Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, MacMillan, Basingstoke 1988, pp.239, £29.50.
The October Revolution drew on an international scale towards Bolshevism a wide range of radical groups and individuals. Despite their initial attraction to Bolshevism, some of them either adopted or continued with an orientation that was virulently hostile to working within bourgeois parliaments and reformist trade unions, and rejected any form of joint work with reformist parties. This book concerns itself with the groups of such a persuasion in Britain in the period of 1917 to 1945.
Along with organisations of a similar outlook, the Workers Socialist Federation, of which Sylvia Pankhurst was a leader, formed in 1920 the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) prior to the formation of the official CP, and attempted to win the Communist movement internationally to an anti-parliamentary strategy. Expelled from the Third International along with other such groups in various countries, it aligned itself with the Communist Workers International in 1921, only to fade away in the mid-1920s. Other anti-parliamentary groups, including one around the colourful Glasgow-based Anarchist Guy Aldred, formed in 1921 the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. This group lasted through the Second World War, which it actively opposed, although not without fissures, Aldred splitting off in 1933 to form the United Socialist Movement.
Having left the Third International, Pankhurst’s group rapidly reconsidered its previously positive attitude towards Bolshevism. The New Economic Policy, of 1921 confirmed its opinion that the Soviet Union was now in fact capitalist with a new, ‘Communist’ ruling class. The Communists’ United Front tactic was seen as a rank capitulation to reformism. Grave doubts arose over Leninist norms of organisation. Aldred, whilst always critical of the Third International’s tactics, waited until the mid-1920s before considering the Soviet Union to be capitalist, and then he dabbled with Trotsky’s degenerated workers’ state theory in 1934.
Despite his sympathy towards the book’s subject, Shipway does not fail to draw attention to the more questionable aspects of the movement. During the first months of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 both the APCF and the USM made no criticisms of the Republican government. Shipway criticises Aldred for opening the pages of his journal during the Second World War to priests, parliamentary pacifists and the highly dubious Duke of Bedford, yet he approves of the anti-parliamentarians’ pacifist opposition to the war. He points to their failure to carry out a theoretical re-evaluation of the October Revolution – did it merely usher in capitalism? – yet considers this omission as justifiable. He does not comment on the APCF’s preference for Rosa Luxemburg’s crude under-consumptionist crisis theory as against the superior concepts expressed by Council Communist Paul Mattick.
One cannot judge the political validity of anti-parliamentary Communism by its failure as a movement; the entire history of Socialism appears to be a sad array of failures both heroic and ignoble. But the refusal of the anti-parliamentarians to work within trade unions or to countenance United Front work helped to keep the bulk of the working class under the influence of reformism. The problem was not the tactics of the Third International, but their application. Yet however much the anti-parliamentarian Communists were wrong, the main problem with the left in Britain has generally been opportunism, not ultra-leftism. Those who have touted left-speaking union bureaucrats or tried to apply United Front tactics regardless of their relevance to the situation should think twice before passing judgement.
Apart from its absurdly high price, the main problem with this book is the absence of oral evidence. Admittedly there can't be many survivors around, yet some interviews would have given an idea of the ‘feel’ of the movement. All the same, Anti-Parliamentary Communism sheds a welcome light upon a little-known corner of the labour movement in Britain.
Paul Flewers
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
Monday, October 11, 2010
***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again, No More"
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of the McGarrigles performing Hard Times Come Again, No More.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Stephen Foster's original lyrics:[4]
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.
Chorus:
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Stephen Foster's original lyrics:[4]
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.
Chorus:
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.
(Chorus)
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Cotton Blue Blues"
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Old man Sargent sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
He'd take the nickels off a dead man's eyes,
To buy a Coca-cola and a Pomo Pie.
cho: I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
Lordy, lordy, spoolin's hard,
You know and I know, I don't have to tell:
Work for Tom Watson, got to work like hell.
I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
( Repeat after each verse)
When I die, don't bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spoolroom wall.
Place a knotter in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
When I die, don't bury me deep,
Bury me down on 600 Street,
Place a bobbin in each hand,
So I can dolph in the Promised Land,
**********
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Old man Sargent sitting at the desk,
The damned old fool won't give us no rest.
He'd take the nickels off a dead man's eyes,
To buy a Coca-cola and a Pomo Pie.
cho: I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
Lordy, lordy, spoolin's hard,
You know and I know, I don't have to tell:
Work for Tom Watson, got to work like hell.
I've got the blues,
I've got the blues,
I've got the Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues,
( Repeat after each verse)
When I die, don't bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spoolroom wall.
Place a knotter in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
When I die, don't bury me deep,
Bury me down on 600 Street,
Place a bobbin in each hand,
So I can dolph in the Promised Land,
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Remembering The Old Songs:THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Remembering The Old Songs:
THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, November 2006)
Other parts of the world may have nomadic groups, such as gypsies, but the lone homeless tramp belongs to the large open spaces. The rise of the railroads in the 19th century brought new efficiency to migrancy. Anyone with the agility and courage to catch a slow-moving freight car could go anywhere in America without a ticket. If you had charm, you could also cadge a meal from a sympathetic homeowner without even having to chop any wood.
There are lone wanderers, people who can't abide others and who can't sit still, but most of the transients would have preferred to have a home. All kinds of misfortunes could happen to even normal men (women seldom rode the rails) in an era without social safety nets. Unemployment was an important cause, as were financial ruin, injury or sickness, and family difficulties (e.g., young runaways). But the trains also carried alcoholics and criminals on the run, so ordinary people, already afraid of strangers, feared tramps. In response, some who understood the varied causes for migrancy published songs portraying tramps in a positive light. One such broadside, published in the 1880s (reprinted in Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong), is a high-minded but ponderous 3rd-person plea that includes a chorus:
So if you meet a tramp that bears misfortune's stamp,
If he is worthy of your aid, why freely give.
