family seek no revenge as their faith is in vengeance is mine saith The Lord . Aafia's case Has become a glaring example Of thousands suffering from rendition operations, illegal detentions, false a Accusations and torture tactics that put barbarism to shame. Dr Aafia’s family and supporters still have hope in fair minded peoples commitment to mercy and justice to raise their voices with theirs so it be heard in the corridors of power. To help end the violations of basic human rights and let freedom ring. Justice for the past, for all Dr. Aafia has suffered, is hard to imagine.All that is asked for the future is for some measure of correction. If Dr. Aafia is repatriated, perhaps she can pick up some fragments of life with her family.   Closing We ask people to look into this case themselves, and to do so with an open mind. There is a lot of information out there on the Internet, and in the media. Many of the stories demonize Aafia, while some raise her to sainthood. Aafia is neither demon nor saint. Aafia is simply a mother, daughter and sister with a dream, trapped in an extraordinary nightmare. What is happening to Aafia and thousands others in the aftermath of 911 and the resulting "terror war" not happen to other innocents anymore.

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

 

 

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


****
International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

We reprint below a statement of greetings from the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women, an internationalist oppositional grouping within the French social democracy, on International Women's Day 1916. It is translated from the version published by the Gruppe Internationale, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches, in the illegal Spartacusbriefe (No. 17, 30 March 1916).


Following the definitive betrayal by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the outbreak of World War I, when its entire Reichstag fraction (initially including even such revolutionists as Karl Liebknecht, who misguidedly yielded to considerations of party "discipline" and "unity") voted the war credits demanded by the government, the minority of revolutionary -internationalists within the party were reduced to tiny, isolated propaganda groups without a party press or a party apparatus.

"Without an organization," said Lenin, "the masses are deprived of the sole expression of their will." The task, then, which the left radicals in the German social democracy faced, was the creation of an organization that might begin to overcome the atomization of the working class. This task had to be accomplished under conditions of illegality and against the old party leadership which, in its fear of such attempts to reach the masses of disfranchised party members, had imposed a moratorium on all discussion and criticism of the "official" line and refused to hold the yearly party congresses required by SPD statutes.

Coinciding with the increasing class collaboration of the party executive from 1910 onward had been a cessation in the growth of party membership (indeed, membership would have dropped, for the first time ever, had it not been for disproportionate recruitment of women). The large masses of non-organized workers were unwilling to take risks for a party whose timidity had emboldened employers to ever harsher attacks on their living standards.

The SPD section for work among women led by Clara Zetkin constituted a laudable exception to the party's general drift to the right (see "Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy," Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9, Spring and Summer; 1975). While subscriptions to the central party press were falling off, Zetkin's Die Gleichheit ("Equality") was able to chalk up a large increase in subscribers; similarly, it was undoubtedly Zetkin's activizing radicalism which in large measure accounted for the growth in women members—an indication that the SPD's capitulation to national chauvinism was not an expression of the "will of the masses" but rather of the revisionist leadership's default of socialist principle.

But Zetkin was able to carry on her fight for socialist international working-class solidarity in the forum of Die Gleichheit only for a short time longer; with the collaboration of the Prussian authorities the party leadership was able to gain control, install a compliant editor and proceed to run the journal into the ground. Circulation fell off sharply, and soon Die Gleichheit was suspended.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee is of interest not merely for its uncompromising interna¬tional proletarian solidarity in the midst of the chauvinist hysteria of the imperialist holocaust but also for the solutions it advances to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Revolted by the quiescence and then by the outright betrayal of the party leadership and correctly viewing the masses as far more revolutionary than this petty-bourgeoisified leadership, many revolutionists over¬reacted by adopting a theory of mass revolutionary initiative exemplified by the "spontaneism" of Rosa Luxemburg. According to this view, the party was to be primarily an educational organization, providing leadership when the masses did decide on their own to initiate the final collapse of capitalism.

Such glorification of the masses' undirected revolutionary will led the social-democratic lefts to downplay the role of proletarian leadership. Thus, Luxemburg could write in 1910, when the SPD party executive was throttling mass demonstrations in favor of electoral reform: "If the mass of party comrades comprehends and truly feels this [the need for militant struggle], then our leaders will also be found at their posts. 'It's the masses that are decisive'."

