In Honor Of The 142^nd Anniversary Of The Paris Commune –Jean-Paul Jacques Paget’s Dilemma

Home, home for a few hours reprieve, a little rest, and some precious bread, if young daughter Lilly had been able to obtain any at the market was all that was on Jean- Paul Paget’s mind as he left the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) on that late march evening. He had a few days before, as a proud and well known Proudhonist around the neighborhood been elected to the ad hoc committee of public safety for the neighborhood, for the section, and for the Paris Commune that had been established week before in the wake of the struggle between the Central Committee of the National Guard and the old, good riddance, Theirs government that had fled, fled tail between its legs, to Versailles and he hoped to oblivion. This day however had not been a good day, not at all, since there were still many hot disputes among the partisans about how to proceed next. All Jean-Paul knew was that he was opposed to the Central Committee of the National Guard trying to duck responsibility for defense of the revolution and that they, meaning not just the committee but all of Paris had to pitch in and try to get the damn Germans and their infernal army the hell away from Paris, far away. And that latter concern was not just a show of French nationalism before the wicked enemy on Jean-Paul’s part but a very practical consideration since his son Leon was being held by the Germans as a prisoner of war waiting parole.

As Jean Paul meandered home and headed toward Rue Saint Catherine he could see his young son Jean Jacques sitting on a chair behind a makeshift barricade parapet, rifle in hand, defending the rue, the section, hell, all of Paris, against the surrounding Germans but, more importantly, any efforts by the Theirs bandits to try to cause a disruption in Paris. Jean- Paul had immense pride in Jean-Jacques (and Leon too, for that matter, although he had advised against going into the army, the national guard would have been a better place for a son of the people ), a lad of only fourteen, yet the leader of the young comrades who had erected the barricade Saint Catherine in a few hours. And in a talk that that the pair had had one night Jean Jacques, after listing all the “demands” he wished considered by the various committees, expressed his willingness to die for the Commune if it came to it. That stopped the old man for a moment, he was willing to die, no question, but to ask the young, the future, to do so was a separate serious question that he was not sure where he stood on. Probably events and luck would sort that out.

After a couple of words with Jean-Jacques Jean-Paul went up the street to home still heated up by the argument that he had with others on the public safety committee, especially Varlin, a fellow Proudhonist, but others as well, about the role of the National Guard. Basically his view was that the Central Committee of the National Guard was necessary to keep a strong military posture when Theirs was still a threat, a distant threat but a threat nevertheless, and the Germans were hovering by. They, in turn, were trying to dissolve themselves into street militias and other ad hocformations and not take central political responsibility for the defense of the Commune. Jean-Paul was not a military man but he remembered what had happened in the June days of 1848 when he was a lad not much older than Jean –Jacques and the practically defenseless Parisian working quarters ran with blood because they had no proper military formations to fight against the government onslaught. As he entered his house he had a queasy foreboding feeling, a something foul in the air feeling …

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Leon Trotsky

Lessons of the Paris Commune

(February 1921)

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Written: 4 February 1921.
First Published: Zlatoost, February 4, 1921
Source: New International, Vol.2 No.2, March 1935, pp.43-47.
Translated: By New International.
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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EACH TIME that we study the history of the Commune we see it from a new aspect, thanks to the experience acquired by the later revolutionary struggles and above all by the latest revolutions, not only the Russian but the German and Hungarian revolutions. The Franco-German war was a bloody explosion, harbinger of an immense world slaughter, the Commune of Paris a lightning harbinger of a world proletarian revolution.

The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite into a single bloc, their talent to sacrifice themselves in the name of the future, but at the same time it shows us the incapacity of the masses to choose their path, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their fatal penchant to come to a halt after the first successes, thus permitting the enemy to regain its breath, to reestablish its position.

The Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at a single stroke at the head of the workers of the country in their struggle against all the forces of the past, against Bismarck as well as against Thiers. But the power fell into the hands of the democratic praters, the deputies of Paris. The Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders to whom it would have been closely bound by previous struggles. The petty bourgeois patriots who thought themselves socialists and sought the support of the workers did not really have any confidence in themselves. They shook the proletariat’s faith in itself, they were continually in quest of celebrated lawyers, of journalists, of deputies, whose baggage consisted only of a dozen vaguely revolutionary phrases, in order to entrust them with the leadership of the movement.

The reason why Jules Favre, Picard, Gamier-Pages and Co. took power in Paris on September 4 is the same as that which permitted Paul-Boncour, A. Varenne, Renaudel and numerous others to be for a time the masters of the party of the proletariat. The Renaudels and the Boncours and even the Longuets and the Pressemanes are much closer, by virtue of their sympathies, their intellectual habits and their conduct, to the Jules Favres and the Jules Ferrys than to the revolutionary proletariat. Their socialist phraseology is nothing but an historic mask which permits them to impose themselves upon the masses. And it is just because Favre, Simon, Picard and the others used and abused a democratico-liberal phraseology that their sons and their grandsons are obliged to resort to a socialist phraseology. But the sons and the grandsons have remained worthy of their fathers and continue their work. And when it will be necessary to decide not the question of the composition of a ministerial clique but the much more important question of knowing what class in France must take power, Renaudel, Varenne, Longuet and their similars will be in the camp of Millerand – collaborator of Galliffet, the butcher of the Commune ... When the revolutionary babblers of the salons and of parliament find themselves face to face, in real life, with the revolution, they never recognize it.

The workers’ party – the real one 𔆇 is not a machine for parliamentary manoeuvres, it is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the paths of development, all its stages, and which extracts from it the necessary formula of action, that the proletariat frees itself from the need of always recommencing its history: its hesitations, its lack of decision, its mistakes.
The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The bourgeois socialists with whom the Commune swarmed, raised their eyes to heaven, waited for a miracle or else a prophetic word, hesitated, and during that time the masses groped about and lost their heads because of the indecision of some and the fantasy of others. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Six months elapsed before the proletariat had reestablished in its memory the lessons of past revolutions, of battles of yore, of the reiterated betrayals of democracy – and it seized power.

These six months proved to be an irreparable loss. If the centralized party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat of France in September 1870, the whole history of France and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction.

If the power was found in the hands of the proletariat of Paris on March 18, it was not because it had been deliberately seized, but because its enemies had quitted Paris.

These latter were losing ground continuously, the workers despised and detested them, the petty bourgeoisie no longer had confidence in them and the big bourgeoisie feared that they were no longer capable of defending it. The soldiers were hostile to the officers. The government fled Paris in order to concentrate its forces elsewhere. And it was then that the proletariat became master of the situation.

But it understood this fact only on the morrow. The revolution fell upon it unexpectedly.

This first success was a new source of passivity. The enemy had fled to Versailles. Wasn’t that a victory? At that moment the governmental band could have been crushed almost without the spilling of blood. In Paris, all the ministers, with Thiers at their head, could have been taken prisoner. Nobody would have raised a hand to defend them. It was not done. There was no organization of a centralized party, having a rounded view of things and special organs for realizing its decisions.

The debris of the infantry did not want to fall back to Versailles. The thread which tied the officers and the soldiers was pretty tenuous. And had there been a directing party center at Paris, it would have incorporated into the retreating armies – since there was the possibility of retreating – a few hundred or even a few dozen devoted workers, and given them the following instructions: enhance the discontent of the soldiers against the officers, profit by the first favorable psychological moment to free the soldiers from their officers and bring them back to Paris to unite with the people. This could easily have been realized, according to the admissions of Thiers’ supporters themselves. Nobody even thought of it. Nor was there anybody to think of it. In the midst of great events, moreover, such decisions can be adopted only by a revolutionary party which looks forward to a revolution, prepares for it, does not lose its head, by a party which is accustomed to having a rounded view and is not afraid to act.

And a party of action is just what the French proletariat did not have.

The Central Committee of the National Guard is in effect a Council of Deputies of the armed workers and the petty bourgeoisie. Such a Council, elected directly by the masses who have taken the revolutionary road, represents an excellent apparatus of action. But at the same time, and just because of its immediate and elementary connection with the masses who are in the state in which the revolutionary has found them, it reflects not only all the strong sides but also the weak sides of the masses, and it reflects at first the weak sides still more than it does the strong: it manifests the spirit of indecision, of waiting, the tendency to be inactive after the first successes.

