Sunday, June 18, 2017

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- The Russian Revolution and Black Liberation

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- The Russian Revolution and Black Liberation   


The full text below the quote 



Workers Vanguard No. 1105
10 February 2017
TROTSKY
LENIN
The Russian Revolution and Black Liberation
(Quote of the Week)
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 gave a powerful impetus to the struggle for black freedom. Lenin and Trotsky’s Third (Communist) International fought to make American Communists understand the centrality of the fight against black oppression to socialist revolution in the U.S. Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, who was a fraternal delegate to the Communist International’s 1922 Fourth Congress in Moscow, underlined the significance of the Bolshevik Revolution for American blacks in an essay published by the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis.
When the Russian workers overturned their infamous government in 1917, one of the first acts of the new Premier, Lenin, was a proclamation greeting all the oppressed peoples throughout the world, exhorting them to organize and unite against the common international oppressor—Private Capitalism. Later on in Moscow, Lenin himself grappled with the question of the American Negroes and spoke on the subject before the Second Congress of the Third International. He consulted with John Reed, the American journalist, and dwelt on the urgent necessity of propaganda and organizational work among the Negroes of the South. The subject was not allowed to drop. When Sen Katayama of Japan, the veteran revolutionist, went from the United States to Russia in 1921 he placed the American Negro problem first upon his full agenda. And ever since he has been working unceasingly and unselfishly to promote the cause of the exploited American Negro among the Soviet councils of Russia.
With the mammoth country securely under their control, and despite the great energy and thought that are being poured into the revival of the national industry, the vanguard of the Russian workers and the national minorities, now set free from imperial oppression, are thinking seriously about the fate of the oppressed classes, the suppressed national and racial minorities in the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. They feel themselves kin in spirit to these people. They want to help make them free.
—Claude McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro” (The Crisis, Vol. 27, No. 2, December 1923)

"Soviet Russia and the Negro"-- An Essay by Claude McKay

Claude McKay
kremlin.jpg (93739 bytes)










The label of propaganda will be affixed to what I say here. I shall not mind; propaganda has now come into its respectable rights and I am proud of being a propagandist. The difference between propaganda and art was impressed on my boyhood mind by a literary mentor, Milton's poetry and his political prose set side by side as the supreme examples. So too, my teacher,--splendid and broadminded though he was, yet unconsciously biased against what he felt was propaganda--thought that that gilt-washed artificiality, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", would outlive "Arms and the Man" and "John Bull's Other Island". But inevitably as I grew older I had perforce to revise and change my mind about propaganda. I lighted on one of Milton's greatest sonnets that was pure propaganda and a widening horizon revealed that some of the finest spirits of modern literature-- Voltaire, Hugo, Heine, Swift, Shelly, Byron, Tolstoy, Ibsen--had carried the taint of propaganda. The broader view did not merely include propaganda literature in my literary outlook; it also swung me away from the childish age of the enjoyment of creative work for pleasurable curiosity to another extreme where I have always sought for the motivating force or propaganda intent that underlies all literature of interest. My birthright, and the historical background of the race that gave it to me, made me very respectful and receptive of propaganda and world events since the year 1914 have proved that it is no mean science of convincing information.

American Negroes are not as yet deeply permeated with the mass movement spirit and so fail to realize the importance of organized propaganda. It was Marcus Garvey's greatest contribution to the Negro movement; his pioneer work in that field is a feat that the men of broader understanding and sounder ideas who will follow him must continue. It was not until I first came to Europe in 1919 that I came to a full realization and understanding of the effectiveness of the insidious propaganda in general that is maintained against the Negro race. And it was not by the occasional affront of the minority of civilized fiends--mainly those Europeans who had been abroad, engaged in the business of robbing colored peoples in their native land--that I gained my knowledge, but rather through the questions about the Negro that were put to me by genuinely sympathetic and cultured persons.

The average Europeans who read the newspapers, the popular books and journals, and go to see the average play and a Mary Pickford movie, are very dense about the problem of the Negro; and they are the most important section of the general public that the Negro propagandists would reach. For them the tragedy of the American Negro ended with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Emancipation. And since then they have been aware only of the comedy--the Negro minstrel and vaudevillian, the boxer, the black mammy and butler of the cinematograph, the caricatures of the romances and the lynched savage who has violated a beautiful white girl.

A very few ask if Booker T. Washington is doing well or if the "Black Star Line" is running; perhaps some one less discreet than sagacious will wonder how colored men can hanker so much after white women in face of the lynching penalty. Misinformation, indifference and levity sum up the attitude of western Europe towards the Negro. There is the superior but very fractional intellectual minority that knows better, but whose influence on public opinion is infinitesimal, and so it may be comparatively easy for white American propagandists--whose interests behoove them to misrepresent the Negro--to turn the general indifference into hostile antagonism if American Negroes who have the intellectual guardianship of racial interests do not organize effectively, and on a world scale, to combat their white exploiters and traducers.

The world war has fundamentally altered the status of Negroes in Europe. It brought thousands of them from America and the British and French colonies to participate in the struggle against the Central Powers. Since then serious clashes have come about in England between the blacks that later settled down in the seaport towns and the natives. France has brought in her black troops to do police duty in the occupied districts in Germany. The color of these troops, and their customs too, are different and strange and the nature of their work would naturally make their presence irritating and unbearable to the inhabitants whose previous knowledge of Negroes has been based, perhaps, on their prowess as cannibals. And besides, the presence of these troops provides rare food for the chauvinists of a once proud and overbearing race, now beaten down and drinking the dirtiest dregs of humiliation under the bayonets of the victor.

However splendid the gesture of Republican France towards colored people, her use of black troops in Germany to further her imperial purpose should meet with nothing less than condemnation from the advanced section of Negroes. The propaganda that Negroes need to put over in Germany is not black troops with bayonets in that unhappy country. As conscript-slave soldiers of Imperial France they can in no wise help the movement of Negroes nor gain the sympathy of the broad-visioned international white groups whose international opponents are also the intransigent enemies of Negro progress. In considering the situation of the black troops in Germany, intelligent Negroes should compare it with that of the white troops in India, San Domingo and Haiti. What might not the Haitian propagandists have done with the marines if they had been black instead of white Americans! The world upheaval having brought the three greatest European nations--England, France and Germany--into closer relationship with Negroes, colored Americans should seize the opportunity to promote finer inter-racial understanding. As white Americans in Europe are taking advantage of the situation to intensify their propaganda against the blacks, so must Negroes meet that with a strong counter-movement. Negroes should realize that the supremacy of American capital today proportionately increases American influence in the politics and social life of the world. Every American official abroad, every smug tourist, is a protagonist of dollar culture and a propagandist against the Negro. Besides brandishing the Rooseveltian stick in the face of the lesser new world natives, America holds an economic club over the heads of all the great European nations, excepting Russia, and so those bold individuals in Western Europe who formerly sneered at dollar culture may yet find it necessary and worth while to be discreetly silent. As American influence increases in the world, and especially in Europe, through the extension of American capital, the more necessaryit becomes for all struggling minorities of the United States to organize extensively for the world wide propagation of their grievances. Such propaganda efforts, besides strengthening the cause at home, will certainly enlist the sympathy and help of those foreign groups that are carrying on a life and death struggle to escape the octuple arms of American business interests.

