From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-French Elections: No Choice for Workers

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Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012

For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!

French Elections: No Choice for Workers

MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.

This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.

The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!

The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”

For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!

The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.

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Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.

The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.

An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!

Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.

While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!

Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.

By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.

We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.

This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.

Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:

“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”

— The State and Revolution (1917)

However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.

Down With the European Union!

The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.

In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.

With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):

“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”

— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011

The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).

Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.

In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”

That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.

In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?

But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:

“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”

Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.

The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.

Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks

Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”

Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.

It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!

This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.

The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!

No Vote to LO!

Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.

LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!

LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.

LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.

At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.

LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.

Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:

“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”

The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.

In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!

From The "Bradley Manning Support Network" Website-"The Radicalization Of Bradley Manning"-A Play

Click on the headline to link to an entry from the Bradley Manning Support Network Website-The Radicalization Of Bradley Manning.

Markin comment:

Support freedom for Bradley Manning anyway and anywhere we can. Catch hte livestream.

Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning During The Week Of April 23-29 In The Boston Area-Why I Will Be Standing With Private Manning On Friday April 27th In Davis Square, Somerville And Saturday April 28th At Park Street Station In Boston

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information on his case and activities on his behalf .

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.

According to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network there are a series of actions planned in Washington, D.C at the Justice Department on April 24th and at Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th and 26th in connection with the next round of legal proceedings in his case. I had originally intended to travel down from Boston to take part in those events that week but some other obligations now prevent me from doing so. Nevertheless there two on-going activities in the Boston area where those of us who support freedom for Bradley Manning can show our solidarity during that week.

Every Friday from 1:00 -2:00 PM there is an on-going solidarity vigil for Brother Manning at the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop in Davis Square, Somerville.

Every Saturday from 1:00-2:00 PM there is an on-going peace vigil/speak-out in our struggle against the war (or wars) of the moment being orchestrated by the American government and its allies at the Redline MBTA Park Street Station in Boston (Boston Common). Bradley Manning’s case is a natural extension of those struggles.

Please plan to attend either or both of these events on Friday April 28th (Davis Square) and/or Saturday April 29th (Park Street) to stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning. I have included my original comment made when I had expected to go down to the Washington/Fort Meade events as motivation for you to stand with Bradley on those days here in Boston.
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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 (2011) 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!

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

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Young Spartacus," November 1975- "Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary"-The Demise Of A Black Panther Party Leader

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1960s Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Clever.

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this entry:

Make no mistake the demise of the Black Panther Party through state repression and internal party wrangling rather than political defeat by communist revolutionaries was not an unimportant part of the demise of the entire radical movement in the early 1970s and has left us a huge gap to fill. So read this entry with care-those sisters and brothers like Cleaver represented, for a time, a very, very decent instinct to right the racial wrongs that are the bedrock of American society-and have been embedded there since its beginning.
********
Editorial Note-Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary-Young Spartacus, November, 1975

From exile Eldridge Cleaver, renowned former leader of the Black Panther Party, recently has repudiated revolutionary politics in an ultra-patriotic bid for a pardon enabling him to return to the U.S. by the Fourth of July.

Seldom has the ruling class spurned a disil­lusioned radical leader who renounces his cause and courts the bourgeois "establishment." Especially now, when the government's dirty laundry is being laundered publicly, defenders of the status quo can certainly make use of ex-radicals willing to support a discredited social system by "testifying" that there are no alternatives. Thus, the media has assisted former New Left ideologue Tom Hayden—who in 1972 followed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" onto the campaign trail of "dove" Democrat George McGovern —to achieve new celebrity now as a pseudo-populist Democratic Party senatorial hopeful in California (see "It's Mr. Hayden Now, If You Please," Young Spartacus, September 1975).

Fashionable, socially well-connected renegades like Hayden can easily traipse back to the bourgeois fold. But in this deeply racist society, charismatic black leaders who rose to political stature through flamboyant defiance of the racist order cannot ex­pect to find the bourgeois state so accommodating. This recognition may well be the motivation for Cleaver's grotesque gestures of capitulation and desperate anti-communist tirades.

Eldridge Cleaver recently made his startling debut in Paris as "Eldridge de Paris," the revolutionary-turned-"radical chic" men's fashion designer. Probably only to attract publicity, Cleaver designed and modeled some "revolutionary hot pants" with a crotch shaped into an attenuated pouch, like a medieval codpiece. As his Soul On Ice several years ago revealed, Cleaver is far from naive; he is cer­tainly well aware of the sexual stereotypes of the black male and their role in the pathological psychol­ogy of white racism. His obscene "hot pants" can only be regarded as a costume tailored according to the debased image of the black man projected by the Ku Klux Klan. The spectacle of Cleaver, the once self-sacrificing revolutionary leader, presenting blacks as an object for ridicule by sniggering racists is truly sickening. In the attempt to crawl back into the bourgeoisie's good graces, Cleaver is willing to fan the murderous flames of white racism.

