The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website-

 

James P. Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s-and today too.

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

 

Sam Eaton comment:

I have already elsewhere gone over the ground of how me and my old time left-wing political activist comrade, Ralph Morris, met under odd circumstances in Washington, D.C. while we were trying each in his own way to help the efforts on May Day 1971 to shut down the government if it would not shut down the Vietnam War. We did not succeed in that effort, not by a long shot but what did happen there was to cement our longtime friendship and political activity (then in those days at full heat, later to die down to occasional protests against the American monster imperial war machine, and since the lead-up to the ill-fated Iraq War in 2002 a steady continuous struggle against the endless wars and endless war policies of the last two presidential administrations). A lot of the activity of the time beside the fight against the Vietnam War centered on defense of the Black Panthers who had been hounded by the cops and governmental spy agencies almost since their beginning in 1966 out in Oakland. As proven later by the release of various documents under the Freedom of Information Act the cops, especially the then J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI really were out to decimate the Panthers and that we were not being paranoid or hyperbolic in our characterizations of the state’s attitude toward the Panthers and all left-wing political dissenters.        

Ralph and I would go to various Panther defense rallies and do other support work for that organization under the rubric of the “United Front Against Fascism” (an organization that was supported heavily by the Communist Party and its legal apparatus once the Panthers realized that they needed some serious legal services and the CP had the history and resources to provide such help). One of our first ventures together had been to go down to New Haven to rally support for what was then called the New Haven Nine, mainly though Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins. (In those days there were plenty of show trials-the Chicago Nine, then Eight, the New York 21, the Catonsville Nine and so on so there was plenty of need for political defense which both taxed all our limited resources and drained and restrained people from our kind of political activities).    

I bring this political defense work around the black liberation fighters up for a couple of reasons. First, neither Ralph nor I except for the extraordinary nature of the times when this country was torn asunder by the conflict between generations and the conflict in Vietnam would have been involved with helping the black liberation struggle. As I will explain in a minute it was not something that through our previous life experiences we would have gravitated toward. Second, if it had not been for our involvement then in the black liberation struggles and other left-wing political work and our subsequent learning about the history of such work before our time we would not have today been standing in solidarity with freedom for Mumia-Abu-Jamal, Albert Woodfox, Leonard Peltier, Hugo Pinell, Chelsea Manning and for the government to keep their dirty hands off of the likes of Edward Snowden and Julian. And many more cases, as well, too many to mention here right now. More about that in a minute too.   

On the first point I had been brought up in Carver in Massachusetts, the cranberry bog capital of the world, then anyway, in the 1950s and 1960s where there were no black people, none and where, truth be told, no blacks were welcome. Certainly not welcomed by my father before he died early of a massive heart attack probably from too much smoking, drinking and hardly heathy food (my mother I don’t know since she never expressed herself on the matter, at least in my hearing) who had all of the white male Northern working-class prejudices that were prevalent in that day (and still are just not as openly expressed except in private company). Moreover the guys I hung around with in school, mainly high school, including Jeff Mullins who I will discuss more in a minute, hated “n-----s,” would go out of their way to harass a couple of brothers over in Lakeville who didn’t bother anybody. And I went along with it, yeah, went along with it and never said boo about what they were doing.   

But here is where things got funny, got all mixed in the turbulent 60s. I was just going along working in Mister Snyder’s print shop, hoping someday to have my own shop, have my own little business, while the Vietnam War was beginning to heat up, to force people to take sides, to be for the kids who opposed it or got caught up in the military. Me, well, the one thing my father did do   for his family by dying early was leaving me to support my mother and four very younger sisters so I was exempt from the draft, was not going to be cannon fodder, so like I said I was just going along. Then my best friend, my corner boy best friend from Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street where we hung out in high school, got blown away in the Central Highlands in Vietnam  (in a place that I can’t spell or pronounce right to this day). I took it hard because despite his racism (which I did not know what to call it then, or didn’t want to) Jeff was a guy who got me out of more scrapes than you could shake a stick at, had more moxie than any five guys I knew. So that senseless death tuned me into the war, tuned me into what the opponents were saying, got me active with things like sitting in with Quakers of all people at draft boards, recruiting stations, military bases and later with more secular radicals as I moved a little further left that big Washington action to shut down the government where I met Ralph. (The Quakers by the way did not endorse that May Day event as I recall since they were knee deep in “quiet” civil disobedience and the like.)  

