On The Native American Day Of Mourning- Damn It- President Trump Pardon Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison!

Damn It- President Trump Pardon Leonard Peltier Now-He Must Not Die In Prison! 

Statement by the Committee For International Labor Defense 


Now that the bid by Amnesty International and others internationally seeking to get former President Barack Obama to pardon Leonard Peltier have gone for nought we supporters are between a rockand a hard place. (See below.) The denial notice was for very flimsy reasons despite the fact that even the prosecutor does not know who killed those two FBI agents in a firefight at Pine Ridge. Hell it could have been friendly forces who knows sometimes in a war zone, and that was exactly what that situation was who knows. (For a current example of another war zone on Native lands check the story on what the various local,state, federal and mercenary forces brought in by the pipe line company at Standing Rock. One false move, provoked or not, would have ended in a bloodbath according to a well-respected Vietnam veteran who along with a few thousand other vets showed up to defend the lands and water and  thought he was in the Central Highlands again) All we know is that Brother Peltier has spent forty some years behind bars and has a slew of medical problems which would have let Obama pardon just on compassionate grounds. He didn't. Don't expect, we almost have to laugh even saying such a thing, one Donald J.Trump,POTUS, and maybe off to jail himself to pardon Leonard Peltier before his term of office is up.         

Still Leonard Peltier along with Mumia Abu-Jamal and now Reality Leigh Winner are America's best known political prisoners and need to be supported and freed. To that end we in Boston have committed ourselves to as best we are able to continue ot keep the Peltier case in the public eye by holding  periodic vigils calling for his pardon and freedom. We call on all Leonard Peltier supporters to keep his name before the public. Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Prison     

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Leonard Peltier
#89637-132
USP Coleman I
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521

Leonard Peltier Denied Clemency by Obama

Web ExclusiveJANUARY 18, 2017

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• Leonard Peltier
• Clemency

The Office of the Pardon Attorney has announced President Obama has denied clemency to imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier is a former member of the American Indian Movement who was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has long maintained his innocence.

Amnesty International condemned the decision.

“We are deeply saddened by the news that President Obama will not let Leonard go home,” said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Despite serious concerns about the fairness of legal proceedings that led to his trial and conviction, Peltier was imprisoned for more than 40 years. He has always maintained his innocence. The families of the FBI agents who were killed during the 1975 confrontation between the FBI and American Indian Movement (AIM) members have a right to justice, but justice will not be served by Peltier’s continued imprisonment.”

Peltier’s attorney Martin Garbus appeared on Democracy Now! today.

"I think it’s fair to say that if he doesn’t get commuted by President Obama, he’ll die in jail. He’s a very sick man," Garbus said. "So, Obama’s not granting him clemency is like a sentence of death. Trump ain’t going to do it. And he’s very sick, and he’s not going to live past that time. I don’t want to be negative, but that’s the reality. He’s very sick, and he’s been in prison over 40 years, hard years, six years of solitary."

Garbus was notified of Obama’s decision earlier today. In an email, the Office of the Pardon Attorney wrote: "The application for commutation of sentence of your client, Mr. Leonard Peltier, was carefully considered in this Department and the White House, and the decision was reached that favorable action is not warranted. Your client’s application was therefore denied by the President on January 18, 2017... Under the Constitution, there is no appeal from this decision."

Click to a Leonard Peltier Defense Committee site.

https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Leonard Peltier was arrested in Canada on February 6, 1976, along with Frank Blackhorse, a.k.a. Frank Deluca. The United States presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who said she was Mr. Peltier’s girlfriend and allegedly saw him shoot the agents. In fact, Ms. Poor Bear had never met Mr. Peltier and was not present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements and said the FBI threatened her and coerced her into signing the affidavits.