And the Negro, as the most suppressed and persecuted minority, should use this period of ferment in international affairs to lift his cause out of his national obscurity and force it forward as a prime international issue.

Though Western Europe can be reported as being quite ignorant and apathetic of the Negro in world affairs, there is one great nation with an arm in Europe that is thinking intelligently on the Negro as it does about all international problems. When the Russian workers overturned their infamous government in 1917, one of the first acts of the new Premier, Lenin, was a proclamation greeting all the oppressed peoples throughout the world, exhorting them to organize and unite against the common international oppressor--Private Capitalism. Later on in Moscow, Lenin himself grappled with the question of the American Negroes and spoke on the subject before the Second Congress of the Third International. He consulted with John Reed, the American journalist, and dwelt on the urgent necessity of propaganda and organizational work among the Negroes of the South. The subject was not allowed to drop. When Sen Katayama of Japan, the veteran revolutionist, went from the United States to Russia in 1921 he placed the American Negro problem first upon his full agenda. And ever since he has been working unceasingly and unselfishly to promote the cause of the exploited American Negro among the Soviet councils of Russia.

With the mammoth country securely under their control, and despite the great energy and thought that are being poured into the revival of the national industry, the vanguard of the Russian workers and the national minorities, now set free from imperial oppression, are thinking seriously about the fate of the oppressed classes, the suppressed national and racial minorities in the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. They feel themselves kin in spirit to these people. They want to help make them free. And not the least of the oppressed that fill the thoughts of the new Russia are the Negroes of America and Africa. If we look back two decades to recall how the Czarist persecution of the Russian Jews agitated Democratic America, we will get some idea of the mind of Liberated Russia towards the Negroes of America. The Russian people are reading the terrible history of their own recent past in the tragic position of the American Negro to-day. Indeed, the Southern States can well serve the purpose of showing what has happened in Russia. For if the exploited poor whites of the South could ever transform themselves into making common cause with the persecuted and plundered Negroes, overcome the oppressive oligarchy--the political crackers and robber landlords--and deprive it of all political privileges, the situation would be very similar to that of Soviet Russia to-day.

In Moscow I met an old Jewish revolutionist who had done time in Siberia, now young again and filled with the spirit of the triumphant Revolution. We talked about American affairs and touched naturally on the subject of the Negro. I told him of the difficulties of the problem, that the best of the liberal white elements were also working for a better status for the Negro, and he remarked: "When the democratic bourgeoisie of the United States were execrating Czardom for the Jewish pogroms they were meting out to your people a treatment more savage and barbarous than the Jews ever experienced in the old Russia. America", he said religiously, "had to make some sort of expiatory gesture for her sins. There is no surfeited bourgeoisie here in Russia to make a hobby of ugly social problems, but the Russian workers, who have won through the ordeal of persecution and revolution, extend the hand of international brotherhood to all the suppressed Negro millions of America".
I met with this spirit of sympathetic appreciation and response prevailing in all circles in Moscow and Petrograd. I never guessed what was awaiting me in Russia. I had left America in September of 1922 determined to get there, to see into the new revolutionary life of the people and report on it. I was not a little dismayed when, congenitally averse to notoriety as I am, I found that on stepping upon Russian soil I forthwith became a notorious character. And strangely enough there was nothing unpleasant about my being swept into the surge of revolutionary Russia. For better or for worse every person in Russia is vitally affected by the revolution. No one but a soulless body can live there without being stirred to the depths by it.

I reached Russia in November--the month of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International and the Fifth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The whole revolutionary nation was mobilized to honor the occasion, Petrograd was magnificent in red flags and streamers. Red flags fluttered against the snow from all the great granite buildings. Railroad trains, street cars, factories, stores, hotels, schools--all wore decorations. It was a festive month of celebration in which I, as a member of the Negro race, was a very active participant. I was received as though the people had been apprised of, and were prepared for, my coming. When Max Eastman and I tried to bore our way through the dense crowds, that jammed the Tverskaya Street in Moscow on the 7th of November, I was caught, tossed up into the air, and passed along by dozens of stalwart youths.

"How warmly excited they get over a strange face!" said Eastman. A young Russian Communist remarked: "But where is the difference? Some of the Indians are as dark as you." To which another replied: "The lines of the face are different. The Indians have been with us long. And so people instinctively see the difference." And so always the conversation revolved around me until my face flamed. The Moscow press printed long articles about the Negroes in America, a poet was inspired to rhyme about the Africans looking to Socialist Russia and soon I was in demand everywhere--at the lectures of poets and journalists, the meetings of soldiers and factory workers. Slowly I began losing self-consciousness with the realization that I was welcomed thus as a symbol, as a member of the great American Negro group--kin to the unhappy black slaves of European Imperialism in Africa--that the workers in Soviet Russia, rejoicing in their freedom, were greeting through me.
Russia, in broad terms, is a country where all the races of Europe and of Asia meet and mix. The fact is that under the repressive power of the Czarist bureaucracy the different races preserved a degree of kindly tolerance towards each other. The fierce racial hatreds that time in the Balkans never existed in Russia. Where in the South no Negro might approach a "cracker" as a man for friendly offices, a Jewish pilgrim in old Russia could find rest and sustenance in the home of an orthodox peasant. It is a problem to define the Russian type by features. The Hindu, the Mongolian, the Persian, the Arab, the West European--all these types may be traced woven into the distinctive polyglot population of Moscow. And so, to the Russian, I was merely another type, but stranger, with which they were not yet familiar. They were curious with me, all and sundry, young and old, in a friendly, refreshing manner. Their curiosity had none of the intolerable impertinence and often downright affront that any very dark colored man, be he Negro, Indian or Arab, would experience in Germany and England.

In 1920, while I was trying to get out a volume of my poems in London, I had a visit with Bernard Shaw who remarked that it must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be an artist. Shaw was right. Some of the English reviews of my book touched the very bottom of journalistic muck. The English reviewer outdid his American cousin (except the South, of course, which could not surprise any white person much less a black) in sprinkling criticism with racial prejudice. The sedate, copperhead "Spectator" as much as said: no "cultured" white man could read a Negro's poetry without prejudice, that instinctively he must search for that "something" that must make him antagonistic to it. But fortunately Mr. McKay did not offend our susceptibilities! The English people from the lowest to the highest, cannot think of a black man as being anything but an entertainer, boxer, a Baptist preacher or a menial. The Germans are just a little worse. Any healthy looking black coon of an adventurous streak can have a wonderful time palming himself off as another Siki or a buck dancer. When an American writer introduced me as a poet to a very cultured German, a lover of all the arts, he could not believe it, and I don't think he does yet. An American student tells his middle class landlady that he is having a black friend to lunch: "But are you sure that he is not a cannibal?" she asks without a flicker of a humorous smile!

