Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for backgrond information concerning the great nationwide coal strike of 1977-78, a classic class-war battle with many lesson, good and bad, for today's labor militants.
Markin comment:
In the wake of the recent somewhat isolated strike action at Verizon this summer and the struggle of the public worker unions in Wisconsin earlier this year that cried out for general strike solidarity action by all of organized labor, private and public, a little glimpse at the kind of solidarity actions by other parts of the organized, if only as an exemplary action, is worth taking note of. The class battles looming ahead will provide of opportunity to take these measures from paper to power. Forward!
ILWU Votes One-Day Work Stoppage to Support Miners
The Spartacist League championed attempts by labor militants to bring other unions out on strike to smash Taft-Hartley and exposed the fake-lefts who helped sabotage this crucial defense of the miners...
—excerpted from WV No. 197, 17 March 1978
SAN FRANCISCO, March 14—As the mine workers face the most critical hour in their 100-day-old strike, the labor movement must ensure that they do not stand alone. With Carter lowering the boom by invoking Taft-Hartley it is the urgent duty of the unions to undertake protest strike action against this government strikebreak¬ing. Last week the International Longshoremen's and Warehouse¬men's Union (ILWU) became the first major U.S. union to move in this direction.
On Friday, March 10 the ILWU International Executive Board (IEB) adopted a resolution whose substance was as follows:
1) to authorize the International officers to call a 24-hour longshore strike coastwide, to protest the use of Taft-Hartley against the miners; 2) to call on the rest of the ILWU, particularly Hawaii and the Warehouse Division, to join in this action; 3) to call on the rest of organized labor in cities where the ILWU has locals to join the 24-hour stop-work action.
Such solidarity action with the coal miners is precisely what is needed at this moment. It could be the spark which ignites the rest of labor to join in this crucial battle, but some of the ILWU tops are predictably dragging their feet. Trade-union militants must raise an urgent clamor demanding that a coastwide dock shutdown and citywide work stoppages against Taft-Hartley and for victory to the miners strike be implemented NOW!...
Ferment in the ILWU
The earliest breakthrough leading to the ILWU resolution came in Local 13 in the San Pedro/Long Beach/Los Angeles area where several hundred longshoremen passed a resolution at the March 2 membership meeting calling for a one-day work action. According to a statement circulated by Chick Loveridge, an IEB member: "Local13 is urging President Carter not to interfere on the side of the mine owners, no Taft-Hartley. Local 13 is calling for a one-day supporting action, by closing down the port of LB/ LA and urging all other ports on the West Coast to do the same. Local 13 is also inviting all other labor organizations to join us in a meeting of support on the day the ports are closed down"
Parallel to the Local 13 action, Stan Gow and Howard Keylor,
members of the Local 10 (S.F. longshore) Executive Board and
publishers of "Longshore Militant," a class-struggle opposition
newsletter in the Local, along with the Militant Caucus in Local 6,
began circulating a petition on March 8 to"call on president Herman
and the Bay Area 1LWU local presidents to organize a 24-hour Bay
Area-wide protest strike against government strikebreaking in the
coalfields." The petition quoted a statement made by Herman at a
February 24 rally, where he boasted: "If they try mining coal with
bayonets or visit harm on the miners, there will be actions here and
throughout the country "
With a couple of days' circulation the petition gathered over 100 signatures in Local 10 and 150 in Local 6, as well as the signatures of Local 13 president Art Almeida and Seattle Local 19 president Dick Moork. This petition was an important factor in forcing the Local 10 Executive Board on March 9 to come out for some kind of solidarity action in support of the miners strike.
Strike Support Coalition
Herman himself had made the call for solidarity actions before some 1,000 assembled trade unionists at a February 24 rally organized by the so-called "Miners Strike Labor/Community Support Coalition," a collection of top Bay Area labor bureaucrats such as John Crowley of the Central Labor Council and Walter Johnson, president of Retail Clerks Local 1100. When this coalition held an organizing meeting March 11 at the Retail Clerks headquarters, about 200 trade union militants showed up, clearly upsetting the conservative trade union tops. Early in the meeting the Coalition's co-chairman, Larry Wing, president of ILWU Local 10, mentioned that the ILWU IEB favored a 24-hour coastwide work stoppage and was calling the rest of labor to join in. Wing also noted the IEB had voted a $25,000 donation to the mine workers as well as a $1 per-month/per-member assessment of the ILWU membership for the miners' families.
At this point a militant Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) worker announced that a similar motion for a "one day stop work mass labor rally of all Bay Area labor" had been passed 44 to 1 at a membership meeting of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 on March 8. Noting the parallel course of the two unions, she put forward a motion calling for implementing the work-stoppage motions and extending them to Bay Area labor as a whole:
"This body calls for a 24-hour Bay Area-wide stop-work protest strike against government strikebreaking in the coalfields. We urge all local unions and the Central Labor Council of all nine Bay Area counties to immediately prepare for such an action."
This simple motion immediately polarized the meeting, for the encrusted U.S. labor bureaucracy cannot abide even such elementary actions of class solidarity. Caught off guard, the nervous bureaucrats sought a way out of this dilemma and found it with the criminal aid of the Communist Party (CP) and the SWP. While both groups are vying to play chief hatchetman against labor militancy for the union tops, at this meeting the SWP clearly led the pack in wrecking the chances of solidarity strike action.
The fight which followed found the CP supporters caught in the middle. With the BART militants' motion simply calling for implementing the 1LWU resolution, they did not want to completely disavow it. But aware that the ILWU bureaucracy was seeking to minimize its impact, neither did they want to go too far out on a limb. Thus early on in the heated discussion Franklin Alexander, well-known CP supporter in ILWU Local 6, said he was "not ready" to vote for such a motion because it was "too soon," and later tried to kill it by referring it to the steering committee. (Ironically Billy Proctor, a CP supporter in Local 10, had signed the "Longshore Militant" petition earlier in the week.)
But the SWP supporters present did not beat around the bush. Mobilizing their small army of hitherto silent "Coalition" members to come out and defeat the motion, they effectively denounced the ILWU resolution as "ultra-left"! First Roland Sheppard, SWP floor leader, openly attacked the solidarity motion on the grounds that:
1) "The job of this body is to support the miners" [read Miller]; 2) "The ILWU actually isn't calling for the action, only looking for the mood in the ranks"; and 3) One must "walk before you run." Actually the SWP is on its hands and knees, a position it got used to during its 1960's peace crawls. And as if the miners who have been on strike for three months would not appreciate the support of a solidarity strike, John Olmstead, a Teamster, seconded Sheppard's remarks and actually cautioned that the motion would "alienate the union membership"!...
At this point a militant Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) worker announced that a similar motion for a "one day stop work mass labor rally of all Bay Area labor" had been passed 44 to 1 at a membership meeting of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 on March 8. Noting the parallel course of the two unions, she put forward a motion calling for implementing the work-stoppage motions and extending them to Bay Area labor as a whole:
"This body calls for a 24-hour Bay Area-wide stop-work protest strike against government strikebreaking in the coalfields. We urge all local unions and the Central Labor Council of all nine Bay Area counties to immediately prepare for such an action."
By voting time the several score SWP supporters had lined up a solid voting bloc of themselves and the most rabid right-wing bureaucrats present. Even so the first voice vote was disputed and a second hand vote was only defeated by a margin of roughly 120 to 70, with CP supporters such as Figueiredo, Franklin and several others abstaining. As if this wasn't enough, the SWP even opposed a subsequent proposal for nothing more frightening than a Saturday rally. (This was tabled to the steering committee!)
This sabotage of the solidarity strike proposal is the most blatant proof yet that the S WP's "turn to the unions" means covering for the bureaucrats and outright sabotage of vitally needed militant labor action. Surely the spectacle of these "socialists" denouncing the call of the ILWU Executive Board as, in substance, adventurist is downright grotesque. No conscious union militant can consider these reformists as anything but despicable betrayers of labor's cause. Because they are seeking to establish themselves as sophisticated braintrusters and apparatchiks for the liberal wing of labor officialdom these pimps for the bureaucracy are fiercely determined to maintain capitalist stability—sometimes even more so than the union tops themselves, who are occasionally subject to pressure from the ranks. Today the most rabid opponent of sympathy protest strikes to aid the miners—excepting only the reactionary Meanyites—is the SWP.
*********
Australian Labour Council Vows to Aid U.S. Coal Strike
SYDNEY—On 16 March the Newcastle, New South Wales Trades and Labour Council approved the following statement of solidarity with striking coal miners in America:
"The U.S. coal miners are currently in the forefront of American labour in their battle to safeguard their union rights and working conditions against the onslaught of the coal bosses and the Carter government. A victory by the miners in their strike is in the interest of the labour movement internationally and all attempts at strikebreaking by U.S. employers and the Carter government must be resisted. We pledge our full support and we condemn the U.S. government union bashing through its use of the Taft-Hartley Act."