The Central Committee of the National Guard needed to be led. It was indispensable to have an organization incarnating the political experience of the proletariat and always present-not only in the Central Committee, but in the legions, in the batallion, in the deepest sectors of the French proletariat. By means of the Councils of Deputies – in the given case they were organs of the National Guard – the party could have been in continual contact with the masses, known their state of mind; its leading center could each day put forward a slogan which, through the medium of the party’s militants, would have penetrated into the masses, uniting their thought and their will.

Hardly had the government fallen back to Versailles than the National Guard hastened to unload its responsibility, at the very moment when this responsibility was enormous. The Central Committee imagined “legal” elections to the Commune. It entered into negotiations with the mayors of Paris in order to cover itself, from the Right, with “legality”.

Had a violent attack been prepared against Versailles at the same time, the negotiations with the mayors would have been a ruse fully justified from the military standpoint and in conformity with the goal. But in reality, these negotiations were being conducted only in order to avert the struggle by some miracle or other. The petty bourgeois radicals and the socialistic idealists, respecting “legality” and the men who embodied a portion of the “legal” state – the deputies, the mayors, etc. – hoped at the bottom of their souls that Thiers would halt respectfully before revolutionary Paris the minute the latter covered itself with the “legal” Commune.

Passivity and indecision were supported in this case by the sacred principle of federation and autonomy. Paris, you see, is only one commune among many other communes. Paris wants to impose nothing upon anyone; it does not struggle for the dictatorship, unless it be for the ’dictatorship of example”.

In sum, it was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy. The real revolutionary task consisted of assuring the proletariat the power all ove the country. Paris had to serve as its base, its support, its stronghold. And to attain this goal, it was necessary to vanquish Versailles without the loss of time and to send agitators, organizers, and armed forces throughout France. It was necessary to enter into contact with sympathizers, to strengthen the hesitators and to shatter the opposition of the adversary. Instead of this policy of offensive and aggression which was the only thing that could save the situation, the leaders of Paris attempted to seclude themselves in their communal autonomy: they will not attack the others if the others do not attack them; each town has its sacred right of self-government. This idealistic chatter – of the same gender as mundane anarchism – covered up in reality a cowardice in face of revolutionary action which should have been conducted incessantly up to the very end, for otherwise it should not have been begun.

The hostility to capitalist organization – a heritage of petty bourgeois localism and autonomism – is without a doubt the weak side of a certain section of the French proletariat. Autonomy for the districts, for the wards, for the batallions, for the towns, is the supreme guarantee of real activity and individual independence for certain revolutionists. But that is a great mistake which cost the French proletariat dearly.

Under the form of the “struggle against despotic centralism” and against “stifling” discipline, a fight takes place for the self-preservation of various groups and sub-groupings of the working class, for their petty interests, with their petty ward leaders and their local oracles. The entire working class, while preserving its cultural originality and its political nuances, can act methodically and firmly, without remaining in the tow of events, and directing each time its mortal blows against the weak sectors of its enemies, on the condition that at its head, above the wards, the districts, the groups, there is an apparatus which is centralized and bound together by an iron discipline. The tendency towards particularism, whatever the form it may assume, is a heritage of the dead past. The sooner French communist-socialist communism and syndicalist communism emancipates itself from it, the better it will be for the proletarian revolution.

* * *

The party does not create the revolution at will, it does not choose the moment for seizing power as it likes, but it intervenes actively in the events, penetrates at every moment the state of mind of the revolutionary masses and evaluates the power of resistance of the enemy, and thus determines the most favoraHe moment for decisive action. This is the most difficult side of its task. The party has no decision that is valid for every case. Needed are a correct theory, an intimate contact with the masses, the comprehension of the situation, a revolutionary perception, a great resoluteness. The more profoundly a revolutionary party penetrates into all the domains of the proletarian struggle, the more unified it is by the unity of goal and discipline, the speedier and better will it arrive at resolving its task.

The difficulty consists in having this organization of a centralized party, internally welded by an iron discipline, linked intimately with the movement of the masses, with its ebbs and flows. The conquest of power cannot be achieved save on the condition of a powerful revolutionary pressure of the toiling masses. But in this act the element of preparation is entirely inevitable. The better the party will understand the conjuncture and the moment, the better the bases of resistance will be prepared, the better the force and the roles will be distributed, the surer will be the success and the less victims will it cost. The correlation of a carefully prepared action and a mass movement is the politico-strategical task of the taking of power.

The comparison of March 18, 1871 with November 7, 1917 is very instructive from this point of view. In Paris, there is an absolute lack of initiative for action on the part of the leading revolutionary circles. The proletariat, armed by the bourgeois government, is in reality master of the town, has all the material means of power – cannon and rifles – at its disposal, but it is not aware of it. The bourgeoisie makes an attempt to retake the weapon of the giant: it wants to steal the cannon of the proletariat. The attempt fails. The government flees in panic from Paris to Versailles. The field is clear. But it is only on the morrow that the proletariat understands that it is the master of Paris. The “leaders” are in the wake of events, they record them when the latter are already accomplished, and they do everything in their power to blunt the revolutionary edge.

In Petrograd, the events developed differently. The party moved firmly, resolutely, to the seizure of power, having its men everywhere, consolidating each position, extending every fissure between the workers and the garrison on the one side and the government on the other.

The armed demonstration of the July days is a vast reconnoitering conducted by the party to sound the degree of close contact between the masses and the power of resistance of the enemy. The reconnoitering is transformed into a struggle of outposts. We are thrown back, but at the same time the action establishes a connection between the party and the depths of the masses. The months of August, September and October see a powerful revolutionary flux. The party profits by it and augments considerably its points of support in the working class and the garrison. Later, the harmony between the conspirative preparations and the mass action takes place almost automatically. The Second Congress of the Soviets is fixed for November ’. All our preceding agitation was to lead to the seizure of power by the Congress. Thus, the overturn was adapted in advance to November 7.

This fact was well known and understood by the enemy. Kerensky and his councillors could not fail to make efforts to consolidate themselves, to however small an extent, in Petrograd for the decisive moment. Also, they stood in need of shipping out of the capital the most revolutionary sections of the garrison. We on our part profited by this attempt by Kerensky in order to make it the source of a new conflict which had a decisive importance. We openly accused the Kerensky government – our accusation subsequently found a written confirmation in an official document – of having planned the removal of a third of the Petrograd garrison not out of military considerations but for the purpose of counter-revolutionary combinations. This conflict bound us still more closely to the garrison and put before the latter a well-defined task, to support the Soviet Congress fixed for November 7. And since the government insisted – even if in a feeble enough manner – that the garrison be sent off, we created in the Petrograd Soviet, already in our hands, a Revolutionary War Committee, on the pretext of verifying the military reasons for the governmental plan.

Thus we had a purely military organ, standing at the head of the Petrograd garrison, which was in reality a legal organ of armed insurrection. At the same time we designated (communist) commissars in all the military units, in the military stores, etc. The clandestine military organization accomplished specific technical tasks and furnished the Revolutionary War Committee with fully trustworthy militants for important military tasks. The essential work concerning the preparation, the realization and the armed insurrection took place openly, and so methodically and naturally that the bourgeoisie, led by Kerensky, did not clearly understand what was taking place under their very eyes. (In Paris, the proletariat understood only on the following day that it had been really victorious – a victory which it had not, moreover, deliberately sought – that it was master of the situation. In Petrograd, it was the contrary. Our party, basing itself on the workers and the garrison, had already seized the power, the bourgeoisie passed a fairly tranquil night and learned only on the following morning that the helm of the country was in the hands of its gravedigger.)

As to strategy, there were many differences of opinion in our party.

A part of the Central Committee declared itself, as is known, against the taking of power, believing that the moment had not yet arrived, that Petrograd was detached from the rest of the country, the proletariat from the peasantry, etc.

Other comrades believed that we were not attributing sufficient importance to the elements of military complot. One of the members of the Central Committee demanded in October the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater where the Democratic Conference was in session, and the proclamation of the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the party. He said: in concentrating our agitation as well as our preparatory military work for the moment of the Second Congress, we are showing our plan to the adversary, we are giving him the possibility of preparing himself and even of dealing us a preventive blow. But there is no doubt that the attempt at a military complot and the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater would have been a fact too alien to the development of the events, that it would have been an event disconcerting to the masses. Even in the Petrograd Soviet, where our faction dominated, such an enterprise, anticipating the logical development of the struggle, would have provoked great disorder at that moment, above all among the garrison where there were hesitant and not very trustful regiments, primarily the cavalry regiments. It would have been much easier for Kerensky to crush a complot unexpected by the masses than to attack the garrison consolidating itself more and more on its positions: the defense of its inviolability in the name of the future Congress of the Soviets. Therefore the majority of the Central Committee rejected the plan to surround the Democratic Conference and it was right. The conjuncture was very well judged: the armed insurrection, almost without bloodshed, triumphed exactly on the date, fixed in advance and openly, for the convening of the Second Soviet Congress.