Cleaver has groomed himself politically by an equally grotesque grovelling before the imperialist appetites of the ruling class of this country. In an interview with Rolling Stone (11 September), that soft-pulp rag which slickly trafficks "counter­culture," Cleaver performs a sickening "step-'n'-f etchit" routine for the Pentagon:

"I now think that the U.S. should be second to none militarily, that we have to strengthen, not demise, our military.... I, for one, intend to develop a new relationship with the U.S. military. I'm on a honey­moon with them myself. I love 'em. (much laughter) "However, experience has shown socialists/communists strap onto people the most oppressive regimes in the history of the world.... I want to see the American military establishment's power sup­porting people who are being fucked over in the world. ... If we are truly the force for democracy in the world, then we have an obligation to help in the disintegration of the totalitarian Soviet regime."

Cleaver's defection is political and must be placed in the context of the development and demise of the Black Panther Party and, more generally, the brutal oppression of black people in this racist society. Like Malcolm X, George Jackson and so many other black radical leaders, Eldridge Cleaver came to political consciousness through generalizing his in­dividual victimization at the hands of racist "law and order" into an elemental resistance to brutal oppression of the black masses by this capitalist system. In this racist society the leap from prison-hardened, street-wise lumpen life to socialist con­sciousness and disciplined functioning for a black person is enormous. Cleaver partially overcame a lumpen, criminal, "hustler" existence by seeking to become part of a struggle on behalf of the op­pressed black masses.

But the black militants who built the Black Panther Party embodied profound contradictions, encompass­ing both true heroism and lumpen hustlerism. The Black Panther Party combined militant self-defense of the ghetto against racist cop terrorization with politically reformist, pragmatic social work (such as "serving the people" through the breakfast for children program).

The massive, unrelenting and murderous state repression unleashed against the Panthers exa­cerbated the contradiction between the impulse toward lumpen-based urban guerrilla confrontations with the state and the pressure to accommodate the liberal establishment for protection. This contra­diction in the Panthers' politics led to the devastat­ing split in 1971 between • the pro-capitalist and openly reformist wing led by Huey Newton and the proto-terrorist/"armed struggle" wing, with which Cleaver was associated (see "Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era," Workers Vanguard, January 1972).

Isolated in exile, Cleaver soon became dis­illusioned with "third-world" nationalism. While certainly no political ingenug and always exploiting his various "third-world" patrons for creature com­forts and political elevation, Cleaver's reconcilia­tion with imperialism was facilitated by the hollow-ness of the "revolutionary" rhetoric of radical-nationalist bourgeois regimes such as Algeria and by the willingness of the parasitic bureaucracies ruling in China, Cuba and the other deformed workers states to betray the oppressed for "detente" with world imperialism.

As Cleaver related to Rolling Stone,

"When I left the U.S. I went first to Cuba, then to Algeria, China, North Vietnam and North Korea. Face it, people are nationalists more than they are internationalists and they use internationalism in a very cynical way in order to further their own nationalist aspirations.... The final shock came the day I saw Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chair­man Mao, When you see Nixon and all that he stands for shaking hands with Mao and all that he sup­posedly stood for—well, it marks a turning point in history and a personal turning point for me."

Cleaver did not flee the U.S. in an act of cowardice. He was instructed to escape by the Panther leader­ship, but only after he had prepared himself for "revolutionary suicide": a final, heroic shoot-out with the cops who were hunting him down like an animal. Eldridge Cleaver is at bottom a victim of this racist capitalist state. His final political dis­integration was assisted by bitter disillusionment with the cynical betrayals of Stalinism.

Cleaver rose from a socially marginal existence as a ghetto "hustler" to a leader of the organization which represented the most subjectively revolution­ary expression of the non-Marxist ideology of black nationalism. That organization was destroyed by political contradictions and state repression. Now Cleaver has returned again to "hustling" as ''El­dridge de Paris." In this sense, his repudiation of revolutionary politics is a hollow victory for the ruling class.

Cleaver's defection is tragic. Yet it should be regarded as only the final curtain to a far greater tragedy: the loss of so many subjectively revolutionary and self-sacrificing black mili­tants through political demoralization and cop repression.

A large burden of the responsibility for the demise of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization must be placed squarely on the shoulders of all those self-proclaimed radical organizations which for years opportunistically refused to struggle political­ly with the Panthers. The white-guilt-ridden Maoist/ New Left wing of SDS (whose leaders went on to form the October League, the Revolutionary Union/ Revolutionary Communist Party and the Weather Underground) wallowed in vicarious nationalism and mindlessly enthused over the Panthers, denouncing any criticism of Panther politics as "counterrevolu­tionary." The International Socialists always kept its criticism hushed, while attempting to broker a Panther/left-liberal alliance through building the reformist Peace and Freedom Party. The Socialist Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance urged the Panthers to become more "nationalist," meaning a retreat into more respectable "community control" politics. And the Communist Party sought to seduce the Panthers into embracing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Although our forces were numerically small and our authority on the left weak during the crucial period prior to the devastating split, the Spartacist League struggled to the best of our abilities to engage the Panthers in political discussion and to win the most subjectively revolutionary cadres to a Leninist perspective. We did not capitulate to the popularity of multi-vanguardist/"third-worldist" il­lusions, seeking instead to pose a proletarian per­spective for the subjectively revolutionary elements of the militant black movement. Instead of glamoriz­ing the lumpen adventurism of the Panthers, we fought for a truly revolutionary program. Only such a perspective could have combatted the decimation of the Panther cadres by organized cop terror and could have preserved a revolutionary wing of the black movement when the besieged Panther organiza­tion veered sharply toward "respectability" in the form of a turn to the Democratic Party under the auspices of the Communist Party in the period of the United Front Against Facism.