• Mr. Peltier was extradited to the United States where he was tried in 1977. The trial was held in North Dakota before United States District Judge Paul Benson, a conservative jurist     appointed to the federal bench by Richard M. Nixon. Key witnesses like Myrtle Poor Bear were not allowed to testify and unlike the Robideau/Butler trial in Iowa, evidence regarding violence on Pine Ridge was severely restricted.
• An FBI agent who had previously testified that the agents followed a pick-up truck onto the scene, a vehicle that could not be tied to Mr. Peltier, changed his account, stating that the agents had followed a red and white van onto the scene, a vehicle which Mr. Peltier drove occasionally.
• Three teenaged Native witnesses testified against Mr. Peltier, they all later admitted that the FBI forced them to testify. Still, not one witness identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter.
• The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case claimed that the government had provided the defense with all FBI documents concerning the case. To the contrary, more than 140,000 pages had been withheld in their entirety.
• An FBI ballistics expert testified that a casing found near the agents’ bodies matched the gun tied to Mr. Peltier. However, a ballistic test proving that the casing did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.
• The jury, unaware of the aforementioned facts, found Mr. Peltier guilty. Judge Benson, in turn, sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.
• Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Mr. Peltier sought a new     trial. The Eighth Circuit ruled, “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case." Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial.
• During oral argument, the government attorney conceded that the government does not know who shot the agents, stating that Mr. Peltier is equally guilty whether he shot the agents at point-blank range, or participated in the shoot-out from a distance. Mr. Peltier’s co-defendants participated in the shoot-out from a distance, but were acquitted.
• Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict Mr. Peltier, the FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out, and that Mr. Peltier's release would promote healing with Native Americans.
• Mr. Peltier has served over 29 years in prison and is long overdue for parole. He has received several human rights awards for his good deeds from behind bars which include annual gift drives for the children of Pine Ridge, fund raisers for battered women’s shelters, and donations of his paintings to Native American recovery programs.
• Mr. Peltier suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. Time for justice is short.
• Currently, Mr. Peltier’s attorneys have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests with FBI Headquarters and all FBI field offices in an attempt to secure the release of all files relating to Mr. Peltier and the RESMURS investigation. To date, the FBI has engaged in a number of dilatory tactics in order to avoid the processing of these requests.

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

Peltier is one of the class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. Google for information on the sipend program. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to: 

Mail

Correspondence, donations, merchandise orders
ILPDC
P.O. Box 329
Fargo, ND 58107

Phone

(701) 293-4806

Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners! 

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance      

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8^th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton. 

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)   

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.      

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that  defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”    

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9^th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress. 

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20^th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.

Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance   

*On The Anniversary Of The Asturias Commune- Those Who Honor The Commune Are Kindred Spirits- A Guest Commentary

*Click on title to link to an article in the on-line edition of "Socialist Appeal" by Ramon Samblas, "75th Anniversary Of The Asturian Commune".

Look At This -Tuesday 6pm Solidarity Needed with Plimouth Plantation workers

Tuesday 6pm Solidarity Needed with Plimouth Plantation workers

Camilo Viveiros

11/20/2017 10:53 AM

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Plimoth Plantation Workers Deliver Petition to Improve Workplace Conditions

6pm, Tuesday, November 21st, 2017
*Photo Opportunity Available with Plantation Workers*
at Plymouth Rock, 79 Water St., Plymouth, MA 02360

Contact:

Kate Moore, Chair SAMP (Society of Allied Museum Professionals), UAW Local
2320, cell: 508-237-4592 samp.chair@gmail.com

Plimoth Plantation Workers to Present Petition Supporting Union: Over 1,000
Signatures Have Been Collected In Support of Union Efforts to Improve
Workplace Conditions

PLYMOUTH, MA, November 21, at 6pm SAMP will hold a photo opportunity at
Plymouth Rock to announce their petition drive in support of their efforts
to gain a fair contract. After almost a year at the negotiating table,
museum management at Plimoth Plantation has yet to reach a contract with
workers who voted to unionize last November. The Society of Allied Museum
Professionals (SAMP, UAW Local 2320) represents Wampanoag and Colonial
Historical Interpreters, artisans in the museum’s Craft Center, as well as
Maintainers. SAMP wants to address issues of job insecurity, low wages,
dangerously low staffing levels, and health and safety concerns. In person
and online, SAMP has collected over 1,000 signatures, which it plans to
deliver to museum management on Thanksgiving.

Through its petition drive, SAMP hopes to show the community’s support for
Plimoth Plantation workers. As the holiday weekend approaches, the workers
of Plimoth Plantation seek the respect they deserve by reaching a contract
with museum management. The workers of Plimoth Plantation will continue
with courage the fight for a fair contract, better working conditions, and
a living wage
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*From The Archive- From The Partisan Defense Committee-The 22nd Holiday Appeal-Free The Class-War Prisoners!