But in Petrograd and Moscow, I could not detect a trace of this ignorant snobbishness among the educated classes, and the attitude of the common workers, the soldiers and sailors was still more remarkable. It was so beautifully naive; for them I was only a black member of the world of humanity. It may be urged that the fine feelings of the Russians towards a Negro was the effect of Bolshevist pressure and propaganda. The fact is that I spent most of my leisure time in non-partisan and antibolshevist circles. In Moscow I found the Luxe Hotel where I put up extremely depressing, the dining room was anathema to me and I grew tired to death of meeting the proletarian ambassadors from foreign lands some of whom bore themselves as if they were the holy messengers of Jesus, Prince of Heaven, instead of working class representatives. And so I spent many of my free evenings at the Domino Café, a notorious den of the dilettante poets and writers. There came the young anarchists and menshevists and all the young aspirant fry to read and discuss their poetry and prose. Sometimes a group of the older men came too. One evening I noticed Pilnyal the novelist, Okonoff the critic, Feodor the translator of Poe, an editor, a theatre manager and their young disciples, beer-drinking through a very interesting literary discussion. There was always music, good folk-singing and bad fiddling, the place was more like a second rate cabaret than a poets' club, but nevertheless much to be enjoyed, with amiable chats and light banter through which the evening wore pleasantly away. This was the meeting place of the frivolous set with whom I eased my mind after writing all day.

The evenings of the proletarian poets held in the Arbot were much more serious affairs. The leadership was communist, the audience working class and attentive like diligent, elementary school children. To these meetings also came some of the keener intellects from the Domino Café. One of these young women told me that she wanted to keep in touch with all the phases of the new culture. In Petrograd the meetings of the intelligentzia seemed more formal and inclusive. There were such notable men there as Chukovsky the critic, Eugene Zamiatan the celebrated novelist and Maishack the poet and translator of Kipling. The artist and theatre world were also represented. There was no communist spirit in evidence at these intelligentzia gatherings. Frankly there was an undercurrent of hostility to the bolshevists. But I was invited to speak and read my poems whenever I appeared at any of them and treated with every courtesy and consideration as a writer. Among those sophisticated and cultured Russians, many of them speaking from two to four languages, there was no overdoing of the correct thing, no vulgar wonderment and bounderish superiority over a Negro's being a poet. I was a poet, that was all, and their keen questions showed that they were much more interested in the technique of my poetry, my views on and my position regarding the modern literary movements than in the difference of my color. Although I will not presume that there was no attraction at all in that little difference!

On my last visit to Petrograd I stayed in the Palace of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, the brother of Czar Nicholas the Second. His old, kindly steward who looked after my comfort wanders round like a ghost through the great rooms. The house is now the headquarters of the Petrograd intellectuals. A fine painting of the Duke stands curtained in the dining room. I was told that he was liberal minded, a patron of the arts, and much liked by the Russian intelligentzia. The atmosphere of the house was theoretically non-political, but I quickly scented a strong hostility to bolshevist authority. But even here I had only pleasant encounters and illuminating conversations with the inmates and visitors, who freely expressed their views against the Soviet Government, although they knew me to be very sympathetic to it.

During the first days of my visit I felt that the great demonstration of friendliness was somehow 
expressive of the enthusiastic spirit of the glad anniversary days, that after the month was ended I could calmly settle down to finish the book about the American Negro that the State Publishing Department of Moscow had commissioned me to write, and in the meantime quietly go about making interesting contacts. But my days in Russia were a progression of affectionate enthusiasm of the peopl  towards me. Among the factory workers, the red-starred and chevroned soldiers and sailors, the proletarian students and children, I could not get off as lightly as I did with the intelligentsia. At every meeting I was received with boisterous acclaim, mobbed with friendly demonstration. The women workers of the great bank in Moscow insisted on hearing about the working conditions of the colored women of America and after a brief outline I was asked the most exacting questions concerning the positions that were most available to colored women, their wages and general relationship with the white women workers. The details I could not give; but when I got through, the Russian women passed a resolution sending greetings to the colored women workers of America, exhorting them to organize their forces and send a woman representative to Russia. I received a similar message from the Propaganda Department of the Petrograd Soviet which is managed by Nicoleva, a very energetic woman. There I was shown the new status of the Russian women gained through the revolution of 1917. Capable women can fit themselves for any position; equal pay with men for equal work; full pay during the period of pregnancy and no work for the mother two months before and two months after the confinement. Getting a divorce is comparatively easy and not influenced by money power, detective chicanery and wire pulling. A special department looks into the problems of joint personal property and the guardianship and support of the children. There is no penalty for legal abortion and no legal stigma of illegitimacy attaching to children born out of wedlock.

There were no problems of the submerged lower classes and the suppressed national minorities of the old Russia that could not bear comparison with the grievous position of the millions of Negroes in the United States to-day. Just as Negroes are barred from the American Navy and the higher ranks of the Army, so were the Jews and the sons of the peasantry and proletariat discriminated against in the Russian Empire. It is needless repetition of the obvious to say that Soviet Russia does not tolerate such discriminations, for the actual government of the country is now in the hands of the combined national minorities, the peasantry and the proletarian By the permission of Leon Trotsky, Commissar-in-chief of the military and naval forces of Soviet Russia, I visited the highest military schools in the Kremlin and environs of Moscow. And there I saw the new material, the sons of the working people in training as cadets by the old officers of the upper classes. For two weeks I was a guest of the Red navy in Petrograd with the same eager proletarian youth of new Russia, who conducted me through the intricate machinery of submarines, took me over aeroplanes captured from the British during the counter-revolutionary war around Petrograd and showed me the making of a warship ready for action. And even of greater interest was the life of the men and the officers, the simplified discipline that was strictly enforced, the food that was served for each and all alike, the extra political educational classes and the extreme tactfulness and elasticity of the political commissars, all communists, who act as advisers and arbitrators between the men and students and the officers. Twice or thrice I was given some of the kasha which is sometimes served with the meals. In Moscow I grew to like this food very much, but it was always difficult to get. I had always imagined that it was quite unwholesome and unpalatable and eaten by the Russian peasant only on account of extreme poverty. But on the contrary I found it very rare and sustaining when cooked right with a bit of meat and served with butter--a grain food very much like the common but very delicious West Indian rice-and-peas.