The motion was referred for action to the Waterfront Group of Unions in Newcastle, which is a major port for shipment of Australian coal. On 21 March the WGU also passed this motion and sent a cable in solidarity with U.S. miners. Bob Rose, secretary of the Waterfront Group, told the Spartacist League that they are not going to ship coal to the U.S. as an expression of solidarity with the coal strike.
The Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand held demonstrations in support of the American miners strike in front of U.S. consulates in Sydney and Melbourne on 14 and 15 March respectively. At these demonstrations and in its press the SL/ ANZ called for a black ban [hot-cargoing] on all coal to the U.S. for the duration of the strike, a demand for which it alone on the Australian left has consistently fought.
Showing posts with label international working class solidarity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label international working class solidarity. Show all posts
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday, September 09, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Union Tops Call Off Verizon Strike- A Post-Strike Analysis
Markin comment:
The Workers Vanguard below is in line with my own comment reposted just below from an earlier American Left History entry:
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Verizon Workers Head Back To Work- No Contract Victory In Sight
Markin comment:
The Verizon strikers are heading back to work without a new contract. From the outside it is sometimes hard to see what negotiations will produce without a picket line to back them up, if anything. A workers’ strike, short of the struggle for state power, is a moment in the class struggle and a union contract is an “armed truce” in that struggle. Not all strikes, obviously, are successful, or produce the hope for results but returning back to work without a better contract on this one does not make sense. First, the picket lines were holding, and being held militantly in many cases. Secondly Verizon acknowledged that the strike was hurting their customer base. In short the strike was hurting the company’s basic concern-profits. This did not seem like a time to walk off the lines. Period.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
With Company Out for Blood
Union Tops Call Off Verizon Strike
After 15 days on strike at Verizon locations from Massachusetts to Virginia, some 45,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) were sent back to work by union officials on August 22 without a new contract. The work stoppage—the largest in the U.S. since the 2007 General Motors strike—pitted repair technicians, FiOS installers and call-center workers against a telecom giant out to squeeze them for $1 billion a year in concessions: health care, pensions, work rules, job security, sick leave, even the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Union workers showed their determination and readiness to fight, dogging scab installers and bosses masquerading as repair techs on their rounds. But just as installation and repair orders were beginning to pile up, the CWA and IBEW tops capitulated and called off the strike after buying Verizon’s empty promise that it would negotiate seriously—even though the company had not backed down on any of the issues in dispute.
In the midst of the strike, Verizon, which has made $19 billion in profits over the last four years alone, put out an ad sneering, “They claim we want to strip away 50 years of contract negotiations. THEY’RE RIGHT.” The company prepared for a showdown months in advance, including plans to fly in large numbers of management scabs. With Verizon out for blood, the CWA/IBEW bureaucrats, who were backed into a fight they did not want, folded at the first opportunity, to the bitter frustration of many workers.
For years, Verizon has maneuvered to isolate and weaken the CWA and IBEW. Mergers, acquisitions and the sales of operations, together with jobs lost to attrition and technological advances, have reduced the unionized workforce to 30 percent of the company, concentrated in FiOS fiber-optic and traditional copper landline services. A key reason the courts deregulated the old AT&T monopoly some three decades ago was to dismember its unionized workforce and open the door to non-union outfits. In recent years, Verizon’s non-union workforce has mushroomed, with over 83,000 in the Wireless division alone. The CWA and IBEW tops have relied on empty contractual promises from management, especially a “neutrality” clause supposedly assuring company non-interference in unionization efforts. Having agreed to “neutrality” in a 2000 strike settlement, Verizon has systematically harassed union supporters and closed union shops.
Failing to organize the legion of non-union workers in Verizon’s highly profitable Wireless division, the union bureaucrats during the strike mustered token pickets at Wireless stores. These pickets did not appeal to Wireless workers to join the strike but were aimed instead at mobilizing “public opinion” against the company. Even so, the CWA reported a flurry of calls from non-union workers wanting to join the union. There needs to be a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized. Labor’s power resides in its collective organization and ability to cut off the flow of profits. The unions can defend themselves only by using their own weapons: mass picket lines, international labor solidarity actions, labor-based mobilizations for health care and other necessities.
Like all labor struggles, the Verizon strike laid bare the class line dividing society: the workers who are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive and the capitalists who reap fabulous profits from exploiting that labor. The CWA and IBEW misleaders undermined the strike by bowing to court injunctions limiting pickets and appealing to the false “friends” of labor in the capitalist Democratic Party to pressure Verizon management. Throughout the strike, the CWA/IBEW tops pitched the battle as a fight for “middle-class jobs,” obscuring the class line between labor and capital. What does a striking worker have in common with a middle-class management scab!
The AFL-CIO bureaucracy has long peddled the lie that any worker with a decent union wage is “middle class.” Now they’re really pushing it as Democratic Party politicians from the White House on down prate about saving “middle-class jobs” in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Even as the AFL-CIO gears up to re-elect Barack Obama, the White House is pushing for trillions in cuts to social programs for working people and the poor. Obama’s health care “reform” last year, with its taxes on “Cadillac” health plans held by union workers, meant that companies like Verizon would try to saddle their workers with the added costs. The Democratic Party accepts the unions’ money and staffers for its election campaigns. But the Democrats represent the capitalist class no less than the Republicans. They made this clear yet again during the strike when the Obama administration launched an FBI investigation against supposed “sabotage” of Verizon property by union members.
With scab management cars clipping and injuring union members on the picket lines, police—including special “anti-terror” units in New York City—escorted strikebreakers into work and arrested striking workers. The cops, embraced by the labor bureaucracy as “fellow unionists,” have no place in the labor movement! Verizon has issued over 100 disciplinary letters against strikers, barring them from returning to their jobs. All labor must demand: Drop all the charges! No reprisals—full amnesty for all strikers!
Faced with the outsourcing of call-center and troubleshooting jobs to the Philippines, Mexico and India, union officials pushed appeals to Verizon “to create good, American jobs.” Fact: Verizon’s strikebreaking efforts were “Made in the U.S.A.” The scabs crossing the picket lines on the Atlantic seaboard were “fellow Americans.” There is no question that Verizon and other corporations have used outsourcing as a way to weaken or bust the unions. But the answer is not the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist chauvinism, which poisons workers’ consciousness by promoting the lie that workers in the U.S. share common interests with their red-white-and-blue exploiters. In February 2010, a call by the CWA for “California work for California workers” took on a chauvinist cast as work shifted across the border to Mexico. A class-struggle labor leadership would support workers’ struggles internationally to organize into unions against the capitalists, of all flags.
Crass flag-waving is hardly surprising coming from the CWA bureaucracy, which has long embraced the aims of U.S. imperialism. In particular, the CWA tops ran point for the imperialists in the Cold War against the Soviet Union by sponsoring and braintrusting the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which worked with the CIA to destroy militant, left-led unions, especially in Latin America.
As we wrote eight years ago, when Verizon workers were facing the exact same issues as today:
“Labor needs a leadership that understands that the ‘partnership’ of labor and capital is a lie, that stands for the complete independence of the working class from the capitalists’ government and political parties. Forging such a leadership through sharp class struggle will be a crucial step in building a workers party that fights for a workers government, which would expropriate the capitalist class and build a planned economy. When those who labor rule, technological advances would not mean workers being thrown onto the scrap heap but would mean reduced workdays, better working conditions and more leisure, and the wealth of society would be used for the benefit of all.”
—“Verizon: For a Solid Strike
to Stop Union-Busting!”
WV No. 807, 1 August 2003
The Workers Vanguard below is in line with my own comment reposted just below from an earlier American Left History entry:
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Verizon Workers Head Back To Work- No Contract Victory In Sight
Markin comment:
The Verizon strikers are heading back to work without a new contract. From the outside it is sometimes hard to see what negotiations will produce without a picket line to back them up, if anything. A workers’ strike, short of the struggle for state power, is a moment in the class struggle and a union contract is an “armed truce” in that struggle. Not all strikes, obviously, are successful, or produce the hope for results but returning back to work without a better contract on this one does not make sense. First, the picket lines were holding, and being held militantly in many cases. Secondly Verizon acknowledged that the strike was hurting their customer base. In short the strike was hurting the company’s basic concern-profits. This did not seem like a time to walk off the lines. Period.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
With Company Out for Blood
Union Tops Call Off Verizon Strike
After 15 days on strike at Verizon locations from Massachusetts to Virginia, some 45,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) were sent back to work by union officials on August 22 without a new contract. The work stoppage—the largest in the U.S. since the 2007 General Motors strike—pitted repair technicians, FiOS installers and call-center workers against a telecom giant out to squeeze them for $1 billion a year in concessions: health care, pensions, work rules, job security, sick leave, even the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Union workers showed their determination and readiness to fight, dogging scab installers and bosses masquerading as repair techs on their rounds. But just as installation and repair orders were beginning to pile up, the CWA and IBEW tops capitulated and called off the strike after buying Verizon’s empty promise that it would negotiate seriously—even though the company had not backed down on any of the issues in dispute.