Similarly, in the Paris Action Committee's statement, there is the belief that the old social democracy will somehow be revived and reconstituted "from below." A complementary error was the divided left social-democrats' neglect of the crucial need for organiza¬tional unity achieved on a firm programmatic basis.

But the theoretical/organizational failings of the social-democratic left opposition display a deeper inadequacy: a failure to come to grips with the changed conditions generated by the dominance of imperialism by the turn of the century. In foreign affairs imperialism had meant an unprecedented aggressiveness of the major capitalist powers, posing an imminent threat of world imperialist conflict. Internally, the dominance of monopoly cartels interpenetrated with bank capital found reflection within the German Second Reich in a closing of ranks by the capitalist exploiters and an unparalleled intransigence toward the labor move¬ment. Now, for example, lockouts were financed by a joint fund set up by all significant German industry. This hard-nosed stance of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the social-democratic threat found expression politi¬cally in a strengthening of the reactionary bloc between industry and the East Elbran junkers with the aim of excluding the SPD from parliament. Within the labor movement itself, imperialism was accompanied by increasing divisions within the working class—not only industrialist-fostered "yellow unionism" but also what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" of relatively well-paid workers.

In the face of this challenge, the German social democracy remained tied to its old policy of verbal militancy and practical impotence. In particular, the entire left still clung to the Kautskyan theory of the "party of the entire class," i.e., including both those backward, reactionary layers which had not even achieved trade-union consciousness and a labor aristocracy whose relatively, elevated status made it prone to accept the status quo. Proponents of proletarian "unity" overlooked the fact that backward and non-revolutionary layers in the party would certainly generate spokesmen for their views within the party leadership.

While the Gruppe Internationale, which published this greeting, consisted of uncompromising revolution¬ists who were to found the German Communist Party, in failing to lend an organizational form to their views, they could offer no real solution to the social-democratic betrayal of the SPD leadership. It was only in the codification of Bolshevik practice in the early Comintern (particularly in the "Theses on Tactics" and "Guidelines on Organization") that the division between maximum and minimum program, enunciat¬ed in the Erfurt Program of 1891, was to be transcended in the creation of a party of a new type, the Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, in which a conscious leadership of professional revolutionaries would be able to intervene decisively at crucial world-historical junctures precisely because it rested on an alert, class-conscious rank and file. Not Kautskyan "unity"-mongering, but such tactics as the united front simultaneously unmasked the old social-democratic misleaders and achieved working-class unity around the achievement of particular shared, strictly limited goals.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women reprinted below is thus essentially a backward-looking document, harking back to the great traditions of the Second International and attempting to preserve a synthesis—"the great socialist family"— that had been first eroded and then dissolved by a triumphant imperialism. But the Second International had died in an act of definitive class-collaborationist betrayal. It was the Third International which was to continue the fight for international proletarian revolu¬tion through the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war directed against the international bourgeoisie under the leadership of an effective and disciplined international party of the working class.

To socialist and proletarian women of all countries the Committee sends an expression of its warmest sympathy on International Women's Day. From the ' bottom of its heart it hopes and desires that a great many socialist women's organizations will succeed— more freely and openly than it has itself been able to— in calling upon women everywhere to express their dearest wish, the wish for an immediate end to the frightful struggle that for 19 months now has been inundating the world in blood, and in uttering in numerous mass meetings with a clear voice the, word "peace" tabooed in our country.

We feel ourselves in solidarity with the socialist proletarians of the so-called enemy nations, with the proletarians whom we no more confuse with their exploiters than we would be confused with our own hangmen. We feel this solidarity the more strongly the more zealously our own, our true enemies, the capitalists, strive to incite us against foreign proletari¬ans. Thus under the present conditions it is particularly to the socialist and proletarian women of countries at war with us and especially to the proletarian women of Germany that we offer the assurance of our most heartfelt, warmest sympathy, and above all to Clara Zetkin and all the women comrades who, heroically and inspired with glowing conviction, are struggling for socialism and for peace without counting the costs to themselves.

The Committee renews the vow of proletarian solidarity made by its members at the time of their entry into the great socialist family. To each and every one it sends fraternal greetings, sad, painful greetings, but greetings supported by the unshakable belief in the future of the proletariat.

