***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – They Shoot Blackmailers, Partner  

 

 

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out).

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

A lot of times guys, hard guys with fast-trigger fingers, or an itch for the high life fall off the edge, fall into places where they never should have fallen. Take our slumming streets of Los Angeles private eye Stubs Lane’s client, let's call him Lance Landry, in this short story about blackmailers (although I would not bet money, bet six-two and even money, that pressed, hard-pressed blackmailers would not be above putting a pair of slugs in anybody who got in their way if necessary). Lance, a hard guy, a former hard guy anyway from back East who went West for the sun, easy pickings, and golden pay- dirt, had an old flame thing, and maybe not so old flame, for Rita Farr. Yes, Rita Farr the exotic and erotic latest 1940s screen siren who made all the boys flutter and the girls shutter (that the boys are fluttering of course, and not over them) was working on another picture to enrich Paine Productions. Paine Productions which had a great deal at stake in the reputation of one Rita Farr.

That is where the maybe not so old flame with Lance came in. See the studio put the big nix sign on Rita and Lance being together. It seemed then (and maybe now too) that movie stars, high profile sex goddess movie stars and rough -edged gangsters were a lethal audience mix. So Lance was out. Except somebody, okay, a blackmailer, had the photos and letters that showed for all the world to see that Lance was still carrying the torch, had still seen Rita after the studio nix.

Enter our man Stubs whom Lance had hired to keep an eye on Rita, keep the riffraff and grifter of the world away from her. Stubs, not always able to be choosy about whom he worked for, and in any case was friends, or at least on speaking terms with more than one outlaw as part of his chosen work, including Lance, took the job, took it seriously too.

 

The problem was that no sooner had Philip been employed than Rita was kidnapped by her driver, kidnapped at the behest of a party (or parties) unknown. As we all know that falling down on the job would make a tough gumshoe like Stubs see red, seek to right thing up quickly, in short, to deliver the ransom and create hell for the kidnappers. And so he did, taking guff from the studio boss, from Lance, from the party unknown, including a few fists flying and bullets whistling by along the way.

But some rough justice wins out in the end. It seems that one of Lance's old partners in crime, as will happen in any enterprise, did not like being shut out of the golden pay- dirt and was seeking revenge for that slight. In the end he went down, the actual kidnapper went down, and even Lance went down in order to save Rita when things got dicey at exchange time. And Rita? Well Rita after taking a run for the satin sheets at Stubs in gratitude (so he said) who was not buying, possibly fearing an affair with Rita might come with a bullet not far behind, went off to marry the studio boss. Jesus.

 

 

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 … he had to laugh, laugh out loud although the deathly rattling of the freight car that he was just then riding, riding as a non-paying customer, would drown that laughter from any ears, if there were any ears open among his fellow “passengers” strewn about the bare wooded floor of their “room.” The reason for his witless fit of laughter was the knowledge that last year, the year of our Lord 1933, he had had money, plenty of money, for a Pullman sleeper to ride west in. And had done just exactly that on one business trip (and spent plenty, treating rounds too at the dining car bar).

Now here he was a little more than a year later, all credit used up, all checks bounced, all flophouses fled without room -rent payment, all Sally soup-lines unwelcomed to him. All job opportunities lost to him since the world was filled, no, over-filled, with ex-stockbrokers, take a number, brother, all sweethearts moved on to the next still employed stockbroker and he heading west, ever west on the floor of this damn freight train. As he rolled up a vagrant newspaper to serve as a make-shift pillow for his tired head he held to a glimmer of hope that his luck would change once he hit the Pacific, or whatever west he was destined for. Held too to that notion that maybe next year he could join the Mayfair swells, the businessmen, and just plain tourists on one of those comfortable Pullman sleepers…           

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Trotsky And The POUM

...There is no question that in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s the prime driving force was the working class of Catalonia, and within that province its capital, Barcelona, was the key hot-bed for revolutionary action. The role of Barcelona thus is somewhat analogous to that of Petrograd (later Leningrad) in the Russian revolution of 1917 and deserves special attention from those of us later revolutionaries trying to draw the lessons of the hard-bitten defeat of the Spanish revolution. All the parties of the left (Socialist Party, Communist Party, left bourgeois radicals, Catalan nationalists, Anarchists, various ostensible Trotskyists, the POUM, and non-party trade unionists) had militants there, and had myriad associated social and political organizations that drove the revolution forward in the early days before the working class surrendered its hard-fought gains to the bourgeoisie or in Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky’s memorable phrase, “the shadow of the bourgeoisie.”