In the midst of the strike, Verizon, which has made $19 billion in profits over the last four years alone, put out an ad sneering, “They claim we want to strip away 50 years of contract negotiations. THEY’RE RIGHT.” The company prepared for a showdown months in advance, including plans to fly in large numbers of management scabs. With Verizon out for blood, the CWA/IBEW bureaucrats, who were backed into a fight they did not want, folded at the first opportunity, to the bitter frustration of many workers.
For years, Verizon has maneuvered to isolate and weaken the CWA and IBEW. Mergers, acquisitions and the sales of operations, together with jobs lost to attrition and technological advances, have reduced the unionized workforce to 30 percent of the company, concentrated in FiOS fiber-optic and traditional copper landline services. A key reason the courts deregulated the old AT&T monopoly some three decades ago was to dismember its unionized workforce and open the door to non-union outfits. In recent years, Verizon’s non-union workforce has mushroomed, with over 83,000 in the Wireless division alone. The CWA and IBEW tops have relied on empty contractual promises from management, especially a “neutrality” clause supposedly assuring company non-interference in unionization efforts. Having agreed to “neutrality” in a 2000 strike settlement, Verizon has systematically harassed union supporters and closed union shops.
Failing to organize the legion of non-union workers in Verizon’s highly profitable Wireless division, the union bureaucrats during the strike mustered token pickets at Wireless stores. These pickets did not appeal to Wireless workers to join the strike but were aimed instead at mobilizing “public opinion” against the company. Even so, the CWA reported a flurry of calls from non-union workers wanting to join the union. There needs to be a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized. Labor’s power resides in its collective organization and ability to cut off the flow of profits. The unions can defend themselves only by using their own weapons: mass picket lines, international labor solidarity actions, labor-based mobilizations for health care and other necessities.
Like all labor struggles, the Verizon strike laid bare the class line dividing society: the workers who are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive and the capitalists who reap fabulous profits from exploiting that labor. The CWA and IBEW misleaders undermined the strike by bowing to court injunctions limiting pickets and appealing to the false “friends” of labor in the capitalist Democratic Party to pressure Verizon management. Throughout the strike, the CWA/IBEW tops pitched the battle as a fight for “middle-class jobs,” obscuring the class line between labor and capital. What does a striking worker have in common with a middle-class management scab!
The AFL-CIO bureaucracy has long peddled the lie that any worker with a decent union wage is “middle class.” Now they’re really pushing it as Democratic Party politicians from the White House on down prate about saving “middle-class jobs” in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Even as the AFL-CIO gears up to re-elect Barack Obama, the White House is pushing for trillions in cuts to social programs for working people and the poor. Obama’s health care “reform” last year, with its taxes on “Cadillac” health plans held by union workers, meant that companies like Verizon would try to saddle their workers with the added costs. The Democratic Party accepts the unions’ money and staffers for its election campaigns. But the Democrats represent the capitalist class no less than the Republicans. They made this clear yet again during the strike when the Obama administration launched an FBI investigation against supposed “sabotage” of Verizon property by union members.
With scab management cars clipping and injuring union members on the picket lines, police—including special “anti-terror” units in New York City—escorted strikebreakers into work and arrested striking workers. The cops, embraced by the labor bureaucracy as “fellow unionists,” have no place in the labor movement! Verizon has issued over 100 disciplinary letters against strikers, barring them from returning to their jobs. All labor must demand: Drop all the charges! No reprisals—full amnesty for all strikers!
Faced with the outsourcing of call-center and troubleshooting jobs to the Philippines, Mexico and India, union officials pushed appeals to Verizon “to create good, American jobs.” Fact: Verizon’s strikebreaking efforts were “Made in the U.S.A.” The scabs crossing the picket lines on the Atlantic seaboard were “fellow Americans.” There is no question that Verizon and other corporations have used outsourcing as a way to weaken or bust the unions. But the answer is not the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist chauvinism, which poisons workers’ consciousness by promoting the lie that workers in the U.S. share common interests with their red-white-and-blue exploiters. In February 2010, a call by the CWA for “California work for California workers” took on a chauvinist cast as work shifted across the border to Mexico. A class-struggle labor leadership would support workers’ struggles internationally to organize into unions against the capitalists, of all flags.
Crass flag-waving is hardly surprising coming from the CWA bureaucracy, which has long embraced the aims of U.S. imperialism. In particular, the CWA tops ran point for the imperialists in the Cold War against the Soviet Union by sponsoring and braintrusting the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which worked with the CIA to destroy militant, left-led unions, especially in Latin America.
As we wrote eight years ago, when Verizon workers were facing the exact same issues as today:
“Labor needs a leadership that understands that the ‘partnership’ of labor and capital is a lie, that stands for the complete independence of the working class from the capitalists’ government and political parties. Forging such a leadership through sharp class struggle will be a crucial step in building a workers party that fights for a workers government, which would expropriate the capitalist class and build a planned economy. When those who labor rule, technological advances would not mean workers being thrown onto the scrap heap but would mean reduced workdays, better working conditions and more leisure, and the wealth of society would be used for the benefit of all.”
—“Verizon: For a Solid Strike
to Stop Union-Busting!”
WV No. 807, 1 August 2003
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity- A Post Riots Analysis
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
Capitalism Loots Wealth Made by Working People
English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity
Free All Arrested for “Looting”!
LONDON—On 4 August, the cops shot and killed a young black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London. Contrary to police disinformation circulated at the time, Duggan did not fire any shots. But that did not stop the press from branding the victim as a “gang member” killed in a “shootout” with police. The family of Mark Duggan, a father of four, were given almost no information about his death. Instead they were told to wait for the results of an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, known among blacks as the police cover-up commission. Two days after Duggan was gunned down, his family members took part in a protest of some 300 people at a Tottenham police station demanding information, but none was given. Reportedly, police attacked a young woman demonstrator, knocking her to the ground.
There is a limit to the endurance of minority youth, who have been treated like criminals since the time they could walk. For black and South Asian youth in this country, degradation at the hands of the cops, including the relentless use of “stop and search,” is calculated to underline the message: you have no rights whatsoever. The killing of Mark Duggan was one atrocity too far. Anger exploded. Tottenham erupted in flames in scenes reminiscent of the riots in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm housing project in 1985, which followed the police killing of a black mother.
Little of substance has changed in the lives of black people since that time. This time around, the revolt in Tottenham ignited a mass of social tinder at the bottom of British capitalist society. Rioting spread like wildfire to other areas of London and to parts of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Black, Asian and white youth took to the streets to give the finger to the police, the government and a society in which they manifestly have no stake. For four days, riots by the impoverished and dispossessed swept cities and towns. Britain was exposed to the world as the racist, class-divided hellhole it is.
The arrogant rulers of decaying British capitalism have long regarded workers and the poor, and especially their black and Asian components, as merely an “underclass” deserving neither of education nor training, worthy only of state repression. In an attempt to deny that the cause of the riots is entrenched economic hardship, exacerbated by his government’s savage budget cuts, Conservative (Tory) prime minister David Cameron blamed the riots on “moral decay” and “criminality pure and simple,” insisting that they “were not about poverty.” Vowing to hunt down and jail “suspects,” Cameron seized the opportunity to massively strengthen repression. A vast police dragnet has so far arrested some 2,000 people, on any and every pretext, using information gleaned from trawling social networking sites and CCTV footage (and of course hacking phones). Television news has shown endless footage of gangs of cops brutally smashing down doors of people’s homes to arrest “suspects.”
Shredding any semblance of “due process,” the police are charging suspects before compiling evidence and opposing bail for the majority of those arrested. Cases involving minor offences that would normally result in a reprimand and would not even go to the lower magistrates’ courts are being referred to the Crown courts, which have greater sentencing powers. The vast majority of those arrested are being jailed, regardless of the alleged offence or of any previous convictions. Such a blanket policy of incarceration will vastly increase the numbers of people with criminal records which, for many youth, particularly blacks and Asians, is enough to ensure that they never work in their lives.