For the Committee: Louise Saumoneau, Paris

 

 

 

In Honor Of International Women’s Day- A Loud Voice Of One’s Own

In Honor Of International Women’s Day- A Loud Voice Of One’s Own 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

She was not sure exactly how she was going to raise the rent money now that she had exhausted her unemployment benefits after having been laid off from the Excelsior Company as a line operator where for two good years she had made enough money to keep herself and her boys above water. Yes she was not sure at all. All she knew was that with three young boys, hungry young boys, nine, seven, and six, that she was going to make sure they were fed, properly fed, and she was equally sure that she and they were not going back out on the streets, the homeless streets not the whore streets if that is what you were thinking (although as a runaway teenager she had tried that whore streets thing, tried that for about two days before giving that idea the wind). She, they, had had enough of that, trying to stay here one night, there another, someplace else the third and the boys, her precious boys, missing their schooling, schooling that she swore that they would get, take advantage of , unlike her own sorry school-less story. Yes, Alma Larkin, was fresh out of ideas, apparently fresh of  luck and not exactly sure where she would turn to, hopefully not to the Sally’s (Salvation Army) again bless them like the last time.

Just that minute, and really for the first time in over two years Alma had to take stock of her situation, and she didn’t like it but the boys’ fate demanded such reflection. Alma knew two things though, come hell or high water, first, she was not going back to Harlan, Harlan down in deep coal country Kentucky where she was brought up, brought up kind of helter-skelter, kind of like some  mountain wind coming down the hills and hollows. She would be just too shamed-faced to face her kin after all these years and after all the big deal she made about putting nothing but distance between herself and the “hillbillies” (hell, she had called them, including her Pa, nothing but white trash more than once) when wild man hot-rod king walking daddy whiskey, corn whiskey if anybody is asking, runner Lance Lane swept her off her fifteen year old feet. Never to look back, that was the way she put it. And then Lance abandoning her in Lexington for some dishy big busted blonde and leaving her to fend for herself  (and that is where that experience of couple of days of street tricks came in, came in lonesome old Lexington).      

Second, even if she could find him, Alma was not going to call on Lennie Small, the father of her three boys, to do the right thing and take care of his own. Hell, she, they, they including Lennie had tried that, tried it a couple of times but it only left her homeless in the end. See Lennie was what he himself called a rolling stone (come to think of it so did Lance, except Lance at least had sense enough not to get her pregnant as part of his rolling stone act) and he refused in the end to gather any moss. That moss thing being some red-headed waitress who took a fancy to him when they moved to Springfield and had enough dough to make it stick, for a while. The last postcard she had received from him (no letters, so no hope of child support money enclosed) he was out in California with some cocktail waitress from Reno trying to “find” himself, and still not working. So Lennie was out, out for good this time.

Then Alma got an idea, got an idea that if she pressed the issue hard enough she would get something, get another job. So she went down to the Illinois State Department of Unemployment office and did her thing. That thing included, after waiting for a couple of hours for her interview and filling out a scad of paperwork, yelling to high heaven to the intake worker that she needed a job, needed it bad, was not going to go back on the streets (implying a little those whore streets for effect), and what was the great state of Illinois going to do about it. She figured that when the office manager came to the intake worker’s desk she had blown it, that she would be arrested and that was that. Instead that office manager, who had  three children of her own, called up the Republic Manufacturing Company and told them that she had right in front of her just the line operator they were looking for.  And so who knows what will happen next week, or next month, but Alma’ Larkin’s three boys will had food and a roof over their heads for a while …

And hence this honor to one righteous woman on this International Women’s Day. 

From The Partisan Defense Committee- A Visit with Mumia-Free Mumia Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

A Visit with Mumia

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The following are edited remarks by the PDC’s Paul Cooperstein at the New York City Holiday Appeal.

Two weeks ago, PDC staff counsel Valerie West and myself visited Mumia in scenic Frackville, Pennsylvania. Last March Mumia was rushed to a hospital, on the verge of death, in a near-diabetic coma. For months he had had debilitating rashes all over his body; he had lost some 50 pounds. Mumia has active hepatitis C, and the prison has restricted efforts to get treatment. He has sued in federal court to compel them to provide such treatment, and before our visit, there was a three-day hearing in that lawsuit, with Mumia participating by teleconference.

