Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings by many newly radicalized militants about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Friday, April 13, 2012
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now! -From The BBC-"The Radicalization Of Bradley Manning"- A Play
Click on the headline to link to a BBC entry on a play based on Bradley Manning's life.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/stand-with-accused-wikileaks-whistle-blower-bradley-manning-during-the-april-24-26-hearing
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We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq war timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
From the American Left History Blog, March 28, 2012
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Fort Meade Maryland On Wednesday April 25th At 8:00 AM - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
An injury to one is an injury to all, ANTI-IMPERIALISM, anti-militarism, frees all class-war prisoners, free Bradley manning, PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/stand-with-accused-wikileaks-whistle-blower-bradley-manning-during-the-april-24-26-hearing
************
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq war timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
From the American Left History Blog, March 28, 2012
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Fort Meade Maryland On Wednesday April 25th At 8:00 AM - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
An injury to one is an injury to all, ANTI-IMPERIALISM, anti-militarism, frees all class-war prisoners, free Bradley manning, PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-For International Labor Solidarity Action!-New Zealand: Auckland Port Bosses Wage War on Union Dock Workers
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
New Zealand: Auckland Port Bosses Wage War on Union Dock Workers
No Reliance on the Capitalist Courts!
For International Labor Solidarity Action!
The following article was written by the Spartacist League of Australia.
MARCH 26—For more than six months, Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) Local 13 has been engaged in a battle with the union-busting Ports of Auckland Limited (POAL), which is dead set on casualising the workforce on the docks of New Zealand’s largest container port. This showdown is part of an offensive by shipping bosses and capitalist governments worldwide to break dockers unions. Ripple effects from the outcome are sure to be felt all around this island nation, which is highly dependent on shipping, across the Tasman Sea in Australia and beyond. At stake is the very existence of MUNZ—historically one of the most powerful and militant unions in New Zealand, with a membership that includes a sizable number of Maori, the brutally oppressed indigenous population.
Auckland port bosses have decreed that if workers want to keep their jobs they must accept an end to regular shifts and concede complete flexibility in rostering (scheduling). In response to a raft of such ultimatums issued by POAL especially since the expiration of the Local 13 collective agreement in September, the union called a series of short strikes. Fed up with management’s intransigence, MUNZ workers downed tools on February 24 for three weeks and began to picket the port. Port traffic dried up to a trickle. On March 7, the port declared that 292 workers, including 235 striking MUNZ members, would be sacked and their jobs outsourced to three stevedoring companies. In response, unionists and others across the country and internationally—themselves suffering the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis—have rallied to the defence of the embattled MUNZ workers.
A March 10 rally in Auckland organised by MUNZ and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) drew thousands of dockworkers and their backers, including dockers from Lyttelton and Wellington, as well as nurses, firefighters and manufacturing workers. A contingent was fielded by the Meat Workers Union, which is itself fighting a union-busting drive by beef and lamb processor AFFCO. Joining the rally from overseas were a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) contingent, Australian Electrical Trades Union workers and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the U.S. Spartacist League of Australia supporters in attendance reported a palpable desire among workers at the demo and on the picket line to strike back against these anti-union attacks. In the middle of the rally, there was great applause after 50 Maori union militants spanning generations commenced a haka—a traditional war dance meant to overawe and terrify the foe.
Amid the outpouring of support for Local 13 wharfies (longshoremen), on March 21 POAL agreed to temporarily halt contracting out jobs for four weeks and resume negotiations with MUNZ. But this was a ruse. The very next day, as MUNZ members were preparing to return to work, a POAL statement declared that the port would continue to employ contract stevedores—i.e., scabs—for the next two weeks. POAL’s plan is to then indefinitely lock out the workforce with, in the words of POAL chairman Richard Pearson, the aim of “maintaining an existing right to move to a competitive stevedoring system.” This provocation was followed on March 23 by Pearson’s violence-baiting picketers for “intimidation and threats of physical violence” against the scabs who are doing his dirty work.
If the POAL bosses get their way, conditions at the Auckland port will match those at the notoriously hazardous, privately owned Port of Tauranga, a POAL rival located at Mount Maunganui on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Management at Tauranga has succeeded in fragmenting the workforce into competing units employed by several stevedoring companies. Two of these outfits set up company unions to better control workers and keep out MUNZ and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU). Workers at the different companies are played off against one another, driving down wages far below Auckland levels. Work is heavily casualised, with high turnover, and already dangerous working conditions are getting worse. In less than two years, three workers have been killed on the job. Workers say they hold back from reporting frequent accidents and injuries for fear of being blacklisted.
This union-busting assault can be turned back. The strength of the proletariat lies in its numbers, organisation, discipline and, above all, in the fact that through its labour it uniquely makes the wheels of profit turn in capitalist society. The union has found plenty of allies, both domestically and internationally. But union power has been kept in check by a Labour Party-loyal leadership whose overwhelming fealty is to New Zealand capitalism. POAL is owned by Auckland Council Investments Limited, the investment arm of the city council, which in turn is presided over by Labour Party mayor Len Brown.
A February 3 MUNZ and NZCTU “Port of Auckland Dispute Fact Sheet” declares that “union members are committed to the success of the company, and to building on the performance improvements already achieved.” Such class-collaborationist rot pushes the lie that there can be a partnership between the exploited and their exploiters. In negotiations, the union has agreed to givebacks amid the port’s drive for more “flexibility.” Even under the previous agreement, 20 percent of workers are casual, with no guarantee of work, while 27 percent can count on only 24 hours a week and the entire workforce can be rostered to work any shift, night and day, seven days a week. Predictably, POAL’s response to the givebacks and the grovelling has been to demand more of the same.
The situation cries out for a class-struggle fight, up to and including a national port strike. In response to the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes, there needs to be a struggle to organise the unorganised—beginning with Tauranga—and fight for uniform wages and conditions at the highest level on an industry-wide basis. Victory to the Auckland dockworkers!
No Reliance on the Capitalist Courts!
Dockworkers elsewhere in New Zealand have been eager to aid their class brothers and sisters in Auckland. Union workers at Wellington and RMTU members at Tauranga refused to handle ships loaded by scabs in Auckland until they were ordered to do so by New Zealand’s Employment Court. Similarly, port workers at Lyttelton announced that they would not service a scab-loaded ship. But while that ship was at sea, the court at Christchurch ruled that it must be worked as usual, and it was unloaded when it called. In each case, the union tops bowed to injunctions issued by the bosses’ courts. Meanwhile, MUNZ president Garry Parsloe has treacherously sown illusions in the very same Employment Court as a tool in the union’s fight against POAL.