Eldridge Cleaver has passed over to the class enemy. To acknowledge his political demise is bitter indeed. But the struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution can advance only if the costly lessons of the political destruction of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization are assimilated.

***From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pen Of American Communist LeaderJames P. Cannon At The End-"Youth And The Socialist Movement"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American Communist leader (CP and SWP) James P. Cannon.

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Youth and the Socialist Movement

Rich Finkel, National Secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance, had the following discussion with James P. Cannon on March 15, 1974, in Los Angeles.

Finkel: On my tour this spring, I've already visited Texas, Arizona and part of California. I get the impression that many students who were active during the height of the antiwar movement and the Black struggle haven't quite figured out what kind of role they can play in a period of different dimensions, opportunities and problems, such as we are facing right now.
Cannon: I think it's very important for us to adopt a completely realistic view of the situation and adjust to the changed consciousness and at­titude on the campus. The party is tested just as much by times like this as by times of an up­swing in activity.

During the fifties, we lived so long in hard times, I think some of the old-timers found it difficult to adjust to the big upsurge we had during the Vietnam war.

It should be made a point of our educational propaganda that a revolutionist's spirit and at­titude is not determined by the popular mood of the moment. We have a historical view and we don't allow the movement to fade away when it runs into changed times, which can happen as we know from experience.

You're acquainted with my pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism? It's a series of six lectures given at the height of the McCarthyite period in the fall of 1952, when reaction seemed to reign supreme. There were practically no actions of any kind. So we decided on the lectures as a deliberate party action. They were given here in Los An­geles as a series of forums on what socialism means. What socialist America will look like. We had a regular attendance of 100, give or take a few, at each lecture.

Don't you find that the young people you talk to have a great interest in what socialism is, what it will look like and so on? There's a temptation in a period of upswing of activities to neglect the exposition of our fundamental program in its historical perspective. But I can recall from
my youth, which was in the heyday of the So­cialist Party! in this country —the Debs2 period — that seemed to be the question that most interested people who were contacted around the party. What is this socialism? What will it look like? How will it come about? And so on. And I think that's true today too, if you really probe the minds of young people.

Finkel: We've noticed that quite a bit. I think one of the stimulants right now is the energy crisis. People know that the oil monopolies prevail. They see what capitalism does, and they ask, "What is socialism? How do we organize it? How do we get there?"

We get more of these questions about socialism today than we did during the antiwar movement. I think that the questions are different at this par­ticular period —more fundamental. With the Water­gate revelations, people want to know, "How can we organize government without corruption? Is it possible?"

Your pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism, was one of the first things I read when I joined the YSA in 1968. It was an old copy, but it an­swered a lot of questions I had. I think that's true for many YSA members.

Could you explain a little about some of the previous experiences of the workers movement with youth groups? That's one of the questions that we often get in the YSA. What happened with the Wobblies? How did the Socialist and Communist parties build their youth organizations? What were their problems and successes?

Cannon: First of all, we've got to understand that the past of the radical and revolutionary movement in this country is part of our heritage — both with its positive and negative sides. We have to know about that. Our new members should be thoroughly schooled in our exposition and analy­sis of the preceding movements — their strong points and their errors which we are trying to correct as a result of experience and greater know­ledge that we've gained from other sources, most importantly from the Russian revolution.

Finkel: Did young people play a special role in the Wobblies or in the early Socialist Party? Were there student members? What sort of role did the radicalizing youth find in the socialist movement?
Cannon: The IWW itself was predominantly a young workers movement. It had no special youth organization. The drive and idealism of youth were a large part of its power and its merit, but again, it had no separate youth organization. There was no need for it as far as anybody could see. There was not even any talk of it.

In the West particularly, the IWW was predomi­nantly a movement of migratory workers. They had to be young because it was a hard life. In the Midwest, for example, the harvest would start early in Texas and Oklahoma, and a great mass of migratory workers traveled by freight train down to the centers where the hiring took place and worked a few weeks or a month —whatever it took to finish the harvest.

Then they rode north by freight until they ended up in Minnesota and the Dakotas. That would be the whole summer long. And there would be rail­road construction work and things of that kind. Migratory workers, as they were called, were some­thing like the harvest pickers of today, except that they were all single men in those days. The wheat fields of Texas and Oklahoma would just be harvested about the time it was getting ripe in Kansas, and then in Nebraska and so on.