We were pleased to see that Mumia is doing pretty well. He looked great; he has gained much of his weight back, he’s been working out at the gym. Mumia is writing his weekly commentaries. As he told us, if he’s able to do this, he feels he’s doing his job. He has a very healthy appetite and relished the chocolate bar he was eating, as he isn’t diabetic. Mumia doesn’t have diabetes. That near-diabetic coma was a response to steroids he had been given for his rashes. Mumia seemed a bit sleepy toward the end of the visit—but I often have that effect on people. Throughout the visit, other prisoners and some of their visitors came by and gave their greetings to Mumia. He was lively, talkative and funny; he actually has great comedic talents and does a very funny impersonation of Donald Trump and others.

The Corrections Department is very embarrassed over this lawsuit. Mumia was elated about the hearing. The judge slapped down the state’s attorneys. The department’s own doctor was turned into Mumia’s witness, and they got caught submitting an affidavit over a doctor’s signature that was not the one he signed. The prison conjured up a secret protocol for treating inmates with hepatitis C, which they didn’t want to have announced in open court, that calls for treatment to be only given after the liver is severely damaged, when cirrhosis has set in—that is, when it’s too late.

Mumia expects a decision in mid February. He’s cautiously optimistic, but he knows from his own long history that what is said in court often has no relationship to how the judge will rule. There’s no doubt that if the judge rules against them, the state will appeal, which will drag this out for another year or so. This will be a long fight, one on which Mumia’s life depends. We encourage people to contribute to his legal expenses. Contributions can be sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, care of the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, 132 Nassau St., Room 922, New York, NY 10038, earmarked “Mumia legal expenses

A View From The Left-Immigration, Racism and Anti-Communism

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

Immigration, Racism and Anti-Communism

 

Reprinted below is an article from Spartacist Canada No. 187 (Winter 2015/2016), publication of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste. The original article was based on a presentation given by Miriam McDonald at a Trotskyist League/Spartacus Youth Club class in Toronto on October 29.

 

One could not find a more powerful indictment of the present imperialist order than the waves of desperate people currently seeking refuge in racist “Fortress Europe.” The U.S.-led wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have destroyed these countries, ravaged their economies and robbed their peoples of their already meagre livelihoods. Life is so intolerable that hundreds of thousands have chosen the deadly risks of this journey.

A good part of this talk will be about Canada’s reactionary history with regard to immigration. For now, I’ll note that the newly elected Liberal government is promising to settle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2015. Such deeply hypocritical gestures should fool no one. Under Liberal and Tory regimes alike, the Canadian imperialists have taken part in most of Washington’s bloody wars across the Near East and Central Asia that have driven millions from their homes. And Canada’s immigration policies—who is let in and how they are treated once here—have always been marked by brutal racism and anti-Communism.

Canada’s rulers are the common enemy of all working people; in their own class interests, workers must champion the rights of immigrants and refugees, demanding full citizenship for everyone in this country! The working class must mobilize to defend their foreign-born class brothers and sisters against the racist violence that is intrinsic to capitalist class rule.

Because of the bloody civil war, more recently compounded by imperialist bombardment, something like four million people have been driven out of Syria. Close to eight million are internal refugees. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, desperate millions yearn to escape the grinding poverty inflicted by the imperialist subjugation of the neocolonial world. According to the UN, there are presently some 60 million people worldwide displaced by war and persecution, the highest number since World War II.

These facts underscore that the solution to this man-made catastrophe lies not in this or that country admitting a few thousand more immigrants, but in overturning the imperialist system that has created it. Our aim is to win workers and youth to the understanding that international proletarian revolution is the only way to secure a future for humanity.