That said, the May Days in Barcelona take added importance for those of us who believe that in the ebb and flow of revolution that the actions taken there by the various parties, or more pertinently, those actions not taken by some, particularly the POUM (and left-anarchists) sealed the fate of the revolution and the struggle against Franco. A description of the flow of the events, a fairly correct description of the events if not of the political conclusions to be drawn, in those days by a militant who was there, Hugo Oehler, is an important aid in understanding what went wrong.

Note: Hugo Oehler was noting but a pain in the butt for Jim Cannon and others in the United States who were trying to coalesce a Trotskyist party that might be able to affect events that were rapidly unrolling here in the heart of the Great Depression. Nevertheless Cannon praised Oehler as a very good and honest mass worker. That meant a lot coming from Cannon. One does not have to accept Oehler’s political conclusions to appreciate this document. Moreover, his point about trying to link up with the Friends of Durritti is an important point that every militant in Barcelona should have been pursuing to break the masses of anarchist workers from the CNT-FAI. Time ran out before these links could be made decisive. But that is a commentary for another day. Read this (and Orwell and Souchy as well) to get a flavor of what was missed in those May days.

additional Note On The POUM Program

The editorial comment above the programmatic points makes the correct criticisms of the "omissions" in the POUM program. I would add that another problem is the issues that are not raised, especially on the specific question of the right to national self-determination on the Spanish peninsula (and not just the question of a socialist federation of nations which is raised) and the very thorny and devastating one the colonial question, particularly on Spanish Morocco where Franco recruited heavily for his side.

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible. 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Trotsky and the POUM

From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

Despite Trotsky’s trenchant criticism of the political parties in the workers’ camp in Spain there were few people in Spain who were listening to him. A Spanish section of the International Left Opposition had been formed by Andres Nin after his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 1927. For two and a half years – from September 1930 to February 1933 – Trotsky corresponded with Nin who was virtually alone in Barcelona. Relations with other supporters in Madrid were slight, a fact which already revealed a chronic provincialism (an adaptation to Catalan nationalism) in Nin’s political make-up.

During these years Nin oriented himself almost exclusively to the Catalan Federation which was a split from the PCE. It was led by Joaquim Maurin who was a right-centrist who only objected to the ultra-leftist excesses of Stalinism. Nin refused to criticise Maurin openly and refused to build a left opposition faction within Maurin’s group. Indeed, Nin went further in his opportunism and even helped to write the Federation’s documents and edit its paper.

Trotsky’s political ties with Nin were effectively broken in 1933 although Nin did not publicly break with Trotsky until 1935 when he joined forces with Maurin to form the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In the intervening period Trotsky upbraided Nin for failing to enter the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Party) and its union (UGT) whose rank and file were undergoing massive radicalisation in 1934 and 1935.

Despite these failings Trotsky recognised that the POUM, small as it was, organised some of the best vanguard elements in the Catalan working class. (Its influence outside this region was negligible.) It was a lone voice in Spain in unmasking the crimes of the Stalinists in the Moscow Trials. Also during 1935 the POUM developed the best formal criticisms of the Popular Front and the Second Republic in the pages of its paper La Batalla. Its leftism earned it the hostility of even the CNT and UGT leaders who sought to exclude POUMists from their unions.

The POUM was small. Before the Civil War estimates of its size vary from 3000 to 8000. Like most of the left groups it grew during the Civil War and by September 1936, it was about 30 000 strong, with l0 000 in its own militia. Yet much more than to contribute to its numerical growth, the Popular Front government and the Civil War cruelly exposed the centrist politics of the POUM leaders. Capable of left criticisms, the POUM consistently refused to carry through a break with the leaders of the CNT and UGT. Fearful above all of ‘isolation’ from these leaders they diplomatically refused to be critical of their practice. Worse still, they acted as a ‘loyal opposition’ in the Popular Front, often arguing against the PCE’s proposals but accepting to abide by them and even taking responsibility for them when they were defeated.

It is for this reason that Trotsky ruthlessly called the POUM ‘the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party’. Unlike Stalinism, which refused for a second to adapt to the revolutionary impulses of the masses after July 1936 and instead derailed and destroyed all radical initiatives, the POUM wanted revolution, proclaimed its necessity and even on occasion proposed correct tactics. However, it did this alongside covering-up the weaknesses and betrayals of the anarchist, socialist and even Stalinist leaders. For one whole year La Batalla refused to criticise the CNT leadership!

The best example of the POUM’s centrism was to be found in its attitude to the Popular Front itself. Before the February 1936 elections the POUM campaigned against any coalition with the republican bourgeoisie. Then, on the very eve of the elections, they actually entered the Popular Front – only to renounce it again when the elections were over. However, Nin’s criticism of the Popular Front after February was not that it tied the workers’ organisations to the programme of the bourgeoisie but that it was not genuinely a Popular Front. La Batalla of 17 July 1936 on the eve of the Civil War, called for ‘an authentic government of the Popular Front, with the direct participation of the Socialist and Communist parties’.

Yet, when the Civil War erupted and the initiative was with the masses, the POUM shifted direction sharply and gave voice to the demands of the socialist revolution. In those early weeks the POUM exercised the leadership in the Lerida revolutionary committee. It was the only committee in Catalonia to refuse to have a representative of the republican bourgeoisie on it.

But even here the POUM stopped halfway. It could and should have used its revolutionary influence in towns like Lerida and Gerona to agitate for the formation of district and provincial Soviet-type bodies which would have developed into a decisive challenge to the authority of the Generalidad.

Not only did they refuse this road but Nin went out of his way to explain at great length that Soviet-type bodies were unnecessary and ‘alien’ to Spain. This unforgivable rationalisation for the prejudices and libertarian localism of the anarcho-syndicalist masses was typical of the POUM. Instead of ‘saying what is’, the POUM tried at every turn of events to minimise the differences and above all to conciliate with the leaders of the CNT.

Nin was to get his wish for a ‘genuine’ Popular Front in September 1936. Up until 7 September La Batalla denounced ‘bourgeois ministers’, unlike the PCE which heaped praise upon them. But once the Caballero cabinet was formed (ie, the PSOE leader and the leftist face of the bourgeoisie) in Madrid and the offer was made to the POUM of a seat in the provincial government in Catalonia, all this ceased.

In its place Nin assured the readers of La Batalla that a revolutionary orientation was ‘assured’ whenever there was a majority of ‘socialists’ in the government. Nin went so far as to define the dictatorship of the proletariat as a united front of workers’ parties and trade union leaders who assume governmental power! Nin ‘forgot’ the little matter of the democratic control and accountability of the mass of workers and poor peasants!

Once the POUM took its seat in the Catalan government it also took responsibility for the measures of the government. Of course, the POUM proposed radical measures to its Stalinist and bourgeois allies: an industrial and credit bank; no compensation to factory owners, etc. But these were rejected and the POUM remained respectfully silent. Worse, when the government proposed that there should be a government agent in each factory, or that there should be no further elections of factory councils for two years, the POUM agreed.

Worse even than that – indeed criminal – was Nin’s readiness to accompany President Companys on a tour of Lerida to convince the workers that the powers of the revolutionary committees should be dissolved. Nin argued:

These revolutionary committees, whether Popular Executive Committees, or Committees of Public Safety, represent only part of the workers’ organisations, or else represent them in incorrect proportions ... Obviously, the suppression of their revolutionary initiative is to be regretted, but one must recognise the need to codify ... the various municipal organisations, as much with the aim of replacing them uniformly as of setting them under the authority of the new General Council.

After having performed these valuable services for the bourgeoisie, on 16 December 1936 Nin was kicked out of the government. The POUM’s usefulness was at an end. Trotsky commented:

In the heat of the revolutionary war between classes Nin entered a bourgeois government whose goal it was to destroy the workers’ committees, the foundation of proletarian government. When this goal was reached, Nin was driven out of the bourgeois government.
 

Postscript

Despite the record of Trotsky’s criticism of the POUM it is sad to reflect that the British Trotskyists grouped around Reg Groves, the Marxist League, and their paper the Red Flag tended to obscure these criticisms and parade the POUM as a revolutionary organisation. The September 1936 Red Flag argued that ‘upon the rapid evolution of POUM into a Bolshevik Party depends the fate of the Spanish Revolution’. This does not reflect Trotsky’s own view of the POUM at the time. The Bolshevik-Leninists of Spain were only formed in the spring of l937 but they were formed in opposition to the POUM.

Keith Hassell

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

… he nothing but a kid, nothing but a bog Irish kid fretting away his time, his after school time, was hungry. No, not food hungry although that happened often enough when his father was out of work like a million other fathers in the reared-back Depression night, but hungry for some new sounds, new musical sound that he kept hearing every time he passed Riley’s Market, Riley’s who to draw a crowd had placed a jukebox in the place to lure and lull the patrons. But since he had no money, no nickels to play such an entertainment, he would just linger for a moment and then pass on.

 

And that hunger was not abated until one day he went over to his grandparents’ house and mentioned something to grandmother who was alone in the house at the time about those sounds he heard at Riley’s. His grandmother summoned him to go to her china closet and bring out the radio, a beautiful old Emerson in perfect working order as far as he could tell, hidden there behind a stack of dishes.

See his grandfather an old Puritan, if as bog Irish as he and the whole blessed family, refused to have what he called the devil’s music, that n----r music in the house. After he brought the radio to his grandmother she told him to turn it on and what he heard that afternoon, and many afternoons after that when his grandfather was not present, was out of heaven, some music all sultry and bluesy (although he would not have known then to call it that, call what ailed him the blues either), especially one voice, one voice that spoke of all the anguish and sorrow of the world, spoke through the subtle pauses between the notes of her own personal sorrows, and sang his blues away for a time. He did not learn until much later that she was a Negro, and that the distance between her negritude and his own bog-Irishness, was very short, very short indeed...    

***As Our 50^th Anniversary Year Approaches… “Forever Young” (Magical Realism 101)

 

…an old man bundled up against the December weathers begins to run, no, better, jog/shuffle along the Causeway end of Wollaston Beach (by the CVS, formerly the First National, if you have not been in the old town in a while), huffing and puffing, head down and this day full of thoughts triggered by his up-coming 50^th anniversary high school class reunion. Thinking just then of the irony of running along a section of his old high school cross-country course, and as he moved along, of those mist of times Wollaston Beach days when he longingly looked out at the sea as if it could solve some riddle of existence. Thinking too, as he struggled along, of times when he was young and flexible and if not fast then able to run the distance in about half the time it would take him this day (his fast running friend back then, Bill Cadger, said he had the “slows,” well okay he had had a point).

As he settled into a pace he began thinking about places he had hung around back in the day, places like Harry’s Variety over on Sagamore trying to cadge pin-ball games from the rough and tumble corner boys; hanging  out at Balducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” begging girls to play some latest song on the jukebox; and, hanging out on sweaty summer nights on the front steps of North, no money in pocket, with that same Bill Cadger, also penniless, speaking of dreams, small dreams of escape and big puffed-ball cloud dreams of success.

Moving along he remembered, an old man’s harmless flash remembering, standing in corridors between classes day-dreaming of, well, you know, certain now nameless girls and of giving furtive glances to a few which they totally ignored. And remembrances too of sitting in classes, some dank seventh period study hall, wondering about what would happen Friday night when he and his corner boys cruised Wollaston Beach (HoJo’s a must stop on hot summer nights, make his cherry vanilla), the Southern Artery (Marley’s,  Pisa’s Tower of Pizza, Adventure Car-Hop, not the real names but memory failed him), and in a pinch going “up the Downs” to Doc’s Drugstore on Billing’s Road, looking, looking for adventure, looking for some magic formula to wipe away the teen angst and alienation blues that crept up on him more than was good for him.                  