Any reliance on the capitalist courts can only disarm and derail workers struggle. The courts, including the arbitration courts, and cops are core components of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the interests of the class enemy. Union struggles that get tied up in court die there.
One need look no further than what happened with the Australian MUA’s fight against the union-busting Patrick Stevedores outfit in 1998. With the backing of the Liberal/National Coalition government, Patrick sacked its entire unionised workforce, sparking a massive show of union power. We wrote at the time that a solid nationwide strike shutting down the ports was necessary (“Smash Bosses’ Union-Busting Offensive in Australia!” WV No. 689, 24 April 1998). But the union tops demobilised labour action, counterposing faith in the courts and the election of a Labor government. The Australian High Court eventually ruled against Patrick’s termination of the whole workforce. But this didn’t stop Patrick from getting rid of hundreds of MUA members and blacklisting others.
New Zealand Labour Party leader David Shearer joined the March 10 rally in Auckland, his posture as a friend of the wharfies made easier by the fact that Labour is currently in opposition. There should be no illusions that the Labour Party represents the workers’ class interests. Labour is a bourgeois workers party, based on trade unions but with a leadership every bit as committed to preserving production for private profit as the National Party, the Greens and other capitalist parties. When in power, Labour directly administers the government on behalf of the capitalist exploiters. Class-conscious workers will not forget the Lange Labour government and its Thatcher-like Finance Minister Roger Douglas, who in the 1980s carried out union-busting privatisations the length and breadth of the country, savagely destroying jobs and living conditions.
In Auckland, MUNZ leaders have repeatedly made appeals to Labour mayor Brown and turned to him to end the lockout, with Parsloe declaring, “Governance at the Ports of Auckland is out of control. It’s time for the mayor and council to step in and sack this board, and replace them with a group who are willing to run this important asset properly” (New Zealand Herald, 22 March). The role of the mayor and other Labour Party politicians is to subordinate workers to the capitalists and their state. As one sign carried at the March 10 MUNZ rally expressed: “Len Brown Is a Scab.”
However much the trade-union bureaucrats might pretend that “Ports of Auckland belongs to the people of Auckland and should remain a public asset that benefits all of us,” the reality is that POAL is a for-profit company owned by the Auckland Council and managed “at arm’s length.” Overseen by Brown, the council, a local capitalist government, takes no second seat to any private facility in its rapacity. Having raked in almost $25 million in after-tax profit from the port last year, the council has projected doubling POAL’s current return on equity from around 6 percent to 12 percent in the next five years. To achieve this largesse, POAL aims to savagely increase the exploitation of all port workers.
Workers of the World, Unite!
MUNZ has received statements of support from unions around the world, and more than 100 MUA and other unionists have rallied outside the New Zealand Consulate in Sydney in solidarity with the Auckland port workers. But what is crucial is international solidarity action—particularly refusal to handle scab cargo. Giving a taste of such solidarity, workers organised by the MUA in Sydney refused to unload the Maersk Brani container ship, which had been loaded by scab labour in Auckland, for 48 hours.
The working-class internationalism required to maintain determined solidarity actions overseas is undermined by the flag-waving patriotism symbolised by the New Zealand, Australian and U.S. flags carried at the March 10 rally. Such flag-waving imbibes the lie that workers have common interests with their “own” bourgeoisie. And in this case, the flags called to mind the ANZUS alliance under which the U.S. and Australian militaries slaughtered millions of workers and peasants in counterrevolutionary wars from Korea to Vietnam. In his speech at the rally, the MUA representative condemned outsourcing to “low-wage countries.” This is protectionist poison—a call for workers to adopt the interests of capitalists at home against their overseas competitors, specifically those of Pacific Rim countries with non-white populations.
Workers in Australia and New Zealand do have an internationalist labour tradition. Following World War II, as Dutch and Allied imperialists sought to move troops and supplies into Indonesia to shore up colonial control, Australian and New Zealand waterfront workers, alongside Indonesian, Chinese and Indian unionists, conducted “black bans” of Dutch shipping—a boycott known as the Black Armada—in support of the renewed Indonesian independence struggle. The maritime unions several times slapped bans on shipping war matériel intended for use against the Vietnamese Revolution, and in 1996 the MUA launched bans against Indonesian shipping in protest against the Suharto regime’s arrests of union activists there.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
In recent decades, the New Zealand working class, its organisations and allies have been weakened by relentless attacks carried out by the capitalist rulers, including under Labour. Now with POAL targeting MUNZ, the bosses throughout the country smell blood, aiming to escalate attacks against the proletariat and the oppressed as they drive to remove any obstacle to their unbridled pursuit of profit.
To transform the unions into instruments of class struggle on behalf of workers and all the victims of the capitalist rulers requires a leadership that begins from the understanding that the interests of labour and capital are irreconcilably counterposed. Such a leadership would oppose union-busting privatisations and fight for complete independence from the capitalist state and against illusions in arbitration.
A fighting labour movement could attract allies amongst broad sections of the population. Already on hearing of POAL’s lockout, 300 students rallied in Auckland in support of the wharfies, with 60 joining the workers’ picket line. In fighting unemployment and poverty and championing struggles against discrimination, the unions would draw support from youth, women and other oppressed sectors. No less important is the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, particularly those from Asian and Pacific Island countries who are subjected to racist victimisation.
With its significant Maori membership, the MUNZ bridges a key fault line in New Zealand society. Like Australia, the history of New Zealand is marked by deep-going xenophobia and racism. However, unlike Australia, where the Aboriginal population suffered near-genocide through European settlement, New Zealand was officially founded on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi signed by the British Crown and Maori chiefs, although Maori land was later stolen through the Maori Wars. Today, almost 15 percent of the population are Maori. They suffer a special oppression reflected in almost every aspect of society, including highly disproportionate levels of unemployment, homelessness and poverty, and are targeted for racist state abuse and terror. Nevertheless, similar to black people in the U.S., Maori form a critical component of the New Zealand proletariat. A key to the struggle to overthrow New Zealand capitalist rule will be the fight for full equality and justice for Maori people, including restoring stolen land. Future Maori communist leaders will be in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle.
The New Zealand proletariat needs a multiracial revolutionary party. Such a party will be built through a political struggle to split the working-class base of the Labour Party away from the pro-capitalist tops. Under the red banner of communist internationalism, such a party will unleash the power of the proletariat leading behind it all the diverse sectors and layers of society devastated by capitalism in the struggle to expropriate the profit-gouging rulers in a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. Those who labour must rule!
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
New Zealand: Auckland Port Bosses Wage War on Union Dock Workers
No Reliance on the Capitalist Courts!
For International Labor Solidarity Action!
The following article was written by the Spartacist League of Australia.