Give him a hearty grip, wish him luck upon his trip,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live.
At some time during the next 45 years, someone re-wrote (and greatly improved) this song, using mostly new words except for the last line of the chorus. The new version, changed to first person, added details about a railroad injury and the need to sing for spare change. It was first recorded by Walter Morris in 1926, although I learned it from Ernest Stoneman's 1927 cover. Later, when the Great Depression hit, almost everyone was on the move searching for work, and the trains were overwhelmed with migrants. By that time, no one could afford to buy records pleading for help to the tramps.
We still have bums, but you don't hear much about tramps any more, and, as far as the media is concerned, to be a hobo is a hobby. Rail yards are guarded, so freight trains are harder to catch. Drivers are afraid to pick up hitchhikers and there's no place to stow away on an airplane. No wonder our homeless are now sedentary, standing with cardboard signs asking for money but not transportation. It's a bad sign for our future if there's no hope for a ride to a better place.
[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)]
Complete Lyrics:
1. I'm a poor old railroad man,
Once a healthy section hand;
And old age is slowly creeping on the way.
Now hard times is coming on
And my last gold dollar is gone,
And this song is what I made to sing and play.
CHORUS:
Now you ofttimes see the stamp
Of a poor unfortunate tramp;
He has no home and has no place to fill.
As you see him pass along
And he sings his little song,
Please remember that the poor tramp has to live.
2. My health broke down out on the track,
With the heavy loads upon my back;
Now I have to make my way the best I can.
We never know when we are young
What may be our future doom.
These words is from a broke-down section hand. CHO.
3. Yes, my health is broken down
And I tramp from town to town;
Sing and play, take whatever you may give.
While I try to play and sing,
Just divide your little change,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live. CHO.
**********
Remembering The Old Songs:
THE POOR TRAMP HAS TO LIVE
by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, November 2006)
Other parts of the world may have nomadic groups, such as gypsies, but the lone homeless tramp belongs to the large open spaces. The rise of the railroads in the 19th century brought new efficiency to migrancy. Anyone with the agility and courage to catch a slow-moving freight car could go anywhere in America without a ticket. If you had charm, you could also cadge a meal from a sympathetic homeowner without even having to chop any wood.
There are lone wanderers, people who can't abide others and who can't sit still, but most of the transients would have preferred to have a home. All kinds of misfortunes could happen to even normal men (women seldom rode the rails) in an era without social safety nets. Unemployment was an important cause, as were financial ruin, injury or sickness, and family difficulties (e.g., young runaways). But the trains also carried alcoholics and criminals on the run, so ordinary people, already afraid of strangers, feared tramps. In response, some who understood the varied causes for migrancy published songs portraying tramps in a positive light. One such broadside, published in the 1880s (reprinted in Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong), is a high-minded but ponderous 3rd-person plea that includes a chorus:
So if you meet a tramp that bears misfortune's stamp,
If he is worthy of your aid, why freely give.
Give him a hearty grip, wish him luck upon his trip,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live.
At some time during the next 45 years, someone re-wrote (and greatly improved) this song, using mostly new words except for the last line of the chorus. The new version, changed to first person, added details about a railroad injury and the need to sing for spare change. It was first recorded by Walter Morris in 1926, although I learned it from Ernest Stoneman's 1927 cover. Later, when the Great Depression hit, almost everyone was on the move searching for work, and the trains were overwhelmed with migrants. By that time, no one could afford to buy records pleading for help to the tramps.
We still have bums, but you don't hear much about tramps any more, and, as far as the media is concerned, to be a hobo is a hobby. Rail yards are guarded, so freight trains are harder to catch. Drivers are afraid to pick up hitchhikers and there's no place to stow away on an airplane. No wonder our homeless are now sedentary, standing with cardboard signs asking for money but not transportation. It's a bad sign for our future if there's no hope for a ride to a better place.
[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)]
Complete Lyrics:
1. I'm a poor old railroad man,
Once a healthy section hand;
And old age is slowly creeping on the way.
Now hard times is coming on
And my last gold dollar is gone,
And this song is what I made to sing and play.
CHORUS:
Now you ofttimes see the stamp
Of a poor unfortunate tramp;
He has no home and has no place to fill.
As you see him pass along
And he sings his little song,
Please remember that the poor tramp has to live.
2. My health broke down out on the track,
With the heavy loads upon my back;
Now I have to make my way the best I can.
We never know when we are young
What may be our future doom.
These words is from a broke-down section hand. CHO.
3. Yes, my health is broken down
And I tramp from town to town;
Sing and play, take whatever you may give.
While I try to play and sing,
Just divide your little change,
And remember that the poor tramp has to live. CHO.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-COTTON MILL COLIC-(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***********
COTTON MILL COLIC
(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s)
McCarn wrote this song in 1926. Released on record in August 1930, it was soon being sung by striking Piedmont mill workers. It was collected by Alan Lomax in 1939 and appeared in FOLKSONGS OF NORTH AMERICA and OUR SINGING COUNTRY. It's recording history is long and includes versions by Lester Pete Bivins (Decca), the Blue Sky Boys (Capitol) and both Pete & Mike Seeger (Folkways). Probably it is McCarn's best composition; revealing with wry humour the often grim situation of the millhand unable to get straight financially.
Mike Paris, liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505. 1970s.
Recorded May 19, 1930, Memphis, TN (Vi 40274).
Lyrics as reprinted in liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505, 1970s.
When you buy clothes on easy terms,
Collectors treat you like measly worms.
One dollar down, then Lord knows,
If you can't make a payment, they'll take your clothes.