An old woman (Jesus, better not say that, make that a mature woman) also bundled up against the December weathers, begins to walk, haltingly, but with head up (proper posture just like her mother taught her long ago), along Wollaston Beach from the Adams Shore end (around what is now Cady Park, named after some long ago fallen Marine). She was drawn to the beach this day after thinking that it had been almost 50 years since her high school graduation and she needed to reflect on that. Thinking thoughts about this beach and about old flames met here and what had happened to them (and creeping into her memory that first kiss sitting in the back seat of her girlfriend’s boyfriend’s car, what was his name, with him, some old flame now un-nameable as well, and about, she blushed as she thought of it, that first French kiss and how she felt awkward about it).

Later in her walk thoughts, funny thoughts, emerged about all the lies she told about those same steamy weekend nights just to keep up with the other girls at talkfest time (not knowing until much later that they too were lying just to keep up with her). And of all the committees she had been on; dance committee, North Star, Manet, whatever would keep her busy and make her a social butterfly.

Then a mishmash of thoughts flooded her mind as she passed Kent Park near the now vanished bowling alleys. About the girls’ bowling team she belonged to wondering, now wondering, why they kept the boys’ team separate; of reading in that crusty old Thomas Crane Public Library “up the Square” where she first learned to love books and saw them as a way to make a success of herself, and had; and, of hot sweltering summer afternoons with the girls down at the beach trying to look, what did Harry call it, “beautiful” for the guys.                

Somewhere between the Squantum Yacht Club and the Wollaston Yacht Club the old man and the mature woman crossed paths. He, she, they gave a quick nod of generational solidarity to each other and both thought they knew the other from some place but couldn’t quite place where. After they passed each other the old man’s pace quickened for a moment as he heard some phantom starter’s gun sounding the last lap and the mature woman’s walk became less halting as she thought once again about that first kiss (whether it was the French kiss that stirred her we will leave to the reader’s imagination) as each reflected back to a time when the world was fresh and all those puffed-cloud dreams of youth loomed ahead of them.        

 

Forever Young-lyrics by Bob Dylan 

 

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

 

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

 

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

 Copyright © 1973 by Ram's Horn Music; renewed 2001 by Ram’s Horn Music

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee Workers Vanguard No. 1034

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.

The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.

The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”

We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).

Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.

Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.

Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)

The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.

At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.

The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.

Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.

The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.

The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.

Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”

In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:

“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”

— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)

The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.

Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.

The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

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.

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

WRITE LYNNE!

Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!

 

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

 

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

 

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

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Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthersin their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.

BOSTON FIRST NIGHT AGAINST THE WARS 2013-2014 EDUCATIONAL Come celebrate the close of 2013 with First Night Against All Wars! Join a growing coalition of people dedicated to ending all forms of oppression ! Noon until 6pm Tuesday, December 31, 2013... Facebook page First Night Against All Wars https://www.facebook.com/firstnightagainstallwars   Meeting first at 565 Boylston St. Community church of Boston and then walking on over to our set up location on the steps of the Boston Public Library (corner of Boylston & Dartmouth starting at Noon till six after the parade).   We'll have free hot chocolate and snacks for passersby who stop to pick up your literature. We're also going to have a bright sticker that has broad appeal and that everyone opposed to these wars can wear.   We're organizing an educational action that reaches the 100,000s of people who will be in Boston to celebrate First Night. We want to welcome them. We want to celebrate.   But we also want everyone to be fully conscious of the many wars: • Wall Street and Government's War on Us! •The wars on women. •The wars on people of color and immigrants. •The wars on working people.   •The wars in Africa and Middle East. •The war on the environment.   These are all connected!   Help make this happen!   To help with the planning and organizing, please call "Dan the Bagel Man", Daniel Kontoff, at 857-272-6743. Daniel.Kontoff@yahoo.com   Our second planning meeting will be on Monday, December 16 at 6:30 PM at the Community Church 565 Boylston Street Copley SquareSee More

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