Tuesday, April 29, 2014


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Left Forum 2014 Conference
 
Sunday Evening Plenary:
Barbara Bowen, Kshama Sawant, and Rob Robinson
Amy Goodman: moderator and interlocutor
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Everyday Revolutions and Transformative Organizing: 
Dialogues, Strategies, Hope, and Trust
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A dialogue in three parts - with audience questions
with a welcome from Dolores Canales
 
Barbara Bowen is a professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). She taught for fifteen years before becoming president of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY.  A scholar of 17th-century English literature and African-American studies, Bowen earned her Ph.D. at Yale and has published numerous works in her field.  Throughout her academic career, she also worked in progressive political movements and as a labor organizer.  Bowen’s election as president of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) in 2000 was as part of a collective of faculty and staff with deep roots in progressive politics.  The PSC represents 25,000 faculty members and professional staff at CUNY and the CUNY Research Foundation.   A fierce opponent of accommodating to economic austerity, Bowen has been an outspoken critic of Albany’s failed strategy of disinvestment in CUNY and reliance on increased student tuition. She is a principled and articulate labor leader, pressing city’s labor movement to challenge Wall Street. 
Kshama Sawant is an activist who brings a passion for social justice to her work as a public servant. As a member of the Seattle City Council, Kshama pledges to be a voice for workers, youth, the oppressed and the voiceless. After earning her PhD, Kshama moved to Seattle and began teaching at Seattle Central Community College, Seattle University, and the University of Washington Tacoma. In 2012, Kshama ran as a Socialist Alternative candidate for WA State Legislature and surprised everyone by winning 29% of the vote. The momentum continued in her campaign for Seattle City Council where she boldly ran on a platform of fighting for a $15/hr. minimum wage, rent control and taxing the super-rich to fund mass transit and education. In November she defeated a 16-year incumbent Democrat to become the first socialist elected in a major US city in decades.
   
Rob Robinson is a member of the Leadership Committee of the Take Back the Land Movement and a staff volunteer at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). After losing his job in 2001 with a fortune 500 company, he spent two years, homeless on the streets of Miami and ten months in a New York City shelter.  He eventually overcame homelessness and has been in the housing movement based in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be New York City chairperson for the first ever official mission of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.  He has worked with homeless populations in Budapest, Hungary and Berlin, Germany and is connected with housing movements in South Africa and Brazil. He works with the European Squatters Collective, International Alliance of Inhabitants, Landless People’s Movement and the Movement of People Affected by Dams and is a member of the Steering Committee of the USA Canada Alliance of Inhabitants. He is a member of the Board of the Left Forum.
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,200 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! "an inspiration." PULSE named her one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.
   
Dolores Canales is a founding member and organizer with California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) and on the Advisory Board of CURB (Californians United for a Responsible Budget) and  mother of John Martinez, who has spent the past 13 years in Solitary Confinement in Pelican Bay SHU prison. Since the July 2011 Hunger Strike Dolores and numerous other family members have been actively involved in raising awareness to the issues of solitary confinement and mass incarceration in California.  Dolores herself is a formally incarcerated, very productive member of society, and spends her free time advocating on behalf of prisoners and their families. Dolores was awarded the Family Unity Award by Legal Services of Prisoners with Children. 
 
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Monday, April 28, 2014

On The 39th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)-Vietnam At The End- No Black-Bordered Obituary For War Criminal Kennedy/Johnson Secretary Of War Robert S. McNamara

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sometimes a picture is in fact better than one thousand words. In this case the famous, or infamous depending on one’s view, photograph of the last American “refugees” being evacuated by helicopter from the American Embassy rooftop in Saigon (now, mercifully, Ho Chi Minh City) tells more about that episode of American imperial hubris that most books. That clinging mass of blurry figures dragging, fighting, pushing to get that last out before the NVA swooped down in a flash and closed down the old shop. Books that spent thousands of words talking about “domino theories, red menaces, communist hegemony, and sticking it to the Soviets by a little proxy war in far off rice fields.

Recently I reviewed Frank Snepp’s book about Vietnam at the end of the war, Indecent Interval , where I noted “as is the case with this little gem of a book, ex- CIA man Frank Snepp’s insider account of that fall from the American side, it is nice to have some serious analytical companionship to that photo [helicopter rescues off the Embassy rooftop].  Moreover, a book that gives numerous details about what happened to who in those last days in a little over five hundred pages. Naming names about who the good guys and bad guys really were (from the American imperial perspective). Especially now, as two or three later generations only see Vietnam through the hoary eyes of old veterans, both military and radical anti-war, from that period like me (a veteran in both senses) to tell the tale.”

And such histories, memoirs and remembrances help to get a fix on that Vietnam episode in the lives of many of the young in that time. Sometimes though the story of war, about what happened before the whole edifice came crashing down, can be told another way, in a more personal way. Who knows in one hundred years the book below may present the more important story.