Click on the headline to link to "Workers Vanguard", dated November 23, 2007, for the article on the subject noted above.

Veterans For Peace-Heading Toward The Danger Not Away In The Struggle Against The Amercian Government's Endless Wars

Veterans For Peace-Heading Toward The Danger Not Away In The Struggle Against The Amercian Government's Endless Wars 

Stop The Nuclear Weapons Madness-Now!

Stop The Nuclear Weapons Madness-Now!

By Special Guest Greg Green

“What goes around, comes around” as my friend Jack Riley’s father, Francis Riley always called Frankie by his friends, would said whenever the circle turned on any subject. Lately the subject, the very serious subject in light of this guy, this President of the United States, POTUS in twitter feed speak, one Donald J. Trump and his ranting about existential threats of nuclear war to his country by tiny miniscule North Korea. The threat given the disparity in size of arsenal and capacity to inflict massive and irreversible damage to that country and the earth much on the side of the United States. At no time in recent memory, certainly since the end of the Cold War with the world-historic defeat and demise of the Soviet Union, has the threat of nuclear war, the saber-rattling,  been as intense as now.          

That brings us to the “what goes around, comes around” part of the story. The late Peter Paul Markin, always known as “Scribe,” Frankie Riley’s old-time hang out in the neighborhood friend, in his very first political act, an act scorned by all his corner boy growing up friends, including Frankie and others who heard about it as well, back in the fall of 1960 attended an anti-nuclear weapons rally sponsored by SANE a group headed by Doctor Spock and some Quakers and people like that at the Park Street subway station stop on the Boston Common. He had been hounded and harassed by anti-communist thugs and other red scare Cold War types but felt that he had done the right thing. (The right thing aided by winning a five dollar bet with Frankie Riley that the Scribe would not go into Boston and do the rally). So protesting against the nuclear madness has come full circle.    

Here’s the interesting part- a few weeks ago at the Park Street subway station on the Boston one ancient Frankie Riley, surrounded by Quakers and other such types, was protesting the war clouds that could lead to nuclear war these days at a current anti-nuclear war rally. Yes, what goes around, comes around. 

*Defending The Legacy Of James P. Cannon- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to "Workers Vanguard", dated November 23, 2007, for the article on the subject noted above.

Tell Me: What Does The Resistance Looks Like-This Is What The Resistance Looks Like-Join The Resistance Now!!

Tell Me: What Does The Resistance Looks Like-This Is What The Resistance Looks Like-Join The Resistance Now!!  

October Bath Irons Work Maine Peace Walk finale video

Maine Peace Walk finale video

Global Network

7:48 AM

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https://youtu.be/BFi2X9Y6_uE

To Seek A Newer World-The Trials And Tribulations Of The Non-Violence Path To Social Change -Join The Resistance Now!

To Seek A Newer World-The Trials And Tribulations Of The Non-Violence Path To Social Change -Join The Resistance Now!  

Frank Jackman comment:

Recently I noted in a short comment about my checkered political past concerning my very often wavering adherence to the principles of non-violent action that Anna Riley my maternal grandmother was a great believer in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement, gave great credence to the essentially non-violent social change message that leaders like Dorothy Day had to say about pursuing the course. I failed to mention then that around the old neighborhood, the Acre section of North Adamsville, the geographic fate of the working poor section, mostly Irish from “famine ships” times to “just off the boat,” most definitely mostly Catholic, that sweet Anna Riley was considered a “saint.” That saint designation provoked primarily by her ability for over fifty years to put up with one curmudgeon, and I am being kind here, named Daniel Patrick Riley, her husband and my maternal grandfather. Virtually everybody in the neighborhood, the older folks and his many local relatives, including me, had except on his deathbed and when they laid him down to rest which in Irish tradition forgives even the most wicked, had nothing but curses when his name was spoken. He was that kind of man, unfortunately.    