When you go to bed you can't sleep,
You owe so much at the end of the week.
No use to colic, they're all that way,
Pecking at your door till they get your pay.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
When you go to work you work like the devil,
At the end of the week you're not on the level.
Payday comes, you pay your rent,
When you get through you've notgot a cent
To buy fat-back meat, pinto beans,
Now and then you get turnip greens.
No use to colic, we're all that way,
Can't get the money to move away.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
Twelve dollars a week is all we get,
How in the heck can we live on that?
I've got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.
Patches on my britches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave, my wife got fat.
No use to colic, everyday at noon,
The kids get to crying in a different tune.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
They run a few days and then they stand,
Just to keep down the working man.
We can't make it, we never will,
As long as we stay at a lousy mill.
The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer,
If you don't starve, I'm a son of a gun.
No use to colic, no use to rave,
We'll never rest till we're in our grave.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
***********
COTTON MILL COLIC
(DAVE McCARN) (1926)
Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s)
McCarn wrote this song in 1926. Released on record in August 1930, it was soon being sung by striking Piedmont mill workers. It was collected by Alan Lomax in 1939 and appeared in FOLKSONGS OF NORTH AMERICA and OUR SINGING COUNTRY. It's recording history is long and includes versions by Lester Pete Bivins (Decca), the Blue Sky Boys (Capitol) and both Pete & Mike Seeger (Folkways). Probably it is McCarn's best composition; revealing with wry humour the often grim situation of the millhand unable to get straight financially.
Mike Paris, liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505. 1970s.
Recorded May 19, 1930, Memphis, TN (Vi 40274).
Lyrics as reprinted in liner notes for "Singers of the Piedmont," Folk Variety/Bear Family Records 15505, 1970s.
When you buy clothes on easy terms,
Collectors treat you like measly worms.
One dollar down, then Lord knows,
If you can't make a payment, they'll take your clothes.
When you go to bed you can't sleep,
You owe so much at the end of the week.
No use to colic, they're all that way,
Pecking at your door till they get your pay.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
When you go to work you work like the devil,
At the end of the week you're not on the level.
Payday comes, you pay your rent,
When you get through you've notgot a cent
To buy fat-back meat, pinto beans,
Now and then you get turnip greens.
No use to colic, we're all that way,
Can't get the money to move away.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
Twelve dollars a week is all we get,
How in the heck can we live on that?
I've got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.
Patches on my britches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave, my wife got fat.
No use to colic, everyday at noon,
The kids get to crying in a different tune.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
They run a few days and then they stand,
Just to keep down the working man.
We can't make it, we never will,
As long as we stay at a lousy mill.
The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer,
If you don't starve, I'm a son of a gun.
No use to colic, no use to rave,
We'll never rest till we're in our grave.
I'm a-gonna starve, and everybody will,
'Cause you can't make a living at a cotton mill.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Blue Harvest Blues"-Mississippi John Hurt
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Blue Harvest Blues
Standing on the mountain : far as I can see
Dark clouds above me : clouds all around poor me
Feeling low and weary : Lord I've got a trouble in mind
Everything that gets me : everybody's so unkind
Harvest time's coming : and will catch me unprepared
Haven't made a dollar : bad luck is all I've had
Lord how can I bear it : Lord what will the harvest bring
Putting up all my money : and I isn't got a doggone thing
I'm a weary traveler : roaming around from place to place
If I don't find something : this will end me in disgrace
Ain't got no mother : father left me long ago
I'm just like an orphan : where my folks is I don't know
Blues around my shoulder : blues are all around my head
With my heavy burden : Lord I wished I was dead
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Blue Harvest Blues
Standing on the mountain : far as I can see
Dark clouds above me : clouds all around poor me
Feeling low and weary : Lord I've got a trouble in mind
Everything that gets me : everybody's so unkind
Harvest time's coming : and will catch me unprepared
Haven't made a dollar : bad luck is all I've had
Lord how can I bear it : Lord what will the harvest bring
Putting up all my money : and I isn't got a doggone thing
I'm a weary traveler : roaming around from place to place
If I don't find something : this will end me in disgrace
Ain't got no mother : father left me long ago
I'm just like an orphan : where my folks is I don't know
Blues around my shoulder : blues are all around my head
With my heavy burden : Lord I wished I was dead
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Georgia Blues"- Ethel Waters
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
******
Georgia Blues
(Higgins-Overstreet)
Transcribed from vocals by Ethel Waters, recorded 5/1922.
From Ethel Waters 1921 - 1923, The Chronogical Classics, vol. 796.
I feel bad,
I feel sad,
But it won't be very long
Before I'll be feeling glad,
I just sigh,
I could die;
I have got Georgia blues,
And I'm just too mean to cry;
I don't live in Boston;
I wasn't born in Maine;
If I don't go to Georgia,
I will surely go insane.
I've got the Georgia blues,
'Cause I've got bad news;
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my baby by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
'Cause the train is waiting,
Got no time to lose,
A certain party that I know
Offered me a ticket to Chicago.
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
I've got those Georgia blues,
'Cause I got bad news
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home, home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my sweet daddy by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
My train is waiting
Got no time to lose,
A party wanted to marry me, way last spring,
Even bought me a brand new diamond ring,
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
******
Georgia Blues
(Higgins-Overstreet)
Transcribed from vocals by Ethel Waters, recorded 5/1922.
From Ethel Waters 1921 - 1923, The Chronogical Classics, vol. 796.
I feel bad,
I feel sad,
But it won't be very long
Before I'll be feeling glad,
I just sigh,
I could die;
I have got Georgia blues,
And I'm just too mean to cry;
I don't live in Boston;
I wasn't born in Maine;
If I don't go to Georgia,
I will surely go insane.