The red cadets are seen in the best light at their gymnasium exercises and at the political assemblies when discipline is set aside. Especially at the latter where a visitor feels that he is in the midst of early revolutionary days, so hortatory the speeches, so intense the enthusiasm of the men. At all these meetings I had to speak and the students asked me general questions about the Negro in the American Army and Navy, and when I gave them common information known to all American Negroes, students, officers and commissars were unanimous in wishing this group of young American Negroes would take up training to become officers in Army and Navy of Soviet Russia. The proletarian students of Moscow were eager to learn of the life and work of Negro students. They sent messages of encouragement and good will to the Negro students of America and, with a fine gesture of fellowship, elected the Negro delegation of the American Communist Party and myself to honorary membership in the Moscow Soviet.

Those Russian days remain the most memorable of my life. The intellectual Communists and the intelligentsia were interested to know that America had produced a formidable body of Negro intelligensia and professionals, possessing a distinctive literature and cultural and business interests alien to the white man's. And they think naturally, that the militant leaders of the intelligentsia must feel and express the spirit of revolt that is slumbering in the inarticulate Negro masses, precisely the emancipation movement of the Russian masses had passed through similar phases. Russia is prepared and waiting to receive couriers and heralds of good will and interracial understanding from the Negro race. Her demonstration of friendliness and equity for Negroes may not conduce to produce healthy relations between Soviet Russia and democratic America, the anthropologists 100 per cent pure white Americanism will soon invoke Science to prove that the Russians are not at all God's white people I even caught a little of American anti-Negro propaganda in Russia. A friend of mine, a member of the Moscow intelligentsia, repeated to me the remarks of the lady respondent of a Danish newspaper: that I should not be taken as a representative Negro for she had lived in America and found all Negroes lazy, bad and vicious, a terror to white women. In Petrograd I got a like story from Chukovsky, the critic, who was on intimate terms with a high worker of the American Relief Administration and his southern wife. Chukovsky is himself an intellectual "Westerner", the term applied to those Russians who put Western-European civilization before Russian culture and believe that Russia's salvation lies in becoming completely westernized. He had spent an impressionable part of his youth in London and adores all things English, and during the world war was very pro-English. For the American democracy, also, he expresses unfeigned admiration. He has more Anglo-American books than Russian in his fine library and considers the literary section of the New York Times a journal of a very high standard. He is really a maniac of Anglo-Saxon American culture. Chukovsky was quite incredulous when I gave him the facts of the Negro's status in American civilization.

"The Americans are a people of such great energy and ability," he said, "how could they act so petty towards a racial minority?" And then he related an experience of his in London that bore a strong smell of cracker breath. However, I record it here in the belief that it is authentic for Chukovsky is a man of integrity: About the beginning of the century, he was sent to England as correspondent of a newspaper in Odessa, but in London he was more given to poetic dreaming and studying English literature in the British museum and rarely sent any news home. So he lost his job and had to find cheap, furnished rooms. A few weeks later, after he had taken up his residence in new quarters, a black guest arrived, an American gentleman of the cloth. The preacher procured a room on the top floor and used the dining and sitting room with the other guests, among whom was a white American family. The latter protested the presence of the Negro in the house and especially in the guest room. The landlady was in a dilemma, she could not lose her American boarders and the clergyman's money was not to be despised. At last she compromised by getting the white Americans to agree to the Negro's staying without being allowed the privilege of the guest room, and Chukovsky was asked to tell the Negro the truth. Chukovsky strode upstairs to give the unpleasant facts to the preacher and to offer a little consolation, but the black man was not unduly offended:

"The white guests have the right to object to me," he explained, anticipating Garvey, "they belong to a superior race."

"But," said Chukovsky, "I do not object to you, I don't feel any difference; we don't understand color prejudice in Russia."

"Well," philosophized the preacher, "you are very kind, but taking the scriptures as authority, I don't consider the Russians to be white people."
From Crisis 27 (December 1923, January 1942): 61-65, 114-18



From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Freedom Road Socialist Organization: Democrats’ Loyal Maoists

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 1004
8 June 2012

Freedom Road Socialist Organization: Democrats’ Loyal Maoists

(Young Spartacus pages)

American Maoism died a shameful death 40 years ago when Mao Zedong warmly embraced President Richard Nixon in Beijing at the very moment that U.S. warplanes were bombing Vietnam. But the Maoist group Freedom Road Socialist Organization never got the news. In New York, Freedom Road (not to be confused with its identically named and equally reformist split-off in the Midwest that publishes Fight Back!) mostly works through a front group called the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee (RSCC). The keystones of Freedom Road’s identity are guilty liberalism and an appetite to liquidate into any “movement” regardless of its program or purpose.

Freedom Road’s origins are in the right wing of the U.S. Maoist movement, in particular the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of the megalomaniacal Bob Avakian. The fragmentation of the Maoist organizations naturally followed the death of Mao in 1976 and the resulting power struggle in the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy. While Freedom Road’s founding cadres doubtless pride themselves on having (eventually) broken from the repulsive cultism of Avakian to form the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH), its political line remains defined not only by the reformism and class collaboration of Maoism but also by the particular “theoretical” contributions of Avakian’s organization.

In line with these traditions, the Freedom Road reformists tout their bogus “anti-imperialist” credentials while simultaneously embracing unity with a wing of U.S. imperialism, namely, the Democratic Party: “We have worked on national campaigns focused on the Democratic Party, but only when they help to promote an anti-racist and pro-people agenda” (“Frequently Asked Questions,” freedomroad.org, 24 August 2005). No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a bourgeois party. No socialist worthy of the name would give even critical support to a politician whose program explicitly upholds the continuance of this inherently racist and oppressive capitalist system.

Freedom Road supported Obama for president in 2008. Its National Executive Committee declared before the election, “If Obama wins it will be in celebration and preparation to push him as much as possible to take progressive positions and move policies in the interest of working class and oppressed people here and outside of the U.S.” (29 October 2008). Freedom Road proclaimed with “enormous pride and joy and hope” after the election that “Obama’s Americanism is obviously preferable to live under and provides the more favorable terrain for the struggles of the working class and the oppressed.” Their article muttered only the most parenthetical caution about Obama’s vow to escalate the murderous occupation in Afghanistan (“Savor the Victory, Get Right to Work,” 11 November 2008).

Today—after Obama’s administration has deported well over one million immigrants, fulfilled his campaign promises in Afghanistan, bombarded Libya and Pakistan, repeatedly bailed out Wall Street on the backs of the workers, and escalated attacks on civil liberties like Bush on steroids—Freedom Road in age-old opportunist fashion is muting its praise of “Obama’s Americanism.”