But dear sweet grandmother Anna was also known around the neighborhood by all except the most hardened heathen Protestants, few as they were, who had nothing but scorn for the raggedly shanty Irish, as a saint for her gentle but persistent adherence to her well-defined Christian-etched social gospel. She was always among the leaders when someone was to be evicted from one of the crummy three-decker apartment buildings for which the section in imitation of the far larger ones in the Dorchester and South Boston sections was locally famous, or infamous. Moreover when the “boyos” were on strike against the shipbuilding companies which drove the economy of the town in those days (now long gone and almost forgotten once the shipbuilders headed off-shore to cheaper labor markets leaving the Acre even poorer and less stable) Anna was the first to knock on doors to get the women and non-shipbuilding men down to the picket lines in support of the brethren. She did a million small and unacknowledged kindnesses as well but also made sure that the local authorities (they were always called the authorities, governmental, court, police around the Acre) knew when children were going to bed hungry in the land of plenty, the 1950s land of plenty.       

What drove Anna like I said was her simple but strong sense of social gospel which was derived not from the main tenets of the Roman Catholic Church (that “Roman” not necessary in North Adamsville but as I am addressing a wider audience Roman to separate from other forms of Christianity) but from her allegiance to a small group of “renegades” the Brethren of the Common Life led by old Father Joyce who was constantly in hot water with the very conservative Cardinal who presided over the Archdiocese of Boston. That old goat threaten ex-communication and perdition to anybody who adhered to such basic principles as opposition to war, charity to the poor and bedraggled, and any communal what he called communistic sensibilities ( I never did get the whole list of their principles but these general categories give an idea of what the organization was about). Hence Anna’s kinship with the old-time Catholic Workers movement.           

Hence also her very great influence over my youthful political and social formation. She never pressed the Brethren issue on me, per se, since my mother and uncles were adamantly opposed to her views and maintained a strict orthodox Roman Catholic view of the world but just being around her gave me a sense of what she was about. And as I came of age in the red scare Cold War anti-communist keep your head down and let Ike handle everything late 1950s her bromides against the craziness of the known world egged me on. Egged me on too when I began to spent more and more time at her house which was only a few blocks from my family house as my mother got to be more and more (and more) overbearing. Those were the days too when Daniel had been placed  in what today would be called an “assisted living” home and back then a rest home after he suffered a stroke. So the place was tranquility itself, a place to read stuff like the Catholic Worker which she subscribed to and other books and pamphlets put out by the Brethren and other such organizations like the Quakers            

I mentioned in that previous comment about non-violent action that in my youth, my younger days, the idea of non-violent action was not an abstract question. I was especially (and so was Grandma) impressed by   the assertive and definitely not passive non-violent lines of the black civil right movement in the South that were unfolding before my eyes  seemingly every night on television and which held great sway over me. In those days sympathy for the black civil rights struggle down South was almost non-existent in the Acre. Any sympathy even in school debating the merits of the case against Mister James Crow and its equivalent in the North was met with snarls of “n----r-lover,” or worse. (Belying the old-time leftist notion that the poor and working people have much in common no matter what race or ethnic grouping which should override everything else. Unfortunately almost the direct opposition was/is true since down there at the margins of society down there where the working poor meet the thugs, gangsters and rip-off artists it is every person for him or herself-and theirs). So very early on I had had to take a very close look at some of the trends that had developed in the struggle for human emancipation. The central debate in my mind, and remember too I was a child of the Acre as well, was about passive non-violence argued by the likes of Tolstoy or a more muscular one that was beginning to form in action down South. I gravitated toward the more muscular variety (and so did Grandma).           

Naturally direct non-violent actions in the North other than solidarity actions with the struggle down South were few and far between in those days. Mainly sit-ins around equal access to places that were supposed to serve the general public-but didn’t. I have mentioned elsewhere that my very first public political street action demonstration had been a SANE-Quaker and other religious pacifistic organizations rally at historic Park Street Station on Boston Common around the struggle against nuclear weapons in the fall of 1960 (at a time when I was also campaigning like crazy to get one of our own, Jack Kennedy, elected President, even though he was rattling the “missile gap” saber-go figure).        

In retrospective those heady days when the black civil rights movement was carrying all before it were also the heydays of my belief in creative non-violent action. The time when whatever Doctor King and the other leadership said about bowing our heads before the aggressors held me in its thrall. Although, and here is my contradiction of the time if you will, I was enamored under the spell of my maternal grandfather, that old curmudgeon Daniel Riley, an ardent Irish nationalist of the struggle in Ireland that got its modern start around Easter, 1916. Despite his gruffness and meanness I would sit by and listen as he told tales learned from cousins who had been in the 1916 fight even if at other times I avoided him like the plague. So let’s put it down that I was probably more tactically committed to non-violent actions (and under current circumstances still am with what I see of the huge disparity of forces on our side and those leveled against us-and the passive quiescence of the working populations).