This strategy cannot, however, become a general rule, it requires specific conditions. Nobody believed any longer in the war with the Germans, and the less revolutionary soldiers did not want to quit Petrograd for the front. And even if the garrison as a whole was on the side of the workers for this single reason, it became stronger in its point of view to the extent that Kerensky’s machinations were revealed. But this mood of the Petrograd garrison had a still deeper cause in the situation of the peasant class and in the development of the imperialist war. Had there been a split in the garrison and had Kerensky obtained the possibility of support from a few regiments, our plan would have failed. The elements of purely military complot (conspiracy and great speed of action) would have prevailed.

It would have been necessary, of course, to choose another moment for the insurrection.

The Commune also had the complete possibility of winning even the peasant regiments, for the latter had lost all confidence and all respect for the power and the command. Yet it undertook nothing towards this end. The fault here is not in the relationships of the peasant and the working classes, but in the revolutionary strategy.

What will be the situation in this regard in the European countries in the present epoch? It is not easy to foretell anything on this score. Yet, with the events developing slowly and the bourgeois governments exerting all their efforts to utilize past experiences, it may be foreseen that the proletariat, in order to attract the sympathies of the soldiers, will have to overcome a great and well organized resistance at a given moment. A skillful and well-timed attack on the part of the revolution will then be necessary. The duty of the party is to prepare itself for it. That is just why it must maintain and develop its character of a centralized organization, which openly guides the revolutionary movement of the masses and is at the same time a clandestine apparatus of the armed insurrection.

* * *

The question of the electibility of the command was one of the reasons of the conflict between the National Guard and Thiers. Paris refused to accept the command designated by Thiers. Varlin subsequently formulated the demand that the command of the National Guard, from top to bottom, ought to be elected by the National Guardsmen themselves. That is where the Central Committee of the National Guard found its support.

This question must he envisaged from two sides: from the political and the military sides, which are interlinked but which should be distinguished. The political task consisted in purging the National Guard of the counter-revolutionary command. Complete electibility was the only means for it, the majority of the National Guard being composed of workers and revolutionary petty bourgeois. And in addition, the motto “electibility of the command”, being extended also to the infantry, Thiers would have been deprived at a single stroke of his essential weapon, the counter-revolutionary officers. In order to realize this plan, a party organization, having its men in all the military units, was required. In a word, electihility in this ease had as its immediate task not to give good commanders to the batallions, but to liberate them from commanders devoted to the bourgeoisie. Electibility served as a wedge for splitting the army into two parts, along class lines. Thus did matters occur with its in the period of Kerensky, above all on the eve of October.

But the liberation of the army from the old commanding apparatus inevitably involves the weakening of organizational cohesion and the diminution of combative power. As a rule, the elected command is pretty weak from the technico-military standpoint and with regard to the maintenance of order and of discipline. Thus, at the moment when the army frees itself from the old counterrevolutionary command which oppressed it, the question arises of giving it a revolutionary command capable of fulfilling its mission. And this question can by no means be resolved by simple elections. Before wide masses of soldiers acquire the experience of well choosing and selecting commanders, the revolution will be beaten by the enemy which is guided in the choice of its command by the experience of centuries. The methods of shapeless democracy (simple electibility) must be supplemented and to a certain extent replaced by measures of selection from above. The revolution must create an organ composed of experienced, reliable organizers, in which one can have absolute confidence, give it full powers to choose, designate and educate the command. If particularism and democratic autonomism are extremely dangerous to the proletarian revolution in general, they are ten times more dangerous ¥to the army. We saw that in the tragic example of the Commune.

The Central Committee of the National Guard drew its authority from democratic electibility. At the moment when the Central Committee needed to develop to the maximum its initiative in the offensive, deprived of the leadership of a proletarian party, it lost its head, hastened to transmit its powers to the representatives of the Commune which required a broader democratic basis. And it was a great mistake in that period to play with elections. But once the elections had been held and the Commune brought together, ft was necessary to concentrate everything in the Commune at a single blow and to have it create an organ possessing real power to reorganize the National Guard. This was not the case. By the side of the elected Commune there remained the Central Committee; the elected character of the latter gave it a political authority thanks to which it was able to compete with the Commune. But at the same time that deprived it of the energy and the firmness necessary in the purely military questions which, after the organization of the Commune, justified its existence.

Electibility, democratic methods, are but one of the instruments in the hands of the proletariat and its party. Electibility can in no wise be a fetish, a remedy for all evils. The methods of electibility must be combined with those of appointments. The power of the Commune came from the elected National Guard. But once created, the Commune should have reorganized with a strong hand the National Guard, from top to bottom, given it reliable leaders and established a régime of very strict discipline. The Commune did not do this, being itself deprived of a powerful revolutionary directing center. It too was crushed.

We can thus thumb the whole history of the Commune, page by page, and we will find in it one single lesson: a strong party leadership is needed. More than any other proletariat has the French made sacrifices for the revolution. But also more than any other has it been duped. Many times has the bourgeoisie dazzled it with all the colors of republicanism, of radicalism, of socialism, so as always to fasten upon it the fetters of capitalism. By means of its agents, its lawyers and its journalists, the bourgeoisie has put forward a whole mass of democratic, parliamentary, autonomist formulae which are nothing but impediments on the feet of the proletariat, hampering its forward movement.

The temperament of the French proletariat is a revolutionary lava. But this lava is now covered with the ashes of skepticismresult of numerous deceptions and disenchantments. Also, the revolutionary proletarians of France must be severer towards their party and unmask more pitilessly any non-conformity between word and action. The French workers have need of an organization, strong as steel, with leaders controlled by the masses at every new stage of the revolutionary movement.
How much time will history afford us to prepare ourselves? We do not know. For fifty years the French bourgeoisie has retained the power in its hands after having elected the Third Republic on the bones of the Communards. Those fighters of ’71 were not lacking in heroism. What they lacked was clarity in method and a centralized leading organization. That is why they were vanquished. Half a century elapsed before the proletariat of France could pose the question of avenging the death of the Communards. But this time, the action will be firmer, more concentrated. The heirs of Thiers will have to pay the historic debt in full.

Leon TROTSKY

***Out In The 1950s Be-Bop Night- With Eddie Bond And The Stompers' Rockin' Daddy In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The night was clear almost cloudless, the moon blazing in the heavens or trying to blaze against the fading day sun, the weather a little sultry for an early summer Memphis night, an early Memphis summer night in that great 1956 crested night. Crested ever since local boy made good Big Jack McGee had busted out on the Moon label and on the Rockabilly charts with his flat-out flail I’m A Good Rocking Daddy that had all the girls, hell some women, some very married women, thinking some thoughts, some private thoughts maybe they should not be thinking in that 1950s night when all thoughts should have been on eternal grace, fear of the end of the world, and if nothing else about working like seven devils to beat those damn Russkies who wanted to take the American dream away. But there you have it those young women, girls, getting wet and sweaty about Big Jack. And here is the beauty of the thing, the guy beauty of it, those same girls, young women, women were as likely to be crazy for, be wet for if you want to know, other guys who could either be-bop bop like Big Jack or who could dance themselves into whirling dervishes on the other side of those females on the dance floor and, uh, walk home with them.

Hence this moony night, this a little sultry for early summer Memphis night in the year of our lord 1956 the Bluelight Ballroom is putting on a dance contest to find out who is, or is not, the good rocking daddy of the region. And hence that is why one Johnny Sparkill (the girls at old Memphis North where he had graduated a few years before had called him Johnny Sparkle when they had their eyes set on him but he never liked it, thought it sounded kind of faggoty, kind of homo and he was glad the women at work (J.D. South‘s Textile Mill, the biggest in town) had never caught on to that moniker was standing at the entrance to the ballroom. Yes, Johnny had worked himself up into standing in front of that ballroom door and was beginning to gather himself together enough to enter and win the dance contest. The decision to enter, to put himself out there, to see if he had what it took to be the be-bop rocking daddy and make the women sweat (he, older now, was not longer interested in girls, like he was some high school goof but only women, and he was not particular as his recent track record indicted whether they were married or not although strictly speaking he favored single women since it cut down on irate and looking for him husbands) had caused him some sleepless nights, some tossing and turning.