MARCH 26—For more than six months, Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) Local 13 has been engaged in a battle with the union-busting Ports of Auckland Limited (POAL), which is dead set on casualising the workforce on the docks of New Zealand’s largest container port. This showdown is part of an offensive by shipping bosses and capitalist governments worldwide to break dockers unions. Ripple effects from the outcome are sure to be felt all around this island nation, which is highly dependent on shipping, across the Tasman Sea in Australia and beyond. At stake is the very existence of MUNZ—historically one of the most powerful and militant unions in New Zealand, with a membership that includes a sizable number of Maori, the brutally oppressed indigenous population.
Auckland port bosses have decreed that if workers want to keep their jobs they must accept an end to regular shifts and concede complete flexibility in rostering (scheduling). In response to a raft of such ultimatums issued by POAL especially since the expiration of the Local 13 collective agreement in September, the union called a series of short strikes. Fed up with management’s intransigence, MUNZ workers downed tools on February 24 for three weeks and began to picket the port. Port traffic dried up to a trickle. On March 7, the port declared that 292 workers, including 235 striking MUNZ members, would be sacked and their jobs outsourced to three stevedoring companies. In response, unionists and others across the country and internationally—themselves suffering the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis—have rallied to the defence of the embattled MUNZ workers.
A March 10 rally in Auckland organised by MUNZ and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) drew thousands of dockworkers and their backers, including dockers from Lyttelton and Wellington, as well as nurses, firefighters and manufacturing workers. A contingent was fielded by the Meat Workers Union, which is itself fighting a union-busting drive by beef and lamb processor AFFCO. Joining the rally from overseas were a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) contingent, Australian Electrical Trades Union workers and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the U.S. Spartacist League of Australia supporters in attendance reported a palpable desire among workers at the demo and on the picket line to strike back against these anti-union attacks. In the middle of the rally, there was great applause after 50 Maori union militants spanning generations commenced a haka—a traditional war dance meant to overawe and terrify the foe.
Amid the outpouring of support for Local 13 wharfies (longshoremen), on March 21 POAL agreed to temporarily halt contracting out jobs for four weeks and resume negotiations with MUNZ. But this was a ruse. The very next day, as MUNZ members were preparing to return to work, a POAL statement declared that the port would continue to employ contract stevedores—i.e., scabs—for the next two weeks. POAL’s plan is to then indefinitely lock out the workforce with, in the words of POAL chairman Richard Pearson, the aim of “maintaining an existing right to move to a competitive stevedoring system.” This provocation was followed on March 23 by Pearson’s violence-baiting picketers for “intimidation and threats of physical violence” against the scabs who are doing his dirty work.
If the POAL bosses get their way, conditions at the Auckland port will match those at the notoriously hazardous, privately owned Port of Tauranga, a POAL rival located at Mount Maunganui on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Management at Tauranga has succeeded in fragmenting the workforce into competing units employed by several stevedoring companies. Two of these outfits set up company unions to better control workers and keep out MUNZ and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU). Workers at the different companies are played off against one another, driving down wages far below Auckland levels. Work is heavily casualised, with high turnover, and already dangerous working conditions are getting worse. In less than two years, three workers have been killed on the job. Workers say they hold back from reporting frequent accidents and injuries for fear of being blacklisted.
This union-busting assault can be turned back. The strength of the proletariat lies in its numbers, organisation, discipline and, above all, in the fact that through its labour it uniquely makes the wheels of profit turn in capitalist society. The union has found plenty of allies, both domestically and internationally. But union power has been kept in check by a Labour Party-loyal leadership whose overwhelming fealty is to New Zealand capitalism. POAL is owned by Auckland Council Investments Limited, the investment arm of the city council, which in turn is presided over by Labour Party mayor Len Brown.
A February 3 MUNZ and NZCTU “Port of Auckland Dispute Fact Sheet” declares that “union members are committed to the success of the company, and to building on the performance improvements already achieved.” Such class-collaborationist rot pushes the lie that there can be a partnership between the exploited and their exploiters. In negotiations, the union has agreed to givebacks amid the port’s drive for more “flexibility.” Even under the previous agreement, 20 percent of workers are casual, with no guarantee of work, while 27 percent can count on only 24 hours a week and the entire workforce can be rostered to work any shift, night and day, seven days a week. Predictably, POAL’s response to the givebacks and the grovelling has been to demand more of the same.
The situation cries out for a class-struggle fight, up to and including a national port strike. In response to the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes, there needs to be a struggle to organise the unorganised—beginning with Tauranga—and fight for uniform wages and conditions at the highest level on an industry-wide basis. Victory to the Auckland dockworkers!
No Reliance on the Capitalist Courts!
Dockworkers elsewhere in New Zealand have been eager to aid their class brothers and sisters in Auckland. Union workers at Wellington and RMTU members at Tauranga refused to handle ships loaded by scabs in Auckland until they were ordered to do so by New Zealand’s Employment Court. Similarly, port workers at Lyttelton announced that they would not service a scab-loaded ship. But while that ship was at sea, the court at Christchurch ruled that it must be worked as usual, and it was unloaded when it called. In each case, the union tops bowed to injunctions issued by the bosses’ courts. Meanwhile, MUNZ president Garry Parsloe has treacherously sown illusions in the very same Employment Court as a tool in the union’s fight against POAL.
Any reliance on the capitalist courts can only disarm and derail workers struggle. The courts, including the arbitration courts, and cops are core components of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the interests of the class enemy. Union struggles that get tied up in court die there.
One need look no further than what happened with the Australian MUA’s fight against the union-busting Patrick Stevedores outfit in 1998. With the backing of the Liberal/National Coalition government, Patrick sacked its entire unionised workforce, sparking a massive show of union power. We wrote at the time that a solid nationwide strike shutting down the ports was necessary (“Smash Bosses’ Union-Busting Offensive in Australia!” WV No. 689, 24 April 1998). But the union tops demobilised labour action, counterposing faith in the courts and the election of a Labor government. The Australian High Court eventually ruled against Patrick’s termination of the whole workforce. But this didn’t stop Patrick from getting rid of hundreds of MUA members and blacklisting others.
New Zealand Labour Party leader David Shearer joined the March 10 rally in Auckland, his posture as a friend of the wharfies made easier by the fact that Labour is currently in opposition. There should be no illusions that the Labour Party represents the workers’ class interests. Labour is a bourgeois workers party, based on trade unions but with a leadership every bit as committed to preserving production for private profit as the National Party, the Greens and other capitalist parties. When in power, Labour directly administers the government on behalf of the capitalist exploiters. Class-conscious workers will not forget the Lange Labour government and its Thatcher-like Finance Minister Roger Douglas, who in the 1980s carried out union-busting privatisations the length and breadth of the country, savagely destroying jobs and living conditions.