*******

No Black-Bordered Obituary For War Criminal Kennedy/Johnson Secretary Of War Robert S. McNamara

Commentary (July 6, 2009)

The recent death, at 93, of Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam War-era War Secretary Robert McNamara has been met with a number of tributes in the bourgeois media about his role as architect of various Cold War military policies in defense of the American Imperial state. That is to be expected for those sources. There is, apparently, an unwritten rule that one does not speak ill of the dead in those circles. Including legitimate war criminals. And in the normal course of events that might be an appropriate response. But one Robert Strange McNamara is of a different stripe.

After a life time of public service to the bourgeois state Mr. McNamara, seemingly, late in life started to worry about his eternal soul and the harm that he had done to it by trying, as an example, to wipe the country of Vietnam, North and South at the time, off the face of the earth with his incessant strategic bombing policy. After exhibiting some qualms late in the Johnson presidency (and around the time of TET 1968) he was booted upstairs to become President of the American-dominated World Bank. Nice soft landing for a war criminal, right?

And who called him a war criminal? Well, of course, this writer did (and does). And so did many of the anti-war activists of the 1960’s. Those calls are to be expected (and might be considered to constitute a minimum response to his egregious policies). But, surprise, surprise late in life, after serious reflection, McNamara implied, haltingly to be sure, in his memoirs (a review of which is re-posted below) that that might have been the case. However, unlike some of his compadres at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunals and other such venues, Mr. McNamara died quietly in his bed.

Not so fortunate were the millions of Vietnamese peasants and workers who bore the onslaught of the maximum fire-power the American military could lay down. No, there will be no final justice in this sorry old world until a future American Workers Republic pays real justice (and serious cash) to the people of Vietnam. As for Robert Strange McNamara, if the worst that happened to him was a “bad conscience” he got off easy.

******

Reposted below is a review of Robert Strange McNamara’s memoirs and of a documentary “Fog Of War” used by him in order to help “the second draft” of history of his legacy.

Reposted From April 30, 2009 Entry

The Fog Of War, Part II- War Secretary Robert McNamara’s View Of His Handiwork in Vietnam

Book Review

In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert Strange McNamara with Brain VanDeMark, Random House, 1995

Anyone who had caught the Friday March 27, 2009 headlines is aware that the Democratic Party-run Obama government has called for some 4,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and what they, euphemistically, call civilian support teams in order to bolster the sagging regime of “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai. Those numbers are in addition to the 17,000 extras already committed by the Obama regime in February. Does the word escalation seem appropriate here?

One of the problems of having gone through the Vietnam experience in my youth (including periods of lukewarm support for American policy under John F. Kennedy, a hands-off attitude in the early Lyndon B. Johnson years and then full-bore opposition under the late Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford regimes) is a tendency to view today’s American imperial policy in the same by-the-numbers approach as I took as a result of observing the Vietnam War as it unfolded. There are differences, some of them hugely so, between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Just as, I have previously noted in this space, there are differences between Vietnam and the recently “completed” Iraq War. (Hey, I’m just going by what the media tells me is going on. They wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?)

But, I keep getting this eerie feeling in the back of my neck every time I hear, or see, anything concerning Afghanistan coming out of this new Obama administration. They appear clueless, yet are determined to forge ahead with this policy that can only lead to the same kind of quagmire than Vietnam and Iraq turned into. That is where the analogies to Vietnam do connect up. In this regard, I have recently been re-reading Kennedy/Johnson War Secretary Robert Strange (that’s his middle name, folk, I didn’t make it up and didn’t need to) McNamara’s memoirs, written in 1995, of his central role in the development of Vietnam policy, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.

Obviously McNamara has put his own ‘spin’ on his personal role then in order to absolve himself (a little) before history. That is to be expected. What comes through crystal clear, however, because in the final analysis McNamara still doesn’t get it, is that when you’re the number one imperial power all the decisions you make are suppose to fall into place for your benefit because you represent the “good guys”. Regardless of what you do, or do not, know about the internal workings of the situation at hand. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations were almost totally ignorant of the internal working of Vietnamese society. That is why I have that eerie, very eerie, feeling about this Obama war policy.

In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were very necessary in his case and hence he had to go to the prints in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his “ghost writer” not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.

After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 8o something, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.

Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic “The Best and The Brightest”.

McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the “lessons” to be drawn from experiences (eleven in all by the way). Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate “war criminal” to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery. Yet, like that freshman course there are things to be learned despite the professor and more to learn, if only by reading between the lines, than he or she wanted to express.

McNamara presents his take by dividing the Vietnam War buildup, at least at the executive level, into periods; the early almost passive Kennedy days; the post Kennedy assassination period when Lyndon Johnson was trying to be all things to all men; the decisive post-1964 election period; and, various periods of fruitless and clueless escalation. It is this process that is, almost unwittingly, the most important to take from this world. Although McNamara, at the time of writing was an older and wiser man, when he had power he went along with ever step of the “hawks”, civilian and military. He led no internal opposition, and certainly not public one. This is the classic “good old boys” network where one falls on one’s sword when the policy turns wrong. And he is still scratching his head over why masses of anti-war protesters chanted “war criminal” when they confronted him with his deeds. And then listen to the latest screeds by current War Secretary Gates concerning Afghanistan. It will sound very familiar.