It wasn’t that Johnny, all snarly and surly good looks in that way working class boys and men were facing the world just then and which many women found, well, found intriguing, all white tee-shirt, blue jeans, wide black belt and engineer boots, cigarette hanging from the lips adding to the effect like some god figure out of Marlon Brando’s The Wild Ones, didn’t have the desire to do the deed but he had one problem, one big problem if one wanted to be the rocking daddy-he couldn’t dance a lick. Had, in fact, something like two left feet. Worse he had no sense of rhythm, no sense of rockabilly rhythm, since he could not pivot well, and his hips seemed welded to his torso. Enter one Jenny Sparkill (the boys at old Memphis North where she was a sophomore called her Jenny Sparkle when they had their eyes set on her and she liked it, liked it especially when Claude Lee called her that, she thought it sounded kind of dreamy), Johnny’s sister who among her set was considered one of the best be-bop be-bop dancers around. It was Jenny (sworn to death-dealing secrecy or else) who painstakingly gave Johnny a left and right foot and unwelded those tragic hips, and showed him a few girlish moves (that he thought too faggy but he bought into it) that she said would give him an edge when the judges were weeding out the wheat from the chaff.

Johnny then threw away his inhibitions as he entered the battle zone and his slight swagger as he surveyed the ballroom, the competition, and more importantly, the women who would be watching and participating and who would perhaps sway thing if something caught their eyes, said he had made that transformation from doubt that Jenny had told him to lose before he got going. He was ready. He went to the entry table, paid his fee, and received his number. Number ten. He looked around the room to see what woman had that same number, which was his partner. (The numbers were issued on an arbitrary basis to avoid any combined hot-dogging.) He spied a thin, tall woman (almost as tall as he) with full frilly dress, kind of plain of face, and his heart fell. A lot of what his sister had told him about chemistry between partners evaporated right there. He walked over to him, introduced herself as Cindy and said she thought they had a very good chance what with his looks and her skill. Johnny thought no way they fit, arbitrary matches or not. Already he saw eights that looked like something out of Hollywood’s idea of the perfect dance pair, some rockabilly Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. Well he was in, come hell or high water.

In the event Johnny Sparkle, yes Johnny Sparkle fit now, fit now that he and Cindy had won the contest hands down and they were working some local dances and bars as the good example dancers hired by management to show the young and clueless what was what in the be-bop be-bop rockabilly night. See Cindy had some moves, some moves like Jenny, and so that egged him on, made him unweld those hips, and so before the night was out he was in a groove, the women were whistling, whistling for more. Best of all Cindy, very married and not looking for any Johnny one night stand, introduced him to her younger sister, Betty Ann, who very definitely was. And who was nothing but a fox. Yah, he was the rocking daddy, the max rocking daddy of the Memphis night…

On The 10^th Anniversary Of The Iraq War-U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

[No this writer is not lost in a time warp, nor is he suffering from a senior moment in noting the 10^th Anniversary of the ill-fated, ill-advised, ill, well, let’s just keep it as the previous two, start of the now seemingly completed fiasco in Iraq. However although American troops have mainly been withdrawn many thousand American bought and paid for “contract” soldiers are still operating in that theater. Moreover the wreckage from the huge American footprint (boot print, really) is still wreaking havoc on that benighted land from lack of electrical power to unexploded bombs to speak nothing of the current constant political turmoil between the myriad factions struggling for power. Then there is the question of those tens of thousands of soldiers switched over within a heartbeat from benighted Iraq to benighted Afghanistan. The call for immediate troop withdrawal from Afghanistan if not drawing much support in these back- burner concern days is still a necessary call. Finally, if there is a modern example of the follies of war, of a needless imperial adventure, of flat-out American imperial hubris to do something explosive (in more ways than one) then the ill-famed Iraq invasion started on March 19, 2003 should be etched in every leftist militant, hell, every thoughtful citizen’s brain.]

*******
Walking toward Union Square in his hometown of New York City one brisk, blustery mid-March Saturday in 2006 Tim Reid was approached by an older man with a full grey-speckled beard and longish matching hair passing out leaflets for a 3rd anniversary of the Iraq war anti-war rally. As the older man tried to interest him in a leaflet Tim recognized him, Artie Feingold, as an old co-worker in the struggle against the first Iraq war under Bush’s father in an ad hocanti-imperialist committee formed quickly to oppose that war. Tim sheepishly took the leaflet and as he did so out of some mist of time Artie also recognized him and started to engage in an effort to get Tim to stay for the rally.

The reason for Tim’s sheepishness and reluctance was that until very recently he had fully supported the Bush war policy. After a couple of years of being lied to from top to bottom by that administration, a couple of years of the whole damn U.S. military being unable to find any weapons of mass destructions that was the lynchpin to his support, the daily horrible carnage in the full-scale civil war going on in Iraq, and the increasing American casualty lists he had taken a few steps away from that support. Tim was not sure that he wanted to engage Artie in his reasoning since he knew that Artie had moved from that ad hoc committee to one of the never-ending Marxoid groupings that canvassed the city and who reasons for separate existence (and in some cases existence at all) always evaded him. By the name of the organization on the leaflet he knew Artie was still a “believer”and that made him even more hesitant to enter a discussion. He at first moved away and then headed back to Artie not to argue so much since there now was less ground separating them but to explain his previous position a little.

Artie, not having seen Tim in many years, was unaware that his politics had changed and so what Tim had to say startled him at first. Tim noted that his opposition to that first Iraq war, and if he recalled Artie’s too, had centered on opposition to a war fought for sheiks, one set of dictators , and oil against the acknowledged mad man Saddam Hussein. It was not our fight, not at all. Mercifully it was soon over and life continued on. This later war though Tim had thought had been fully justified in the new post 9/11world reality especially when the mad men were hitting New York City. Hitting, he admitted, the place where he and his kids were living, a fact that changed his view significantly since he felt he had to go to any lengths to protect his kids in a dangerous world. Besides he was sure that when, of all the Bush administration speakers, solid Colin Powell a man not easily to rattles and of sound judgment in military matters, had given the“green light” to those tales of weapons of mass destruction he was on board. After the initial “slam dunk” invasion Tim felt that the whole thing would be wrapped up and nation-building could go forward quickly. Then the whole thing turned to ashes, turned to ashes almost as quickly as the initial success. He felt sure though that that devious Hussein bastard’s hiding places would be found at some point. Then nothing, nothing but casualty reports.

Artie listened to Tim rather politely like in the intervening years he too had learned to be less hot-headed and argumentative and more thoughtful. He confessed that Tim’s story sounded very much like that of his parents who still lived over in Brooklyn and who had been early members of Students for Socialism in their youthful student days who went that extra mile with Bush on Iraq to save their beloved city. Then, naturally, Artie, good old Artie, tried to badger Tim a little into coming over to the rally for a little while anyway, maybe run into a few more old co-workers from the old days. Tim begged off, first using the excuse of having to deal with the kids and then, more truthfully, stated that he while he wasn’t on board the Bush bus any longer he was not sure that his opposition was deep enough to publicly express anti-wars sentiments. To Tim’s surprise Artie did not press the issue but left Tim with this-“Maybe next year for the fourth anniversary anti-war rally you will join us.” Tim did a double-take and then realized that what Artie had to say about another year of war might be very true. As he turned away toward home with the first chants of the day Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of U.S. Troops, Stop The War,and Bring The Troops Home burst into the old New York air some of the old juices began to flow in his veins…

New Issue of Black History and the Class Struggle

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

New Issue of Black History and the Class Struggle

The following article was written by our comrades of Spartacist/South Africa, Section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) as the Introduction to the new issue of Black History and the Class Struggle (No. 23, February 2013). We have not included references to articles contained in the pamphlet.