In Auckland, MUNZ leaders have repeatedly made appeals to Labour mayor Brown and turned to him to end the lockout, with Parsloe declaring, “Governance at the Ports of Auckland is out of control. It’s time for the mayor and council to step in and sack this board, and replace them with a group who are willing to run this important asset properly” (New Zealand Herald, 22 March). The role of the mayor and other Labour Party politicians is to subordinate workers to the capitalists and their state. As one sign carried at the March 10 MUNZ rally expressed: “Len Brown Is a Scab.”
However much the trade-union bureaucrats might pretend that “Ports of Auckland belongs to the people of Auckland and should remain a public asset that benefits all of us,” the reality is that POAL is a for-profit company owned by the Auckland Council and managed “at arm’s length.” Overseen by Brown, the council, a local capitalist government, takes no second seat to any private facility in its rapacity. Having raked in almost $25 million in after-tax profit from the port last year, the council has projected doubling POAL’s current return on equity from around 6 percent to 12 percent in the next five years. To achieve this largesse, POAL aims to savagely increase the exploitation of all port workers.
Workers of the World, Unite!
MUNZ has received statements of support from unions around the world, and more than 100 MUA and other unionists have rallied outside the New Zealand Consulate in Sydney in solidarity with the Auckland port workers. But what is crucial is international solidarity action—particularly refusal to handle scab cargo. Giving a taste of such solidarity, workers organised by the MUA in Sydney refused to unload the Maersk Brani container ship, which had been loaded by scab labour in Auckland, for 48 hours.
The working-class internationalism required to maintain determined solidarity actions overseas is undermined by the flag-waving patriotism symbolised by the New Zealand, Australian and U.S. flags carried at the March 10 rally. Such flag-waving imbibes the lie that workers have common interests with their “own” bourgeoisie. And in this case, the flags called to mind the ANZUS alliance under which the U.S. and Australian militaries slaughtered millions of workers and peasants in counterrevolutionary wars from Korea to Vietnam. In his speech at the rally, the MUA representative condemned outsourcing to “low-wage countries.” This is protectionist poison—a call for workers to adopt the interests of capitalists at home against their overseas competitors, specifically those of Pacific Rim countries with non-white populations.
Workers in Australia and New Zealand do have an internationalist labour tradition. Following World War II, as Dutch and Allied imperialists sought to move troops and supplies into Indonesia to shore up colonial control, Australian and New Zealand waterfront workers, alongside Indonesian, Chinese and Indian unionists, conducted “black bans” of Dutch shipping—a boycott known as the Black Armada—in support of the renewed Indonesian independence struggle. The maritime unions several times slapped bans on shipping war matériel intended for use against the Vietnamese Revolution, and in 1996 the MUA launched bans against Indonesian shipping in protest against the Suharto regime’s arrests of union activists there.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
In recent decades, the New Zealand working class, its organisations and allies have been weakened by relentless attacks carried out by the capitalist rulers, including under Labour. Now with POAL targeting MUNZ, the bosses throughout the country smell blood, aiming to escalate attacks against the proletariat and the oppressed as they drive to remove any obstacle to their unbridled pursuit of profit.
To transform the unions into instruments of class struggle on behalf of workers and all the victims of the capitalist rulers requires a leadership that begins from the understanding that the interests of labour and capital are irreconcilably counterposed. Such a leadership would oppose union-busting privatisations and fight for complete independence from the capitalist state and against illusions in arbitration.
A fighting labour movement could attract allies amongst broad sections of the population. Already on hearing of POAL’s lockout, 300 students rallied in Auckland in support of the wharfies, with 60 joining the workers’ picket line. In fighting unemployment and poverty and championing struggles against discrimination, the unions would draw support from youth, women and other oppressed sectors. No less important is the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, particularly those from Asian and Pacific Island countries who are subjected to racist victimisation.
With its significant Maori membership, the MUNZ bridges a key fault line in New Zealand society. Like Australia, the history of New Zealand is marked by deep-going xenophobia and racism. However, unlike Australia, where the Aboriginal population suffered near-genocide through European settlement, New Zealand was officially founded on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi signed by the British Crown and Maori chiefs, although Maori land was later stolen through the Maori Wars. Today, almost 15 percent of the population are Maori. They suffer a special oppression reflected in almost every aspect of society, including highly disproportionate levels of unemployment, homelessness and poverty, and are targeted for racist state abuse and terror. Nevertheless, similar to black people in the U.S., Maori form a critical component of the New Zealand proletariat. A key to the struggle to overthrow New Zealand capitalist rule will be the fight for full equality and justice for Maori people, including restoring stolen land. Future Maori communist leaders will be in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle.
The New Zealand proletariat needs a multiracial revolutionary party. Such a party will be built through a political struggle to split the working-class base of the Labour Party away from the pro-capitalist tops. Under the red banner of communist internationalism, such a party will unleash the power of the proletariat leading behind it all the diverse sectors and layers of society devastated by capitalism in the struggle to expropriate the profit-gouging rulers in a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. Those who labour must rule!
Ocupemos el Barrio In Boston On April 14th- Viva La Lucha!
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio is a group of loca. rcsidcnts committed to keeping alive the spirit of resistance that sparked the >ccupation of Wall Street to demand that the rich 1% pays for their crisis. We jelieve in the practice of direct democracy, we believe in participatory democracy, and we are committed to working with other neighborhood groups, organizations, and individuals to :>uild better lives for ourselves, our amities, and our communities.
Organizing Meeting
Saturday April 14, 1:00 pm
East Boston YMCA 215 Bremen st, East Boston (Blue Line- Airport Station)
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio es un grupo de person, as del veeindarip eomprometidos en inantener vivo el spiritu de resislencia que impulse la ocupaeion de Wall Street para demandar que el multimillonario 1% responsable de la crisis pague por ella. Como grupo creemos en la deinocracia directa, en la democracia participativas y estamos comprometidos a trabajar con otros grupos vecinales, organizaciones e individuos para construir una vida nejor para toda nuestra comunidad.
Reunion Organizativa
Sabado 14deAbril, 1:00 pm
East Boston YMCA 215 Bremen st, East Boston (Linea Azul- Estacion Airport)
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio is a group of loca. rcsidcnts committed to keeping alive the spirit of resistance that sparked the >ccupation of Wall Street to demand that the rich 1% pays for their crisis. We jelieve in the practice of direct democracy, we believe in participatory democracy, and we are committed to working with other neighborhood groups, organizations, and individuals to :>uild better lives for ourselves, our amities, and our communities.