Ralph’s story, well Ralph’s story goes a different way and kind of tells you about the times and how you met people that you probably would not have connected with before, or later. Ralph, from Troy, New York, the same kind of working class town as Carver except lots bigger, an old factory town, where the big deal was General Electric. Ralph’s father a high-skilled electrical shop owner had a few contracts with them and Ralph worked in that shop before he was drafted. Ralph’s father from what he told me hated blacks even worse than my father, especially when they started to try to move into the Tappan Street section of town. Ralph’s father led the opposition and Ralph was right there with him. But here is where things changed in other ways too. Ralph instead of taking the draft decided to enlist, to get an electronics specialty to keep his “young white ass” away from harm. But see in 1967, 1968 Uncle needed killers in the field to kill every commie in Vietnam and so Ralph was cannon fodder, strangely also stationed with a unit up in the Central Highlands. He extended his tour to get out early but when he did in 1969 he was a changed man, he had hated what he did there, hated what his buddies did, including a couple of black guys who had saved his bacon a couple of times, and what the government had done to make him and them nothing but animals, nothing more. So he got the anti-war “religion” the hard way and tagged along with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) when he got out. So he with his veterans and me with my Cambridge radical friends wound up in Washington on May Day 1917 and the start of a long friendship.

Things were hot then and you could find almost any kind of progressive or left-wing action you wanted if that is what you wanted probably seven days a week. Then things cooled considerable when the draft changed and then was ended and the various liberation struggles (blacks, Chicanos, Native peoples, gays, women) went their separate ways and a kind of cultural counter-revolution if I am not incorrectly using that over-worked word set in. A counter-revolution that we are to this day fighting a rearguard action against. At that time though Ralph and I who had been so busy doing the day to day political stuff that we both agreed we had kind of lost the thread of what we were doing, except we knew we were spinning our wheels against the monster using the old strategies and tactics. So we, me first since I was living in a commune in Cambridge, started studying old time texts about early left-wing movements in American history and their international connections  (and my getting back into the swing of the workaday world for me then with the very small print shop I had set up and let an old friend from Carver, Jack Callahan, manage in my absence) and ran into lots of people, mainly radicals, who were also trying to figure out where we had gone wrong, what had worked and not worked and which was the way forward. So in the summer of 1972 I invited Ralph to join me and we joined a study group led by one of the many “red collectives” that were sprouting up at the time to try to figure things out.            

What we learned in that group and I think probably held our interests and anchored or studies for the rest of our lives was a better appreciation of the long haul of the struggle against imperialism, against militarism, against racial, gender and class biases which have held us together in the rather barren period since those heady 1960, 1970 days. After the high tide ebbed about 1975, 76, we continued as best we could to support what we could while raising families and building up our small businesses (Ralph eventually after some hard fights finally made a “truce” with his father and wound up taking over that electrical business of his when his father retires.).   

One area that we were always willing to lend a hand was anytime the question of political prisoner defense work came up, especially around death penalty cases or attempts to put people away for political offenses. Along the way we helped defend guys like the Angola Three (now down to Albert Woodfox), a lot of ex-Panthers in trouble for one thing or another like Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier of the Native American movement, the remnants of the Weather Underground, the Ohio Seven, Assata Shakur, and more recently, especially Ralph, Chelsea Manning.

Along the way we worked with lots of defense groups like the National Jericho Movement and the group I am writing this piece for, the Partisan Defense Committee. The latter because they have declared themselves to be working in the tradition of James P. Cannon and the old International Labor Defense organization that the American Communist Party established to work on political prisoner cases. They, as far as we can see, have generally held to that standard.  So even when things were slow, or we were on the defensive in some social struggle Ralph and I would always heed the PDCs annual appeal to donate money for the good old cause. I wrote a letter one time giving my reasons for doing so and rather than write something new will finish up here with an updated version of that letter:   

 

 

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning [formerly Bradley].

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta. Anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year though when I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal leaflet 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’s present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); 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. Many, too many for most of that time. 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 bourgeoisie 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. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

And this at another time when one of the Ohio Seven died in jail

*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.

Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.