28 JANUARY—The 16 August 2012 massacre of 34 striking Lonmin platinum miners at Marikana was the worst instance of lethal police violence in response to struggle since the end of white-supremacist apartheid rule in 1994. Carried out under the bourgeois Tripartite Alliance government led by the African National Congress (ANC), this massacre was meant to be a bloody warning to those amongst the oppressed who dare to stand up against their miserable conditions of existence. But the plan backfired as the police slaughter fuelled a wave of wildcat strikes across the industry and beyond, shaking the fragile foundations of neo-apartheid capitalism. The miners, who had been making as little as 4,000 rand per month (US$440), demanded a R12,500 minimum wage. After they won most of that amount for the majority of Lonmin workers, that demand became the battle cry for many other workers who are sick and tired of waiting for the promised better life for all.

The massacre and the strike wave it spurred ripped a huge tear in the fabric of this society. There is wide and deep discontent at the pace of change over the nearly 20 years of rule by the Tripartite Alliance—the ANC, South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) misleaders, along with the COSATU bureaucracy as a whole, acted as strikebreakers at Lonmin and at other “illegal” strikes, helping spur the growth of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The ferment and political volatility in the mines have not dissipated, as the causes of last year’s strikes centring on starvation wages and terrible conditions of employment remain unresolved. This is likely to be a lightning rod for more struggles ahead.

Like atrocities in the last days of the apartheid era, the Lonmin massacre failed to break the fighting spirit of the striking workers. But militancy on the trade-union level is not capable in and of itself of breaking the overwhelmingly black working class from bourgeois consciousness, which in South Africa is mainly expressed through the politics of nationalism. The rise of powerful trade unions of black workers in the 1980s was a factor in bringing an end to the apartheid regime, but the leadership of the SACP and the emerging COSATU union federation derailed any fight for workers rule by selling the lie that the ANC and its partners are the leaders in the fight for national liberation. A revolutionary leadership is required to break the hold of such deadly illusions among the combative proletariat.

So long as capitalism remains in power, a decent life for the masses can never be won and any gains secured by class struggle remain highly reversible. Nor is there any genuine solution to the masses’ entrenched poverty within the confines of South Africa. Mainly owned by British and U.S. capital, this country’s mining industry—the core of the economy—is subject to the ebbs and flows of the imperialist-dominated world market. Indeed, the economic position of the platinum miners has been undermined by the narrowing of the market for this metal, whose main use is in auto production, due to the ongoing world capitalist contraction. Such facts underscore that the struggle of the working class against capital must be an international struggle reaching into the imperialist centres, which are themselves class-divided and multiracial societies.

Mine capitalists have started this year with a backlash, threatening to lay off tens of thousands of workers. In Carletonville, west of Johannesburg, Harmony Gold locked out its 6,000 mostly migrant workers returning from the holidays, closing hostels and forcing workers to sleep out in the open. Owners are demanding prior assurances that it would be “profitable and safe” to reopen the mine, in other words, workers should commit never to strike again. At Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), miners responded with strike action to the company’s announcement that it would close down four shafts, threatening 14,000 jobs mainly in the Rustenburg area, centre of the platinum industry. The employer was forced to back off from its decision and agree to negotiate with workers’ leaders. This confirms again that class struggle is the only reliable weapon in the hands of the working class. Later it was announced that management decided to delay the implementation of its plan.

The coldblooded murder of workers at Lonmin was the most horrific moment of the 2012 mining wildcat strike movement, which began in late January at Impala Platinum. The massacre showed, in blood, the absurdity of reformist arguments that the ANC/Alliance government is “class contested terrain.” Those like the SACP misleaders and apologists who portray the Alliance as a “people’s government” on the “peaceful road to socialism” are practicing deceit. It is a bourgeois government pledged to maintaining capitalist private property.

This is further shown by the regime’s apartheid-style demolition of houses occupied mainly by black people in predominantly Indian Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, and by the ruthless attacks on recent strikes by farm workers in the Western Cape. Three of those workers have been killed by police and private security guards, and scores of others injured or arrested. Workers have reported police raids in the wee hours of the morning accompanied by beatings and random shootings, injuring women and children in their homes. The “new,” “democratic” South African state is a direct continuity of the old apartheid.

The farm workers ignored authorities’ attempts to play divide-and-rule among coloured [mixed-race, partly Malay-derived], black and immigrant workers. The workers maintained their unity and class integrity in struggle against their common class enemy to ameliorate their slave-like labour conditions. But instead of organising the powerful harbour, transport and other workers in solidarity with the farm workers, COSATU leaders have done everything in their power to stop the strikes. COSATU has historically neglected organising efforts among these isolated and miserably exploited workers, who make as little as R69 per day. To this day, only a small minority belong to unions. The R150-a-day minimum wage the workers have demanded is still far below what they need to survive.

Underlying the farm workers strikes is the burning issue of the land, a question which is at the centre of the dispossession of the non-white majority in this country. The white minority, which forms less than 10 percent of the population, owns more than 70 percent of urban and arable rural land. Most farming is done by large, mechanised and capital-intensive agribusiness employing agricultural proletarians. We are for the expropriation of the large, white-owned farms and for their transformation into collective and state farms under workers rule. Farm workers are going to be central in achieving this goal, which is indissolubly bound up with the socialist revolution to be led by the mainly urban proletariat.

Amid Rising Mass Anger, State Repression Intensifies

The explosive anger at the base of society has triggered an increase in the state’s violent suppression of protest, further helping to peel away the democratic facade of the post-apartheid capitalist state. In January, police minister Nathi Mthethwa announced that 704 people were arrested for “public violence” in December alone. Militants who take part in strikes or township protests demanding electricity, water and other basic services are viciously attacked by police, sometimes with live ammunition, and arrested. We demand the dropping of all charges and the immediate, unconditional freedom of those jailed for protesting against this racist, neo-apartheid capitalist hellhole. An injury to one is an injury to all!

The organised working class must wield its social power on behalf of all the oppressed, particularly the desperate unemployed in the townships. In doing so, it must fight against anti-immigrant attacks, which are often fuelled by petty-bourgeois elements in the townships who see shopkeepers from Somalia, Pakistan or elsewhere as competitors. From the Rustenburg platinum mines to the Western Cape vineyards and orchards, recent strikes have shown a high degree of unity in struggle by South African and immigrant workers. Spartacist/South Africa and the ICL demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Recent proposed legislation attacking democratic rights includes the Protection of State Information Bill, which requires prior approval for the publication of material deemed sensitive by the state, and the Traditional Courts Bill. The latter gives traditional leaders, headed by tribal chiefs, unchallenged legal power over 17 million rural black inhabitants, who are balkanised according to tribal background. Chiefs would get enhanced legal authority for making laws, deciding cases and handing down punishment. The burden would be disproportionately felt by women, who are viciously oppressed by backward practices like lobola (bride price) and marriage-by-capture, a form of kidnapping. Under the bill, women would not be allowed to represent themselves but must be represented by their husbands or other male family members. The bill is a rehash of British colonial and later apartheid laws that, in relegating blacks to the bottom of society, designed a separate legal system enshrining the power of traditional leaders.

ANC at Mangaung: The Business of Running Capitalism

At the ANC’s recent Mangaung national elective conference, Jacob Zuma convincingly defeated supporters of his deputy Kgalema Mothlante to retain the ANC presidency. The conference also confirmed the expulsion of the hypocrite populist and former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, who is himself a small-time capitalist. Spartacist/South Africa opposes all factions of this party of the class enemy. For the exploited and oppressed masses, whether Zuma or Mothlante won would have changed nothing.

For the first time, prominent COSATU leaders were included in the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC), its highest decision-making body between conferences, where they will have to take direct responsibility for the policies of the capitalist government. This is what the COSATU and SACP leaders’ perpetual call to “swell the ranks of the ANC” means. Since becoming president, Zuma has been careful to integrate SACP leaders into his government, in the process succeeding in silencing even their most superficial criticisms. Now he looks set to do the same with COSATU. Zwelinzima Vavi and Irvin Jim, leaders of COSATU and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) respectively, who both declined nomination to the NEC, use the appearance of distance from the ANC hierarchy to occasionally mouth some criticisms of the government while in practice adhering to the entire programme of class collaboration.

The Mangaung conference also elected trade unionist-turned-billionaire-capitalist Cyril Ramaphosa as Zuma’s second-in-command. While leading the NUM in the 1980s, Ramaphosa became the protégé of the head of the Oppenheimer family, the dominant owner of Anglo American, the country’s leading mining company. He soon became the chief architect of the sellout deal that set the stage for the replacement of the apartheid government by the ANC-led Alliance. Today, among his many business concerns, Ramaphosa is a prominent shareholder at Lonmin. Just 24 hours before the killing of workers at Marikana, he sent e-mails to Lonmin management and police minister Mthethwa describing strike activities as being “plainly dastardly criminal” and calling for “concomitant action” to be taken.