The Imperialist System

In the Communist Manifesto—written in 1847, a few decades before the rise of the imperialist order—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained the driving forces of capitalism. Through free competition on the market, manufacturing and then large-scale industry swept away the old patchwork of handicraft systems from medieval times. Industrial production, communication and transportation were revolutionized. The bourgeoisie’s “heavy artillery,” as Marx and Engels put it, was the cheap prices of commodities which allowed it to penetrate the less developed regions of the world. The capitalist system, as the Manifesto declared, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

By the dawn of the 20th century, the “normal” capitalist exploitation of workers had been supplemented and intensified by the exploitation of entire nations, ruled directly or indirectly as colonies of one or another of the great powers. As Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin wrote in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:

“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

This was an elite club which does not to this day admit new members. The powers established at that time remain the central imperialist powers today: the U.S., Germany, France, Britain and Japan, along with a constellation of smaller countries in Europe as well as Canada and Australia. The imperialists foment civil wars and communal slaughter, and topple or install as necessary the local despots whose task it is to ensure the uninterrupted flow of profits from the neocolonial world to the banks and stock exchanges of Wall Street, the City of London, Bay Street [center of Toronto’s financial district] and elsewhere.

Liberals like Naomi Klein and reformists parading as Marxists will denounce some of the crimes of the bourgeoisie. But they also push the false notion that imperialism is a policy that can be moulded depending on the politics of whatever capitalist party is in power. The corollary is that this system can be reformed to be more humane, less rapacious. It falls to us Marxists to expose this rubbish and to show that imperialism is an economic system, as integral to the modern world as skin and bones are to a person, and that it must be overthrown.

In the last century, rivalries among the bourgeoisies of the imperialist states twice engulfed the entire world in interimperialist war. Lenin’s pamphlet was written two years into World War I. Millions of young men were sent by their exploiters to die in a bloody scramble for markets and spheres of influence. In Lenin’s words, this marked the epoch of wars and revolutions. A year later, in 1917, his Bolshevik party led the proletariat to power in the world’s first successful workers revolution. They smashed the capitalist state, swept out the bankers, bosses and landlords, and inspired uprisings of workers and oppressed peoples in country after country.

For the rest of the 20th century, the imperialists were obsessed with reversing the Bolshevik victory and preventing its spread. The political counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin beginning in 1923-24 performed a valuable service for imperialism by destroying the revolutionary Bolshevik party and the internationalist program it embodied. The Soviet Union was undermined and betrayed by the Stalinists’ twin nationalist dogmas of building “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Yet the very existence of the Soviet workers state, with its planned economy and collectivized property forms, remained a beacon and a call to struggle for workers and the oppressed around the world.

The USSR also provided the nominally independent countries of the neocolonial world a breathing space to at least manoeuvre between the Soviets on one side and the imperialists on the other. Hence the 1991-92 destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state removed an enormous military and diplomatic obstacle to untrammelled imperialist freebooting and militarism. This, perhaps more than any other factor, has contributed to the increased poverty and oppression that drives the massive tide of refugees that only grows year by year.

The 1990-91 U.S.-led war on Iraq, which began as the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR entered its terminal decline, opened an ongoing 25-year quagmire of imperialist-fomented slaughter, civil wars and ethnic cleansing in the Near East. This has been accompanied by more imperialist military adventures in Africa and Asia. During the 1992-93 UN “peacekeeping” invasion of Somalia, racist murder and torture of civilians was carried out by Canadian airborne troops who included known fascists. Under cover of the “war on terror,” the U.S. and its British, Canadian and other allies have laid waste to countries from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya. In these bloody wars, the workers of the world had a side against the imperialist forces. Any military setbacks for the imperialists can provide some respite to the afflicted region and can stimulate opposition by the working class in the imperialist centres.

Immigration, Racism and the Working Class

Under capitalism, immigration is manipulated to suit the economic and political needs of the rulers; thus there can be no “progressive” immigration policy. Indeed, one of the prime roles of national borders and nation-states is to control the flow of goods, capital and people between countries. In times of boom, the capitalists import workers; in times of economic constriction, these workers are fired, scapegoated for the loss of jobs and often deported.

Concentrated at the point of production, workers have great potential social power: they can shut down production and stop the flow of profits to the bosses. Their collective organization and methods of struggle, such as strikes, require class unity and thereby undercut racial and ethnic divisions. The numerically tiny ruling class is well aware of this, and it uses all the institutions of bourgeois society—the media, schools, churches and courts—to disguise the truth about capitalism and to promulgate its reactionary ideology. Each group of workers is taught that the problems are not due to the profit system but are the fault of workers who are from a different country, have different religious ideas or have a different skin colour.