The draconian measures meted out in the aftermath of the riots are an escalation of the type of harsh repression meted out to students protesting against education cuts last year. The message from the capitalist rulers to the working class and the oppressed is clear: meekly accept the relentless attacks on jobs and living standards, or else! It is in the direct interests of the working class, especially the trade unions, to oppose these police-state measures and to demand that all charges be dropped against those arrested. We demand: Immediate release of all those arrested and jailed for “looting”!
Prominent politicians are calling for the use of plastic bullets and other weapons that the British state has historically deployed against the oppressed Catholics of Northern Ireland. The same capitalist ruling class that is brutally cracking down on dissent and opposition at home is engaged in imperialist subjugation abroad. Under the Labour Party government, British imperialist armed forces were in the forefront of the bloody occupations of neocolonial Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the present Tory-Liberal coalition government, British imperialism is playing a leading role in the NATO terror bombing of oil-rich Libya. Mocking Cameron’s lying claim that NATO bombs are “protecting civilians” and upholding “democracy,” Qaddafi’s deputy foreign minister urged Cameron to step down on the grounds that “violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police” showed that “Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy” (London Daily Telegraph, 11 August). At the outset of the bombing, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) issued a statement calling on workers around the world to take a stand for military defence of semicolonial Libya against the imperialist attack (printed in WV No. 977, 1 April).
The flames that engulfed English cities lit up the grotesque class inequality and racist oppression that are endemic to British capitalism. While venal Conservative and Labour spokesmen pontificate against the evils of “looting,” everyone knows that the capitalist rulers are guilty of looting the country’s wealth. The City of London is an international citadel of finance capital whose gleaming office towers represent the opulence that is generated by the grinding exploitation of the working people. Not far from the City are some of the poorest districts in London, where a large percentage of minorities are concentrated. When boom turned to bust, the banks were bailed out (and the gigantic bankers’ bonuses were protected) at massive cost to the taxpayers. Now, at Cameron’s instigation, local councils have begun proceedings to evict families of “rioters” from public housing, while work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith proposed withdrawing benefits from those convicted.
“There Is Nothing Here for Us”
The rioting spread so dramatically because, on top of decades of grinding poverty affecting whites as well as blacks and Asians, the working people are being fleeced to pay for the current economic crisis. Nearly a million people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed. Youth joblessness overall has reached almost 20 per cent and is almost 50 per cent for black youth. Official figures for riot-affected areas such as Hackney, East London, show 44 per cent of children living in poverty.
A growing number of youth are being cast out of productive economic life and dubbed Neets—“not in employment, education or training.” The government tripled tuition fees in higher education and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, a small stipend that enabled poor youth to attend college, sparking militant student protests last December. Faced with cutting its budget by 75 per cent, Haringey local council, which covers Tottenham area, closed most of its youth clubs. One youth remarked, “At least we had somewhere to go. Now we walk down the streets, we get pulled over by police. There is nothing here for us” (London Guardian, 29 July).
There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
In looking at the British “justice” system today, one does not have to be a Marxist to see what class it serves. No one has been arrested from the Metropolitan Police—truly one of London’s most dangerous armed gangs—which has been exposed for receiving hefty sums of cash (in plastic shopping bags) from the gang of Rupert Murdoch & Co. Intimately connected to these outfits, Tory and Labour politicians howl against the “criminality” of anyone who helped himself to a pair of sneakers or a bottle of water. The politicians’ hypocrisy is indeed rich in light of the recent scandal over Members of Parliament (MPs) making taxpayers shell out for the upkeep of their second homes, not to mention the cost of your “duck island” or cleaning out the moat at your country estate!
People accused of involvement in “rioting” are being thrown into prison on ludicrously trivial charges. Two white youths were sentenced to four years in prison for having (jokingly) summoned friends on Facebook to a “riot” that never happened. In Brixton, a black neighbourhood in South London, one person got a six-month sentence for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50. In Manchester an alcoholic who had just been released from prison and had only £4 in his pocket was sentenced to 16 months for taking a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. The truth is that in poor neighbourhoods such as Tottenham, there isn’t much to steal.
The blatant class bias of capitalist “justice” in Britain today recalls the 17th-century English poem protesting the enclosure (i.e., theft) of common lands that were being privatised by the rising bourgeoisie:
“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common off the goose.”
Or, as Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, aptly wrote in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, the majority of offences against property arise from some form of want because “what a man has, he does not steal.” With the masses being driven to rioting by the increasingly abject conditions of their lives, the Spartacist League/Britain suggests, as an immediate measure, that the government give the “looters” £10,000 each and let them go!
Rioting, however, can do nothing to eliminate the grinding poverty of Britain’s working class. As the Spartacist League/U.S. wrote when Los Angeles exploded following the 1992 acquittal of the cops who beat black motorist Rodney King nearly to death, the looting there was “indeed understandable, but won’t do anything to eliminate the entrenched poverty of America’s inner cities…. The point is not to seize articles of consumption but to expropriate the means of production. And that takes a leap in consciousness and organization to do away with the capitalist order” (WV No. 551, 15 May 1992).
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), followers of the late Tony Cliff, ludicrously equates looting with the expropriation of the means of production—i.e., the seizure and collectivisation of industry, the banks, etc., by the proletariat. The SWP writes: “Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. That’s what looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act” (Socialist Worker, 13 August). The idea that looting offers a solution to the grinding poverty, racism and oppression besetting black and Asian communities shows that the SWP will mindlessly cheerlead for anything that moves, no matter how far removed from socialist consciousness it may be. But the bottom line for these reformists is to refurbish Labour’s image, which they do with calls to “Jail the Tories, not young people” (Socialist Worker, 20 August) and by hailing what they call a “rising against Tory Britain” (Socialist Worker, 13 August).
Riots are an expression of despair, often including ugly incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals. The killing of three young Asian men in Birmingham by a car driven straight at them is a heinous crime. The racial tensions between blacks and Asians during the riots were an outgrowth of the “divide and rule” policies the British rulers apply to divide the proletariat and weaken its struggles, as they did historically to maintain their Empire. In an effort to defuse those tensions, Tariq Jahan, father of one of the victims, courageously appealed for calm, saying, “I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites—we all live in the same community.” He added: “Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home—please.”
There is an urgent need for the working class and oppressed to struggle against the relentless attacks on their livelihoods. The question is how. The current deepgoing economic crisis is part and parcel of the normal workings of the capitalist system. There will be no end to the misery, poverty and repression that afflict the vast majority of the population short of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of rule by the working class. The SL/B seeks to forge a multiethnic revolutionary workers party—a Leninist-Trotskyist party—based on a programme for international socialist revolution.
Mobilize Workers’ Social Power!
Britain is the latest country in Europe to be swept by major unrest, reflecting seething anger among the working classes against relentless attacks on their living standards. Particularly in Greece, the working class has waged major class battles, including several general strikes in recent years, but the impact of these struggles has been undermined by the reformist misleaders of the working class, who accept the need for austerity as a solution to the economic crisis. In Britain, the fact that the pent-up fury against the government’s attacks on the working class is being dissipated in outbursts of rioting testifies to the low level of class struggle over the past two decades. This is due in no small part to the failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to mount any effective struggle against austerity and job cuts, allowing the capitalist rulers to ride roughshod over the working people.
Trade-union membership in Britain today is concentrated among low-paid workers in the public sector, with minorities heavily represented. The membership of the rail unions in London Underground and the national railway network, as well as the civil service and postal unions, is multiethnic. Together, these unions have considerable social power. Transport workers in London for example, have the power to bring the city to a halt, including its precious financial district. But mobilising that power requires a political struggle against the reformist trade-union bureaucracy, which is tied to the Labour Party and to the racist capitalist order.
It is through the intervention of Marxists into class and social struggles that a revolutionary workers party will be forged. Such a party would champion the interests of all the oppressed, fighting against racism and other manifestations of chauvinism. An integral part of building this party is the fight for a class-struggle leadership in the trade unions. In Britain today, such a leadership would appeal to disaffected youth by waging a fight for jobs, through demands such as a shorter working week with no loss in pay. A class-struggle leadership would demand union control of hiring and union-run job training and skills programmes to recruit minority youth into the workforce and into the unions. The task of a Leninist party is to bring about the necessary change in consciousness in the proletariat, leading to the understanding that a society run in the interests of the working people—with jobs for all and a decent standard of living—cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism.
From the point of view of Britain’s working class and oppressed minorities, it makes little difference whether the government is Tory or Labour, historically the social-democratic vehicle that tied the working class to the capitalist order. When the riots erupted both parties (as well as the Liberal Democrats) vied to be seen as the best defenders of the police. Not a single Labour MP—neither the so-called “lefts” nor the handful of black MPs—condemned the cops who killed Mark Duggan. Far from it: Labour spokesmen attacked the government from the right, denouncing the planned cuts to the police budget. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said, “Police on our streets make our communities safer and make the public feel safer” (BBC, 11 August).