I've got the Georgia blues,
'Cause I've got bad news;
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my baby by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
'Cause the train is waiting,
Got no time to lose,
A certain party that I know
Offered me a ticket to Chicago.
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
I've got those Georgia blues,
'Cause I got bad news
I'm gonna catch a train,
And I ain't gonna stop until I'm home, home,
Home again;
I'm not satisfied,
Just must take a ride;
Gee, but I'll be happy
With my sweet daddy by my side;
Hear that whistle blow,
Now it's time to go,
My train is waiting
Got no time to lose,
A party wanted to marry me, way last spring,
Even bought me a brand new diamond ring,
But he can have it, I don't want it,
'Cause I got the Georgia blues.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"One Dime Blues"-Blind Lemmon Jefferson
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON ONE DIME BLUES LYRICS
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and aint got a dime,
Everybody gets in hard luck
sometime.
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
Just give'm a six shooter and
highway some passenger train.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON ONE DIME BLUES LYRICS
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and I aint got a dime,
I'm broke and aint got a dime,
Everybody gets in hard luck
sometime.
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
You want your friend to be bad like
Jesse James ?
Just give'm a six shooter and
highway some passenger train.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-“War on Terror” Witchhunt-Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist mentioned in this day's (and yesterday's) other posts.
************
Workers Vanguard No. 966
8 October 2010
“War on Terror” Witchhunt
Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
OCTOBER 5—In a series of dawn raids on September 24, FBI agents in Minneapolis and Chicago invaded seven homes and an office of leftists and labor activists. The Feds spent hours ransacking their homes, seizing cell phones and passports and carting away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks. The activists were slapped with subpoenas to testify this month before a witchhunting grand jury. Subpoenas have also been served against individuals in North Carolina and Michigan. The government seeks to pin charges of “material support to terrorism” on the activists and others associated with them based on their political activities in solidarity with the oppressed in the Near East and Latin America. Today, an attorney for the activists announced that all 14 of those hit with subpoenas in the Midwest will refuse to testify before the grand jury in Chicago.
Most of the victims of the raids are well-known leftists. Jessica Sundin is a longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis, a supporter of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and member of the Anti-War Committee, whose office was also raided. Joe Iosbaker is a chief steward and executive board member of Service Employees International Union Local 73 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he acts as an adviser to the Students for a Democratic Society. Mick Kelly is the editor of the FRSO’s newspaper, Fight Back! Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian American antiwar activist, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network.
It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to come to the defense of these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. For decades, the capitalist rulers have sought to tar leftists as “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything. The recent FBI raids open a sinister new front in that effort. Paving the Feds’ way, a June 21 Supreme Court decision expanded what can legally be considered “material support to terrorism” to include a wide range of activities deemed as somehow aiding proscribed foreign organizations.
In a protest letter issued the day after the raids, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, denounced the Feds’ attempt to chill the political activities of those who protest government policies at home and wars abroad. The letter stated: “From its inception under the Bush administration, the ‘war on terror,’ which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures that also target leftists, trade unionists, and black people. Now the Obama administration is escalating these wholesale attacks on civil liberties with these neo-McCarthyite raids.”
The PDC and a number of other organizations have demanded that the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that all belongings seized by the Feds be returned immediately. On September 27, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution condemning the raids, and protest rallies have been held in cities across the country.
Almost to a man, liberal organizations and the reformist left had promoted the illusion that Barack Obama would represent some kind of “change” from the George W. Bush regime. But as we pointed out, what drove Obama’s promises to clean up some of the Bush gang’s most blatant “excesses” was his commitment to wage a more effective “war on terror.” In office, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed down to him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton)—and then some: detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo; domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency; invocation of “state secrets” to quash lawsuits exposing U.S.-sponsored torture; kangaroo-court military commissions to try “terror” suspects; endorsement of indefinite detention, a hallmark of police-state regimes. While Bush broadened the FBI’s legal authority to launch “terrorism” investigations based solely on one’s political views, the Obama government has taken this a big step further with the concerted raids against leftists.
“War on Terror” Targets All of Us
The same day as the FBI raids, the left-wing National Lawyers Guild released a report titled “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” that pointed to “a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties” in the nine years since the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The report denounced the government’s stigmatizing activists as terrorists and its use of “fear-based techniques against those who dare speak out against government policies.”
The purpose of “anti-terror” witchhunts is...to instill terror in the population. The country’s rulers fan fears of constant threat from the likes of Al Qaeda in order to garner popular support for (or acquiescence to) an immense expansion of police powers. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in an amici curiae brief filed in July 2003 on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant”:
“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
It did not take long after the September 11 attacks for the government to demonstrate that its campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism” targeted a much wider swath than immigrants from Islamic countries, not least the labor movement. In December 2001, striking school teachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban. The following year, Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, personally intervened to warn West Coast longshoremen organized by the ILWU that any strike action would be treated as a threat to national security. Even such liberal pacifists as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker group have been spied upon in the “anti-terror” witchhunt, as documented in a report issued last month by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
The SL/PDC amici brief pointed out: “The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents.” The brief continued, “The Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” Taking this “right” to its logical conclusion, the Obama administration earlier this year gave legal authority for the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen living abroad—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of being an Al Qaeda operative and is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
How the “anti-terror” laws and other measures could be used for political witchhunts was on display in the police mobilizations that met protesters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004 and 2008. Civil disobedience and disruptions caused by a few anarchoid youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct”—were now defined as acts of terrorism. In the lead-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), eight protest organizers were arrested on “terrorism” charges. Since then, charges have been dropped against three of the “RNC 8” and another has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While “terrorism” charges have been dropped against the remaining four, they still face trumped-up conspiracy charges that carry with them the threat of years in prison. With the trial for the four due to begin this month, we demand: Drop all charges against the RNC protesters!