Kneeling at the Altar of Black Democrats

The pro-Democratic Party tradition of these fraudulent “socialists” dates back to their 1985 founding, a fusion of RWH and a group called Proletarian Unity League (PUL). Writing about a later fusion, Freedom Road said, “Our organizations have extensive experience in electoral campaigns, having worked in the Jesse Jackson [1984 and 1988 Democratic Party] Presidential campaigns, in the Rainbow Coalition, and on local campaigns and issues” (“Unity Statement,” June 1994).

From his earliest days in the civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson acted as a fireman brought in to douse the flames of black revolt and herd angry people back into supporting the Democratic Party. Notably, he enlisted early on in the racist “war on drugs,” demanding harsher laws and applauding prosecution of “offenders.” Jackson infamously proclaimed, “We’ve lost more by dope than by the rope.” Thus, in the despicable Booker T. Washington tradition, Jackson laid the blame on black people for their oppression while belittling the struggle against racist terror, exemplified by the lynch rope.

Today the consequences of the “war on drugs” are plain to see: the racist cops are given the go-ahead to stop and search millions of black and Latino youth at will and hand them over to be ground up by the capitalist courts and prisons. Freedom Road and its forebears, and indeed all those opportunist “leftists” who built support for Jesse Jackson, have their own little share of responsibility for the mass incarceration resulting from the racist “war on drugs.”

Nothing could be further from the mind of Freedom Road than learning anything from history. Indeed they continue to promote the lie that the real gains for the working class and oppressed are won through the ballot box, not through struggle: “Electoral politics has been and will remain an important realm of political struggle for working people, to improve their daily lives” (ibid.). No better than the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Workers World Party and so many others who falsely claim to be socialists, Freedom Road uses the black Democrats as the wrapping in which to package its support for this capitalist party. If anything they are more open about it: the ISO for example normally stops short of explicitly pushing the ballot box as a vehicle for political “struggle,” while of course pandering to illusions in the Democrats by celebrating Obama’s victory.

The prominent role of black politicians in the Democratic Party is a direct result of the bourgeoisie’s need to derail the explosive struggles of the civil rights movement of the 1960s by teaching activists to look to the federal government and to the election of Democrats to bring supposed liberation from racist oppression. Long before Obama, black mayors were installed in one major city after another to put a lid on the ghetto upheavals, which were a desperate response to the inability of formal civil rights gains to address the ingrained social oppression and discrimination that black people endure in racist America.

Supporting the Democrats stands fully in the tradition of Stalinist class collaboration, as practiced by Maoists as well as by the formerly pro-Soviet Communist Party (the latter has been in bed with the Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s). The search for an illusory “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie actually dates back to the Russian Mensheviks. Ruthlessly combating the Menshevik program, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party fought for the independent mobilization of the proletariat and against the illusion that any wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie could play a progressive role.

Publicity Agents for “Occupy” Liberalism

During the populist Occupy protests last year, Freedom Road mouthed empty platitudes against “the danger of the Occupy movement being coopted by the system, particularly by the Democratic Party.” But the whole point was to stave off any notions of breaking with the Democrats entirely: “There is in fact an equal danger in a political line that says we should have nothing whatsoever to do with the Democrats in any way” (“The Occupy Movement: Lessons for Revolutionaries,” 30 October 2011). Long before Occupy came into existence, Freedom Road redefined “socialism” as “full democracy and some form of public direction of the economy” (1991 “Unity Statement”), a notion that would probably meet with approval from the vast majority of liberal Occupy activists. In truth, socialism is about eliminating scarcity worldwide through international socialist revolutions that smash capitalism and install the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On March 17, comrades of the Spartacist League exposed Freedom Road’s reformist program at this year’s Left Forum in New York. The Left Forum was a three-day event sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which seeks to turn angry Occupy protesters into voting cattle for the Democrats. At a workshop titled “The Occupy Motion and the Revolutionary Process,” featuring Freedom Road spokesman Eric Odell and two speakers from the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the panelists fatuously hailed the petty-bourgeois Occupy protests as a “revolutionary process.”

Against Odell’s claim that the Occupy protests were “implicitly anti-capitalist,” a Spartacist comrade pointed out that these protests were petty-bourgeois and populist, submerging any working-class component into the so-called “99 percent”—a term that treats workers, their supervisors and the cops as all part of the “middle class” with supposed common interests. He explained that the program of the Occupy movement “was to clean up and reform capitalism” and achieve true “democracy” for all within this hideously exploitative, class-divided society. Our comrade noted that we defended the Occupy protesters against the cops and intervened into the protests with our revolutionary program in frank opposition to Occupy’s pro-Democratic politics, which Freedom Road tails after today. He exposed the supposed “socialists” on the panel for not even mentioning the Democratic Party, which is a dead end for struggle.

Odell replied by exhorting the audience to put its faith in the wisdom of the Occupy protesters. “The collective wisdom of the masses is greater than any one smart person or even any single organization.... We just need to get out there and build the movement.” Bolshevik leader Lenin had nothing but contempt for the reformists of his time who “kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe…upon the ‘posterior’ of the Russian proletariat” (What Is To Be Done?). Freedom Road gazes with awe upon the posterior of the petty-bourgeois liberals. Another comrade at the workshop pointed out that the “movement” Freedom Road was busy building in 2008 was the movement to elect America’s next top war criminal.

The “Mass Line”: Regurgitated Reformism

During the March 17 workshop Odell offered his organization’s theoretical justification for its craven reformist cheerleading: the so-called Principle of the Mass Line. In his presentation Odell defined this “principle”: “Revolutionaries should get out and work and struggle among the masses, on the same level as them.... You don’t stand on the sidelines and hector the masses or get so far out in front of them that they don’t follow you, or run along behind them trying to catch up. We believe that this principle applies everywhere, in all situations.”

The “mass line” is nothing but warmed-over social-democratic reformism. It is a justification in different words for the time-dishonored minimum-maximum program exemplified by the practice of the German social democracy, which became infamous for voting for war credits for its own bourgeoisie during the first imperialist world war. According to this “principle,” actually arguing the need for socialism is reserved for occasional Sunday speechifying, while the real program is pushing the idea of the reform of capitalism in political work all day and every day.

In the hands of Freedom Road, the “mass line” is an explicit justification for telling people whatever you think they want to hear: you can enthuse over Obama or accommodate to the suicidal idea that cops can be allies of Occupy activists, while you can put on a more left face if you happen to encounter somebody who is what Freedom Road calls more “advanced.” Needless to say, the ISO and innumerable others are quite capable of doing exactly the same thing without having a “theory” to justify their opportunism.

What Freedom Road seeks to be “on the same level” with is thoroughly bourgeois consciousness. Marxists, on the contrary, seek to break the hold of bourgeois ideology on the working class and oppressed masses. We are indeed “far out in front” of the masses in our principled opposition to voting for Democrats or any other capitalist party. But when class struggle heats up and consciousness changes, the workers will remember which party told them the truth they did not want to hear at the time as well as which groups flattered their bourgeois liberal prejudices as “revolutionary.”