Organizing Meeting
Saturday April 14, 1:00 pm
East Boston YMCA 215 Bremen st, East Boston (Blue Line- Airport Station)
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio
Ocupemos el Barrio es un grupo de person, as del veeindarip eomprometidos en inantener vivo el spiritu de resislencia que impulse la ocupaeion de Wall Street para demandar que el multimillonario 1% responsable de la crisis pague por ella. Como grupo creemos en la deinocracia directa, en la democracia participativas y estamos comprometidos a trabajar con otros grupos vecinales, organizaciones e individuos para construir una vida nejor para toda nuestra comunidad.
Reunion Organizativa
Sabado 14deAbril, 1:00 pm
East Boston YMCA 215 Bremen st, East Boston (Linea Azul- Estacion Airport)
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five-SCHEDULE OF "5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5"-PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE FROM APRIL 17 TO 21 IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011- The anniversary date of the 1953 failed Moncada uprising that launched the Cuban Revolution)
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
*********
SCHEDULE OF "5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5"
PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE FROM APRIL 17 TO 21
Tuesday, April 17
All day of lobbying on Capitol Hill
Wednesday, April 18
Lobby activities continue with distribution of information to elected officials.
2pm-4:30 pm Discussion of the Flawed Trial of the Cuban Five as Described in Stephen Kimbers's Book, What Lies Across the Water at the University of California Washington Center 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. Host: Wayne S. Smith, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy, and Former Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Presenter: Stephen Kimber is an award-winning Canadian journalist and writer. The author of one novel and seven books of nonfiction, he is Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, Canada, where he specializes in nonfiction.
7pm: Screening of the documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up, Nyumburu Cultural Center at University of Maryland, with the participation of invited guest Miguel Barnet, President of the National Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC)
Thursday April 19
Morning: setting up outreach tables in strategic points around Washington D.C.
6:00 pm. 102 Park Ave. Takoma Park, MD . Community Event to launch a new committee in Takoma Park in support of the Cuban 5. Local elected officials will be invited. Distribution of information and showing of the new documentary "Esencias" about the historic tour of La Colmenita in the U.S. in October 2011. Local elected officials will be invited. Distribution of information and showing of the new documentary "Esencias" about the historic tour of La Colmenita in the U.S. in October 2011.
7pm: Screening of the documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up," Blackburn Center Auditorium, Howard University, 2400 Sixth Street, NW featuring Professor Piero Gleyeses, author of Conflicting Mission: Havana, Washington and Cuba 1959-1976.
Friday, April 20 "OBAMA GIVE ME FIVE"
Public Event, Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW. Beginning at 6 pm with the traveling exhibit, Humor From My Pen, the political cartoons of Gerardo Hernandez. Meeting begins at 7pm with topics including; 1) Lift the blockade of Cuba 2) End the Travel Ban 3) Free the Cuban Five, 4) Remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism and 5) Return Guantanamo to Cuba.
Keynote Speaker: Dolores Huerta, President, Dolores Huerta Foundation and Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers.
Special Guest: Actor Danny Glover
James Early: Director, Cultural Heritage Policy, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Saiim Lamrani: Lecturer at Paris Sorbonne Paris IV University and Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee University and French journalist, specialist on relations between Cuba and the US
Saul Landau: Professor, author, filmmaker. Emmy Award for his film produced with filmmaker Haskell Wexler, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (1980). His most recent documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up"
Wayne Smith: Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy and Former Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
Jose Pertierra: Immigration Attorney. He represents the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the case of Luis Posada Carriles's extradition.
Mavis Anderson: Senior Associate at Latin America Working Group (LAWG)
Poetry readings by invited guest Nancy Morejon, one of Cuba's major authors and poets and Washington DC local artist Abayomi Huria
U.S. and International guests: Cindy Sheehan, Norman Paech (Germany) Arnold August (Quebec), Stephen Kimber, and Brian Gordon Sinclair (Canada) Katrien Demynck (Belgium), Salim Lamrani (France), Juan Manuel Morales Iglesias and actor Willy Toledo(Spain), Invited Ambassadors of ALBA's countries
Saturday 21 April
10AM, meeting with leaders of different religious denominations (Place TBA) withSpecial Guest: Rev. Dora Arce-Valentin, Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba.Cuban Theologian and professor of the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Matanzas.
1 pm picket/rally at the White House, people will be coming from DC and cities all over the country including buses from New York City that will travel to DC under the slogan "Freedom ride for the Cuban 5".
We are urging everyone to bring their signs and banners to send a strong message to President Obama.
4 pm, Closing Event, Bolivarian Salon of the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 2443 Massachusetts Ave, N.W., Keynote Speaker Cindy Sheehan.Presentations by DC children's theater group: "The greatest weapon of Cuba, a tribute to Cuban doctors", directed by Obi Egbuna Jr. and Hemingway's HOT Havana:Brian Gordon Sinclair, Artistic Director.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011- The anniversary date of the 1953 failed Moncada uprising that launched the Cuban Revolution)
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
*********
SCHEDULE OF "5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5"
PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE FROM APRIL 17 TO 21
Tuesday, April 17
All day of lobbying on Capitol Hill
Wednesday, April 18
Lobby activities continue with distribution of information to elected officials.
2pm-4:30 pm Discussion of the Flawed Trial of the Cuban Five as Described in Stephen Kimbers's Book, What Lies Across the Water at the University of California Washington Center 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. Host: Wayne S. Smith, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy, and Former Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Presenter: Stephen Kimber is an award-winning Canadian journalist and writer. The author of one novel and seven books of nonfiction, he is Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, Canada, where he specializes in nonfiction.
7pm: Screening of the documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up, Nyumburu Cultural Center at University of Maryland, with the participation of invited guest Miguel Barnet, President of the National Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC)
Thursday April 19
Morning: setting up outreach tables in strategic points around Washington D.C.
6:00 pm. 102 Park Ave. Takoma Park, MD . Community Event to launch a new committee in Takoma Park in support of the Cuban 5. Local elected officials will be invited. Distribution of information and showing of the new documentary "Esencias" about the historic tour of La Colmenita in the U.S. in October 2011. Local elected officials will be invited. Distribution of information and showing of the new documentary "Esencias" about the historic tour of La Colmenita in the U.S. in October 2011.
7pm: Screening of the documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up," Blackburn Center Auditorium, Howard University, 2400 Sixth Street, NW featuring Professor Piero Gleyeses, author of Conflicting Mission: Havana, Washington and Cuba 1959-1976.
Friday, April 20 "OBAMA GIVE ME FIVE"
Public Event, Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW. Beginning at 6 pm with the traveling exhibit, Humor From My Pen, the political cartoons of Gerardo Hernandez. Meeting begins at 7pm with topics including; 1) Lift the blockade of Cuba 2) End the Travel Ban 3) Free the Cuban Five, 4) Remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism and 5) Return Guantanamo to Cuba.