Another big source of their membership was the lumber woods of the Northwest. That con­stituency consisted of the same type of workers. And in the East in the textile mills, the IWW at one time had a strong movement, many strikes, mostly of young foreign-born and women workers.

Socialist youth organizations

Finkel: What were the first socialist youth or­ganizations in this country?

Cannon: Well, to my recollection, there have been several histories written of the socialist move­ment which I think I mentioned in my book, The First Ten Years of American Communism. Up until the thirties, the socialist movement didn't amount to much on the campuses. There was a pretty sharp division between students and work­ers in those days. College boys came from the better-off classes and didn't associate with the workers.

The first manifestation of a ripple of the move­ment on the colleges came when Jack London and Upton Sinclair, who were the two literary heroes of the movement at that time, gave some lectures at Yale or Harvard or a place like that on so­cialism—"How I Became a Socialist" and so on.
They received a favorable response, and the result of it was the formation of what I think was called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. It was a very thin movement because the percentage of people going to college was not great in those days.

Colleges were by no means the center of radicalization. Just the contrary. They were the center of conservatism. The Intercollegiate Socialist So­ciety, I think, later changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). It still exists, doesn't it?

Finkel: Yes. In fact, SDS —the Students for a Democratic Society — was originally the youth group of LID. Prior to 1959, I think, it was called the Student League for Industrial Democracy. But in 1964 the LID disowned it, because SDS wouldn't exclude groups like the YSA from an antiwar march it was planning in Washington, D.C.

Cannon: Anyway, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society became sort of a gentlemen's socialist club on the campuses. They called it the country club of the movement. The real movement itself had virtually nothing on the campuses. I don't know the exact year when the Young People's Socialist League4 was formed. You can probably check it in the history books, but it didn't really amount to much before the thirties when there was an upsurge of interest in political questions during the depression. Campus radicalism was at that time dominated by the Communist Party. The Socialists were quite a secondary factor, but they were largely swamped by the Communist Party.

There's been of course a great, fundamental change since then. One of the big changes to note is the percentage of people going to college now. I don't know the statistics, but you can easily check it. I think you'll find that the difference is practically qualitative.

In the old days of the IWW, anybody who'd been to high school was an exception. The average worker was lucky enough to finish grade school, get some kind of job, and that was it. But various factors, including the development of technology and the improved standard of living, greatly ex­panded the college population. Have you ever thought of that or have you ever read anything about it? Tremendous expansion.

For example, we've had here in our household over the last number of years 15 or 20 people who've lived here with me. There are two people here now. Six months ago there were two others. I think every single one of them had been to college. They were all working. They have either finished college or have had some college ex­perience, but they're working. And I guess a large percentage of those who attend college today go to work not as managers of prosperous family empires, but as workers in the labor force.

In 1919 Harvard students-had a great holiday going to Lawrence to help break a strike^ there. You can hardly imagine such a thing today.

The same thing happened in England in the general strike of 1926. There was a big move­ment recruiting strikebreakers from universities and prep schools and so on. They tried to help break the general strike.

Student radicalism in the '30s

In the thirties during the depression, that was the first time I ever noticed — the first time it came to general public attention —that there was a great rumbling on campus. The Communist Party had a very strong student membership. The Socialist Party too. We had a few, but nothing numerically significant.

The CP developed an antiwar movement on the campuses during the depression years. They ab­sorbed to a large extent the young socialists, the YPSL people, in a broader movement called the League Against War and Fascism.
The big problem for a person going to college then was what you were going to do after you got out There was no job to go to. That was the fate of many of them.

I remember Ted Draper, the author of The Roots of American Communism, told me that he con­centrated on the humanities courses in college rather than on the courses that would equip him for some kind of technical job. He said, "What was the use? Everybody knew there was no job to go to." He was preparing himself to be a writer.

An odd little story about the Socialist Party and the Communist Party is the story of the Draper brothers. You've heard of Hal Draper, the peren­nial YPSL? He's the brother of Ted Draper, the historian. Hal Draper was the Socialist, and the Socialists had a rather militant left wing in those days. He was one of the outstanding leaders of YPSL, and Ted Draper was one of the outstanding leaders of the Stalinists in the New York college community.

I was told that a big feature of that period was the debates between the two Draper brothers over questions of policy, war and so on. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist and Ted Draper was a Stalinist. In those days many Socialists stood to the left of the Stalinists.

A great many of those young people recruited by the Stalinists came out of college — either as graduates or dropouts. The Communist Party dominated a big unemployment movement, the Unemployed Councils. And young CP members who had acquired certain skills on the campuses in the organization of the movement—learning how to speak at meetings, make motions and do other things which the average person is afraid to even think of—went into the unemployment movement where they got further experience in organizational work.

When a slight upturn in industry came in the mid-thirties, they were sent into the factories. Many of these leaders of the Stalinist movement, as well as the Socialist Party to a lesser extent, became prominent. Some of their leaders in auto and other mass production industries began as former stu­dents, former Unemployed Council workers. I bet if a statistical record could be made, a large per­centage of their most dynamic and influential peo­ple had had some experience on the colleges, as well as in the Unemployed Councils.