Freedom Road will eagerly ditch its “divisive” socialist pretensions and blend into the movement like chameleons. In response to a Frequently Asked Question on their Web site, “Why don’t I see you with banners and papers at demos?” they admit they have no print newspaper and add, “Overall we probably err in a ‘movementist’ direction—focusing on the broad movement and underplaying our own independent public face.” A leaflet distributed at the March 17 workshop baldly stated, “The socialist Left must be prepared to entertain the idea of a ‘front’ of parties.... The assumption that there will only be one leading party constitutes idealism and dogmatism” (“The Life of the Party: Thoughts on What We Are Trying to Build”). Many parties, many programs: Freedom Road will meander down any path except the road to revolution.

“Anti-Imperialist People’s Front”: Maoist Formula of Class Betrayal

We fight for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and for the right of all nations to self-determination. Unlike Freedom Road, we give no political support to capitalist governments, including those in the oppressed countries. Successful struggle against U.S. imperialism in the underdeveloped countries requires workers revolution to overthrow the semicolonial bourgeoisie, which ultimately relies on the imperialists and will unite with them at every turn to destroy revolutionary struggles that threaten their rule. We defend the Colombian FARC, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and other guerrilla forces against state repression. But we do not extend political support to such petty-bourgeois nationalist groups, which are hostile to the perspective of workers revolution to overthrow capitalism. Nationalism serves to tie the proletariat to its “own” bourgeoisie. Motivating the burning need for proletarian unity on an internationalist basis, Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “The working men have no country.”

What Lenin explained in The State and Revolution about the centrality of the proletariat is no less true in the Third World than in the imperialist countries: “Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation” (emphasis in original).

Freedom Road has embraced just about any left-talking capitalist politician or party, from President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the African National Congress in South Africa. Freedom Road’s political support to neocolonial capitalist rulers, to anti-proletarian petty-bourgeois nationalist movements and, not least, to the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism are all positions cut from the same Maoist cloth.

While hostile to the Soviet bureaucracy after the Sino-Soviet split, Mao and his cothinkers were no less devoted to the Stalinist fiction of building socialism in a single country (in the case of the Maoists, of course, the country was China). Opposing the Leninist program for workers revolutions worldwide, Mao sought to buy the neutrality of the world bourgeoisie toward China by eschewing revolutionary struggle abroad. Like the Kremlin Stalinists, Mao pursued a policy of class collaboration with supposedly “progressive, anti-imperialist” capitalists in other countries, ostensibly to secure bourgeois democracy in the “first stage,” with socialism relegated to some mythical future stage.

One example of the devastating consequences of such reformism resulted from Mao’s and the pro-Chinese Indonesian Communist Party’s (PKI) support to Sukarno’s “anti-imperialist” capitalist government in the 1960s. Exactly as the pro-Soviet Stalinist parties themselves had done for decades, the PKI politically subordinated its supporters to “brother” Sukarno rather than fighting for a socialist revolution against imperialism and capitalism. The pro-Communist workers were politically disarmed and defenseless when U.S.-backed reaction overthrew the Sukarno regime and slaughtered over a million people in 1965-66—workers, peasants and members of the ethnic Chinese minority. The largest Maoist party outside China was obliterated. The Stalinist/Maoist formula of “two-stage revolution” has been put into practice in Spain, Chile, Egypt, Iran, and so many other countries: the first stage is the communists’ political liquidation into bourgeois-nationalist forces. The second stage is the slaughter of the communists and advanced workers at the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Mao’s program of “peaceful coexistence” with “friendly” capitalist governments led China straight into the arms of U.S. imperialism. In 1972 Mao and President Nixon sealed an alliance against the Soviet Union while American bombs rained over Vietnam. Freedom Road’s forebears proudly saluted Mao’s alliance with the U.S. and railed against “Soviet social-imperialism” as a greater enemy of the workers and oppressed of the world than the mass-murdering U.S. imperialists.

In contrast, we Trotskyists fought for the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution, without placing political confidence in the Vietnamese Stalinist leadership, which had handed power back to the capitalist rulers in the southern part of the country in 1954 and sought to make deals with the imperialists almost up until the final military defeat of the U.S. forces. Our fight for revolution abroad went hand in hand with pursuing the class struggle at home, as we fought to win antiwar militants to forthrightly oppose the capitalist system. In contrast, Stalinists, social democrats and other reformists built platforms for Democratic Party politicians who espoused “peace” in Vietnam only because the U.S. was losing. As Trotskyists we defended the gains of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, calling for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies and establish Lenin’s program of international proletarian revolution.

Guilty White Liberalism Serves Racist Rulers

We reject the liberal illusion that black equality can be achieved under capitalism. We champion every struggle against racial discrimination and seek to imbue other anti-racist militants with the understanding that black freedom requires nothing less than smashing the capitalist system and constructing a socialist society into which black people will be fully assimilated as equals.

This perspective is flatly counterposed to Freedom Road’s petty-bourgeois black nationalism, a defeatist acceptance of racial segregation. Freedom Road advances the idea of an independent “African American nation” in the South, a utopian fantasy that would deny blacks their birthright: the wealth and culture of this country that their labor along with that of other workers has created. Simultaneously, they push community control of the crumbling inner cities, a reactionary line compatible with the idea that black cops will be less devoted than their white counterparts in doing their job for the capitalists to repress the ghetto masses.

A particularly repellent contribution to anti-Marxist “theory” by the Avakian RCP as well as PUL was the notion that white working people and their bosses are somehow united in “white privilege.” This is an application of the position of the old New Leftists and right-wing Maoists that the working class in advanced capitalist countries has been “bought off” and can never play a revolutionary role. Among other things, it served as a justification for rejecting any potential for revolutionary struggle to break out in the imperialist countries.

Freedom Road continues to proudly trumpet the “white privilege” line as one of the “keystones of our identity.” Arguing that white workers must be won to renouncing their “privilege,” Freedom Road joins bourgeois liberals in viewing racist ideas among white workers as responsible for racial oppression, thus providing an alibi for the capitalist system. It is the bourgeoisie that profits from the double oppression of black workers and the division of the working people along racial and ethnic lines. Freedom Road’s “theory” also mimics the constituency politics of the Democratic Party, which pits workers of different ethnicities against one another in fighting for crumbs from the capitalists’ table.

In the same reactionary idealist vein, Freedom Road and its RSCC front group deflect the anger of oppressed minority students away from the capitalist system and instead blame teachers for the oppressive, stifling hellholes that are America’s segregated ghetto schools. The RSCC platform states, “We want teachers who suppress progressive and revolutionary ideas to be removed.” This is a despicable call to purge teachers and is of a piece with the nationwide crusade against the teachers unions, spearheaded by the White House and directed in New York City by Bloomberg’s administration. We side with the teachers unions against the wholesale attacks on public education, including the attempts to shred seniority rights and tenure.