Keynote Speaker: Dolores Huerta, President, Dolores Huerta Foundation and Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers.
Special Guest: Actor Danny Glover
James Early: Director, Cultural Heritage Policy, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Saiim Lamrani: Lecturer at Paris Sorbonne Paris IV University and Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee University and French journalist, specialist on relations between Cuba and the US
Saul Landau: Professor, author, filmmaker. Emmy Award for his film produced with filmmaker Haskell Wexler, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (1980). His most recent documentary "Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up"
Wayne Smith: Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy and Former Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
Jose Pertierra: Immigration Attorney. He represents the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the case of Luis Posada Carriles's extradition.
Mavis Anderson: Senior Associate at Latin America Working Group (LAWG)
Poetry readings by invited guest Nancy Morejon, one of Cuba's major authors and poets and Washington DC local artist Abayomi Huria
U.S. and International guests: Cindy Sheehan, Norman Paech (Germany) Arnold August (Quebec), Stephen Kimber, and Brian Gordon Sinclair (Canada) Katrien Demynck (Belgium), Salim Lamrani (France), Juan Manuel Morales Iglesias and actor Willy Toledo(Spain), Invited Ambassadors of ALBA's countries
Saturday 21 April
10AM, meeting with leaders of different religious denominations (Place TBA) withSpecial Guest: Rev. Dora Arce-Valentin, Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba.Cuban Theologian and professor of the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Matanzas.
1 pm picket/rally at the White House, people will be coming from DC and cities all over the country including buses from New York City that will travel to DC under the slogan "Freedom ride for the Cuban 5".
We are urging everyone to bring their signs and banners to send a strong message to President Obama.
4 pm, Closing Event, Bolivarian Salon of the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 2443 Massachusetts Ave, N.W., Keynote Speaker Cindy Sheehan.Presentations by DC children's theater group: "The greatest weapon of Cuba, a tribute to Cuban doctors", directed by Obi Egbuna Jr. and Hemingway's HOT Havana:Brian Gordon Sinclair, Artistic Director.
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY-IN CAMBRIDGE
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA-10:00 AM-Sat- Noon Sunday
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA-10:00 AM-Sat- Noon Sunday
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
From The Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
Thursday, April 12, 2012
All Out In Solidarity With The Farmworkers-OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers In Quincy (Ma) Today April 12th At 12 Noon
Markin comment:
An injury to one is an injury to all applies with special force with the beleaguered farmworkers.
OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers
April 10th, 2012 · mhacker · Passed ResolutionsNo comments
The following proposal was passed at the General Assembly of Occupy Boston on April 7, 2012:
To continue the success of groundbreaking agreements with food retailers, Occupy Boston stands with the Decolonize to Liberate Working Group, in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their quest for adoption of the Fair Food Program by “Giant Supermarkets” to eliminate modern day slavery in the daily violation of basic human rights, including physical and sexual abuse, and exposure to pesticides, in order to harvest the food on our plates. Occupy Boston will utilize its resources to spread the word and get people to Stop and Shop headquarters on April 12, 2012 at 12:00 PM to join in the action to demonstrate our commitment to human and worker rights.
***********
Upcoming Events:
•
Justice for Farmworkers! Picket, Delegation and Theater at Stop & Shop Headquarters, Thursday, April 12 at 12pm, Stop & Shop Corporate Office Headquarters, 1385 Hancock St., Quincy.
Just days before the Ahold (parent company of Stop & Shop) Shareholder Meeting, please join farmworkers and Fair Food allies in calling on Stop and Shop to join the Fair Food Program!
For decades, Florida’s farmworkers faced poverty wages and daily violations of their basic rights — including physical abuse, sexual harassment, and in the most extreme cases, modern-day slavery — in order to harvest the food on our plates. Today, however, a new day is dawning in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) — an internationally-recognized farmworker organization — has reached groundbreaking agreements with ten of the world’s leading food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway and Trader Joe’s. Hailed by the New York Times as “possibly the most successful labor action in the US in twenty years,” the Fair Food Program establishes a worker-designed code of conduct in the fields and requires retailers to pay one more penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy to go directly to the workers who picked them—all of which is monitored and enforced by the independent Fair Food Standards Council. Supermarkets like Ahold leverage their high-volume purchasing power to demand the ever-lower prices that result in farmworker exploitation. By refusing to partner with the CIW, the steps the company has taken fall far short of the substantive, verifiable and enforceable standards that the situation requires, consumers expect, and others within the industry have embraced.
Join farmworkers and Fair Food advocates in demanding that Ahold uphold human rights and join the Fair Food Program! More information: www.ciw-online.org, Contact: elena@interfaithact.org; 650.678.9127
An injury to one is an injury to all applies with special force with the beleaguered farmworkers.
OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers
April 10th, 2012 · mhacker · Passed ResolutionsNo comments
The following proposal was passed at the General Assembly of Occupy Boston on April 7, 2012:
To continue the success of groundbreaking agreements with food retailers, Occupy Boston stands with the Decolonize to Liberate Working Group, in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their quest for adoption of the Fair Food Program by “Giant Supermarkets” to eliminate modern day slavery in the daily violation of basic human rights, including physical and sexual abuse, and exposure to pesticides, in order to harvest the food on our plates. Occupy Boston will utilize its resources to spread the word and get people to Stop and Shop headquarters on April 12, 2012 at 12:00 PM to join in the action to demonstrate our commitment to human and worker rights.
***********
Upcoming Events:
•
Justice for Farmworkers! Picket, Delegation and Theater at Stop & Shop Headquarters, Thursday, April 12 at 12pm, Stop & Shop Corporate Office Headquarters, 1385 Hancock St., Quincy.
Just days before the Ahold (parent company of Stop & Shop) Shareholder Meeting, please join farmworkers and Fair Food allies in calling on Stop and Shop to join the Fair Food Program!
For decades, Florida’s farmworkers faced poverty wages and daily violations of their basic rights — including physical abuse, sexual harassment, and in the most extreme cases, modern-day slavery — in order to harvest the food on our plates. Today, however, a new day is dawning in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) — an internationally-recognized farmworker organization — has reached groundbreaking agreements with ten of the world’s leading food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway and Trader Joe’s. Hailed by the New York Times as “possibly the most successful labor action in the US in twenty years,” the Fair Food Program establishes a worker-designed code of conduct in the fields and requires retailers to pay one more penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy to go directly to the workers who picked them—all of which is monitored and enforced by the independent Fair Food Standards Council. Supermarkets like Ahold leverage their high-volume purchasing power to demand the ever-lower prices that result in farmworker exploitation. By refusing to partner with the CIW, the steps the company has taken fall far short of the substantive, verifiable and enforceable standards that the situation requires, consumers expect, and others within the industry have embraced.