I always think of that whenever I hear this chatter of the sectarian groups who make a hue and cry about leaving the campus and getting into the factories. Theoretically if s all right in the long run, because you certainly can't make a rev­olution on the campuses. For one reason, they don't have the industrial power. But workers re­cruited and convinced of the historical trend toward socialism and committed to it—and who have also had the benefit of a college education and experience in college organizations —can become very effective leaders in the mass movement of the workers.

And the same holds true for the unemployment movement, which will become, in my opinion, a big phenomenon in a period of serious economic crisis in this country.

I think we should think of our work on the campuses as preparatory work for the coming upsurge of the workers movement, in which the people who were recruited and trained as social­ists can play a great role. Both their education and their experience in organization will be very im­portant factors and can be extremely advantageous in a surging new movement of workers—whether in unemployed movements or in unions or both.

Organizational independence

Finkel: How did the YPSL and the Young Com­munists organize? Were they independent of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party? Were they controlled from the top down?

Cannon: They were completely controlled. The theory of the Communist youth organization as laid down in Russia by the Bolsheviks was ap­plied only on paper here. The formula was an organization of young people politically subordi­nate, but organizationally independent of the party. That was the formula. But in practice it didn't amount to much here. The control of the party was pretty absolute—as you see it now in the Communist Party.

The Young Communist League in my day in the twenties played no independent role. It was an appendage of the party. And the able young people in it were only too eager to get through with their YCL experience and get into the party, into the party faction fights where the real action was.

Max Shachtman, for instance, was the editor of the Young Worker, which was the Young Com­munist League paper. And Martin Abern was na­tional secretary. As I say, they considered them­selves as going through an apprenticeship. Their real interest was in the party. They belonged to the Cannon faction, as it was called, in the early twenties.

I didn't take much interest in YPSL in the twen­ties, so I can't speak from direct experience. But I think it was pretty much the same thing. Sort of shepherded by the party.

YPSL broke loose in the thirties. The YPSLs turned left politically faster than the Socialist Party. So that when we came to the showdown in 1937 — at the time we were in the Socialist Party6—at the national convention held in Philadelphia, the Trotskyists had a majority in YPSL, and we took a majority of YPSL with us.

I think YPSL at that time had about 1,000 members. Hal Draper was the national secretary, and he stayed with us a few years and then went out with the Shachtmanites. He remained a YPSL at heart. The last I heard of him, he was still operating on the campus.

YSA a new phenomenon

The Young Socialist Alliance of today is an entirely new phenomenon, as far as my experience can judge, by its composition, its general activity and in practically every other way.

The earlier youth movements were not nearly as serious as the party itself. A great many of them seemed really to be playing with ideas for awhile before turning their attention to some career. I used to hear the expression "career-oriented." That meant that they were not aiming to fight the rest of their lives for socialism; they were look­ing for a good job or profession or something of that sort.

This was true even of the left-wing young so­cialists that we recruited in 1937. The great ma­jority were not serious. The Shachtman and Burn-ham gang took the majority of them and they were fully entitled to them because they weren't made for a serious party.
Our youth movement of today benefits greatly from the tradition that we carried over with us from the Communist Party —the Leninist con­cepts of the movement. A serious movement of people who join and commit themselves to fight for socialism under any circumstances. And the conception of a professional staff.

This concept was not originated in America. It came entirely from the Bolsheviks like many of our other best ideas. I don't know how big a staff we now have in the party and the youth movement, but in the movement before the Russian revolution everything was a very casual affair. The national office consisted of a national secre­tary, a couple of stenographers, a bookkeeper and a lecture bureau and that was about it The IWW national office consisted of a general sec­retary, Vincent St John, in the days when I used to go there. SL John, a stenographer and a book­keeper and that was it

Finkel That was all?

How the IWW was organized

Cannon: That was the national office of the IWW. There was a tremendous movement of what was called the "decentralizers," who thought even that was too damn big of a bureaucracy to have hang­ing around their necks. They conducted a bitter fight to transform the national office into simply a communications center where the locals would send communications that would be forwarded to others. In 1913 we had a knock-down-drag-out fight at the convention with the decentralizers.

In addition to the national office of St John, the stenographer and the bookkeeper, you see, there was a General Executive Board of I think seven members who met about once every three months. The rest of the time they went out as field organizers, sometimes on the payroll, some­times not, according to how the finances stood out in the field.

And the decentralizers howled their heads off at the 1913 convention (that's the last one I at­tended) demanding that the organization be de­centralized and that all power be in the hands of the rank and file. The rank and file meant the locals. Each local for itself. They should com­municate with each other through the national office, sending letters to Chicago. And Chicago would forward a copy. On such things they ar­gued for days and days.

Well, they were defeated by St. John, who had an overwhelming personality. He was an organiz­er of the first quality and knew that organization required some centralization. And then St. John was succeeded by Bill Haywood7 —in 1914 I think.