The systematic job discrimination, decrepit and overpriced housing and rampant cop terror that afflict most black Americans are materially rooted in the capitalist system, in which the mass of the black population is segregated at the bottom of society. Obviously, some white workers accept the racist rulers’ lies of white superiority and black inferiority, especially in this period lacking in class struggle—due in large part to the venal pro-Democratic union bureaucracy and its longstanding indifference to black oppression. Just as obviously, such prejudices do not shower “privilege” on white workers, on the contrary they work to their detriment. In the 1890s, revolutionary Friedrich Engels observed that the U.S. bourgeoisie is so skilled at using prejudice to divide the working class “that differences in the living standard of the workers exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard-of elsewhere.”

White workers, along with black, Latino and Asian workers, have lost their jobs in the current economic crisis and suffer bankruptcy and homelessness in staggering numbers nationwide. Thus white workers have no material stake in the perpetuation of this incredibly unequal society. Any serious strike on the part of the multiracial proletariat will undercut, often dramatically, the racism and other forms of bigotry that infect and cripple the working class. Ultimately, breaking down racial barriers requires the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party intervening into social struggle to win the working class to reject the supposed inevitability of capitalism and fight for a socialist system, which alone can satisfy the needs of all working people and the oppressed.

With its support to the capitalist Democratic Party and its “mass line” adaptation to prevailing bourgeois consciousness, Freedom Road swims with the regressive ideological flow. The Spartacist League/U.S. and the other national sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) swim against the stream, fighting to break the working class and militant youth from the false consciousness that obstructs the struggle for new October Revolutions. Exposing the fake-Marxist pretensions of other organizations is crucial to removing the obstacles to workers and young radicals seeking a revolutionary alternative to this system of exploitation, poverty, racism and war.

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know 









 


 Frank Jackman comment:


 


One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.


        


To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).


 


Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.  


 


Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         






From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"--From The 1960s Civil Rights Struggle- The Sit-Ins- Reformists Knifed 1960 NYC Woolworth’s Protests

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 1004
8 June 2012

Reformists Knifed 1960 NYC Woolworth’s Protests

(Letter)

Dear WV,

The photo and caption to the article “For Black Trotskyism” in WV No. 1002 (11 May)—an excerpt from the July 1963 document of the same name by the Revolutionary Tendency, a minority faction in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and forerunner of the Spartacist League—showed a 13 February 1960 picket line in New York City against Woolworth’s. This protest was in solidarity with the Southern sit-in campaign against segregation at lunch counters that began on 1 February 1960 at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. The sit-in campaign, by mobilizing large numbers of young militants in direct action, was a watershed in the civil rights movement. Our readers may be interested to know about the role of the social democrats and Stalinists in moving to squelch the solidarity movement in the North, which we wrote about previously in the article “Socialists and the 1960 Woolworth Sit-Ins” (WV No. 579, 2 July 1993).

On 15 February 1960, supporters of the Young Socialist (YS) newspaper, who in April 1960 would found the Young Socialist Alliance and formally affiliate with the then-Trotskyist SWP, launched a national student campaign of picket-line protests in support of the Southern activists. The young socialists formed an ad hoc New York Youth Committee for Integration. Calling to “Boycott Woolworth’s,” the YS campaign immediately got a powerful response, with committees and pickets soon spreading to Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco and other cities. But the picket-line movement against racist Jim Crow quickly ran into opposition in New York from liberal and pacifist groups like the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), as well as the National Student Association (NSA) and the Young People’s Socialist League, which was affiliated with the anti-Communists of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF).

These groups, abetted by the reformist Communist Party (CP), sought to demobilize the mass pickets with diversionary rallies, pledges of “nonviolence” and redbaiting while attempting to wrest leadership of the struggle away from the Trotskyists. Spearheading the charge was A. Philip Randolph, the veteran liberal civil rights leader associated with the SP-SDF. Waving a copy of Young Socialist over his head at a March 26 rally in Harlem, Randolph “declared that he would prefer no picket demonstrations at all to united demonstrations with ‘Communists’.” (The Militant, 11 April 1960).

Meanwhile, the NSA and the CP Stalinists had packed a meeting of the Youth Committee and voted to dissolve it. The liberals then formed a “Metropolitan Students for Non-Violent Civil Rights Action” group that did nothing for three weeks before finally holding a small picket of ten white students. At one of their pickets, the CP urged the cops to arrest a YS salesman and Youth Committee members who had come to help strengthen the line. Against such sabotage, the Trotskyists regrouped what was left of the Youth Committee and continued to wage a militant campaign in New York and elsewhere. The YS took up a call by Randolph for a mass rally on May 17, the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision formally outlawing segregation in the public schools. The Trotskyists organized pickets in several cities, and the youth committee submitted 10,000 boycott pledges to Woolworth’s headquarters in NYC.

In the spring of 1960, the liberal civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin and Randolph, joined by the SP-SDF and CP, pushed a strategy of begging the two capitalist parties to put some verbiage in favor of civil rights in their 1960 election platforms. They all threw support to John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party, with its racist Dixiecrat component in the South. Forcing the Trotskyists out of leadership of the Woolworth’s campaign was part of their efforts to contain the movement for civil rights within the framework of capitalist electoral politics.

Comradely, J.W.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From the International Communist League Archives-“Homosexual Oppression and the Communist Program”

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Workers Vanguard No. 1004
8 June 2012

From the International Communist League Archives-“Homosexual Oppression and the Communist Program”

Workers Vanguard No. 172, 9 September 1977 (Excerpt)

This August marks the 35th anniversary of the conference at which the Red Flag Union (RFU, formerly Lavender & Red Union) and the Spartacist League merged their organizations and political futures. The Lavender & Red Union, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1974, originally defined itself as a “Gay liberation-Communist organization.” At the time, its members, who felt a “cultural and political identity with our people and work for our liberation,” had not yet entirely broken from the gay milieu’s sectoralism—the notion that each oppressed sector of society should organize separately for its own liberation. But they also realized that their aim of socialist revolution necessitated the building of a vanguard party to fight in the interests of the working class and all the oppressed. Three years later, at the point of fusion, an RFU spokesman said: “We did not know that we were founded on a political contradiction.”

The RFU was assiduously courted and patronized by other groups on the left, from the socialist-feminist Freedom Socialist Party to the anti-Soviet Shachtmanite Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). In contrast, the SL sharply confronted the RFU, seeking to clarify the contradiction between their gay lifestylism and sectoralism on the one hand and the Marxist program to build a proletarian, revolutionary internationalist party as a Leninist “tribune of the people” on the other. Thus, the fusion of the RFU and SL was widely seen and excoriated by our opportunist opponents as some kind of “unnatural act.”