While the country’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent, the designation of political opponents as terrorists is a threat of greater magnitude. To be declared a terrorist is to be declared an individual outside of society, for whom democratic rights have no application and who the cops have license to gun down, or disappear, without any purported reason. In the 1960s, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that the Black Panther Party constituted the “greatest threat to national security” gave police nationwide a green light to blow Panthers away. Thirty-eight Black Panther Party members were assassinated in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign and hundreds of others railroaded to prison. Begun in the 1950s, COINTELPRO was vastly expanded under Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark (long a leading light in the Workers World Party’s International Action Center).
Democrats, Republicans Criminalize Dissent
The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s USA Patriot Act. The law proscribes providing money, personnel, services or training to some 40 foreign organizations designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist.
One measure of the threat that “anti-terror” laws pose for the rights of the population as a whole can be seen in the case of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart. Along with her legal assistant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and translator Mohamed Yousry, Stewart was convicted in 2005 of frame-up charges of support to terrorism for her determined legal defense of blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. At stake in Stewart’s case was the very right to legal representation. This July, Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in pressing the courts to vindictively increase her sentence to ten years—a virtual death sentence for a 70-year-old woman who suffers from breast cancer.
The June Supreme Court ruling expanded what constitutes “material support” to include the exercise of the rights of speech and association, which are supposedly protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was in response to a case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and other groups and individuals who wanted to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on how to appeal to the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their struggles. The LTTE and PKK had long been targets of the wars waged by the U.S.-supported Sri Lankan and Turkish governments against the oppressed Tamil and Kurdish national minorities.
The Court’s decision essentially criminalized any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to “terrorists.” This could include anything from donating money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press (see “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July). The secular nationalist LTTE and PKK had made it onto the State Department hit list because they fought a desperate struggle against regimes allied with the U.S.
In ruling against the Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court declared outright: “Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining the United States’ relationships with its allies.” A mere three months later, the Feds launched their attack against leftist activists. Freedom Road, which cheered Obama’s 2008 campaign, is hardly a radical leftist outfit. However, the FRSO and others became targets of government repression on the basis of their support to the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The FARC has been embroiled in a long struggle against Washington’s Colombian puppet regime and its paramilitary death squads, who specialize in killing union activists. Some of the leftists targeted in the FBI raids have been active in the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a political prisoner in the U.S. who, as a leader of the FARC, was tracked down and arrested in Ecuador with the help of U.S. agents.
For the U.S. imperialists, who carry out mass terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a daily basis, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. The last domestic “terrorism” witchhunt, under the Republican Reagan administration, was aimed at mobilizing the population for war against the Soviet Union. We wrote in “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984): “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”
Washington’s terrorist designation has included the Irish Republican Army and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. Included on today’s list are the Basque nationalist ETA, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Real IRA. Although the Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda are currently at the top of the U.S. hit list, when these forces were throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government hailed them as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military intervention in that country had opened the road to the liberation of its horribly oppressed peoples, and particularly women. The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal of troops in 1988-89 allowed the mujahedin cutthroats to eventually take power, after which the likes of Osama bin Laden turned on their former U.S. paymasters.
The Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!
That Obama has stepped up Bush’s attacks on civil liberties should come as no surprise. The Democrats’ posture as the friend of labor and minorities makes them often more effective in carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World as well as Eugene Debs and members of his Socialist Party for their opposition to the interimperialist First World War. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt who interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II and imprisoned 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. His successor, Harry Truman, carried out the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party members in the late 1940s.
Where before the government raised the spectre of communism, today it paints its witchhunt targets as “terrorists” and their supporters. In any case, the point of these campaigns is to strengthen the apparatus of the bourgeois state, which is a machinery of repression and violence against those the capitalists exploit and oppress.
In our fight to build a revolutionary workers party that will act as a tribune of the people, we Marxists are intransigent in our opposition to any infringement on democratic rights. In the mid 1980s, we successfully challenged the FBI’s Domestic Security/Terrorism guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. In announcing our suit against the FBI, we wrote in WV No. 340 (21 October 1983):
“We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!”
As a result of our lawsuit, the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism. The FBI changed its definition of the SL to one that describes what we are—“a Marxist political organization.” Our suit struck a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But, as we wrote when we announced the victory of our suit, “We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government” (“FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
A longstanding low level of class and social struggle has given the rulers a virtually free hand in implementing their attacks on democratic rights and the rights of labor. Bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation are the capitalists’ lieutenants in the labor bureaucracy, who have acceded to wage cuts and union-busting while saluting the imperialists’ “war on terror” in the name of “national unity.”
As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the potential social power and class interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear are secure. The Spartacist League fights to build the vanguard workers party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away murderous capitalist-imperialism and establishes the rule of the working class.
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist mentioned in this day's (and yesterday's) other posts.
************
Workers Vanguard No. 966
8 October 2010
“War on Terror” Witchhunt
Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!
OCTOBER 5—In a series of dawn raids on September 24, FBI agents in Minneapolis and Chicago invaded seven homes and an office of leftists and labor activists. The Feds spent hours ransacking their homes, seizing cell phones and passports and carting away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks. The activists were slapped with subpoenas to testify this month before a witchhunting grand jury. Subpoenas have also been served against individuals in North Carolina and Michigan. The government seeks to pin charges of “material support to terrorism” on the activists and others associated with them based on their political activities in solidarity with the oppressed in the Near East and Latin America. Today, an attorney for the activists announced that all 14 of those hit with subpoenas in the Midwest will refuse to testify before the grand jury in Chicago.