Haywood went to prison in 1918, and the de-centralizers took over by a quiet operation in 1919. They adopted a motion that the national officers, the national secretary and the national organizer (who was not in the office but out in the field all the time) and any other national of­ficials should serve only one term. Just about the time they got their hands into their jobs, they'd be out and the new force would come in. And that was one, but not the main reason I think, for the decline of the IWW after the big persecu­tion8 during the First World War and the prison terms of the top leaders and so on.

I think there's some kind of myth or legend about the IWW which is entertained maybe by a lot of students. They've heard so much about it. And there was a wonderful militancy in the IWW.

But the IWW after the big persecution where hundreds were jailed, after 1920 or 1921, had no action whatever in the industrial field that any­body can recall. When the time came for the IWW project of industrial unions to be realized, it came from below in the mass production industries and the IWW was standing on the sidelines with their mouths open.9 They had nothing to do with it except as participants under different auspices.

Finkel: One of the questions we often get is how students can be effective. They don't see the work­ing class in motion and they often wonder what difference it makes or matters if they join the YSA. It's very abstract to them. How would you an­swer a question like that?

Cannon: Well, I would say a good beginning is to adopt a historical view of society. Try to get a clear idea of where we came from and where from all indications we're heading.

And the second would be, as a beginning, to read my pamphlet America's Road to Socialism and get the beginning of a concept of the historical collision that's in the making and that's not so far away. Students today are going to face such crises that they will see that any plan they've made for a settled, secure and a quiet career of making a lot of money is not in the cards any­more.

Things are going to blow up. There's either go­ing to be a revolution that transforms the whole social system or there isn't going to be anything left.

And we don't need to say that with any exag­geration or hysteria at all. That's what practically all scholars and other observers of society take for granted. One of the most common expressions you read in historical prognoses these days is "In the future, if there is to be a future of the hu­man race, it has to be different."

If you think, on top of everything else, that they've already got enough atomic weapons of var­ious kinds that can reach all points on the globe at the push of a button — enough to destroy the whole human race seven or eight times over. And if you think that every time there's any sign of a sharp international crisis everybody gets apprehensive about who's going to drop the first atom bomb and what will follow it, then you realize that the old slogan of the days before the First World War — that is, the historical perspective is either socialism or barbarism — is even more true today.

Today everybody with any knowledge of things will have to admit that the perspective is either socialism or annihilation. That's even worse than barbarism, because theoretically you can recover from a new barbarism. But nobody's yet recovered from the ashes of atomic destruction.

I believe that young people are particularly re­sponsive to discussions of that kind. And that's not some pipe dream at all. These are the demon­strable facts of life in the year 1974. The only worthwhile thing for a young person to commit herself or himself to is a movement to make pos­sible the continuation of the human race and its further evolution, development and progress. That can be stated seriously as a practical proposi­tion. "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite says when he winds up his evening news.

We couldn't say that with such assurance in the old days. One of the hardest things to answer was, "Well it's a good idea, but we'll never realize it. People will never agree to it." or "It's a hundred years away, so what's the use of worrying about it?"

But that's not the case today. The young genera­tion you're talking to is going to see it one way or another. And you may be able to decide. That's really a terrific thought—that one single person may make the difference.

I heard on TV several years ago an interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russell who was greatly disturbed about the development of atomic weapons and was agitated about the danger of them. He had accumulated considerable knowledge of atomic weapons' potential for destruction.

He was asked, "What do you consider is your main concern?" He hesitated a moment, and he said, "I want to see the human race continue." And then he was asked, "And what do you think are the odds?" He replied, "About four to six as I see it right now" — about four to six, for the chances of the human race continuing. The next question was, "What can we do about it?" And he said, "The only thing I know is to keep work­ing and struggling to change the odds."

I always thought of this as a very perceptive statement of the dilemma facing the young genera­tion today. Not at all what it was 50 or 100 years ago. In some of my last speeches before I fell into retirement, so to speak, I quoted this along with opinions of other informed people. I found a great response to that formulation and developed it further.

I said, "Suppose by our efforts we can push the odds up to 50-50, which is easily conceivable. By our efforts we can make it five to five instead of four to six! There's a point where one feather on one side of the scale or the other can make a difference on the basic question. It doesn't matter who we are, or where we're situated, or what we do; any one of us can make that difference."

It's a sobering formulation, isn't it? And yet, I personally feel that it is not at all a fantastic for­mulation. I feel that the human race is at the point where it's got to decide and hasn't too much time to do it. I'm almost certain it's going to be de­cided one way or another in the lifetime of the new generation entering the world of political action.

And then you should consider that the human race hasn't yet had a real chance to show what it's capable of doing. It has been the victim throughout the millenia of the social system that it has been born into. Humanity has done pretty well in coping with the problems of nature, of science and technology, but we have not yet gained control of our own social system. Nobody knows what's possible. But we can say all things are pos­sible if we had an organized, consciously directed and planned organization of society and produc­tion.

It just staggers the mind to think of what could be done if everybody in the world had access to all the knowledge that has been accumulated over the ages and had an opportunity to develop the latent talents that everybody has to a greater or lesser extent. How much waste in the social system could be eliminated and converted to con­structive uses! Good God! Just think, in this coun­try we throw away $80 billion a year on weapons of destruction. Just that alone, to say nothing of what we throw away on useless advertising, dirty tricks and things of that sort in politics. God almighty!