In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to read this book if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defended their state then, and now.

DVD REVIEW

The Fog of War, starring former Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara, 2003

In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, former Kennedy and Johnson Administration Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were not enough and hence he had to go before the cameras in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his interviewer not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.

After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 85, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.

Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic The Best and The Brightest.

McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the `lessons' to be drawn from experiences. Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's Freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate `war criminal' to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery.

In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to watch this film if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defend their state.

 

 


From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broué-The Italian Communist Party, the War and the Revolution (March 1987)



 
From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The 70th Anniversary Of His Death (2010)-

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist ( I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.


Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

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


Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

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

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

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

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

******** 

Pierre Broué-The Italian Communist Party, the War and the Revolution (March 1987)


From Revolutionary History, Vol. 5 No. 4, Spring 1995, pp. 111–122.
Originally published in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 29, March 1987, pp. 70–9.
Translated by John Archer.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

What follows here first appeared as an article in the Cahiers Léon Trotsky (no. 29, March 1987, pp. 70–9) entitled Le PC italien, le guerre et la révolution, and we are indebted to Pierre Broué and his translator, John Archer, for permission to publish it here. The text has been collated against the French and slightly amended, with the addition of our own footnotes.
Although it does not relate directly to Arturo Peregalli’s article that follows, it does provide us with a very useful background to what was going on, and enables us to place these events in their global context. The operations of Stalinism in Italy are thus seen to occupy an intermediate position between the very different techniques used to head off revolution in France and Greece (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no. 4, Winter 1988–89, pp. 34–8; Volume 3, no. 3, Spring 1981, pp. 6–9).



SERGE LAMBERT’S thesis has not ‘yet’ found a publisher. [1] We are not complaining about that. We believe that he was able to find someone to supervise his research and people to examine him because he presented his thesis in France, and he would not have found anyone to do it in Italy itself, for political reasons, and because there are myths which politicians defend tooth and nail against real historians, in other words, against the search for historical truth.
The history of Italy during the Second World War, and the history of the Italian Communist Party during that war, are not in fact minor episodes. In Italy it was the workers’ agitation – and no one will be surprised to learn that it began in the Fiat plant – which finally shook the ground under the Fascist regime, and dug the grave of Benito Mussolini. The end of his regime is a faint echo of that in February 1917, with the same phenomenon of the police hesitating to repress the workers and allowing them a little time, just enough for them to achieve solidarity, which became a general strike to bring down the regime the next day. It was also in Italy that the Italian Communist Party – that section of the Communist International directly under the control of Moscow – made approaches to the notables, the renegade Fascists, the marshals and the princes of the church, to propose a compromise to them that was to save all of them from the pressure from the streets in exchange for a government ministry, and hence legal recognition for the Italian Agency in Moscow.
The work of Serge Lambert begins there. It concentrates on the Italian Communist Party, but actually goes far beyond it, because its limits are not strictly defined. It is both a history of the Italian Communists during the war, and a history of the revolution which was looking for guidelines and failed to find them in time. Serge Lambert’s merit lies in his having understood all this, not limiting himself to keeping one eye on the Bordigists and the other on Togliatti and Longo [2], writing neither a history of the small groups nor of the apparatuses, but writing the history of a revolutionary development and movement which largely elude chronology and classical stereotypes, which essentially consisted of a rough and difficult process in which a handful of apparatchiks, supported by the strength of the Allied armies, succeeded in diverting the Italian revolution, and in this way won a decisive battle in the struggle against the revolution.
To begin with, the history of Italy at this historic crossroads can only be explained if it is firmly understood that it here obeys a kind of law of uneven and combined development on the level of politics, because of the long period of Fascist rule. To all intents and purposes it was in 1926 that Italian Communism parted ways with world Communism, and entered a kind of no man’s land, in which time had suspended its flight. The party, prohibited in law and in fact, was marked by the influence of Bordigism, not in the sectarian sense that the word was to assume later on, it is true, but in the left revolutionary sense by which the current influenced by Amadeo Bordiga [3], the real founder of the Communist Party of Italy, could be described. The people who had been through years of prison and internal exile, or even ‘survived’ precariously at liberty, remained faithful to the Communism of the mid-1920s, which no one can deny was utterly dominated by the perspective of revolution in its motives and thinking. On the other hand these revolutionaries had a Mecca in revolutionary Moscow, which had begun the era in which they sooner or later expected to take a leading part. Now as far as they were concerned, Moscow and the Soviet Union still existed in the colours of 1920–26. In most of the towns and villages none of them had had any contact with the party apparatus for years. They had no idea of how Hitlerism had come to power with the aid of a split encouraged by the Communist International and its denunciations of ‘Social Fascism’. They knew nothing about the era of the Popular Front, the ‘holding out of a hand’ to Catholics and Blackshirts, [4] or of participation in government. As far as they were concerned, the war in Spain had only been a crusade by their executioners and masters against their brethren, the workers and peasants of the Iberian peninsula. They knew nothing of the Moscow Trials and the crimes of Stalinism, and not much about the German-Soviet Pact and the alliance for a new Europe between Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. But on the other hand they threw themselves enthusiastically against Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which they regarded as their own, the army of ‘the workers and peasants’.
Is it so surprising that as soon as the great weight of Fascism splintered and broke up under the explosive pressure of the masses, these people returned to the gestures and symbols they knew, the hammer and sickle, the banner and the red star, as well as to the words and institutions that symbolised for them the revolution, the committees and councils which they saw as soviets, and the armed formations of the ‘partisans’, which for them were Italy’s ‘Red Army’? Is it so surprising that in their struggle against the Fascist regime they should first and foremost attack the great landed proprietors, the industrialists, the big merchants, the bankers and the high officials, in other words all those who were the incarnation of Fascism as well as of the bourgeoisie, private property and the exploitation of man by man? Is it so surprising that they should again spontaneously take up the language of class struggle and not that of class harmony, even before the call to arms arrived?
The Stalinist apparatus had not of course disappeared. It had maintained itself in exile abroad in France and Moscow during the 1930s, where it had carried on a harsh struggle against its oppositionists, practically all of them the pioneers of the Communist movement, and had expelled and even murdered them, as in Spain. The few hundreds that it had managed to hold on to were ‘hard’, steeled in factional struggle, often connected with the GPU [5], completely accustomed to ‘turns’ and ‘recantations’, and perfectly disciplined. They came back when the Italian revolution began in 1943, but they controlled nothing as yet. Most of them, having been penetrated and arrested or handed over by the European countries in which they sought refuge, found themselves in internal exile, where they reformed their nuclei. It is evidently they who were capable of expelling Terracini in 1943 [6], long after the beginning of Hitler’s war against the USSR – for having denounced the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939! It was they who tried to reconstruct the party apparatus by systematically playing off the youth, who were cut off from the revolutionary tradition, against the older people who were imbued with it, playing off the intellectuals and the petit-bourgeois who had accepted collaboration with the Catholics and the deserters from Fascism who were calling for ‘class harmony’ and ‘anti-Fascism’ against the workers, who were attacking the employers, the landed proprietors and the princes of the church, and wanted to pay off old scores, with class oppression at the top of the list. The most well-known example is obviously that described in Rome by Serge Lambert, where the Communist Party admitted a group of intellectuals, along with Ingrao, which had come from the Fascist youth, but rejected the Scintilla group of old workers, which had devoted itself to organising detachments of red partisans.
The history of the Italian Communist Party from 1943 onwards is the history of a Stalinist apparatus brought into Italy from outside, struggling to impose itself from above upon the real party, the true party, the party that had survived Fascism and continued to live on in the workers’ districts and the villages, to muzzle them and to impose on their ‘Bordigist’ tradition a Stalinist war policy for which obviously no tradition had prepared them.
One of the exceptional merits of Serge Lambert’s work is that it enables us to grasp how, whatever the strength of its technique, the rigour of its discipline, the determination of its activists and the counter-revolutionary experience and firmness of its leaders, this apparatus could only derive its strength from the fact that it was the spearhead of the ‘Allied’ international coalition in Italy. Not only was it Togliatti who saved the monarchy with his Salerno Speech [7] on that occasion being the spokesman of the Soviet government as much as of the Allied joint command, but it was to Stalinist militants like Irving Goff, trained to collaborate with the GPU in Spain, that the OSS [8] applied for reports about the trade unions and political bodies that refused to conform to the requirements of the Allies in occupied southern Italy.
It is almost impossible to summarise Serge Lambert’s work. We need to experience with him in patiently reconstructed detail the efforts of the Communist militants of the northern industrial cities, beginning with those Communists in the factories and in the workers’ districts who formed their organisations and published Stella Rossa, Bandiera Rossa or Il Lavatore, the class struggle organs of ‘revolutionary’ Communism, sometimes called ‘fundamentalist’. The apparatus finished them off with great determination, combining threats, splits, appeals for unity, violence and corruption, even on occasion accepting the need (as in the ‘Montesanto’ affair in Naples [9]) to rebuild from the ground up when a Communist organisation had taken up class positions and was uniting all the Communists in its ranks from Bordigists to Trotskyists, as well as Socialists who had become revolutionaries. Sometimes entire federations formed outside the apparatus, especially in the south, where it was not easy to subject them to centralised control.
It was in fact the position of Italy as an ‘enemy’ power of the Allies occupied by its conquerors, with the presence of the occupying forces, that was to become the trump card in the hands of the ‘normalisers’, who wanted a Communist Party opposed to the revolution, and mass patriotic organisations. The intelligence agent Irving Goff waxes indignant about the fact that a trade union organisation with several hundred thousand members could be allowed to have a newspaper which expressed a viewpoint other than that of class harmony. And the trade unions were to be united by force, with leaders who were not elected, but nominated by the parties of the Resistance, who were, as is well known, linked with the Allies, and represented them as their auxiliaries in the conduct of the war.
Who can fail to understand the real division of labour between the enemy and the occupying powers? It was German shock troops who went as far as a systematic massacre of all the fighters of the Roman Red Army of the ‘Communist Movement of Italy’ which had raised the Red Flag over the buildings it had conquered, and had celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution rather than the national holiday. Nor can the disappearance of the radical local leaders under the blows of the Gestapo be regarded as a negligible factor in a struggle in which every position counted.
Like a good researcher Serge Lambert has not neglected any avenues. In this way he has very carefully followed the trail of the disagreements inside the PCI to the very heart of the apparatus, for example what is called the ‘extremism’ of the Turin Federation of the Communist Party, or the way in which Togliatti wrong-footed the leadership of the party when he supported the sacred union under the government of the ex-Fascist boss Badoglio [10], who had been recognised by the Soviet Union, and was supported by the United States and Britain. Nor has he neglected the rumours often hinted at or described by the newspapers about conflicts between the ‘military’ and the ‘civilians’, or of the ‘danger of revolution’ embodied in the ‘red partisans’ which may at certain times have brought them up against civilian politicians.
His conclusion will not be acceptable to everybody, but it is based upon solid arguments. It is undeniable that the resistance of the ‘northern’ leadership reflected, in however indirect a fashion, the pressure of the masses in the great industrial centres, who formed the big battalions of the first armed groups, as in Greece. But this pressure was often exerted in a very particular direction: the ‘leaders’ here did not insist on going against their troops by forcing them to bury their weapons and disarm, for they feared a reaction against these untimely orders which risked their being overturned by their men. The insistence with which a man like Luigi Longo emphasised that it was only ‘external considerations’ – in other words, the requirements of the Stalinist USSR – which ‘prevented’ the party from taking power, reveal no disagreement with the line dictated to these top cadres, but only the difficulty they had in applying it.
As for what has been considered to be a clash that arose between the military and civilian leaders, this also only comes up in the form of secondary questions of prestige, rivalries and power sharing. But the question of direction, of knowing whether the leadership of the Communist Party and the very numerous armed forces that it controlled would be at the service of a ‘revolution’ and a seizure of power by the workers, or at the service of national reconstruction in dispute with the Allies had been settled long before. In this sense Serge Lambert is perfectly correct to emphasise not only that this question was decided on the political level, and particularly by the victory of the apparatus over the ‘old party’, which imposed the class collaborationist line of the ‘new party’, but that even the insurrection, for example, had been thought up by the apparatus from start to finish as a preventive initiative... against the revolution, and that the most enthusiastic supporters of the insurrection were not secret supporters of the revolution at this time, but on the contrary its most determined opponents.
The way in which the first political conflict was decided, whether in the industrial cities of the north or in Naples, in the suburbs of Rome or in the partisan units, in any case shows clearly, according to Serge Lambert, that the Italian revolutionary Communists bowed to the authority of the USSR as the country of the revolution, and that it was the prestige of the October Revolution, of ‘transformation’ and of ‘Socialist construction’ put at the service of class harmony that ensured the success of the material forces in the service of the policy of the Italian Communist Party. The ‘old’ Italian Communists, cut off from the debates about the Soviet Union, knowing nothing of the developments of the past two decades, of hairpin ‘turns’, of the retractions and acrobatics of the Stalinist Comintern, seemed generally even to have believed that Togliatti was trying to impose on them an opportunistic policy behind the back of Stalin himself. They waited patiently for Stalin, when he had been informed about what was going on, to release the brake and remove the gag that had been forced on them in his name! Even if Togliatti’s people sometimes had to resort to assassination – when it was really necessary – they usually succeeded in doing without it, by going in for splits, and by grinding down their critics and the opponents of the official line, whose slightest fault amounted to a lack of that absolute faith which all placed in the Soviet Union and the man who seemed to symbolise it at the time.
Now we can better understand why the greater part of the forces of Stella Rossa, whose archives reveal traces of discussions about an article by Trotsky, finally went back to the Italian Communist Party, whom they had once outnumbered in Turin, but not before they had been forced into a conflict marked by numerous physical confrontations. We can also understand how feeble appeared to be the ‘neutralist’ or ‘defeatist’ position of those direct descendants of Bordiga who supported the theses of Prometeo, some of whom also ended up supporting the national union.
In an article in this issue Serge Lambert tries to retrace the history of the Italian Trotskyists, their attempt at the end of the war to set up a section of the Fourth International, and the bitter defeat which followed. [11] Here there is a marked contrast with the French Trotskyists. Nowhere were there in France so many groups as in Italy, armed or otherwise, and predominantly working class, which consciously opposed the policy dictated to them by the Communist Party. No section of French militants could form groups of workers around a journal, or military detachments that could take initiatives in defence or in harassing the enemy, or had a political rationale capable of competing seriously with and sometimes totally eclipsing the influence of the party officially linked with Moscow. Yet there never was a more complete collapse than in Italy. Bordigists like Bordiga, former Bordigists like Enrico Russo, oppositional Communists like Libero Villone [12], old Trotskyists who had entered into the PSI like Di Bartolomeo, and out and out Trotskyists like Nardini, all came to the same conclusion, totally negative as far as the construction of the ‘revolutionary party’ which they wanted to counterpose to the Italian Communist Party. None of them was capable, even to a small degree, of providing an explanation for the Soviet Union and Stalinist policy which, without making those to whom they were talking enemies of the USSR itself, would prevent them from taking its leaders at their word any longer, or from taking an attitude towards the first country to enter the revolution as the touchstone of political rectitude.
Serge Lambert tells how Togliatti, on his return from the Soviet Union, and after having launched the ‘Salerno turn’, went to Naples, where one of his first meetings was with the veteran ex-Bordigist Russo, the former head of the Lenin column of the POUM [13], and leader along with Nicola Di Bartolomeo of the newly independent trade union centre, the CGL. He began in a friendly manner, and told him that whilst he did not share his positions, he understood his criticisms: Russo’s place was in the Communist Party, where he would always have the right to have differences and to express them.
Here we touch upon a question which Serge Lambert does not deal with as such, but which he mentions several times. Obviously, Togliatti’s position is not to be explained by some sort of ‘democratism’ or ‘liberalism’, or by any particular attachment to the rights of old party militants or to the democratic functioning of the party in Naples. Russo was a leader well known to part of the Neapolitan proletariat, against whom several intrigues had failed, and he retained a real influence. His overthrow could only take place with his consent, or at the cost of a hard fight in which both sides would have their feathers ruffled. Palmiro Togliatti accordingly began by negotiating.
Russo refused. But at the same time his comrade in the Montesanto split, the lawyer Mario Palermo, agreed to return to the party and... received a ministerial portfolio. [14] The Communist Party’s proposals undermined its opponents, finally leaving them with no basis of support, and at the end of the day enabled it to dispense with the need to liquidate physically people who no longer counted for anything in the struggle. At the same time in the maquis, at the time of the Liberation and in the months that followed, it seems that the secret services of the French Communist Party operated less with kid gloves with the French oppositionists: they liquidated first and negotiated afterwards.
Serge Lambert suggests an explanation for this phenomenon, which is after all a distinctive characteristic of Italian Stalinism in contrast with French Stalinism: a greater ability to tolerate contradiction, to accept discussion, a greater flexibility in relation to opposition from within, and apparently less rigid and more ‘democratic’ practices. Of course, there can be no question of suggesting that the ‘new’ Italian Communist Party, built as it was in opposition to the revolutionary basis of the party of the time of Gramsci and Bordiga, could at some indeterminate date – the dissolution of the Communist International – have broken its links with Moscow and ceased to be a Stalinist party such as the French Communist Party was at the time. Nor can it be supposed that Togliatti’s ‘new party’ had been completely constructed from new material, making a ‘Eurocommunist’ party of it before the word was invented. That way we would find transubstantiation and the search for the philosopher’s stone rehabilitated in the field of political science, enabling the nature of parties to be changed – a change made every day in their commentaries by people who are considered to be serious and specialists in Italian politics.
In reality, we have an accidental but significant reflection of the application to the Italian Communist Party of Marx’s law of uneven and combined development, in the ability of the Italian Communist Party to deal with its internal problems and the oppositions on its left by methods other than machine gun bullets or a simple club. A comparison with the French Communist Party allows this notion to be put to use and illustrated.
The construction of the apparatus of the French Communist Party up to the end of the Second World War took place in a continuous fashion, without any long interruption or any sudden shocks. The leaders of the French Communist Party at this time, like its principle cadres, had generally been won over in the period of the ultra-left sectarian tactic of the late 1920s known as ‘class against class’. These are the same people who abruptly advocated and supported the policy of the Popular Front and the French Front, called for national unity against Fascism before assuring everyone that the Hitler-Stalin Pact was a positive gesture for peace against the Allied ‘warmongers’, and then found themselves in the front rank of propagandists for the ‘great patriotic war’. There was no crack in the formation of this apparatus, nothing missing, no gaping holes, and no break in continuity between the generations. The apparatus was so homogenous that it reacted almost automatically, and on every occasion showed itself to be perfectly capable of responding to external pressures, the movement of the masses and any risk of being overtaken. The hold of this apparatus over the party was as complete as the hold of the party was on the working class, and on circles like those of the intelligentsia in the years 1944–45. To this extent it had no need to handle opponents with kid gloves who in any case were more or less isolated individuals and marginalised from the start. It had no difficulty much later in expelling, slandering and persecuting any opponent, and any critic or any suspected of being one, without any other form of trial. Democracy was a useless luxury for the French Communist Party.
The Italian Communist Party, on the other hand, found itself during the war years in a very precarious position. Its ‘Spanish squad’, its apparatus capable of anything, were all of one age group, those men who had been of an age to fight in Spain and who had emigrated beforehand. It was only little by little that it was able to select and test from amongst the young generation of militants people who were later to show unconditional loyalty to the alliance with de Gasperi [15], the admiration for Tito [16], the hatred for Tito and denunciation of de Gasperi, for the Cold War as well as for peaceful coexistence, and with Stalin as well as with Khrushchev. On every occasion they had to conciliate, discuss, divide and gain time. They had to learn how to convince and how to threaten, to cajole as well as to strike. Thus the apparatus of the Italian Communist Party from the very foundation of the ‘new party’ was in possession of an extremely varied arsenal, and had in particular a very great suppleness in the struggle against oppositions in the party and its adversaries on the left. It is basically the weakness of the Italian Communist Party at this decisive moment of its history that was to allow it much later to play with ‘democracy’ at little cost, and to ‘recover’ much more easily from critical and oppositional movements. Is not the historical explanation advanced by Serge Lambert better than the metaphysical explanation proposed by the recognised specialists?
The British historians Bornstein and Richardson have provided in their history of the British Trotskyists during the war in their War and the International, with which we will have to deal later, some extensive extracts from the recollections of British Trotskyists, notably Charlie Van Gelderen, and of their contact with that Italian workers’ movement which was so surprising because it had no recent history! From the halcyon picture that everyone has more or less formed of this Italian past, so recent yet so little known, emerge interesting figures in the workers’ movement, and some of them at least, of exceptional importance. There is, for example, Temistocle Vaccarella, the rank and file leader of the Italian Communist Party, who inspired Stella Rossa, and who was probably murdered by the party’s secret services. There are the Venegoni brothers from Legnano, from that admirable group of militants in the Communist Movement of Italy in Rome and their Red Army. There is the philosopher Libero Villone, one of the men of Montesanto who came over to Trotskyism. There is Nicola Di Bartolomeo, the old Bordigist emigré who passed over to Trotskyism, the friend of Molinier who was well known in the POUM in Spain under the name of Fosco, who rebuilt the workers’ movement and the Socialist Party in Campania, within which he practised entrism on an individual basis on his release from internal exile. Finally, and above all, there is that extraordinary personage Enrico Russo; we can only regret that historians have shown so little interest in him, even if they have not ignored him totally, which leads us to speculate on the reasons for their silence.
Born in Naples in 1895, Russo joined the Socialist Youth at the age of 15 and the party at the age of 16. His intelligence gained him promotion to the rank of artillery lieutenant during the First World War. He returned wounded to become a metalworker once more, and in 1917 was Secretary of the FIOM (Metal Workers Federation) in Naples. He argued against Bordiga’s premature policy of splitting the Socialist Party, and favoured conquering it. He was the leader of the supporters of the Third International in Serrati’s party after the Leghorn Conference [17], joined the Communist Party of Italy in 1924, was Secretary of the Naples Trades Council in 1925, and leader of the CGL in Campania, where he led a general strike against a rise in the cost of living. Having become party Secretary in Campania in 1925, he emigrated to France on the instructions of the party, joined the Central Committee, became the General Secretary of the Communist groups of the Paris region, and in 1928 secured from their congress the adoption of a platform close to that of the Left Opposition. Thorez intervened to cancel the decision, which was repeated. Dimitrov intervened, with the same result. Finally the Italian Communist groups in France were dissolved and reorganised. Russo was not expelled, but he was not readmitted. Now he was alone, but not for long. He and his friends joined the Left Fraction [18], which he even represented under the name of Candiani on the International Bureau of the Left Opposition. He broke with the Fraction when it declared for a position of revolutionary defeatism in the Spanish Civil War. [19] He went off to fight and was military commander of the Lenin battalion, the foreign volunteers of the POUM. He took refuge in France after the defeat, and was interned at Saint Cyprien, from where he was handed over by the Vichy authorities to the Fascist authorities and condemned to five years’ imprisonment. He was freed in September 1943, and after almost 20 years again became Secretary of the Naples Trades Council, which he helped to re-establish, and became General Secretary of the CGL in the south, and an influential member of the ‘Montesanto’ Communist Party. His appointment was confirmed by the Salerno Congress of the CGL, he became the editor of Battaglie sindicali, and organised and led the strike and demonstration of 4 March 1944, at the height of the war. Of course, he was a target for the Communist Party, was abandoned by the Socialist Party, and had to retreat. We find him in the PSDI trying to encourage a left current. We still find his signature in 1960 at the bottom of a manifesto in support of class struggle trade unionism. We know only that he died in 1973.
In any case, what Serge Lambert has found out about him is sufficient for us to be able to say that the life of Enrico Russo was exceptional; he was an exemplary Communist militant, who remained loyal to his class and his conscience, and was never influenced by the temptations of Stalinism, which he had fought for decades, just as he fought the Italian bourgeoisie. Russo is obviously at present unknown to the Italian working class and the youth. But this oblivion will not last for ever. We know that the movement will rediscover one of those who were among the most honourable of its forefathers, and will give him back his place. It is not the least merit of Serge Lambert’s thesis that it has prepared for rehabilitations of this magnitude and importance, as opposed to those of the trials which took place more or less everywhere, but which, like the three well known ones, were decided in Moscow.

Notes

1. S. Lambert, Tradition révolutionnaire et ‘Nouveau Parti’ en Italie (1942-1945), Thesis at the University of Grenoble, 1985. [Author’s note]
2. Palmiro Togliatti (Ercoli, 1893–1964) was one of the principle leaders of Italian Communism. He had been a supporter of Bukharin until 1928, but after he had gone over to Stalin he was entrusted with the more unpleasant operations of the Comintern. After Stalin’s death he became one of the main spokesmen for Eurocommunism. Luigi Longo (Gallo, 1900–80) went over from Bordiga to Gramsci in 1925, and was another of the principal leaders of the Italian Communist Party.
3. Amadeo Bordiga (1889–1970) was the main leader of the Italian Left who rejected the united front theses of the Comintern, and was expelled from the Communist Party of Italy in 1930. Several currents still trace their origins to his ideas.
4. Cf. above, p. 64, n136. This notorious manifesto began: ‘Italian people! Fascists of the Old Guard! Young Fascists! We Communists adopt as our own the Fascist programme of 1919, which is a programme of peace, of freedom, of defence of the interests of the workers ...’ Stalin had been providing Italy with oil during its colonial war in Ethiopia, and was hoping to prevent the imminent alliance between Mussolini and Hitler. For further details, cf. Joan Barth Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer, London 1986, pp. 127–30.
5. Togliatti, Longo and Vidali all saw service in Spain, and were closely connected with the operations of the GPU, Vidali in particular being directly responsible with Orlov for the murder of Andreu Nin.
6. Umberto Terracini (1895–1985), co-founder of Ordine nuovo along with Gramsci, was a delegate to the Third Congress of the Comintern, and represented the Communist Party of Italy on the ECCI. He had been condemned to 22 years’ imprisonment in 1928.
7. In January 1944 the Italian anti-Fascist parties met in conference at Bari and passed resolutions against Badoglio and the monarchy. However, shortly after his return from exile in the Soviet Union, Togliatti spoke on 29 March to the Communist leaders in the southern zone at Salerno and persuaded them with the backing of Stalin to support the Badoglio government. He called on all workers, unemployed and ex-soldiers not to follow any ‘self-styled class interest’, but only the national interest. This was the famous ‘Salerno switch’ (svolta di Salerno).
8. The OSS was the predecessor of the CIA.
9. On the Montesanto split, cf. below, p. 162, n7.
10. Marshal Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956) was commander of the Italian army in the conquest of Ethiopia, and head of state from 25 July 1943 after the removal of Mussolini.
11. Serge Lambert, Notes sur l’histoire du trotskysme en Italie: le POC, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 29, March 1987, pp. 57–69.
12. Libero Villone (1913–73) opposed the class collaborationist line of the Moscow leadership of the Italian Communist Party, and was one of the leaders of the militant CGL trade union in the south (cf. below, pp. 182ff.).
13. On Russo in Spain, cf. Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, New Brunswick 1988, pp. 124, 295.
14. Mario Palermo became the Under-Secretary for War in the government led by Ivanoe Bonomi, who took over from Badoglio.
15. Alcide de Gasperi (1881–1954) was head of the Christian Democrats, and President of the Council of State from 1945 to 1953.
16. Josip Broz (Brezovich), known as Marshal Tito (1892–1980), was head of the Yugoslav Communist Party, led a partisan struggle against the German occupation, and became head of state at the end of the war. Although a loyal Stalinist – he also had seen service in Spain – in 1948 he refused to subordinate his country to Stalin’s requirements, and broke with Moscow. Almost overnight the world Communist press, which had been fulsome in its praise for him, began to denounce him as a ‘Trotskyite’ and a ‘Fascist’.
17. Giacinto Serrati (1874–1926) was a supporter of the Zimmerwald Left in the First World War, and led the centre faction of the Italian Socialist Party which refused to support either the split of the Communists or the expulsion of the right of the party at the Leghorn Conference in 1921.
18. The Left Fraction was created in exile in 1927 by the exclusion of the supporters of Bordiga from the Communist Party of Italy. Cf. pp. 196–201 below.
19. When the Spanish Civil War broke out the majority of the Italian Left in exile considered that both sides were equally bourgeois, that it was an imperialist war supported by different foreign powers for their own advantage, and that the workers should refuse to take sides. A minority of some 26 members led by Russo, Mario di Leone, Bruno Zecchini, Renato Pace and Piero Corradi regarding this as a sterile policy of abstention, split in November 1936 and all left for Barcelona. Cf. Revolutionary Perspectives, no. 5, 1976; Mouvement Communiste, Barcelone Mai ‘37: Fascisme et antifascisme contre le prolétariat, Brussels 1991; International Communist Current, The Italian Left 1926–45, London 1992, pp. 93–102.


 

Sunday, April 27, 2014


In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!

Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, and other actions including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.

Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the

current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor

(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.

This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over side without worrying for a minute about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ourselves. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.

Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on the broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.

The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capital profit driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces to fight for our interests. This must include a forthright rejection of their attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.

The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.

Show Power

We demand:

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizinga wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.

*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”

*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take it as a wakeup call by a risen people.

And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says–“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.

Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.

All out in Boston on May Day 2012.