Tottenham’s black Labour MP, David Lammy, ranted to the press about the “totally unacceptable” behaviour of the rioters, voicing only the mildest criticisms of the cops who gunned down Mark Duggan. Nevertheless, Lammy, who symbolises a very small layer of middle-class blacks, was subjected to an outrageous racist tirade by reactionary historian David Starkey on BBC television. Black MP for Hackney Diane Abbott, once regarded as a Labour “left,” chimed in with the “law and order” brigade, calling for curfews to help “regain control of the streets.” Labour’s backing for the racist cops is not new: When he was London mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone was unwavering in his support for the police who in 2005 brutally killed Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, deemed a “terrorism suspect.” Mark Duggan was killed under the Metropolitan Police’s “Operation Trident,” which supposedly targets “gun crime” among blacks. This operation was begun under Labour home secretary David Blunkett, in consultation with William Bratton, the former police chief of New York and other major U.S. cities whom David Cameron proposes to employ in London.
Minorities and the 1984-85 Miners Strike
The link between class struggle against the capitalist state and the fight against racial oppression seems remote today, but this was not always the case. It is not an accident that the last major assault by the state on Britain’s predominantly black and Asian inner-city areas took place in 1985, the same year as the defeat of the heroic miners strike. For more than a year of bitter class war, miners and their families had defended themselves against an army of police sent by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government to occupy the coalfields. In the course of the strike, powerful bonds were forged between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and black and Asian minorities. While blacks and Asians saw in the (predominantly white) miners union a powerful force battling against the state and became enthusiastic supporters of the strike, many miners became convinced of the importance of combating racial oppression.
The defeat of the NUM dealt a severe blow to the workers movement in this country, the effects of which—from accelerating deindustrialisation to gutting the unions—are still felt today. For minority communities, the strike’s defeat also had grave ramifications. In the space of a few weeks, the cops staged racist provocations that sparked explosions of anger in major black and Asian neighbourhoods. A police provocation in September 1985 in Birmingham’s Handsworth was followed weeks later by the police shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, in Brixton, sparking a revolt there. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool’s Toxteth area also erupted. When the police invaded Broadwater Farm on 7 October 1985 in the aftermath of the racist cop killing of Cynthia Jarrett, they got more than they bargained for. As residents defended their communities in a raging battle lasting several days, one cop was killed. For this, three innocent youth—Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite—served years in prison as the result of a police frame-up.
Following the revolts in Handsworth and Brixton, the SL/B noted that in the aftermath of the miners strike, Thatcher was intent on teaching a bloody lesson to the black and Asian population that had warmly supported the miners, warning that this would mean escalating racist attacks. The article stated:
“The Spartacist League has fought to tap the sense of unity between minorities and trade union militants kindled in the miners strike, as part of our perspective of building the multiracial revolutionary workers party which will be a tribune of all the oppressed. We have fought to mobilise the integrated Birmingham labour movement for defence of the Handsworth community against the cop terror. The same is needed in Brixton and elsewhere. Protest strike action by London’s heavily black and Asian Tube and bus workers, for example, could make the racist bosses put a halt to their reign of terror in Brixton. But that takes a political struggle against the racist, pro-capitalist labour misleaders.”
—Workers Hammer No. 73, October 1985
It wasn’t mainly the repression by the viciously anti-union Thatcher government that ensured the defeat of the miners strike. The Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock and the Trades Union Congress bureaucracy were openly hostile to the strike. Particularly responsible for the defeat were the “left” trade-union leaders who failed to strike alongside the miners. This includes the dockers union leaders, who sent their members back to work twice during the miners strike. A few years later, the dockers union itself was decimated. The trade-union “lefts” were wedded to the Labour Party, to “gradual change” through Parliament, and hence to the capitalist order.
When the black Labour leader of Haringey council, Bernie Grant, voiced the simple truth that the cops who invaded Broadwater Farm got “a bloody good hiding,” he was widely denounced, including by the Labour leadership. Grant later apologised, but he remained popular among blacks until his death in 2000. Although he was regarded as a troublemaker by the Labour Party leadership, Grant served Labour’s purpose, notably in 1993 when he helped prevent an explosion of rage from “getting out of hand” following the death of Jamaican woman Joy Gardner at the hands of cops who had seized her for deportation. Above all, Grant played his part in fostering illusions among black youth in Labour, the party that had introduced racist virginity tests for South Asian women entering Britain when it was in office in 1974-79.
The unfettered financial boom that characterised the Thatcher years went hand in hand with the destruction of manufacturing jobs, which continued throughout Labour’s years in office. Among those thrown onto the dole queues were the descendants of immigrants from former Caribbean and Indian colonies brought over to do low-paid work in times of labour shortage, particularly after World War II. Not only the former coal and steel producing areas but also the textile manufacturing towns of Oldham and Bradford, which employed thousands of Asian workers, became wastelands of chronic unemployment and poverty.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Today Labour is lurching towards right-wing populism, which is inherently racist, competing with the fascist English Defence League (EDL) for the allegiance of backward white workers. In recent years, Labour leaders and trade-union bureaucrats have embraced the slogan “British jobs for British workers,” historically a rallying cry of the fascists that became prevalent during reactionary strikes against foreign workers on construction sites in 2009. The reformist Socialist Party (SP), section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, wholeheartedly supported these strikes. We categorically denounced these actions and underlined the need for defence of immigrant workers. We pointed out that a class-struggle leadership in the unions would start from an internationalist framework, organising immigrant workers into the unions and collaborating with workers across national boundaries.
In keeping with its long record of supporting the police and prison guards, the SP echoed the Labour leaders during the hoopla over the recent riots, sympathetically quoting a spokesman from the Metropolitan Police Federation bemoaning the low morale among cops due to the government’s intended cuts (socialistparty.org.uk, 8 August). Harassment by cops—lyingly depicted by the SP as fellow workers—has now reached the point where black people are 26 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales, according to a study by London School of Economics and others.
The number of deaths, particularly of black people, in police custody is staggering. In March, reggae artist Smiley Culture (David Emmanuel) died during a police raid at his Surrey home, with the cops making the incredible claim that he stabbed himself to death. The same month, Kingsley Burrell Brown died from injuries sustained in the course of being committed to hospital under the Mental Health Act by police in Birmingham. Last month, 21-year-old Demetre Fraser supposedly “committed suicide” by jumping from the 11th floor of a high-rise block in Birmingham when confronted by police. In a single week in August, three people died at the hands of police: 27-year-old Dale Burns died in Cumbria when police subjected him to shocks from a Taser gun and pepper spray; black 25-year-old Jacob Michael died after being pepper sprayed in Cheshire; 53-year-old Philip Hulmes died in police custody in Bolton.
The racist backlash against “looters” has emboldened the EDL, which smelled an opportunity to mobilise vigilantes in some of the riot-hit areas. Under previous Labour governments, the EDL had drawn strength from the “war on terror” that primarily targeted Muslims, as well as from the relentless anti-immigrant campaigns. The EDL is a deadly threat to blacks as well as to Asians, against whom it has staged numerous racist provocations in the past and threatens to do again in East London on 3 September. And make no mistake: these fascists pose a direct threat to the entire working class, as potential shock troops to be deployed against rising class struggle. It is the task of the workers movement to stop them in their tracks.
As distinct from the liberals and reformists who lead Unite Against Fascism, we oppose calls on the capitalist state to “ban the fascists.” It is not hard to see why. In response to the planned EDL march in East London and an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, Home Secretary Theresa May has banned all demonstrations in five London boroughs for a period of 30 days. As Workers Hammer No. 209 (Winter 2009-2010) declared, EDL provocations “must be met with massive protest centred on the trade unions mobilised for defence of Muslims, immigrants and all the intended victims of the EDL scum.” The article continued:
“It is in the interests of the multiethnic working class as a whole to combat these racist terrorists. We call for trade union/minority mobilisations to stop fascist provocations. At the same time, as Marxists we make clear that the decaying capitalist system breeds the social conditions in which the fascists thrive and therefore the struggle against fascism is inseparable from the fight for socialist revolution.”
Out of the social struggles that will inevitably be waged by workers and minorities will arise a new generation of militant leaders. What’s needed is a party dedicated to the task of leading the working class to power. This requires socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist order. Fundamental change in the interests of the working people can only come about through revolutionary internationalist class struggle, which must shatter the framework of capitalism worldwide. Socialist revolution will lay the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not for profit, and for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society.
2 September 2011
Capitalism Loots Wealth Made by Working People
English Cities Erupt Over Racist Cop Killing, Austerity
Free All Arrested for “Looting”!
LONDON—On 4 August, the cops shot and killed a young black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London. Contrary to police disinformation circulated at the time, Duggan did not fire any shots. But that did not stop the press from branding the victim as a “gang member” killed in a “shootout” with police. The family of Mark Duggan, a father of four, were given almost no information about his death. Instead they were told to wait for the results of an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, known among blacks as the police cover-up commission. Two days after Duggan was gunned down, his family members took part in a protest of some 300 people at a Tottenham police station demanding information, but none was given. Reportedly, police attacked a young woman demonstrator, knocking her to the ground.
There is a limit to the endurance of minority youth, who have been treated like criminals since the time they could walk. For black and South Asian youth in this country, degradation at the hands of the cops, including the relentless use of “stop and search,” is calculated to underline the message: you have no rights whatsoever. The killing of Mark Duggan was one atrocity too far. Anger exploded. Tottenham erupted in flames in scenes reminiscent of the riots in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm housing project in 1985, which followed the police killing of a black mother.
Little of substance has changed in the lives of black people since that time. This time around, the revolt in Tottenham ignited a mass of social tinder at the bottom of British capitalist society. Rioting spread like wildfire to other areas of London and to parts of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Black, Asian and white youth took to the streets to give the finger to the police, the government and a society in which they manifestly have no stake. For four days, riots by the impoverished and dispossessed swept cities and towns. Britain was exposed to the world as the racist, class-divided hellhole it is.
The arrogant rulers of decaying British capitalism have long regarded workers and the poor, and especially their black and Asian components, as merely an “underclass” deserving neither of education nor training, worthy only of state repression. In an attempt to deny that the cause of the riots is entrenched economic hardship, exacerbated by his government’s savage budget cuts, Conservative (Tory) prime minister David Cameron blamed the riots on “moral decay” and “criminality pure and simple,” insisting that they “were not about poverty.” Vowing to hunt down and jail “suspects,” Cameron seized the opportunity to massively strengthen repression. A vast police dragnet has so far arrested some 2,000 people, on any and every pretext, using information gleaned from trawling social networking sites and CCTV footage (and of course hacking phones). Television news has shown endless footage of gangs of cops brutally smashing down doors of people’s homes to arrest “suspects.”
Shredding any semblance of “due process,” the police are charging suspects before compiling evidence and opposing bail for the majority of those arrested. Cases involving minor offences that would normally result in a reprimand and would not even go to the lower magistrates’ courts are being referred to the Crown courts, which have greater sentencing powers. The vast majority of those arrested are being jailed, regardless of the alleged offence or of any previous convictions. Such a blanket policy of incarceration will vastly increase the numbers of people with criminal records which, for many youth, particularly blacks and Asians, is enough to ensure that they never work in their lives.
The draconian measures meted out in the aftermath of the riots are an escalation of the type of harsh repression meted out to students protesting against education cuts last year. The message from the capitalist rulers to the working class and the oppressed is clear: meekly accept the relentless attacks on jobs and living standards, or else! It is in the direct interests of the working class, especially the trade unions, to oppose these police-state measures and to demand that all charges be dropped against those arrested. We demand: Immediate release of all those arrested and jailed for “looting”!
Prominent politicians are calling for the use of plastic bullets and other weapons that the British state has historically deployed against the oppressed Catholics of Northern Ireland. The same capitalist ruling class that is brutally cracking down on dissent and opposition at home is engaged in imperialist subjugation abroad. Under the Labour Party government, British imperialist armed forces were in the forefront of the bloody occupations of neocolonial Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the present Tory-Liberal coalition government, British imperialism is playing a leading role in the NATO terror bombing of oil-rich Libya. Mocking Cameron’s lying claim that NATO bombs are “protecting civilians” and upholding “democracy,” Qaddafi’s deputy foreign minister urged Cameron to step down on the grounds that “violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police” showed that “Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy” (London Daily Telegraph, 11 August). At the outset of the bombing, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) issued a statement calling on workers around the world to take a stand for military defence of semicolonial Libya against the imperialist attack (printed in WV No. 977, 1 April).
The flames that engulfed English cities lit up the grotesque class inequality and racist oppression that are endemic to British capitalism. While venal Conservative and Labour spokesmen pontificate against the evils of “looting,” everyone knows that the capitalist rulers are guilty of looting the country’s wealth. The City of London is an international citadel of finance capital whose gleaming office towers represent the opulence that is generated by the grinding exploitation of the working people. Not far from the City are some of the poorest districts in London, where a large percentage of minorities are concentrated. When boom turned to bust, the banks were bailed out (and the gigantic bankers’ bonuses were protected) at massive cost to the taxpayers. Now, at Cameron’s instigation, local councils have begun proceedings to evict families of “rioters” from public housing, while work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith proposed withdrawing benefits from those convicted.
“There Is Nothing Here for Us”
The rioting spread so dramatically because, on top of decades of grinding poverty affecting whites as well as blacks and Asians, the working people are being fleeced to pay for the current economic crisis. Nearly a million people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed. Youth joblessness overall has reached almost 20 per cent and is almost 50 per cent for black youth. Official figures for riot-affected areas such as Hackney, East London, show 44 per cent of children living in poverty.
A growing number of youth are being cast out of productive economic life and dubbed Neets—“not in employment, education or training.” The government tripled tuition fees in higher education and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, a small stipend that enabled poor youth to attend college, sparking militant student protests last December. Faced with cutting its budget by 75 per cent, Haringey local council, which covers Tottenham area, closed most of its youth clubs. One youth remarked, “At least we had somewhere to go. Now we walk down the streets, we get pulled over by police. There is nothing here for us” (London Guardian, 29 July).
There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
In looking at the British “justice” system today, one does not have to be a Marxist to see what class it serves. No one has been arrested from the Metropolitan Police—truly one of London’s most dangerous armed gangs—which has been exposed for receiving hefty sums of cash (in plastic shopping bags) from the gang of Rupert Murdoch & Co. Intimately connected to these outfits, Tory and Labour politicians howl against the “criminality” of anyone who helped himself to a pair of sneakers or a bottle of water. The politicians’ hypocrisy is indeed rich in light of the recent scandal over Members of Parliament (MPs) making taxpayers shell out for the upkeep of their second homes, not to mention the cost of your “duck island” or cleaning out the moat at your country estate!
People accused of involvement in “rioting” are being thrown into prison on ludicrously trivial charges. Two white youths were sentenced to four years in prison for having (jokingly) summoned friends on Facebook to a “riot” that never happened. In Brixton, a black neighbourhood in South London, one person got a six-month sentence for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50. In Manchester an alcoholic who had just been released from prison and had only £4 in his pocket was sentenced to 16 months for taking a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. The truth is that in poor neighbourhoods such as Tottenham, there isn’t much to steal.
The blatant class bias of capitalist “justice” in Britain today recalls the 17th-century English poem protesting the enclosure (i.e., theft) of common lands that were being privatised by the rising bourgeoisie:
“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common off the goose.”
Or, as Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, aptly wrote in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, the majority of offences against property arise from some form of want because “what a man has, he does not steal.” With the masses being driven to rioting by the increasingly abject conditions of their lives, the Spartacist League/Britain suggests, as an immediate measure, that the government give the “looters” £10,000 each and let them go!
Rioting, however, can do nothing to eliminate the grinding poverty of Britain’s working class. As the Spartacist League/U.S. wrote when Los Angeles exploded following the 1992 acquittal of the cops who beat black motorist Rodney King nearly to death, the looting there was “indeed understandable, but won’t do anything to eliminate the entrenched poverty of America’s inner cities…. The point is not to seize articles of consumption but to expropriate the means of production. And that takes a leap in consciousness and organization to do away with the capitalist order” (WV No. 551, 15 May 1992).
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), followers of the late Tony Cliff, ludicrously equates looting with the expropriation of the means of production—i.e., the seizure and collectivisation of industry, the banks, etc., by the proletariat. The SWP writes: “Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. That’s what looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act” (Socialist Worker, 13 August). The idea that looting offers a solution to the grinding poverty, racism and oppression besetting black and Asian communities shows that the SWP will mindlessly cheerlead for anything that moves, no matter how far removed from socialist consciousness it may be. But the bottom line for these reformists is to refurbish Labour’s image, which they do with calls to “Jail the Tories, not young people” (Socialist Worker, 20 August) and by hailing what they call a “rising against Tory Britain” (Socialist Worker, 13 August).