The great change, maybe of emphasis, maybe of getting older and wiser, and maybe, just maybe as a result of my truncated Army career which was a watershed of sorts since that service happened during the Vietnam War (where I didn’t go although I was 11 Bravo, an infantryman but that is a story also told elsewhere). The savagery of the American government against a small but real national liberation struggle (like the British for a long time against the Irish if you want an analogy until they got noses bloody in 1916) which could not be fought any other way except under the gun led me away from even that previous total tactical acceptance of the idea that non-violent action could slay the evil dragon. And that stance has not changed much in the last forty years or so, although I wish those who can “keep the faith,” the faith of my youth, well.

Independence for Catalonia! Down With the EU! Spain Strangles Catalonia For Workers Republics!

Workers Vanguard No. 1121	3 November 2017

Independence for Catalonia! Down With the EU!

Spain Strangles Catalonia

For Workers Republics!

OCTOBER 30—Three days ago, the parliament of Catalonia voted to secede from Spain and establish an independent Catalan republic. Minutes later, the Spanish senate, dominated by the Castilian chauvinists of the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and of the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), voted to dissolve the Catalan parliament and depose the regional government.

Madrid is officially seizing control of Catalonia, including its finances, police force and major TV and radio stations under Article 155 of the Spanish constitution, which enables the rulers of the Spanish prison house of oppressed peoples to strip autonomous communities of their powers. It has also ordered new regional elections on December 21. Catalan pro-independence deputies, including President Carles Puigdemont (of the Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català, PDeCAT) and his vice president Oriol Junqueras (of the Esquerra Republicana, ERC) have been threatened with arrest for “rebellion,” for which they could spend as long as 30 years in prison. Two prominent leaders of independentiste groups, Jordi Sànchez of the Catalan National Assembly and Jordi Cuixart of Òmnium Cultural, were imprisoned on October 16 and face trial for sedition.

The Spanish state unleashed a wave of repression in late September in an attempt to suppress the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. Over two million people cast ballots, courageously defying the thousands of vicious Guardia Civil and Policía Nacional sent by Madrid. Ninety percent voted in favor of independence. Since then, Catalonia and its largest city, Barcelona, have been rocked by huge protests demanding an end to the repression and freedom for the imprisoned independence leaders. Several chauvinist protests have also taken place, led by the neo-Francoist PP, the right-wing Ciutadans and the social-democratic Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC), in defense of the unity of monarchical, Castile-ruled capitalist Spain. It is in the interests of the working class throughout Spain and France to defend the oppressed Catalan people, whose nation straddles the Franco-Spanish border. Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil out of Catalonia! Free Cuixart, Sànchez and all pro-independence activists! Down with the monarchy! Defend Catalan independence!

Like Catalonia, the oppressed Basque nation in Euskal Herria (the Basque Country) stretches from Spain into France. For decades, the Basques have suffered deadly repression at the hands of both the Spanish and French governments. As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we fight for the independence of the Basque Country and Catalonia, North and South—that is, against the capitalist rulers of both France and Spain. We seek to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties that support the just struggles of oppressed nations, which can be a lever to advance the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist rulers. Our program is for proletarian revolution, the seizure of power by the working class. For workers republics in Catalonia and the Basque Country as parts of a voluntary Socialist United States of Europe!

For the Catalan workers and poor, the struggle for national liberation is a component part of their struggle against exploitation. The potential power of the working class was demonstrated in a small but important way by the port workers in Barcelona and Tarragona, who refused to service the ships being used to house the Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil at the time of the referendum. But Catalan workers have not been mobilized as an independent force due to their wretched reformist misleaders, who, on the whole, refuse to fight for Catalan independence. For this reason, Catalan workers are dissolved into the mass movement, and pro-independence working-class militants have nowhere to look for their liberation except to the bourgeois nationalists. It is necessary to forge a revolutionary proletarian leadership that champions the struggle for national liberation.

No Illusions in the Catalan Bourgeoisie!