Join farmworkers and Fair Food advocates in demanding that Ahold uphold human rights and join the Fair Food Program! More information: www.ciw-online.org, Contact: elena@interfaithact.org; 650.678.9127
Glory To The Massachusetts 54th Regiment (Volunteers) In The American Civil War-The Film “Glory”
Over the past several years that this blog has existed I have touted the heroic experiences of the American Civil War Union black volunteer Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment many times. Recently in preparing materials for this space to be posted in honor of Black History Month I noticed that I had not reviewed the subject of the entry, the Oscar-winning film “Glory”. I make amends here.
This fictionalized version of the creation of an all black volunteer regiment (at least in the ranks) hews pretty closely to the actual events in that process, taking into account the inevitable dramaticizations required by the “laws” of cinematic license. And that fact is important. In other commentary on the history of the 54th, and in previous recollections of my own personal history of “discovery” of the regiment I have noted that in my high school years in the 1960s no mention was ever made of the exploits of this hardy band of soldiers fighting for their freedom and the preservation of the American union. None. And that, my friends, was here in Massachusetts the home of the regiment and of the famous, if then obscure Saint-Gaudens memorial plague to the regiment that, at one point in my life I passed every day.
Lincoln and other Northern war leaders hesitated to create all black regiments for a number of reasons despite the need for man power in the battlefield as the war was drawn out inconclusively for a long period. Those reasons did not include the fact that the likes of the revolutionary black abolitionist Frederick were clamoring for black soldiers not only to preserve the union but to actively gain their own freedom, to prove their manhood and worth in the parlance of the time. This film details the struggle by hard abolitionist Massachusetts Governor Andrews and a significant portion of the white Boston citizenry, including the eventual leader of the regiment, Robert Gould Shaw and his parents, to create such a unit.
The film goes on to look at the actual creation of the unit , its training, the troubles over pay, the racial animosities on both sides that were then current in that American time, the deployment South and the mauling that the regiment took at Fort Wagner, including the deaths of Shaw and many brave black soldiers. I will tell you the best part though, although this is not brought up in the film. At war’s end what was left of the Massachusetts 54th marched through Charleston, South Carolina, in many ways the ideological and political center of the Confederacy, singing “John Brown’s Body”. That seems just about right. Hats off to the 54th.
Note: I have not mentioned the very good performances here by Denzel Washington as a testy recruit and Morgan Freeman as the wise old man. Let me put it this way, if you had a choice, wouldn’t you have this pair in this type of film. No-brainer, right? Matthew Broderick also shines in an understated performance as Colonel Shaw.
MASSACHUSETTS 54TH REGIMENT
This fictionalized version of the creation of an all black volunteer regiment (at least in the ranks) hews pretty closely to the actual events in that process, taking into account the inevitable dramaticizations required by the “laws” of cinematic license. And that fact is important. In other commentary on the history of the 54th, and in previous recollections of my own personal history of “discovery” of the regiment I have noted that in my high school years in the 1960s no mention was ever made of the exploits of this hardy band of soldiers fighting for their freedom and the preservation of the American union. None. And that, my friends, was here in Massachusetts the home of the regiment and of the famous, if then obscure Saint-Gaudens memorial plague to the regiment that, at one point in my life I passed every day.
Lincoln and other Northern war leaders hesitated to create all black regiments for a number of reasons despite the need for man power in the battlefield as the war was drawn out inconclusively for a long period. Those reasons did not include the fact that the likes of the revolutionary black abolitionist Frederick were clamoring for black soldiers not only to preserve the union but to actively gain their own freedom, to prove their manhood and worth in the parlance of the time. This film details the struggle by hard abolitionist Massachusetts Governor Andrews and a significant portion of the white Boston citizenry, including the eventual leader of the regiment, Robert Gould Shaw and his parents, to create such a unit.
The film goes on to look at the actual creation of the unit , its training, the troubles over pay, the racial animosities on both sides that were then current in that American time, the deployment South and the mauling that the regiment took at Fort Wagner, including the deaths of Shaw and many brave black soldiers. I will tell you the best part though, although this is not brought up in the film. At war’s end what was left of the Massachusetts 54th marched through Charleston, South Carolina, in many ways the ideological and political center of the Confederacy, singing “John Brown’s Body”. That seems just about right. Hats off to the 54th.
Note: I have not mentioned the very good performances here by Denzel Washington as a testy recruit and Morgan Freeman as the wise old man. Let me put it this way, if you had a choice, wouldn’t you have this pair in this type of film. No-brainer, right? Matthew Broderick also shines in an understated performance as Colonel Shaw.
MASSACHUSETTS 54TH REGIMENT
Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-“Attractive Labour”
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Attractive Labour”
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends – he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master’s and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor fulfill the following seven conditions:
1. That every laborer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages.
2. That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
3. That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
4. That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
5. That the workshops and husbandry offer the laborer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.
6. That the division of labor be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
7. That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be in full enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism, whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable, and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day (besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district, behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Attractive Labour”
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends – he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master’s and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor fulfill the following seven conditions:
1. That every laborer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages.
2. That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
3. That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
4. That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
5. That the workshops and husbandry offer the laborer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.
6. That the division of labor be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
7. That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be in full enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism, whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable, and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day (besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district, behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.
On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side
Markin comment:
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
A Criticism of American Affairs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 226;
Written: in early August, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, August 9, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The crisis, which at the moment reigns in the United States has been brought about by two causes: military and political.
Had the last campaign been conducted according to a single strategic plan, the main army of the West was then bound, as previously explained in these columns, to exploit its successes in Kentucky and Tennessee to make its way through north Alabama to Georgia and to seize the railway junctions there at Decatur, Milledgeville, etc. The link between the Eastern and Western armies of the secessionists would thereby have been broken and their mutual support rendered impossible. Instead of this, the Kentucky army marched south down the Mississippi in the direction of New Orleans and its victory near Memphis had no other result than to dispatch the greater part of Beauregard’s troops to Richmond, so that the Confederates, with a superior army in a superior position, here now suddenly confronted McClellan, who had not exploited the defeat of the enemy’s troops at Yorktown and Williamsburg and, moreover, had from the first split up his own forces. McClellan’s generalship, already described
by us previously, was in itself sufficient to ensure the ruin of the biggest and best disciplined army. Finally, War Secretary Stanton committed an unpardonable error. To make an impression abroad, he suspended recruiting after the conquest of Tennessee and so condemned the army to be constantly weakened, just when it was most in need of reinforcements for a rapid, decisive offensive. Despite the strategic blunders and despite McClellan’s generalship, with a steady influx of recruits the war, if not decided, had hitherto been rapidly nearing a victorious end. Stanton’s step was all the more disastrous since the South had at that precise moment enlisted every man from 18 to 35 years old and therefore staked everything on a single card. It is those men, who have been trained in the meantime, that give the Confederates the upper hand almost everywhere and secure them the initiative. They held Halleck fast, dislodged Curtis from Arkansas, beat McClellan, and under Stonewall Jackson gave the signal for the guerilla raids that are now already pushing forward as far as the Ohio.
In part, the military causes of the crisis are connected with the political ones. It was the influence of the Democratic Party that elevated an incompetent like McClellan to the position of Commander-in-Chief of all the military forces of the North, because he had been a supporter of Breckinridge. It is anxious regard for the wishes, advantages and interests of the spokesmen of the border slave states that has so far broken off the Civil War’s point of principle and deprived it of its soul, so to speak. The “loyal” slaveholders of these border states saw to it that the fugitive slave laws dictated by the South ... were maintained and the sympathies of the Negroes for the North forcibly suppressed, that no general could venture to put a company of Negroes in the field and that slavery was finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South -Into its invulnerable horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-bodied men in the South can be put into the field!
At the present moment, when secession’s stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states are making even greater claims. However, Lincoln’s appeal to them, in which he threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, shows that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Abolition of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but he knows that he cannot resist it for long. Hence his urgent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under advantageous contractual conditions. He knows that only the continuance of slavery in the border states has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War — the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.
Meanwhile, during its first session Congress, now adjourned, decreed a series of important measures that we shall briefly summarise here.
Apart from its financial legislation, it passed the Homestead Bill, which the Northern masses had long striven for in vain; in accordance with this Bill, part of the state lands is given gratis to the colonists, whether indigenous or new-comers, for cultivation. It abolished slavery in Columbia and the national capital, with monetary compensation for the former slaveholders. Slavery was declared “forever impossible” in all the Territories of the United States. The Act, under which the new State of West Virginia is admitted into the Union, prescribes abolition of slavery by stages and declares that all Negro children born after July 4, 1863, are born free. The conditions of this emancipation by stages are on the whole borrowed from the law that was enacted 70 years ago in Pennsylvania for the same purpose . By a fourth Act all the slaves of rebels are to be emancipated, as soon as they fall into the hands of the republican army. Another law, which is now being put into effect for the first time, provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and put into the field against the South. The independence of the Negro republics of Liberia and Haiti has been recognised and, finally, a treaty on the abolition of the slave trade has been concluded with Britain.
Thus, no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
A Criticism of American Affairs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 226;
Written: in early August, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, August 9, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The crisis, which at the moment reigns in the United States has been brought about by two causes: military and political.
Had the last campaign been conducted according to a single strategic plan, the main army of the West was then bound, as previously explained in these columns, to exploit its successes in Kentucky and Tennessee to make its way through north Alabama to Georgia and to seize the railway junctions there at Decatur, Milledgeville, etc. The link between the Eastern and Western armies of the secessionists would thereby have been broken and their mutual support rendered impossible. Instead of this, the Kentucky army marched south down the Mississippi in the direction of New Orleans and its victory near Memphis had no other result than to dispatch the greater part of Beauregard’s troops to Richmond, so that the Confederates, with a superior army in a superior position, here now suddenly confronted McClellan, who had not exploited the defeat of the enemy’s troops at Yorktown and Williamsburg and, moreover, had from the first split up his own forces. McClellan’s generalship, already described
by us previously, was in itself sufficient to ensure the ruin of the biggest and best disciplined army. Finally, War Secretary Stanton committed an unpardonable error. To make an impression abroad, he suspended recruiting after the conquest of Tennessee and so condemned the army to be constantly weakened, just when it was most in need of reinforcements for a rapid, decisive offensive. Despite the strategic blunders and despite McClellan’s generalship, with a steady influx of recruits the war, if not decided, had hitherto been rapidly nearing a victorious end. Stanton’s step was all the more disastrous since the South had at that precise moment enlisted every man from 18 to 35 years old and therefore staked everything on a single card. It is those men, who have been trained in the meantime, that give the Confederates the upper hand almost everywhere and secure them the initiative. They held Halleck fast, dislodged Curtis from Arkansas, beat McClellan, and under Stonewall Jackson gave the signal for the guerilla raids that are now already pushing forward as far as the Ohio.
In part, the military causes of the crisis are connected with the political ones. It was the influence of the Democratic Party that elevated an incompetent like McClellan to the position of Commander-in-Chief of all the military forces of the North, because he had been a supporter of Breckinridge. It is anxious regard for the wishes, advantages and interests of the spokesmen of the border slave states that has so far broken off the Civil War’s point of principle and deprived it of its soul, so to speak. The “loyal” slaveholders of these border states saw to it that the fugitive slave laws dictated by the South ... were maintained and the sympathies of the Negroes for the North forcibly suppressed, that no general could venture to put a company of Negroes in the field and that slavery was finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South -Into its invulnerable horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-bodied men in the South can be put into the field!
At the present moment, when secession’s stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states are making even greater claims. However, Lincoln’s appeal to them, in which he threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, shows that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Abolition of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but he knows that he cannot resist it for long. Hence his urgent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under advantageous contractual conditions. He knows that only the continuance of slavery in the border states has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War — the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.
Meanwhile, during its first session Congress, now adjourned, decreed a series of important measures that we shall briefly summarise here.
Apart from its financial legislation, it passed the Homestead Bill, which the Northern masses had long striven for in vain; in accordance with this Bill, part of the state lands is given gratis to the colonists, whether indigenous or new-comers, for cultivation. It abolished slavery in Columbia and the national capital, with monetary compensation for the former slaveholders. Slavery was declared “forever impossible” in all the Territories of the United States. The Act, under which the new State of West Virginia is admitted into the Union, prescribes abolition of slavery by stages and declares that all Negro children born after July 4, 1863, are born free. The conditions of this emancipation by stages are on the whole borrowed from the law that was enacted 70 years ago in Pennsylvania for the same purpose . By a fourth Act all the slaves of rebels are to be emancipated, as soon as they fall into the hands of the republican army. Another law, which is now being put into effect for the first time, provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and put into the field against the South. The independence of the Negro republics of Liberia and Haiti has been recognised and, finally, a treaty on the abolition of the slave trade has been concluded with Britain.
Thus, no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947, Zed, London 1990, pp.230, £9.95
Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947, Zed, London 1990, pp.230, £9.95
Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
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