Riots are an expression of despair, often including ugly incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals. The killing of three young Asian men in Birmingham by a car driven straight at them is a heinous crime. The racial tensions between blacks and Asians during the riots were an outgrowth of the “divide and rule” policies the British rulers apply to divide the proletariat and weaken its struggles, as they did historically to maintain their Empire. In an effort to defuse those tensions, Tariq Jahan, father of one of the victims, courageously appealed for calm, saying, “I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites—we all live in the same community.” He added: “Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home—please.”
There is an urgent need for the working class and oppressed to struggle against the relentless attacks on their livelihoods. The question is how. The current deepgoing economic crisis is part and parcel of the normal workings of the capitalist system. There will be no end to the misery, poverty and repression that afflict the vast majority of the population short of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of rule by the working class. The SL/B seeks to forge a multiethnic revolutionary workers party—a Leninist-Trotskyist party—based on a programme for international socialist revolution.
Mobilize Workers’ Social Power!
Britain is the latest country in Europe to be swept by major unrest, reflecting seething anger among the working classes against relentless attacks on their living standards. Particularly in Greece, the working class has waged major class battles, including several general strikes in recent years, but the impact of these struggles has been undermined by the reformist misleaders of the working class, who accept the need for austerity as a solution to the economic crisis. In Britain, the fact that the pent-up fury against the government’s attacks on the working class is being dissipated in outbursts of rioting testifies to the low level of class struggle over the past two decades. This is due in no small part to the failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to mount any effective struggle against austerity and job cuts, allowing the capitalist rulers to ride roughshod over the working people.
Trade-union membership in Britain today is concentrated among low-paid workers in the public sector, with minorities heavily represented. The membership of the rail unions in London Underground and the national railway network, as well as the civil service and postal unions, is multiethnic. Together, these unions have considerable social power. Transport workers in London for example, have the power to bring the city to a halt, including its precious financial district. But mobilising that power requires a political struggle against the reformist trade-union bureaucracy, which is tied to the Labour Party and to the racist capitalist order.
It is through the intervention of Marxists into class and social struggles that a revolutionary workers party will be forged. Such a party would champion the interests of all the oppressed, fighting against racism and other manifestations of chauvinism. An integral part of building this party is the fight for a class-struggle leadership in the trade unions. In Britain today, such a leadership would appeal to disaffected youth by waging a fight for jobs, through demands such as a shorter working week with no loss in pay. A class-struggle leadership would demand union control of hiring and union-run job training and skills programmes to recruit minority youth into the workforce and into the unions. The task of a Leninist party is to bring about the necessary change in consciousness in the proletariat, leading to the understanding that a society run in the interests of the working people—with jobs for all and a decent standard of living—cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism.
From the point of view of Britain’s working class and oppressed minorities, it makes little difference whether the government is Tory or Labour, historically the social-democratic vehicle that tied the working class to the capitalist order. When the riots erupted both parties (as well as the Liberal Democrats) vied to be seen as the best defenders of the police. Not a single Labour MP—neither the so-called “lefts” nor the handful of black MPs—condemned the cops who killed Mark Duggan. Far from it: Labour spokesmen attacked the government from the right, denouncing the planned cuts to the police budget. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said, “Police on our streets make our communities safer and make the public feel safer” (BBC, 11 August).
Tottenham’s black Labour MP, David Lammy, ranted to the press about the “totally unacceptable” behaviour of the rioters, voicing only the mildest criticisms of the cops who gunned down Mark Duggan. Nevertheless, Lammy, who symbolises a very small layer of middle-class blacks, was subjected to an outrageous racist tirade by reactionary historian David Starkey on BBC television. Black MP for Hackney Diane Abbott, once regarded as a Labour “left,” chimed in with the “law and order” brigade, calling for curfews to help “regain control of the streets.” Labour’s backing for the racist cops is not new: When he was London mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone was unwavering in his support for the police who in 2005 brutally killed Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, deemed a “terrorism suspect.” Mark Duggan was killed under the Metropolitan Police’s “Operation Trident,” which supposedly targets “gun crime” among blacks. This operation was begun under Labour home secretary David Blunkett, in consultation with William Bratton, the former police chief of New York and other major U.S. cities whom David Cameron proposes to employ in London.
Minorities and the 1984-85 Miners Strike
The link between class struggle against the capitalist state and the fight against racial oppression seems remote today, but this was not always the case. It is not an accident that the last major assault by the state on Britain’s predominantly black and Asian inner-city areas took place in 1985, the same year as the defeat of the heroic miners strike. For more than a year of bitter class war, miners and their families had defended themselves against an army of police sent by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government to occupy the coalfields. In the course of the strike, powerful bonds were forged between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and black and Asian minorities. While blacks and Asians saw in the (predominantly white) miners union a powerful force battling against the state and became enthusiastic supporters of the strike, many miners became convinced of the importance of combating racial oppression.
The defeat of the NUM dealt a severe blow to the workers movement in this country, the effects of which—from accelerating deindustrialisation to gutting the unions—are still felt today. For minority communities, the strike’s defeat also had grave ramifications. In the space of a few weeks, the cops staged racist provocations that sparked explosions of anger in major black and Asian neighbourhoods. A police provocation in September 1985 in Birmingham’s Handsworth was followed weeks later by the police shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, in Brixton, sparking a revolt there. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool’s Toxteth area also erupted. When the police invaded Broadwater Farm on 7 October 1985 in the aftermath of the racist cop killing of Cynthia Jarrett, they got more than they bargained for. As residents defended their communities in a raging battle lasting several days, one cop was killed. For this, three innocent youth—Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite—served years in prison as the result of a police frame-up.
Following the revolts in Handsworth and Brixton, the SL/B noted that in the aftermath of the miners strike, Thatcher was intent on teaching a bloody lesson to the black and Asian population that had warmly supported the miners, warning that this would mean escalating racist attacks. The article stated:
“The Spartacist League has fought to tap the sense of unity between minorities and trade union militants kindled in the miners strike, as part of our perspective of building the multiracial revolutionary workers party which will be a tribune of all the oppressed. We have fought to mobilise the integrated Birmingham labour movement for defence of the Handsworth community against the cop terror. The same is needed in Brixton and elsewhere. Protest strike action by London’s heavily black and Asian Tube and bus workers, for example, could make the racist bosses put a halt to their reign of terror in Brixton. But that takes a political struggle against the racist, pro-capitalist labour misleaders.”
—Workers Hammer No. 73, October 1985
It wasn’t mainly the repression by the viciously anti-union Thatcher government that ensured the defeat of the miners strike. The Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock and the Trades Union Congress bureaucracy were openly hostile to the strike. Particularly responsible for the defeat were the “left” trade-union leaders who failed to strike alongside the miners. This includes the dockers union leaders, who sent their members back to work twice during the miners strike. A few years later, the dockers union itself was decimated. The trade-union “lefts” were wedded to the Labour Party, to “gradual change” through Parliament, and hence to the capitalist order.
When the black Labour leader of Haringey council, Bernie Grant, voiced the simple truth that the cops who invaded Broadwater Farm got “a bloody good hiding,” he was widely denounced, including by the Labour leadership. Grant later apologised, but he remained popular among blacks until his death in 2000. Although he was regarded as a troublemaker by the Labour Party leadership, Grant served Labour’s purpose, notably in 1993 when he helped prevent an explosion of rage from “getting out of hand” following the death of Jamaican woman Joy Gardner at the hands of cops who had seized her for deportation. Above all, Grant played his part in fostering illusions among black youth in Labour, the party that had introduced racist virginity tests for South Asian women entering Britain when it was in office in 1974-79.
The unfettered financial boom that characterised the Thatcher years went hand in hand with the destruction of manufacturing jobs, which continued throughout Labour’s years in office. Among those thrown onto the dole queues were the descendants of immigrants from former Caribbean and Indian colonies brought over to do low-paid work in times of labour shortage, particularly after World War II. Not only the former coal and steel producing areas but also the textile manufacturing towns of Oldham and Bradford, which employed thousands of Asian workers, became wastelands of chronic unemployment and poverty.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Today Labour is lurching towards right-wing populism, which is inherently racist, competing with the fascist English Defence League (EDL) for the allegiance of backward white workers. In recent years, Labour leaders and trade-union bureaucrats have embraced the slogan “British jobs for British workers,” historically a rallying cry of the fascists that became prevalent during reactionary strikes against foreign workers on construction sites in 2009. The reformist Socialist Party (SP), section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, wholeheartedly supported these strikes. We categorically denounced these actions and underlined the need for defence of immigrant workers. We pointed out that a class-struggle leadership in the unions would start from an internationalist framework, organising immigrant workers into the unions and collaborating with workers across national boundaries.