Amid fears that an independent Catalonia would be kicked out of the European Union (EU), a host of Catalan companies, including two large banks, CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell, promptly seized on Madrid’s offerings and opted to register their headquarters outside Catalonia. The Catalan bourgeoisie (represented prominently by the PDeCAT and its predecessors, as well as by the ERC) has sometimes used separatism as a bargaining chip in its dealings with Madrid. But the chauvinist, vindictive humiliations inflicted by the central government, as well as pressure from the Catalan masses, have pushed the political representatives of a section of the Catalan bourgeoisie into open defiance. Puigdemont postponed declaring independence after the October 1 referendum, and even offered to hold early regional elections if PP prime minister Mariano Rajoy would guarantee that Catalonia would retain its autonomous status. But the Castilian-chauvinist Rajoy and his cohorts would have nothing less than total capitulation. Thus, the Catalan government declared independence.

Madrid has made clear that it will go to any lengths to maintain the territorial integrity of Spain, while Catalonia lacks anything resembling a state of its own—centrally, armed forces—that could resist the Spanish state. The Catalan working class, meanwhile, has given no sign of significant independent motion. Under these circumstances, there is no hope of realizing Catalan independence now. Yet Catalonia remains in turmoil. With the immediate prospect of further repression and humiliation at the hands of the Castilian overlords, combined with the impotence of the Catalan bourgeoisie, further struggles are likely to erupt—the Catalan masses are in dire need of allies.

Such allies are to be found primarily in the proletariat of Spain and France. The Spanish and French bourgeoisies are both oppressing the Catalans and Basques and exploiting the working class as a whole. The breakup of the reactionary Spanish state would open the road for workers struggle against the capitalist rulers in Madrid. A relentless struggle must be waged against the chauvinism promoted by social democrats and the labor lieutenants of capital in the trade-union bureaucracies in order to win workers in the region to the fight for self-determination of the oppressed nations.

The struggle of the Catalan people has resonated across the border with Basques and Catalans living in France. Protests in support of Catalan independence have taken place in both the north and south of Euskal Herria. In an act of solidarity by Catalans in France, the ballots for the October 1 referendum were printed in Catalunya Nord and transported across the border.

Despite the Catalan government’s constant appeals, the rulers of the reactionary, imperialist EU have backed Madrid’s repression to the hilt, precisely because they know that a breakup of Spain portends a breakup of the EU. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned that “we need to avoid splits, because we already have enough splits and fractures,” and that the EU could not be made up of “95 different states.” The president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, made it clear on October 22 that “no one is going to recognise Catalonia in Europe as an independent country.” The EU is an instrument for the imperialist powers of Europe, centrally Germany, to ratchet up the exploitation of the working people throughout Europe and to further impoverish weaker countries such as Greece and Portugal.

For Proletarian Political Independence!

The Rajoy government’s repression, supported by its lapdogs in the PSOE, has evoked memories of the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and its savage suppression of Basque, Catalan and Galician national rights. PP spokesman Pablo Casado didn’t hesitate to invoke this bloody history when he warned Puigdemont not to declare independence “because perhaps the person who makes the declaration will end up like the person who made the declaration 83 years ago.” This is a reference to Lluís Companys, the bourgeois-nationalist president of the Catalan Generalitat who was executed by a Francoist firing squad after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. (See “Trotskyism vs. Popular Frontism in the Spanish Civil War,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009.)

The reality is that the repression being meted out today is fully in keeping with the legal framework of Spanish bourgeois democracy. The oppression of the Basque, Catalan and Galician nations was enshrined in the 1978 post-Franco constitution, which maintains that Spain cannot be divided. The two historic parties of the Spanish working class, the PSOE and the Communist Party (PCE), supported the formation of a monarchical state based on the denial of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations of Spain and voted for the 1978 constitution.

The PSOE in government loyally served the king and fomented Castilian chauvinism for decades, notoriously setting up death squads to murder Basque independence fighters in the 1980s. For its own part, the PCE has also maintained its disgusting opposition to independence for the oppressed. The chauvinist misleaders of the CCOO and UGT union federations bear responsibility for the fact that workers in Catalonia and Spain have not come out as an organized force in defense of independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The PSOE’s Catalan counterpart, the PSC, joined with Francoists and fascists in a reactionary demonstration in Barcelona on October 8 and October 29, under slogans such as “Catalonia is Spain.” Emboldened by Rajoy’s offensive, on October 27 fascists attacked the headquarters of Catalunya Ràdio as well as a Catalan cultural center and school in Barcelona. The fascists are a deadly danger to all workers, immigrants and oppressed minorities, and the working class must be mobilized to stop them.