And then, as Trotsky said in one of his articles in Literature and Revolution, humanity under so­cialism for the first time will begin to understand itself and to consciously develop to its best capac­ity. That's never been done. That requires a change in the social system. And he predicted that we will develop the human race to the point where the average person reaches the height of an Aristotle, or a Goethe or a Marx, and beyond that, new peaks will rise.

Well, I think a young person listening to those arguments will have a hard time coming up with an answer to them. You've got to pose the ques­tion flatly: that there's a danger that the human race may not continue; and if it's going to con­tinue it's got to take control of its own social system and reorganize it and plan and eliminate the constant day-to-day danger of annihilation.

Finkel: Then they ask you how do you do it?

Cannon: Well, we're not going to say it's an easy thing to do. It's a lifetime job for each and every­one of us. But the thing that inspires one's life and makes it worth living in the face of all this calami­tous danger everywhere, uncertainties and insecuri­ty, is to commit yourself to an effort to change it. And not to belittle oneself and think you don't count. You may be the decisive factor.

Finkel: Thank you very much, Jim.

Cannon: Thank you for giving me a chance to sound off. I don't get on the soapbox much any more these days. If I can convey any sug­gestion to you it's this —the longer you live in this fight, the more determined you are to try to win it and the more confident you are that the human race will survive.
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All Out For May Day In Boston 2012-Tuesday May 1st - Schedule Of Events

Click on the headline to link the Boston May Day Coalition website

INTERNATIONAL WORKERS DAY 1886-2012

The right to an 8-hour working day was won with the blood of the martyrs of Chicago in 1886. 126 years later we continue to fight for the rights of all workers in the U.S.

Boston rally at 12 noon – Tuesday May 1, 2012
Boston City Hall Plaza/Government Center (Cambridge & Court Streets)

Public Transportation: Blue line Train - State Street stop
Green line Train - Government Center stop

After the rally we will join East Boston at 2 pm and march to the Everett May Day rally.

The 99% demands:

1. Stop attacks on workers!

2. Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!

3. Stop racial profiling legislations and programs!

4. End police brutality!

5. Money for jobs and education, transportation not for war!

6. Keep education public!

7. An end to corporate rule and a return of power to the people!

More information: www.bostonmayday.org
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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) 889-6080

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
857 203-2393

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

Out In The Menacing 1950s Be-Bop Night- John Cassavetes’s “Crime In The Streets”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir Crime In The Streets.

DVD Review

Crime In The Streets, starring John Cassavetes, James Whitmore, Sal Mineo, 1956

There was a menace, a serious menace, in American society in the 1950s that threatened the whole way of life and concerned young and old rich and poor, no question. People seized up at the very mention of the idea and went screaming into some dreaded night at the thought. The “red scare” you say with all those secret agents in high places and low, working 24/7/365 for “Uncle Joe” and his commie empire? Well, maybe but this is not the right answer here. The gut-wrenching fear of every kid (and adult who worried about their kids) who had to hide under his or her desk in some weak-kneed and empty-headed attempt to fend off some coming atomic bomb blast? Close, but no cigar. No, the thing that drove terror into the hearts of every self-respecting and well-meaning citizen, and even those who were not, was the invasion of … the juvenile delinquent (JD). Yes, JDs, usually shiftless young men, teenagers really, from the lower depths. And their hanger-on girlfriends (although the girlfriends were not as feared, not nearly as feared for obviously 1950s male-dominated society reasons).

If you came from “the projects” as I did, or from the urban slums as portrayed in the film under review, Crime In The Streets, a classic of this mid-1950s genre then the social snubs (I am being kind here) from the upper crust as the immoral, illegal, and threatening male teenager with time on his hands, a chip on his shoulder and no dough and no way to make dough was a lot more pressing that some hyped-up red scare or silly atomic bomb explosion. And as the plot line unfolds here in the small back streets world those great world-shaking problems don’t even enter the horizon. Life close to the bone, angst-filled and alienation-flooded just swamped all other worldly considerations. Especially for wayward kids.

This film opens with a classic “rumble,” over turf naturally, between two rival street gangs. After that audience fright as a way to get the juices flowing the rest of the film is a study in whatever sociological notions were floating at the time to identify, descript, and put a Band-Aid on the JD problem.

Frank, sensitive but totally alienated Frank (played by a very young John Cassavetes), is trying to find his place in his small world of the slums but people won’t let him alone. Especially one old goat of a man (a bowler no less so you know his is nothing but a bad hombre to mess with) , who snitches to the coppers on one of Frank’s boys, and is set up to take the fall- the deep fall so Frankie can feel better about himself. Aided by two fellow gang members he decides to alleviate his bad feeling but a small off-hand murder of this guy right in the neighborhood. One of Frank’s confederates turns out to be Baby (played by Sal Mineo made famous as a JD movie character in Rebel Without A Cause) and another played by Mark Rydell who seems to be a pyscho (or at least seriously anti-social).