Spartacist/South Africa and the ICL have been unique among leftists internationally for our consistent, principled political opposition to the ANC/SACP/COSATU nationalist popular front. This is in stark contrast to reformists like the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), which not only supported the ANC in the 1994 elections but joined this bourgeois party as a so-called Marxist Tendency.

Such fake-left organisations as the DSM, Keep Left! (supporters of the late Tony Cliff) and the Workers International Vanguard Party (formerly League) support the membership of cops and security guards in trade unions. COSATU includes the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) as well as cops organised by the SAMWU municipal workers and other unions, and the SACP recruits police into its own organisation. We oppose the inclusion of cops or security guards—the armed protectors of bourgeois rule and profits—in the unions and the broader working-class movement. After witnessing the wanton butchering of his comrades, and himself suffering torture in police custody, one Marikana striker said of the cops that “they are like dogs to me now.... I do not trust them anymore, they are like enemies” (Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer, 2012). The single experience of these workers has taught them more than the reformists have been capable of learning throughout their whole miserable history.

Talk about “democratic control of the police,” “winning over the police” or “raising the consciousness of the police” has nothing to do with revolutionary Marxism and everything to do with reformism. As Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky argued repeatedly, there is no such thing as a class-neutral “democracy”: the capitalist state is an apparatus of repression based on armed bodies of men—principally the army and the police—that protects the interests and property forms of the ruling class. The working class cannot simply lay hold of this state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. The capitalist state must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state.

The DSM intervened in the Rustenburg strikes to channel working-class militancy into bourgeois parliamentary reformist schemes. In December, the DSM announced the launch of the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP). The projected programme of this party is thoroughly reformist. The press release announcing it consists solely of bread-and-butter economic demands with not even a reference to women’s oppression, much less any call for socialist revolution. Instead, they peddle reformist schemes of cleaning up capitalist municipal governments by leading “a campaign for the recall of all incompetent and corrupt councillors to replace them with WASP representatives” (socialistworld.net, 20 December 2012). This programme is not that of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the October Revolution of 1917, the only successful workers revolution in history, but of social-democratic gradualism in the spirit of the classic British Labour Party. Thus the DSM’s British comrades claim that “socialism” will be introduced by nationalising industry through the mechanism of an “enabling bill” passed by the bourgeois Parliament.

A recent survey reporting on the deepening rift between the COSATU leaders and the rank and file states that a significant number of shop stewards want COSATU to leave the ANC and form a workers party, also expressing no confidence in the SACP. We encourage and welcome workers’ desire for independence from the bourgeois ANC as the beginning of wisdom. But the key question is what programme such a workers party would be based on. Reformists push a “workers party” as a con game, seeking merely a vehicle to better pressure the capitalist rulers, or even administer the state on their behalf. We strive to forge a party that stands for proletarian class independence from, and opposition to, the bourgeois state and all its political parties and fights for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Class and Race in South Africa

Some worker militants who have broken from the NUM are calling for “nonpolitical” unions. While this is understandable given the history of betrayals by the NUM leaders allied to the ANC, it is impossible to divorce union struggle from political struggle. This is especially clear in a country like South Africa, where the superexploitation of mainly black labour is the living legacy of apartheid and centuries of colonial oppression.

In a 17 January press conference widely broadcast on TV, AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa warned against “illegal, unprotected strikes,” insisted that workers must follow prescribed arbitration procedures and called for government intervention to settle disputes at Amplats. This shows clearly that the AMCU leadership does not oppose the established procedures for class collaboration and views the world through the same lens as the rest of the trade-union bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, the class-collaborationist Democratic Left Front, which is tied to imperialist-funded “social movements,” seeks to channel workers’ anger into the dead-end of pressuring the Farlam Commission of Enquiry, which was established by the government to whitewash its crimes at Marikana and to let the outraged public blow off some steam. We reject the double standards of people who claim to support struggling miners while at the same time preaching illusions in the institutions of the government that mowed them down like wild animals.

Trade-union consciousness is completely inadequate for the tasks necessary for the emancipation of the non-white majority. Parallel to starvation wages, there are problems of vulnerable workers employed by labour brokers, poor black communities in urban areas and especially in the rural reserves, and impoverished coloured townships as well. It is crucial that militant workers and youth assimilate the history of the genuine communist movement. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was a steadfast champion of all struggles against oppression in the tsarist empire, the “prison house of peoples.” The Bolsheviks fought against Great Russian chauvinism and for the liberation of oppressed peoples using the methods of proletarian class struggle.

This Leninist understanding is all the more critical for South Africa, where class exploitation has always been integrally bound up with the national oppression of the non-white masses. In the mid 1930s, Leon Trotsky wrote to his followers in South Africa that in the event of a proletarian revolution there:

“But it is entirely obvious that the predominant majority of the population, liberated from slavish dependence, will put a certain imprint on the state.

“Insofar as a victorious revolution will radically change not only the relation between classes, but also between races, and will assure to the blacks that place in the state which corresponds to their numbers, insofar will social revolution in South Africa also have a national character.”

Our perspective for a black-centred workers government flows from this understanding of the class content of the struggle for the emancipation of the black majority. History shows that the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist leaders of struggles for national liberation, once in power, become the agents of the same imperialist overlords, oppressing their “own” people. The “national liberation” rulers killed Marikana workers to protect the profits of Lonmin, which is based in London, capital city of the British former colonial masters of South Africa.

To answer the crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality plaguing this country, which no capitalist regime can solve, we turn to Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Programme, founding programme of the Fourth International. The programme puts forward transitional demands that provide a bridge from workers’ current struggles and consciousness to the fight for workers power. These include the demand for a sliding scale of wages, which means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in prices of consumer goods. This is a burning issue in South Africa, where, in addition to skyrocketing food and fuel prices, the masses are faced with the Eskom electrical company’s demand for annual 16 percent tariff hikes until the year 2018, as well as the threatened imposition of “e-tolling” on the highways.

To address unemployment, the trade unions should fight for a sliding scale of working hours, i.e., the division of work amongst available labour without the loss of pay. This would help to bind together the working class and the unemployed masses, who in South Africa are maintained mainly by workers who themselves make only starvation wages. The crying need for a massive public works programme—building affordable houses for the millions who need them, hospitals, schools, roads, etc.—would provide the jobs that apologists for the ANC-led regime say are nowhere to be found.

All these demands point to the need for a black-centred workers government that would expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class. With mining and banking dominated by finance capital based in London and New York, the fight for socialist revolution in South Africa is completely bound up with the struggle for workers power in the imperialist centres. Under a revolutionary leadership, workers who see the failure of capitalism to meet even the most basic human wants will be won to the understanding that the bourgeois order and its system of production for profit must be overthrown and replaced with a collectivised economy, where production is based on social need. This is the perspective of Spartacist/South Africa. Those who want to play a role in the emancipation of the workers and toilers should examine the revolutionary programme of the International Communist League.

In Honor of International Women’s Day

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

In Honor of International Women’s Day

(Quote of the Week)

In a pioneering Marxist study, August Bebel, a founding leader of the German Social Democratic Party, explained that women’s emancipation required their full integration into economic and social life. This will be possible only in a socialist society based on material abundance and scientific technique, as the household tasks of the family are carried out by social institutions and the role of women will no longer be defined primarily as breeders of the next generation.

One factor is of leading importance in the question of population in the future—the higher, freer position which all women will then occupy. Leaving exceptions aside, intelligent and energetic women are not as a rule inclined to give life to a large number of children as “the gift of God,” and to spend the best years of their own lives in pregnancy, or with a child at their breasts. This disinclination for numerous children, which even now is entertained by most women, may—all the solicitude notwithstanding that a Socialist society will bestow upon pregnant women and mothers—be rather strengthened than weakened. In our opinion, there lies in this the great probability that the increase of population will proceed slower than in bourgeois society....

In Socialist society, where alone mankind will be truly free and planted on its natural basis, it will direct its own development knowingly along the line of natural law. In all epochs hitherto, society handled the questions of production and distribution, as well as of the increase of population without the knowledge of the laws that underlie them,—hence, unconsciously. In the new social order, equipped with the knowledge of the laws of its own development, society will proceed consciously and planfully.