With the PSOE heavily discredited among working people for having mercilessly administered EU-dictated austerity, the bourgeois Podemos party—which issued out of the 2011 petty-bourgeois Indignados movement—has taken up the task of refurbishing Spanish bourgeois democracy. Podemos has mobilized protests in opposition to Rajoy’s repression against Catalonia. But Podemos is firmly opposed to Catalan independence and merely provides brutal Castilian chauvinism with a “human face”: an October 23 letter to its membership decried any declaration of Catalan independence as “illegitimate.” Podemos advises the Spanish bourgeoisie to “ensure that Catalonia remains a part of Spain” with the carrot of greater democracy, rather than the stick of repression. Podemos has moved to strip the leadership of its Catalan organization (Podem) of its authority for not being hard enough against independence.

A more left-appearing Catalan bourgeois-nationalist party is the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP). Although the CUP claims to be socialist, in fact it is a party based on the petty bourgeoisie. It propped up the regional capitalist government for more than a year. The affiliate of the British Socialist Workers Party in Catalonia, En Lluita, liquidated completely into the CUP last year. These opportunists had no trouble simultaneously building the pro-independence CUP in Catalonia, while building the anti-independence Podemos in other parts of Spain, i.e., capitulating to one bourgeois nationalism or another.

No such confusion afflicts the fake-Trotskyist Internationalist Group (IG), which capitulates entirely to Castilian chauvinism. In their article “Defend the Right to Self-Determination and Independence for Catalonia” (September 2017) they do anything but defend Catalan independence. The IG denigrates the Catalan people’s just struggle for national liberation, sneering: “This is a nationalist movement led by the richest bourgeoisie in Spain” and “The impulse for independence comes above all from powerful sectors of the well-to-do Catalan bourgeoisie.” You’d think the IG had taken a page from the Francoist newspaper ABC, which wrote that the “Catalanist revolt against the state is a performance of the rich, by the rich and for the rich” (4 June).

These petty-bourgeois professors in the U.S. urged Catalans to battle their way to the polling stations on October 1—defying police truncheons, rubber bullets and tear gas—to “cast a blank ballot”! Dripping with contempt for the oppressed Catalans, the IG rants: “It’s not like some national liberation movement in a semi-colonial country.” The IG’s counterposition between national liberation struggles in the backward and advanced countries reveals their fundamentally Third World nationalist perspective. Further, the IG argues that Catalonia’s separation from Spain “could seriously undercut the potential for united struggle of the working class throughout the peninsula” (“Mass Resistance to Police Repression in Catalonia,” 4 October).

It is Madrid’s national oppression of Catalans, Basques and Galicians that has undercut the unity of the working classes in the artificial Spanish state. This unity can only be achieved by boldly championing the liberation of the oppressed nations—the opposite of the IG’s left-talking chauvinism, which blames the oppressed Catalans for dividing the working class, rather than the Castilian bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys.

Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin emphasized that achieving proletarian unity requires breaking the chains binding an oppressed nation to its oppressor. He used as an example Norway, which gained independence from Sweden following a 1905 referendum:

“The close alliance between the Norwegian and Swedish workers, their complete fraternal class solidarity, gained from the Swedish workers’ recognition of the right of the Norwegians to secede. This convinced the Norwegian workers that the Swedish workers were not infected with Swedish nationalism, and that they placed fraternity with the Norwegian proletarians above the privileges of the Swedish bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The dissolution of the ties imposed upon Norway by the monarchs of Europe and the Swedish aristocracy strengthened the ties between the Norwegian and Swedish workers.”

— “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914)

As explained in the current issue of our international theoretical journal, Spartacist (No. 65, Summer 2017), Lenin’s steadfast defense of the right of self-determination and implacable opposition to Great Russian chauvinism were crucial in forging the Bolshevik Party. It was Lenin’s revolutionary internationalist program that allowed the Bolsheviks to lead the working class to power 100 years ago. Today, the ICL upholds Leninism on the national question as part of our struggle for new October Revolutions.