Most of the victims of the raids are well-known leftists. Jessica Sundin is a longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis, a supporter of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and member of the Anti-War Committee, whose office was also raided. Joe Iosbaker is a chief steward and executive board member of Service Employees International Union Local 73 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he acts as an adviser to the Students for a Democratic Society. Mick Kelly is the editor of the FRSO’s newspaper, Fight Back! Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian American antiwar activist, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network.
It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to come to the defense of these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. For decades, the capitalist rulers have sought to tar leftists as “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything. The recent FBI raids open a sinister new front in that effort. Paving the Feds’ way, a June 21 Supreme Court decision expanded what can legally be considered “material support to terrorism” to include a wide range of activities deemed as somehow aiding proscribed foreign organizations.
In a protest letter issued the day after the raids, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, denounced the Feds’ attempt to chill the political activities of those who protest government policies at home and wars abroad. The letter stated: “From its inception under the Bush administration, the ‘war on terror,’ which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures that also target leftists, trade unionists, and black people. Now the Obama administration is escalating these wholesale attacks on civil liberties with these neo-McCarthyite raids.”
The PDC and a number of other organizations have demanded that the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that all belongings seized by the Feds be returned immediately. On September 27, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution condemning the raids, and protest rallies have been held in cities across the country.
Almost to a man, liberal organizations and the reformist left had promoted the illusion that Barack Obama would represent some kind of “change” from the George W. Bush regime. But as we pointed out, what drove Obama’s promises to clean up some of the Bush gang’s most blatant “excesses” was his commitment to wage a more effective “war on terror.” In office, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed down to him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton)—and then some: detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo; domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency; invocation of “state secrets” to quash lawsuits exposing U.S.-sponsored torture; kangaroo-court military commissions to try “terror” suspects; endorsement of indefinite detention, a hallmark of police-state regimes. While Bush broadened the FBI’s legal authority to launch “terrorism” investigations based solely on one’s political views, the Obama government has taken this a big step further with the concerted raids against leftists.
“War on Terror” Targets All of Us
The same day as the FBI raids, the left-wing National Lawyers Guild released a report titled “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” that pointed to “a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties” in the nine years since the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The report denounced the government’s stigmatizing activists as terrorists and its use of “fear-based techniques against those who dare speak out against government policies.”
The purpose of “anti-terror” witchhunts is...to instill terror in the population. The country’s rulers fan fears of constant threat from the likes of Al Qaeda in order to garner popular support for (or acquiescence to) an immense expansion of police powers. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in an amici curiae brief filed in July 2003 on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant”:
“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
It did not take long after the September 11 attacks for the government to demonstrate that its campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism” targeted a much wider swath than immigrants from Islamic countries, not least the labor movement. In December 2001, striking school teachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban. The following year, Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, personally intervened to warn West Coast longshoremen organized by the ILWU that any strike action would be treated as a threat to national security. Even such liberal pacifists as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker group have been spied upon in the “anti-terror” witchhunt, as documented in a report issued last month by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
The SL/PDC amici brief pointed out: “The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents.” The brief continued, “The Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” Taking this “right” to its logical conclusion, the Obama administration earlier this year gave legal authority for the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen living abroad—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of being an Al Qaeda operative and is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
How the “anti-terror” laws and other measures could be used for political witchhunts was on display in the police mobilizations that met protesters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004 and 2008. Civil disobedience and disruptions caused by a few anarchoid youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct”—were now defined as acts of terrorism. In the lead-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), eight protest organizers were arrested on “terrorism” charges. Since then, charges have been dropped against three of the “RNC 8” and another has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While “terrorism” charges have been dropped against the remaining four, they still face trumped-up conspiracy charges that carry with them the threat of years in prison. With the trial for the four due to begin this month, we demand: Drop all charges against the RNC protesters!
While the country’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent, the designation of political opponents as terrorists is a threat of greater magnitude. To be declared a terrorist is to be declared an individual outside of society, for whom democratic rights have no application and who the cops have license to gun down, or disappear, without any purported reason. In the 1960s, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that the Black Panther Party constituted the “greatest threat to national security” gave police nationwide a green light to blow Panthers away. Thirty-eight Black Panther Party members were assassinated in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign and hundreds of others railroaded to prison. Begun in the 1950s, COINTELPRO was vastly expanded under Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark (long a leading light in the Workers World Party’s International Action Center).
Democrats, Republicans Criminalize Dissent
The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s USA Patriot Act. The law proscribes providing money, personnel, services or training to some 40 foreign organizations designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist.
One measure of the threat that “anti-terror” laws pose for the rights of the population as a whole can be seen in the case of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart. Along with her legal assistant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and translator Mohamed Yousry, Stewart was convicted in 2005 of frame-up charges of support to terrorism for her determined legal defense of blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. At stake in Stewart’s case was the very right to legal representation. This July, Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in pressing the courts to vindictively increase her sentence to ten years—a virtual death sentence for a 70-year-old woman who suffers from breast cancer.
The June Supreme Court ruling expanded what constitutes “material support” to include the exercise of the rights of speech and association, which are supposedly protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was in response to a case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and other groups and individuals who wanted to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on how to appeal to the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their struggles. The LTTE and PKK had long been targets of the wars waged by the U.S.-supported Sri Lankan and Turkish governments against the oppressed Tamil and Kurdish national minorities.
The Court’s decision essentially criminalized any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to “terrorists.” This could include anything from donating money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press (see “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July). The secular nationalist LTTE and PKK had made it onto the State Department hit list because they fought a desperate struggle against regimes allied with the U.S.