In the late 19th century, sparsely populated Canada brought in 15,000 Chinese workers to build the railway. When this was completed and their labour no longer required, the racist head tax was imposed on Chinese people to restrict immigration. During the 1907 recession, the Asiatic Exclusion League, a group formed by the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, staged a race riot, storming through Vancouver’s Japanese and Chinese areas.

The union misleaders refused to organize non-white workers, crippling working-class unity against a common foe. There were important exceptions, like William “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners and later founder of the Industrial Workers of the World and prominent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution. During a 1903 miners strike on Vancouver Island, Haywood cabled the union: “We approve of calling out any or all men necessary to win at Ladysmith. Organize Japanese and Chinese if possible.”

Labour Must Champion Immigrant Rights!

This history has lost none of its relevance. Today, thanks to the former Tory government, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) has expanded the pool of superexploited labour with no rights. The TFWP especially targets low-wage agricultural workers, for example from Mexico, and live-in caregivers, mostly women from the Philippines. These workers toil as sub-minimum wage indentured servants. Any assertion of their rights can mean loss of employment, which usually means deportation since the TFWP worker’s permit is tied to the sponsoring employer.

Some 70,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada face deportation because they’ve been here for four years—and they may not reapply for another four years. A class-struggle labour leadership would demand an end to the TFWP and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Against the capitalists’ attempts to play off one nationality against another, such a leadership would fight to unionize these foreign-born workers and for equal pay for equal work.

Instead the pro-capitalist union leaders promote nationalist protectionism—the false view that workers have a common interest with their capitalist exploiters. In 2012, several labour organizations in British Columbia opposed the entry of 200 Chinese temporary workers, with the United Steelworkers demanding “B.C. jobs for B.C. workers.” Such poison benefits only the bosses, since it pits worker against worker in a race to the bottom.

The Canadian bourgeoisie prattles about how Canada is a country of immigrants. That’s true, but this is not due to any ruling-class munificence. It was only in 1967 that the government finally lifted its official colour bar. Harper’s Tories are gone, but the history of the Liberal Party, which ran Canada for most of the last century, is replete with crimes against immigrants and ethnic minorities. It was the Liberals who refused admission to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. It was they who interned 22,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II and after the war deported many of them to devastated Japan. And by the way, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessors of the NDP [New Democratic Party], backed this racist atrocity.

The Tories’ nine-year rule was marked by crude xenophobia and racism. As they erected one new barrier after the other, it became increasingly difficult for immigrants to enter Canada. Thousands of refugees have been detained. Dual citizens, including native-born children of immigrants, may now lose their citizenship if found guilty of certain crimes. The bogus “war on terror” has seen a torrent of repressive, racist laws. These laws target Muslims in the first instance, but they are also an assault on democratic rights and the rights of labour and the left. It is in the interests of the working class to oppose the capitalists’ racist, anti-working-class moves against the foreign-born.

Immigration and Anti-Communism

Capitalist immigration policy is not simply an economic but also a political question, wielded to serve foreign and domestic policy ends. This is especially evident with respect to refugees. According to a New York Times Magazine article (20 September), the history of the modern right to asylum started with the 1917 Russian Revolution, after which “an unprecedented wave of 1.5 million Russians streamed into Europe.” As part of the drive to defeat the revolution, the imperialist powers opened their arms to these “Russian refugees,” many of them open counterrevolutionaries, for whom the League of Nations authorized “certificates of identity.”

The Times did not deem “fit to print” the fact that after the 1917 Revolution, workers from other countries were welcomed to become citizens of the new Russian workers state, then known as the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]. Its 1918 constitution declared, “in support of the solidarity of the workers of all countries, the RSFSR grants all the political rights of Russian citizens to foreigners living on the territory of the Russian Republic and to members of the working class or peasants not using the work of others.” The infant workers state was guided in this by the internationalism of the heroic Communards of Paris in 1871, who also granted citizenship to foreign-born workers.