Enter one settlement house social worker (this was the uptown swells’, 1950s version, notion of how to get these JDs back into society and away from dangerous weapons) played by James Whitmore who keeps prodding on Frankie’s conscious and his “inner” suburban youth. Naturally since a central motif of all crime noirs, JDs or hardened criminals, is that crime doesn’t pay old Frankie is made in his own way and in his own time to see the light. And to take responsibility for his actions. I think based on this plot I would have preferred to be just another punk JD than go that route. So there.

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-“The Exchange”

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

http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes

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.
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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!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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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.
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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.
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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. 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!
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)

“The Exchange”

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Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: Manuscrits de Charles Fourier. Année 1851.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.


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No series has more members than that of the Exchange. Insofar as possible everyone in the Phalanx gathers at its sessions which are held every day to plan the activities of the following days. They take place at nightfall, at the time when everyone is returning to the Phalanstery and when there is little or no activity in the kitchens and gardens.

There is much more animation and intrigue at the Exchange of a Phalanx than there is at the stock exchanges of London or Amsterdam. For every individual must go to the Exchange to arrange his work and pleasure sessions for the following days. It is there that he makes plans concerning his gastronomic and amorous meetings and, especially, for his work sessions in the shops and fields. Everyone has at least twenty sessions to arrange, since he makes definite plans for the following day and tentative ones for the day after.

Assuming that 1200 individuals are present, and that each one has twenty sessions to arrange, this means that in the meeting as a whole there are 24,000 transactions to be concluded. Each of these transactions can involve 20, 40 or 100 individuals who must be consulted and intrigued with or against. It would be impossible to unravel so many intrigues and conclude so many transactions if one proceeded according to the confused methods employed by our commercial exchanges. operating at their rate it would take at least a whole day to organise half the meetings that the Harmonians must plan in half an hour. I will now describe their expeditious methods.

In the center of the hall there is a raised platform on which the director, the directrice and their secretaries are seated. Scattered around the hall are the desks of 24 negotiators, 12 men and 12 women. Each of them handles the affairs of a given number of series and serves as the representative of several neighbouring Phalanxes. Each of the four secretaries corresponds with six of the 24 negotiators by means of iron wires whose movements indicate requests and decisions.

Negotiations are carried on quietly by means of signals. Each negotiator holds up the escutcheons of the groups or Phalanxes which he represents, and by certain prearranged signs he indicates the approximate number of members which he has recruited. Everyone else walks around the hall. In one or two circuits a given individual may take part in 20 transactions, since all he has to do is to accept or refuse. Dorimon suggests that a meeting of the bee-keepers be held the next day at ten o'clock. The leaders of this group have taken the initiative according to the customary procedures. Their job is to find out whether or not a majority of the members of the bee-keeping group wish to hold a session. In this case the decision is affirmative. Each of the members takes his peg from the bee-keepers’ board which is placed in front of Dorimon’s desk... .

At the other side of the hall Araminte calls for a meeting of the rose-growers to be held at the same time. Since many of Araminte’s rose-growers are also members of the bee-keeping group, they raise an objection and notify Dorimon. He conveys their message to the directorate which tells Araminte to halt his negotiations. The rose-growers are obliged to choose another hour, since bee-keeping is a more necessary form of work than rose-growing.

Negotiations frequently become so complicated that three, four or five groups, and even complete series, find themselves in competition. Everything is settled by the signals of the negotiators. Their acolytes confer with the leaders of the various conspiring groups by calling them over to one of the desks. Every time someone tries to initiate an intrigue, either to organise a session or prevent one from being held, a conference takes place at some point outside the main promenade area so as not to disturb those who are still walking around the hall, watching the progress of negotiations and making up their minds... .

When a session of the Exchange is over everyone writes down a list of the meetings which he has agreed to attend, and the negotiators and directors draw up a summary of all the transactions. This summary is immediately sent to the press and then it is distributed to neighbouring communities by a dog who carries it around his neck.

Conflicts and changes of time frequently cause the postponement of sessions. News of such postponements is regularly announced in the main hall of the Phalanstery, where there are always intermediaries or brokers to initiate new activities and plan meetings which could not be arranged at the evening’s Exchange due to conflicts and cabales. In all the public halls there are special bureaus to deal with such problems.

All of these transactions will be carried on by methods totally unlike those of our stock exchanges where people try to conceal their thoughts and use crafty tactics. In the Exchanges of Harmony everyone desires to manifest his intentions and to make them known to all.

Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case and the April 24th and 25th support rallies on his behalf.

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.
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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!

From The Coalition Of Immokalee Workers (CWI)-The April 12th Quincy (Ma) Rally At Stop& (Sweat) Shop)-Victory To The Florida Farmworkers!

Click on the headline to link to a report from the Coalition Of Immokalee Workers (CWI) website-The April 12th Quincy (Ma) Rally At Stop& (Sweat) Shop)

Markin comment:

The headline says it all--Victory To The CIW Florida Farmworkers!