The August 1977 fusion conference marked the culmination of three years of the RFU’s political development, especially the several months of intense discussion and political collaboration with the SL. Two key questions that figured in the SL-RFU discussion and dominated the RFU’s “Stonewall 77” Conference were the class nature of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and the necessity of a Leninist vanguard party. The debate over these and other programmatic questions precipitated a split in the RFU. The majority was won to the Leninist-Trotskyist Spartacist League, while a minority joined the anti-Soviet, gay-lifestylist RSL.

This was a fusion in the best Leninist sense. The SL gained valuable cadre, who entered the organization with proportional representation on leading party bodies. The enrichment was also on the theoretical plane: the extensive discussions resulted in a more precise Marxist appreciation of gay oppression as a derivative of women’s oppression under the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family.

We reprint below a selection from the main programmatic article in the last issue of Red Flag, the RFU’s newspaper, which was published as a special fusion supplement to Workers Vanguard No. 172 (9 September 1977).

*   *   *

For sectoralists, the communist movement is seen as an amalgam of various oppressed strata rather than as a solitary movement with a singular program. In this context it seemed logical that the task of the “revolutionary” elements among each oppressed group should be to call on their constituency to support the socialist revolution. But the sum total of individual programs which address the various forms of capitalist oppression is not a communist program.

The program of the revolutionary party must express the objective historical interests and tasks of the international proletariat. There is only one communist program. Thus, the purpose of Trotsky’s Transitional Program is to mobilize the entire working class—to bridge the gap between felt needs and objective tasks, between consciousness of oppression and the need to take state power under the leadership of the proletarian vanguard.

There is no special revolutionary program for homosexuals. The communist program includes demands which address the special oppression of homosexuals. But unlike sectoralists, revolutionaries understand that the fate of homosexuals—like that of any other oppressed group—is determined by the course of the class struggle.

Revolutionary Marxists approach the question of homosexual oppression as the only consistent defenders of democratic rights for all the exploited and oppressed. These rights are indivisible and can be secured only with the proletariat in power. The slogan “Full Democratic Rights for Homosexuals” means a commitment not only to fight against such abuses as job discrimination and legal inequality, but also to mobilize the power of the working class in defense of homosexuals’ democratic rights. It is not a separate demand for homosexuals, but a demand in the interests of the entire working class.

The Trotskyist program is not only the Transitional Program, which Trotsky described as “a program for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution”; it is also everything the party stands for—on both sides of the proletarian revolution.

The Program and the Revolution

The socialist program is committed to the eradication of homosexual oppression, which is linked to the special oppression of women. The sexual division of labor based on child-rearing became a source of social oppression in class society. The nuclear family conditions sex roles which are inherently oppressive to those who deviate from the accepted sex role norms. While proletarian rule will do much to end homosexual oppression, the final eradication of all ideological oppression of homosexuals cannot occur until the family is replaced in socialist society.

Unlike the oppression of women or blacks in the U.S., the oppression of homosexuals is not directly based on the economic institutions of capitalism. Black workers, for instance, are disproportionately concentrated in the least skilled, lowest paid layers of the working people and among the unemployed. Thus, the overturn of capitalist productive relations will be a decisive and immediate step toward ending their oppression. Much of the oppression of homosexuals is situated in the realm of discriminatory denial of democratic rights. Homosexuals (like blacks and women, for that matter) will benefit immediately from the victorious proletarian dictatorship’s assault on discriminatory laws and practices. But they will still continue to suffer from pervasive hostile social attitudes deeply ingrained in the residual nuclear family sex role norms of the culture of a transitional society.

The new transitional society can no more legislate away such attitudes than it can eliminate the family by legislation. To arrive at socialism requires a tremendous leap in the productive forces and the gradual development of real social freedom. The withering away of the family as the basic institution defining sexual relations will result in the eventual disappearance of male chauvinism, and with it of generalized anti-homosexual prejudice.

The Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Program

The ultimate abolition of the family has been part of the Marxist program since the Communist Manifesto. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 provided the example of how even a backward, largely peasant country began to create the basis to replace the family. In the first few years of the proletarian dictatorship, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, anti-homosexual laws were struck down and many measures were undertaken with the goal of liberating women from household slavery: kitchens, child care, laundry, dwellings and schools were collectivized. This task was pursued even under the harsh conditions of war and famine.

But the Bolshevik program also recognized that the revolution isolated in Russia could not advance to socialist society. For that, there would have to be revolution in the West. And so the Bolshevik program was necessarily internationalist at its core. It was Stalin who concocted the rationale for the consolidation of a bureaucratic caste in Russia with the nationalistic program of “Socialism in One Country.” The revolution degenerated, and with that came Stalinist class collaboration and terror. The nuclear family was reinforced, and laws against homosexuals were reinstituted.

The Russian Revolution demonstrates how the proletariat led by its vanguard party moves immediately to establish institutions appropriate to its rule. So it establishes soviets (workers councils) while it seeks to lay the basis for replacing the nuclear family. But where capitalism is overthrown by peasant and petty-bourgeois forces, such as in China or Cuba, under the class collaborationist program of “Socialism in One Country,” the bureaucracy fosters institutions appropriate to the peasantry and Stalinism—institutions which replicate the product of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution: prison camps for revolutionaries and “deviants,” the strengthening of the nuclear family.

Many New Leftists fall into the bourgeoisie’s trap of equating Leninism with Stalinism; the degenerated workers state in the USSR is seen as the “natural” outgrowth of the Bolshevik revolution. In actuality, the revolution fell prey to a political counterrevolution. The goal of abolition of the nuclear family which had hitherto been a hallmark of the communist program was replaced by the Stalinist program of the family as a “fighting unit for socialism.” No “autonomous gay movement” could have exempted homosexuals from the consequences of the Stalinist political counterrevolution, which exterminated the “Old Bolsheviks,” liquidated the workers councils, reversed the drive toward progressive social institutions and turned the Communist International into an instrument of class collaboration and “peaceful coexistence.”

It was only when the RFU came to grips with the continuity of revolutionary Marxism—Trotskyism—that we were able to explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and its consequences for homosexuals in the “socialist” countries. Because the Spartacist League uniquely understood the Russian question and the primacy of program, it could play the decisive role in the transformation of the comrades of the RFU from gay left activists into revolutionary communists.

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project   







 


By Frank Jackman


The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.


But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.


That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         


Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Tylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     


Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.


Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”


Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  










In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Robert Seth Hayes


In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Robert Seth Hayes



http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html



A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)


In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!


  • If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83

    If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83





    By Music Critic  Bart Webber

    Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in (and the former two never got over since they will still tell a tale or two about the times if you go anywhere within ten miles of the subject-I will take my chances here because this notice is important) all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. That is where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, and a whole crew of younger folksingers who sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  

    But there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some other colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s where some of those names played but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.


    The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. She was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember her cover of Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels