From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners And The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- 75th Anniversary of Founding of Fourth International
James P.Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.
Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for details about the Annual Holiday Appeal.
http://www.partisandefense.org/
Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for details about the Annual Holiday Appeal.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
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75th Anniversary of Founding of Fourth International
(Quote of the Week)
We print below excerpts from the Fourth International’s founding
document, commonly known as the Transitional Program, adopted in September 1938
near Paris. Written by revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky during the Great
Depression, the document continues to serve as a guide for Marxist intervention
into class and social struggle, providing a bridge from the masses’ immediate
needs to the overthrow of the decaying capitalist system.
Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive
capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the
minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the
framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which
promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future.
Between the minimum and the maximum program, no bridge existed....
The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old
“minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of
their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and
social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within
the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary, perspective.
Insofar as the old partial, “minimal” demands of the masses clash with the
destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at
each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional
demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more
openly and decisively they will be directed against the very foundations of the
bourgeois regime. The old “minimal program” is superseded by the
transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic
mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution....
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot
permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into
chronically unemployed paupers, living off the crumbs of a disintegrating
society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to
the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn
from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as
“conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance, along with the slogan of public
works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade
unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed
together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work
on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how
the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker
remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, with a strictly
guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is
impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability”
of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists in addition will refer
to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions
and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing
material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay,
demoralization, and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only
creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If
capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the
calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or
“unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of
forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no
matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come
to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the
Fourth International” (1938)
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