SOCIALISM IS SCIENCE, APPLIED WITH FULL UNDERSTANDING TO ALL THE FIELDS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY.

—August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism (1879)

U.S. Health Care and the Elderly: Capitalist Cruelty

Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

Working Families Foot the Bill

U.S. Health Care and the Elderly: Capitalist Cruelty

The squabbling by the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans over how to implement spending cuts—including the recent “sequestration” of funds for everything from the Pentagon to national parks—has dominated headlines. While Social Security and Medicaid were exempted from this round of cuts, there can be no doubt that these programs are in the sights of both the Democrats and Republicans. Barack Obama’s health care “reform” of three years ago slashed Medicare payments by over $700 billion, and in the recent deficit negotiations the president reportedly pushed for further cuts of $400 billion to Medicare and other social programs. Both capitalist parties at bottom agree that the budget ax must fall primarily on society’s most vulnerable: the aged, the poor, the disabled and the chronically ill.

Obama has repeatedly proposed cutting $100 billion from Medicaid—the federal assistance program for the poor—which has become the main source of aid for the long-term care of the elderly and disabled. With encouragement from the White House, both Democratic- and Republican-controlled statehouses have been massively rolling back Medicaid benefits, eliminating coverage for many medical conditions and striking tens of thousands of people from the states’ rolls. To cap spending on long-term care, 26 states—among them New York, California and Illinois—have petitioned Washington for approval to turn millions of Medicaid recipients over to private “managed-care organizations.” Those outfits would be paid a fixed sum for providing a lifetime of (grossly inadequate) care.

These and future cuts in social programs will add enormously to the already crushing burden on families as they try to cope with providing care for aging parents or disabled family members. The Elder Care Study (2010) by the non-profit Families and Work Institute found that during the five years preceding the study, fully 40 percent of the country’s workforce had provided elder care to family members. On average, such care represents the equivalent of a part-time job and typically lasts for over four years. Although family caregivers often perform medical tasks such as administering IVs and injections, caring for wounds and operating dialysis or other specialized equipment, they normally receive no help from anyone except other relatives—no home visits by nurses, medical assistants or other health care professionals.

The percentage of adults providing personal care and/or financial assistance to an aged parent has more than tripled over the past 15 years, reflecting the rapid increase in the country’s elderly population. According to the 2010 census, the number of those 85 years and older increased by 30 percent during the previous decade. Many studies have documented the dramatic toll that the stress and anxiety of caring for aging parents takes on adult children’s health, from higher mortality risks and rates of hospitalization to greater incidence of chronic disease.

Overall, two-thirds of caregivers are women. As they marry and give birth at an increasingly later age, more are becoming part of the “sandwich generation”—adults who are responsible for the care of both young children and elderly parents at the same time. Today, nearly 40 percent of women caring for elderly relatives are still raising children of their own, with many of those women also holding down a full-time job. In this capitalist class society, the enormous costs of providing elder care, which should be borne by society as a whole, fall on individual working-class and poor families and, above all, women.

For Free, Quality Health Care for All!

A 2007 study, Family Caregivers: What They Spend, What They Sacrifice, by hospice provider Evercare estimated that caregivers incurred out-of-pocket expenses averaging over $5,500 per year. Low-income families in particular can scarcely hope to recover from such costs. The study noted: “The lowest income family caregivers have the highest burden of care in terms of both the number of hours they spend helping their family member and in their actual proportion of income spent on care.”

In fully one-third of working families faced with the demands of elder care, one or both parents are forced to reduce the number of hours worked—or to quit working entirely—thus deepening their financial distress. The impact on caregivers leaving the workforce is devastating, as it means not only lost wages but also diminished Social Security benefits for their retirement years. Various studies have estimated the average lifetime financial loss to be from $300,000 to over $650,000. A downward spiral is unfolding: As the current generation of caregivers forego opportunities to save for retirement, they increase the financial burden that they likely will impose one day upon their own children.

The total monetary value of unpaid work that family members perform in caring for the elderly far exceeds the amount that the U.S. spends on home health care and nursing home care. In short, the responsibility for caring for the country’s aging population is overwhelmingly borne by working people. If families are unable to provide that care, then the aged have no choice but to just hurry up and die!

That cruel calculus makes perfect sense in terms of the functioning of the capitalist system. For the owners of banks and industry, government spending on caring for the aged is an unnecessary overhead expense that ultimately lowers the overall profit rate. As Karl Marx explained, profits derive from the exploitation of labor: Workers, who have to sell their labor power to survive, add value to what they produce, but they only get paid a sum that allows them to continue to toil and to raise a new generation of workers. The difference between the value added by the workers and what they actually get paid ends up in the capitalists’ pockets in the form of surplus value. However, the aged and infirm do not labor and therefore do not generate surplus value. In the interest of maximizing profits, the engine that powers the capitalist system, public spending on the aged and disabled should logically be cut to the bone.

Those welfare programs that exist have been achieved as a result of mass social struggles. In 1934, the year before the passage of the Social Security Act, there were three victorious citywide organizing strikes: one led by Communists in San Francisco, the Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamsters strikes and a general strike led by left-wing socialists in Toledo. In fact, Social Security and other New Deal programs were part of an effort by the bourgeoisie to head off growing leftist political radicalization and the burgeoning labor struggles in the 1930s. Medicare as well as Medicaid and other “war on poverty” programs were enacted to buy social peace during the turbulent 1960s, a period marked by the civil rights upsurge and the Vietnam antiwar movement.

In the U.S., every president since Ronald Reagan has trimmed spending on Medicare, the federal health insurance program for those aged 65 and older as well as younger people with disabilities. The slashing of the social safety net—given added impetus by the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92—has been accompanied by a vicious anti-union offensive. The dearth of strikes in recent decades has helped pave the way for the exploiters to butcher health care, pensions and other union gains with impunity. Free, quality medical care is today a burning need for the mass of the population. The labor movement would galvanize broad support if it were to take up this fight as part of a struggle for jobs and decent pensions for all.

To wage such battles poses the need to oust the pro-capitalist trade-union leaders, who peddle the lie that the workers have interests in common with their exploiters. They must be replaced with new leaders based on a program of class struggle in opposition to the capitalist class enemy and its political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. The two parties play a time-honored game of “hard cop, soft cop” in which the Republicans demand draconian cuts in social programs and the Democrats posture as friends of working people while implementing much the same austerity agenda as the Republicans. The working class needs its own party: a workers party that fights for a workers government, which would expropriate the productive wealth of the capitalist class and build and develop a planned economy.

Discarding Those They Cannot Exploit

The responsibility of caring for the older generation in this country has always fallen primarily on younger family members. In the overwhelmingly rural America of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when extended families tended to live in close proximity and women did not work outside the home, kinship networks were in some ways better equipped than today’s families to handle such care. In addition, elder care then was typically less onerous. Before the development of antibiotics in the mid 20th century, the aged often died precipitately of infectious diseases rather than suffering for extended periods with debilitating or chronic illness as is now common.

Urban and industrial growth increasingly undermined the ability of families to care for the elderly, not least because urban families were smaller than rural ones. Yet even as families were finding it more difficult to cope with elder care, the ruling class had not the slightest intention of taking on that role. Throughout the 19th century, state and local governments maintained some bare-bones assistance (termed “outdoor relief”) for the impoverished in the interest of social stability. As one historian explained, “The poor were seen as a threat to civil order, and those in a position of authority sought an effective way of relieving (and calming) them” (Thomas Streissguth, Welfare and Welfare Reform [2009]).

Except for the favored few who received some financial assistance, the policy for those elderly who had no family to provide support was so-called “indoor relief”: They were simply locked up in poorhouses. These dreadful institutions were direct descendants of the English workhouses that had existed since the 16th century essentially to punish the poor for their lamentable state. Far from seeking to ameliorate the condition of the infirm and disabled, the purpose of institutionalizing them was to isolate them and remove them from view. The American bourgeoisie of the 19th and early 20th centuries subjected the most needy of the elderly population to inhuman, prison-like conditions: overcrowded cells swarming with vermin, noxious air that was often barely breathable, rampant disease.