In keeping with its long record of supporting the police and prison guards, the SP echoed the Labour leaders during the hoopla over the recent riots, sympathetically quoting a spokesman from the Metropolitan Police Federation bemoaning the low morale among cops due to the government’s intended cuts (socialistparty.org.uk, 8 August). Harassment by cops—lyingly depicted by the SP as fellow workers—has now reached the point where black people are 26 times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales, according to a study by London School of Economics and others.
The number of deaths, particularly of black people, in police custody is staggering. In March, reggae artist Smiley Culture (David Emmanuel) died during a police raid at his Surrey home, with the cops making the incredible claim that he stabbed himself to death. The same month, Kingsley Burrell Brown died from injuries sustained in the course of being committed to hospital under the Mental Health Act by police in Birmingham. Last month, 21-year-old Demetre Fraser supposedly “committed suicide” by jumping from the 11th floor of a high-rise block in Birmingham when confronted by police. In a single week in August, three people died at the hands of police: 27-year-old Dale Burns died in Cumbria when police subjected him to shocks from a Taser gun and pepper spray; black 25-year-old Jacob Michael died after being pepper sprayed in Cheshire; 53-year-old Philip Hulmes died in police custody in Bolton.
The racist backlash against “looters” has emboldened the EDL, which smelled an opportunity to mobilise vigilantes in some of the riot-hit areas. Under previous Labour governments, the EDL had drawn strength from the “war on terror” that primarily targeted Muslims, as well as from the relentless anti-immigrant campaigns. The EDL is a deadly threat to blacks as well as to Asians, against whom it has staged numerous racist provocations in the past and threatens to do again in East London on 3 September. And make no mistake: these fascists pose a direct threat to the entire working class, as potential shock troops to be deployed against rising class struggle. It is the task of the workers movement to stop them in their tracks.
As distinct from the liberals and reformists who lead Unite Against Fascism, we oppose calls on the capitalist state to “ban the fascists.” It is not hard to see why. In response to the planned EDL march in East London and an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, Home Secretary Theresa May has banned all demonstrations in five London boroughs for a period of 30 days. As Workers Hammer No. 209 (Winter 2009-2010) declared, EDL provocations “must be met with massive protest centred on the trade unions mobilised for defence of Muslims, immigrants and all the intended victims of the EDL scum.” The article continued:
“It is in the interests of the multiethnic working class as a whole to combat these racist terrorists. We call for trade union/minority mobilisations to stop fascist provocations. At the same time, as Marxists we make clear that the decaying capitalist system breeds the social conditions in which the fascists thrive and therefore the struggle against fascism is inseparable from the fight for socialist revolution.”
Out of the social struggles that will inevitably be waged by workers and minorities will arise a new generation of militant leaders. What’s needed is a party dedicated to the task of leading the working class to power. This requires socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist order. Fundamental change in the interests of the working people can only come about through revolutionary internationalist class struggle, which must shatter the framework of capitalism worldwide. Socialist revolution will lay the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not for profit, and for a qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of poverty and the creation of an egalitarian socialist society.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
From "The Rag Blog"- Nancy Miller Saunders : Jane Fonda and the 'Home of the Brave'
Click on the headline to line to The Rag Blog entry listed in the headline.
Markin comment:
Despite any political disagreements we were kinda fonda Jane in those days. Especially anti-war G.I.s. And yes we all smoked, smoked whatever, in those days.
Markin comment:
Despite any political disagreements we were kinda fonda Jane in those days. Especially anti-war G.I.s. And yes we all smoked, smoked whatever, in those days.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- September 1971
Click on the headline to link to a an online copy of Workers Action, an early labor-oriented newspaper of the International Communist League's Spartacist League/U.S. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1970, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle against the Nixon government around the effects of the cost of the Vietnam on the economic well-being of the American working class. This issue, as importantly, poses the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1970 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
Another section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The last section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of organizing a union caucus. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1970, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle against the Nixon government around the effects of the cost of the Vietnam on the economic well-being of the American working class. This issue, as importantly, poses the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1970 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
Another section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The last section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of organizing a union caucus. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
Friday, August 05, 2011
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- Spring 1970
Click on the headline to link to a an online copy of Workers Action, an early labor-oriented newspaper of the International Communist League's Spartacist League/U.S. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
***********
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does, forthrightly, pose raised in the last isse-the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
One section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of a strike The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
***********
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does, forthrightly, pose raised in the last isse-the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
One section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the ten point … And What We Stand For. With a an obvious need for some technical updating, like replace Vietnam War with Iraq and Afghan Wars, the thing reads as a very presentable program for a revolutionary labor party, or a caucus in a reformist labor party in a period of left-wing motion in 2011. The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, the lessons of a strike The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. This says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
Thursday, August 04, 2011
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- Winter 1969-1970
I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
*******
Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
*****
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
******
Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.
This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.
The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1971
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:
One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- December 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Additional comment on The Panthers, Racism and The Radicals article in this issue:
In the time period that I write this comment (June 2011) I have been informed that former class-war prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) has passed away. Having memories of working on the campaign to secure this innocent man’s release from the California prisons and re-reading his political profile as part of an article honoring his life brought back an old political thought germane to this article. I am struck, struck as I am always struck, by how really destructive the whole evolved strategy of “sectoralization” that paralyzed and acted to destroy the 1960s left, and the Panthers in particular, wasted precious cadre like Geronimo. Cadre that it took years to create out of fire of the ghettos, out of the hell-hole of Vietnam, out of the ebb and flow of Panther movement politics. And that, in the end, was the price paid by a non-aggression treaty, forced by idolization (and fear) of the Panthers to be sure, to let them do their “own thing” without criticism by white radicals.
As I wrote in a previous comment in this series regarding SDS and the women’s liberation the falsity of that sectoral strategy applies as a lesson here as well:
“There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer, responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.” And the demise of the Panthers was one of those nevers.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On Optimism and Pessimism-On the 20th Century and on Many Other Issues (1901)-Good Advise For The 21st Century
Leon Trotsky
On Optimism and Pessimism-On the 20th Century and on Many Other Issues
(1901)
Dum spiro spero! [While there is life, there’s hope!] ... If I were one of the celestial bodies, I would look with complete detachment upon this miserable ball of dust and dirt ... I would shine upon the good and the evil alike ... But I am a man. World history which to you, dispassionate gobbler of science, to you, book-keeper of eternity, seems only a negligible moment in the balance of time, is to me everything! As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness! ...
The nineteenth century has in many ways satisfied and has in even more ways deceived the hopes of the optimist ... It has compelled him to transfer most of his hopes to twentieth century. Whenever the optimist was confronted by an atrocious fact, he exclaimed: What, and this can happen on the threshold of the twentieth century! When he drew wonderful pictured of the harmonious future, he placed them in the twentieth century.
And now that century has come! What has it brought with it from the outset?
In France – the poisonous foam of racial hatred [1]; in Austria – nationalist strife ...; in South Africa – the agony of a tiny people, which is being murdered by a colossus [2]; on the ‘free’ island itself – triumphant hymns to the victorious greed of jingoist jobbers; dramatic ‘complications’ in the east; rebellions of starving popular masses in Italy, Bulgaria, Romania ... Hatred and murder, famine and blood ...
It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana.
– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.
– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’
– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.
****
Notes
1. The Dreyfus Affair.
2. The Boer War
On Optimism and Pessimism-On the 20th Century and on Many Other Issues
(1901)
Dum spiro spero! [While there is life, there’s hope!] ... If I were one of the celestial bodies, I would look with complete detachment upon this miserable ball of dust and dirt ... I would shine upon the good and the evil alike ... But I am a man. World history which to you, dispassionate gobbler of science, to you, book-keeper of eternity, seems only a negligible moment in the balance of time, is to me everything! As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness! ...
The nineteenth century has in many ways satisfied and has in even more ways deceived the hopes of the optimist ... It has compelled him to transfer most of his hopes to twentieth century. Whenever the optimist was confronted by an atrocious fact, he exclaimed: What, and this can happen on the threshold of the twentieth century! When he drew wonderful pictured of the harmonious future, he placed them in the twentieth century.
And now that century has come! What has it brought with it from the outset?
In France – the poisonous foam of racial hatred [1]; in Austria – nationalist strife ...; in South Africa – the agony of a tiny people, which is being murdered by a colossus [2]; on the ‘free’ island itself – triumphant hymns to the victorious greed of jingoist jobbers; dramatic ‘complications’ in the east; rebellions of starving popular masses in Italy, Bulgaria, Romania ... Hatred and murder, famine and blood ...
It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana.
– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.
– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’
– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.
****
Notes
1. The Dreyfus Affair.
2. The Boer War
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