Anti-Communism has been a defining feature of Canadian immigration and refugee policies for almost a century, and it is still a factor. This fall the bourgeois media was awash with calls on the government to carry out the kind of large-scale mobilization on behalf of displaced Syrians that was undertaken in 1979 to bring in 50,000 Vietnamese “boat people.” A sign at a recent refugee rights rally invoked this history: “Canada accepted 50,000 Boat People and ??? Syrian refugees.” Aging former Tory cabinet ministers were wheeled out to reminisce about how they helped organize the exodus from the Vietnamese Revolution, which had just defeated the U.S. imperialists. One feels only revulsion at such “humanitarian” anti-Communism.

During U.S. imperialism’s long, losing war in Vietnam, the Canadian junior imperialists were “merchants of death,” profiting from $1 million a day in arms sold to the U.S. war machine. The Vietnamese first beat the French imperialists in 1954, leading to the creation of a deformed workers state in the north. Two decades later, in 1975, they defeated the U.S., the most powerful imperialist country on the planet. Our tendency raised the slogan: “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” We hailed the extension of the Vietnamese workers state to include the whole country, a victory for all the world’s workers.

What occurred in South Vietnam was a social revolution in which capitalist property relations were abolished. The big Vietnamese war criminals and mass murderers were spirited out with the aid of their U.S. masters right after the fall of Saigon in 1975. We were utterly opposed to giving any kind of sanctuary to these butchers, declaring, “No Asylum for Vietnamese War Criminals!” The wave of Vietnamese “boat people,” which came somewhat later, originated in a social layer which included former petty traders and entrepreneurs whose shops were nationalized. In the eyes of the U.S. and its allies, these would-be migrants were of marginal use and thus dispensable. At the same time, a racist outcry was whipped up against the “boat people.”

From the standpoint of defense of the Vietnamese Revolution, the exodus of thousands of skilled and educated people could be seen as damaging to the economic foundations of the deformed workers state. However, in the face of the nativist backlash, we concluded that “it could only be chauvinist to campaign against admission of the mass of the ‘boat people’” (“Imperialist Hypocrisy and the Boat People,” Spartacist Canada No. 38, August/September 1979). For the capitalist rulers, anti-Communism ultimately trumped racism, and a massive drive was undertaken to relocate these people in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia.

Quite another calculus was used for victims of right-wing terror. During this same period, the Canadian government targeted leftists for deportation, issuing dozens of “security certificates” to get rid of “subversives.” In Chile in September 1973, the military, with the direct assistance of the CIA, overthrew the democratically elected government headed by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende. Thousands of leftists and workers were murdered. In contrast to the welcome given the Vietnamese “boat people,” in the 18 months following the coup—which caused over 200,000 to flee for their lives—Canada saw fit to accept just 1,188 refugees from Chile. The government claimed the total later climbed to 7,000, but the Canadian rulers’ attitude was best expressed by their ambassador to Chile in 1973, who smeared Latin American leftists as “riffraff” and expressed his relief that the Allende government was overthrown.

Anti-Communism and Union-Busting

World War II in Europe ended with the destruction of the Nazi forces by the Soviet Red Army and the concomitant liberation of East Europe from Hitlerite fascism. After the war, Canada eagerly gave haven to thousands of Nazi war criminals because they were hardened opponents of Communism and Soviet Russia. The subsequent Cold War against the USSR was spearheaded domestically by a ruthless witchhunt in the labour movement. The Communist Party (CP) had been in the forefront of the struggle to build the unions. The bosses recruited tens of thousands of hardened anti-Communists to undermine the CP’s influence. In purging the “reds,” the ruling class was fully aided and abetted by the CCF; many social democrats and labour fakers built careers on driving Communists and their supporters out of the unions.

Immigration helped to provide the capitalist class with the manpower to undertake this assault. In 1956, an incipient proletarian political revolution shook Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the Hungarian deformed workers state. The workers uprising had repulsed attempts by fascistic and monarchist elements which saw an opening for counterrevolution. However, the insurgent workers were finally overcome by the Soviet military.