By the mid 19th century, scores of Protestant evangelical and other reform societies had set up charities to enable those who could become productive members of society (and lead virtuous Christian lives) to escape the corrupt influence of the poorhouse. Often, the aged—who, it was assumed, could no longer be productive—were specifically excluded from these uplifting endeavors. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor piously resolved “to give no aid to persons who, from infirmity, imbecility, old age, or any other cause, are likely to continue unable to earn their own support” (quoted in Carole Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past [1983]).

By the late 19th century, sectors of the poorhouse population were increasingly transferred to newly created, specialized institutions—orphans to orphanages, the insane to insane asylums and the homeless to flophouses. The poorhouses were essentially transformed into “homes for the aged and infirm,” as many began calling themselves. By the early 1920s, more than 70 percent of the country’s poorhouse inmates were over the age of 55, and most were seriously disabled.

With the passage of the Social Security Act, the bourgeoisie seized the opportunity to do away with the poorhouses, the Dickensian horrors of which had become a national embarrassment. No less important to the Franklin Roosevelt administration was the argument that a system of small pensions would be a cheaper way of providing minimal elder care than maintaining the poorhouses, which were swarming with victims of the Great Depression. Thus, the law prohibited Social Security payments to the elderly inmates of public institutions. Almost overnight, a new industry was born as the direct legacy of the poorhouses: privately owned, for-profit nursing homes.

The Nursing Home Pestilence

Providing professional care for elderly people in this country is big business, and it will become even bigger with the baby-boomer generation entering retirement age. At the center of that business are for-profit nursing homes, often run by giant corporations. As is true of all capitalist enterprises, nursing homes must drive down expenses in the pursuit of profits. Many nursing homes avoid admitting elderly patients who are afflicted with dementia or other chronic diseases—precisely those who need care the most—due to the high cost of looking after them.

Likewise, nursing homes minimize the number of registered nurses employed, almost never hire on-staff doctors and pay the direct-care staff (almost always non-unionized) a wage they could earn at McDonald’s. Often, even in the better nursing homes, there is not enough staff to ensure that residents are properly fed. What they do not stint on are tranquilizers and other drugs that allow them to cut corners in attending to residents. As one academic researcher told the New York Times (23 September 2007), nursing home chains “have made a lot of money by cutting nurses, but it’s at the cost of human lives.”

This also exacts a toll on the remaining nurses and other staff. Nursing homes are stress-filled, physically demanding workplaces where non-fatal injury rates are greater than in the construction, meatpacking and mining industries. Inadequate training and equipment, higher patient loads and mandatory overtime feed the problem. Nursing home workers, who are predominantly women, need to be organized into the trade unions that represent nurses and other health care workers. Backed by the industrial unions, whose role in production gives them far greater potential social power, this fight must be part of a broader campaign to organize all the unorganized, a struggle that is crucial to reversing the decades of attacks on labor.

With employers taking aim at wages, benefits and working conditions, unionized nursing home workers have engaged in several strikes in recent years. One involving 600 workers at five Connecticut nursing homes operated by HealthBridge began last summer after the bosses froze pensions and imposed other takebacks. The company responded to the strike with naked union-busting: Scabs were brought in as permanent replacements and a RICO lawsuit was filed claiming that the activities of the union, which is affiliated with the SEIU 1199 service workers, amounted to “a shake-down by a lawless enterprise.” On March 3, union members returned to the job, three months after a federal judge ordered management to take them back under the terms of their existing contract. Following in the footsteps of many other businesses attempting to void labor contracts, the five HealthBridge nursing homes have filed for bankruptcy.

The struggle for decent wages and working conditions is directly linked to the quality of care. For decades, Congressional committees, journalists and academic researchers have documented the indifference, abuse and outright cruelty of the nursing-home owners toward residents. As a result, the industry is one of the most regulated in the country. Yet nursing homes that provide low-quality care or mistreat their residents face no real consequences because Congress is not about to appropriate the funds for the necessary inspections or to pursue sanctions against those that are non-compliant. Families that try to bring wrongful death lawsuits in egregious cases of neglect are often stymied by a complex web of corporate ownership put in place to shield nursing-home operators from legal responsibility.

Even a generation ago, when defined-benefit pension plans were included in many union contracts, the exorbitant cost of quality nursing homes put them largely out of reach of the working class. Nationally, the average cost of a semi-private (shared) room in a nursing home is today almost $75,000 per year—in New York, it is over $120,000. The elderly will typically soon exhaust their life savings paying for care and, once they are indigent, apply for meager government assistance under Medicaid.

As is true throughout the U.S. health care system, there is a two-class system of nursing homes in which the well-to-do get near-adequate (sometimes even high-quality) care while everyone else receives outrageously dreadful treatment. Many nursing homes will only accept residents who can afford to pay the cost and shun those who are on Medicaid, which typically pays about 30 percent less than what residents would pay out-of-pocket for the same care.

Low-budget nursing homes that cater to impoverished Medicaid recipients, especially those located in poor black and Hispanic communities, are often simply foul-smelling hellholes. According to a 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, at least one in six nursing homes provides such poor care that residents are at risk of physical harm. Such conditions often persist despite the best efforts of health care workers, who seek to provide quality care in defiance of the rapacious nursing-home bosses. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, it was the staff, often putting in 36-hour shifts, that carried out the emergency evacuations of dozens of stricken New York City nursing homes. There was no good reason why people could not have been evacuated in an orderly fashion before the storm hit. It was penny-pinching by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that left the elderly in harm’s way.

Under capitalism, nursing homes hardly even begin to address the social need for elder care. Only about one person in eight aged 85 or over is placed in a nursing home. Of course, many prefer staying with their families, especially with what is on offer at most old-age facilities. The whole setup is focused on profiteering. By raking in about $160 billion per year while holding down costs, private nursing homes have been quite successful in maximizing their shareholders’ return on investment. This industry provides an object lesson in how the capitalist system is incompatible with satisfying basic human needs.

For Socialized Elder Care!

In the early 19th century, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier observed that the status of women serves as a hallmark of overall emancipation in any society. A not-unrelated hallmark is how society treats its elderly and disabled. The prize-winning 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama depicts a primitive 19th-century Japanese village so impoverished that the elderly were expected to die voluntarily so that a new generation could survive. Amid brutal images of near-starvation, the film contrasts the dignity of the protagonist’s ascent of Mt. Narayama to die there of exposure.

In capitalist America, that contrast is cruelly inverted. Modern industrial society is fully capable of providing quality health care for all, including for the aged, disabled and chronically ill. Yet the bourgeoisie’s treatment of the elderly population denies many—especially working people, minorities and the poor—even basic human dignity. In a study published last October, Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, the AARP and the non-profit United Hospital Fund offered “recommendations for action” that are premised on younger family members’ responsibility for long-term care of the elderly. The study simply lists various ways that “family caregivers” could be provided with additional “training and support.” And no politicians in Washington are offering anything remotely resembling an improvement in the conditions of the elderly.

We have written extensively about the Marxist program of replacing the institution of the family—the main source of women’s oppression under capitalism—with socialized childcare and housework. In “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006), we described how V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, after leading the working class to power in Russia in 1917, sought to free women from the drudgery of housework by setting up communal childcare facilities, dining halls and laundries, as well as by introducing paid maternity leave and free health care. Such measures represent the concrete expression of our slogan: For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

Socialized elder care, like socialized childcare, would represent a significant step toward replacing the institution of the family. Yet elder care is fundamentally different from childcare in that it addresses a process of increasing, not decreasing, dependence. That calls for flexible institutional solutions corresponding to the successive stages of decline in old age. Different levels of group care for the aged, requiring increasing levels of medical supervision, would be necessary, from assisted living and nursing facilities to long-term hospitalization.

The aged in today’s society overwhelmingly wish to remain in their homes as long as possible. A workers state would establish communal facilities attractive to the aged who require care. The needs of the aged who remain attached to their homes could, through state support, be largely met in the same way as for the rich today: by bringing nursing services into their homes on a daily basis. A wide-ranging effort would be undertaken to provide housing, transportation, custodial care and the many other needs of older people that working families today attempt to meet.

We Marxists are for socialized medicine—the expropriation of the pharmaceutical, health care and insurance companies, including the parasitic private nursing home industry—as part of the fight for a workers government. To this end, a workers party is needed to lead the proletariat in the fight to overturn the capitalist order through socialist revolution, ushering in a society based on production for need, not for profit. A rational, internationally planned economy would lay the basis for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society. Based on material abundance, the future communist society would adopt the rule, as Karl Marx declared in his 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”