In ruling against the Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court declared outright: “Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining the United States’ relationships with its allies.” A mere three months later, the Feds launched their attack against leftist activists. Freedom Road, which cheered Obama’s 2008 campaign, is hardly a radical leftist outfit. However, the FRSO and others became targets of government repression on the basis of their support to the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The FARC has been embroiled in a long struggle against Washington’s Colombian puppet regime and its paramilitary death squads, who specialize in killing union activists. Some of the leftists targeted in the FBI raids have been active in the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a political prisoner in the U.S. who, as a leader of the FARC, was tracked down and arrested in Ecuador with the help of U.S. agents.
For the U.S. imperialists, who carry out mass terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a daily basis, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. The last domestic “terrorism” witchhunt, under the Republican Reagan administration, was aimed at mobilizing the population for war against the Soviet Union. We wrote in “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984): “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”
Washington’s terrorist designation has included the Irish Republican Army and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. Included on today’s list are the Basque nationalist ETA, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Real IRA. Although the Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda are currently at the top of the U.S. hit list, when these forces were throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government hailed them as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military intervention in that country had opened the road to the liberation of its horribly oppressed peoples, and particularly women. The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal of troops in 1988-89 allowed the mujahedin cutthroats to eventually take power, after which the likes of Osama bin Laden turned on their former U.S. paymasters.
The Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!
That Obama has stepped up Bush’s attacks on civil liberties should come as no surprise. The Democrats’ posture as the friend of labor and minorities makes them often more effective in carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World as well as Eugene Debs and members of his Socialist Party for their opposition to the interimperialist First World War. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt who interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II and imprisoned 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. His successor, Harry Truman, carried out the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party members in the late 1940s.
Where before the government raised the spectre of communism, today it paints its witchhunt targets as “terrorists” and their supporters. In any case, the point of these campaigns is to strengthen the apparatus of the bourgeois state, which is a machinery of repression and violence against those the capitalists exploit and oppress.
In our fight to build a revolutionary workers party that will act as a tribune of the people, we Marxists are intransigent in our opposition to any infringement on democratic rights. In the mid 1980s, we successfully challenged the FBI’s Domestic Security/Terrorism guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. In announcing our suit against the FBI, we wrote in WV No. 340 (21 October 1983):
“We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!”
As a result of our lawsuit, the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism. The FBI changed its definition of the SL to one that describes what we are—“a Marxist political organization.” Our suit struck a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But, as we wrote when we announced the victory of our suit, “We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government” (“FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
A longstanding low level of class and social struggle has given the rulers a virtually free hand in implementing their attacks on democratic rights and the rights of labor. Bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation are the capitalists’ lieutenants in the labor bureaucracy, who have acceded to wage cuts and union-busting while saluting the imperialists’ “war on terror” in the name of “national unity.”
As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the potential social power and class interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear are secure. The Spartacist League fights to build the vanguard workers party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away murderous capitalist-imperialism and establishes the rule of the working class.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder-Capitalism and Global Warming
Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of Part Two of this article
Markin comment:
Maybe one hundred years or so ago one could have rationally assumed that the Earth would survive with some kind of hodge-podge, off-handed, afterthought economic and social planning among the major imperialist capitalist powers and those actions would, more or less, lift all boats. World War I definitively put an end to that notion. And should have put an end to the notion (and the capitalist system that supports it) that the Earth could survive; survive well and fruitfully, without international centralized planning through workers democracy.
But, alas, we are almost back to square one and the current intense question of climate change is only the most pressing question of the day that requires international centralized planning. I could add about fifty other issues that require that same kind of attention from agriculture production to international labor standards. But to get anyway with those pressing issues we need parties committed to centralized planning. More importantly, we need parties that fight for workers governments who will take power and implement that planning principle. And no, it is not some Green party, spare us that, please. In any case read this article in order to see one more reason why we have to fight, and fight like hell, for our common communist future right now.
*****
Workers Vanguard No. 965
24 September 2010
Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder
Capitalism and Global Warming
For Socialist Revolution!
For an Internationally Planned Economy!
Part One
The Earth as a whole is without question heating up. According to figures released in July by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since monitoring began in 1880—the 304th consecutive month above the 20th-century average—while Arctic sea ice melted at a record-breaking pace. Undoubtedly, the heat can be attributed in good part to periodic and natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure. But there is some other factor at work behind the overall warming trend. A vast majority of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but the national scientific academies of the U.S. and most other countries, identifies that factor as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.
In league with liberal environmentalists, reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) have seized on “climate change” to beg the major capitalist powers to join hands in cutting back heat-trapping gases—a goal that significant sections of the ruling capitalist classes have laid claim to. Thus the ISO, Greenpeace et al. put great stock in the climate talks that took place last December in Copenhagen under the sponsorship of the UN, which is, simply, a den of imperialist thieves and their victims.
A new “international climate justice movement” was proclaimed after tens of thousands flocked to the Danish capital, in the main to demand that the world powers agree to curb greenhouse gas emissions and give financial support to Third World countries. The protests included a 100,000-strong demonstration in the middle of the two-week summit, during which heavily armed police squads arrested some 1,000 people. Soon after, thousands of observer delegates, including from such mainstream groups as Greenpeace, were locked out of the conference on its final days.
What some had dubbed “Hopenhagen” ended without reaching its stated goals of renewing the emissions-reduction commitments made by industrialized countries that signed on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the U.S. never ratified) and setting emissions targets for all other countries. This was a predictable outcome. For one thing, the world’s capitalist classes are divided internally over this issue. More fundamentally, each capitalist government is charged with protecting its own “national interests.” The handful of imperialist countries that dominate the world market are in competition with each other for spheres of exploitation around the world, and have already carried out two devastating world wars in their insatiable drive for profit.