Tens of thousands of overwhelmingly right-wing Hungarians fled the country. As with the Nazis, Canada welcomed this counterrevolutionary wave, taking in 37,000 in less than a year. A few years later, a significant number of these people were enlisted in the drive to destroy the CP-led Mine Mill and Smelter Workers Union, which represented hardrock miners in northern Ontario. This campaign was a powerful illustration of the organic link between the bourgeoisie’s union-busting and its anti-Communist immigration policy. As we wrote earlier:

“With the help of the federal Department of Mines and Resources, which was then responsible for immigration, companies like International Nickel (Inco) actively sought out ‘former’ fascists to work in their mines in and around Sudbury. Meanwhile, the USWA [Steelworkers union] organized anti-Communist raids against Mine-Mill throughout the 1950s.”

— “For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Anti-Immigrant Racism!” Spartacist Canada No. 99, September/October 1994

In a showdown on August 26, 1961, a mob of 1,800 laid siege to Mine Mill’s Sudbury union hall, and the cops stood by as the rioters smashed every window. Years later, the Sudbury Star obtained an RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] report on the attack which revealed that “the mob on Saturday night was composed of former Hungarian freedom fighters and ex-Nazi storm troopers, who have been imported in considerable numbers by Inco in the past few years.”

By the 1980s, East Europeans could pretty much step off the plane in Gander airport in Newfoundland and gain asylum. But for leftists fleeing “free world” death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile the Canadian door was slammed shut.

Open Borders: A Liberal Utopian Response

As Marxist revolutionaries, we understand that there can be no progressive immigration policy under capitalism. It’s not our business to propose solutions to the imperialists, but rather to educate the working class in the need to overthrow their system. Not so our opponents on the left, who promote illusions that the same rapacious imperialists who have destroyed the Near East can be persuaded to come to the aid of their victims.

Today, many leftists—for example, the International Socialists and No-One Is Illegal—call for “open borders,” a demand increasingly raised as a solution to the present crisis in Europe. In reality, this call reflects illusions in the European Union, a reactionary imperialist consortium which we Marxists oppose on principle. In his Imperialism pamphlet, Lenin devoted a chapter to ridicule the “silly little fable about ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism,” which was pushed by Karl Kautsky, theoretician of the German social democracy and vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The notion of a peaceful imperialist order without immigration restrictions is utterly utopian and tantamount to calling for the abolition of national states under capitalism. The modern nation-state with defined borders arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and it remains the basis of the capitalists’ economy and their state. No bourgeoisie will give up control over its territory or borders without a fight. This will be so until the capitalist order is destroyed through a series of workers revolutions.

Applied to small or neocolonial countries, the consequences of “open borders” can be reactionary, for example in advancing imperialist economic penetration. On a sufficiently large scale, mass immigration is incompatible with the right of national self-determination. Just look at Israel. The imperialist states closed their borders first to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and then to survivors of the death camps. Hundreds of thousands of European Jews were forced to go to Palestine. This mass influx resulted in the Palestinian Arab population being displaced and expelled from their homeland.

Some advocates of “open borders” argue that unlimited immigration can be a solution to world poverty. In “The Leninist Policy Toward Immigration/Emigration,” written more than 40 years ago, we explained:

“This is merely a variant of utopian egalitarianism—the belief that a just society can be established by sharing out the currently available wealth….

“In reality, the economic resources do not now exist to satisfy the material aspirations of mankind, and a policy of worldwide leveling would only intensify conflicts between the working masses of various countries.”

— WV No. 36, 18 January 1974

The realization of the Marxist program—a communist society—requires the eradication of economic scarcity. Replacement of capitalist property relations by collective ownership of the means of production and a worldwide planned economy will result in a vast increase in the productivity of labour and living standards, and this alone can lay the basis for the emergence of a classless society. The elimination of national borders will be possible in a communist society where material scarcity, national divisions and racism will be relics of the past.

Today, the working class in this country is thoroughly multiracial, from Punjabi port truckers in B.C. to black transit workers in Toronto. Workers must take up the cause of immigrants and ethnic minorities, who are key to the workings of the Canadian economy. Often more willing to fight for the rights of all workers, these workers can be a catalyst for broader class and other social struggles. This perspective requires a fight against the pro-capitalist union misleaders and the NDP, during which a new class-struggle leadership of the unions will be forged. The battles of a revitalized labour movement will in turn help to create conditions for the emergence of the multiracial vanguard party that is required to lead the workers to overthrow the capitalist order.