Significant emissions shifts would almost certainly mean substantial economic costs, which few capitalist governments want to incur, especially in the face of a global economic slowdown. The main human activity contributing to the release of heat-trapping gases is also the main activity turning the wheels of the modern economy: the combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. Given the importance of cheap energy sources, imperialist competition for fossil fuels, especially oil, has played a part in sparking numerous military conflagrations in the last century. Countries with a hand on the oil spigot or access to ample coal reserves have a vested material interest in maintaining the status quo.
The example of the United States, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, is illustrative. Giant American companies like ExxonMobil are central to the global oil cartel, while the core European Union (EU) powers of Germany and France cannot make the same claim. Hence an increase in the world market price of oil not only enriches a dominant sector of corporate America but also increases the energy costs of rival French and German capitalists. For years, the U.S. clashed with the EU over carrying out the Kyoto Protocol, because the nominal emissions caps included in the accord would have affected the U.S. most directly.
Whatever their differences with each other, the imperialists, led by the U.S., have joined together in recent climate talks to pressure China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, largely in order to throttle its growing industrial strength. After winning EU backing to shift the burden of emissions-reduction agreements onto the more backward countries, the U.S. refused to support any deal at Copenhagen that did not include stringent monitoring of China’s emissions. Behind such maneuvers lies the imperialists’ strategic goal of smashing the Chinese workers state and once again subjecting the country to untrammeled capitalist exploitation. Against the environmentalists and fake socialists who join in the China-bashing, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.
For Marxists, addressing the human-derived aspect of global warming is fundamentally not a technical but a social problem. Marxism is opposed to environmentalist ideology, which accepts the inviolability of capitalist class rule, in which production is profit-driven and society’s wealth is monopolized by a tiny bourgeois ruling class. We fight for a society that will provide more, not less, for the working people and the impoverished masses of the world. Our goal is to eliminate material scarcity and qualitatively advance the living standards of all. To this end, we fight for socialist revolutions in the capitalist countries to expropriate the bourgeoisie and for proletarian political revolutions in China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, laying the basis for the construction of a planned, collectivized world economy. With production liberated from the profit motive, humans’ creative powers will be unleashed to build a society in which poverty, malnutrition, inequality and oppression are things of the past.
When the workers of the world rule, energy will be generated and used in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing new energy sources. We do not rule out in advance the use of fossil fuels or any other energy source—nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc. Simply to promote modernization and all-round development in the Third World, where today billions are locked in desperate poverty, would almost certainly involve far greater energy production on a global scale.
It is futile to attempt to deal with climate-related problems within the boundaries of the anarchic, nationally based capitalist system. The climate is the outcome of interactions among the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice sheets, living organisms and the soils, sediments and rocks, which all affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of heat around the surface of the Earth. The best prospect for positively influencing something as dynamic, large and complex as the climate system is to undertake coordinated global action based on the latest science and technology.
With the world economy reorganized on a socialist basis, a plan on a scale unimaginable under capitalism for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the impacts of warming could be worked out and implemented. If necessary, a concerted effort could be undertaken to retool entire industries and transform their operations, whether in energy production and distribution, transportation, construction, manufacturing or agriculture.
Crucially, increasing abundance also will eliminate the material factors—and backward social values, such as those expounded by religions—that fuel population growth. As we will develop in Part Two of this article, a socialist reorganization of society would lay the basis for a prolonged, mild population shrinkage, helping to ensure that there are enough resources for the well-being of all.
Climate Science and Global Warming
The climate of the Earth naturally undergoes constant change, driven by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbital motions and axial tilt as well as variations in sunlight intensity and volcanic activity. Analysis of ice and ocean sediment cores has shown periods of prolonged ice ages and interglacial periods over the past few million years. The interglacials include times when the world was warmer than today and cold-intolerant reptiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The geological record indicates that the transition from the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, to the warmth of today was no gentle change but rather the wildest of roller-coaster rides. The beginning and end of some climate spikes took place over mere decades.
Outside of the “climate skeptics” (including those in the pay of Big Oil), it is widely accepted that human activities are also influencing the climate. The 2007 report of the IPCC, arguably the world’s most authoritative climate body, concludes: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The report adds: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.” Written and reviewed by thousands of scientists worldwide, this report draws on the latest scientific and technical data and represents a broad consensus within the scientific community.
“Anthropogenic greenhouse gases” impact the climate by enhancing what is called by inaccurate analogy the atmospheric “greenhouse effect.” As mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Fourier first described in the 1820s, energy in the form of light from the sun mostly passes through the atmosphere to reach the surface of the Earth and heats it, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. The air absorbs a significant fraction of the total infrared radiation (what Fourier called “dark heat”) emitted by the Earth, and some of this thermal energy is radiated back down to the surface, helping it to stay warm. The surface of an Earth-like planet with no atmosphere would be on average roughly 59°F (33°C) colder than the Earth actually is, and the contrast in temperature between night and day and between summer and winter would be very large, as suggested by the case of the Moon.
However, not all gases in the atmosphere are equal in keeping the Earth warm. The most abundant atmospheric constituents, diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, are almost transparent to infrared radiation, which is strongly absorbed by molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Outside of water vapor, carbon dioxide is the most abundant of these “greenhouse gases,” presently constituting about 390 parts per million (ppm) by volume and amounting to a total mass of roughly 3,000 metric gigatons (three trillion tons). This concentration has risen significantly in a relatively short time from a level of 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution, as determined by ice-core measurements. Carbon dioxide is presently accumulating at a rate of over two ppm per year.
Humans through a variety of activities contribute significantly to the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels and wood releases carbon dioxide; livestock, oil production and coal mining add methane; agricultural processes and the production of nitric acid contribute nitrous oxide. Other practices, such as logging, also play a role because forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it. But the spotlight has fallen on fossil fuel combustion, which accounts for the vast majority of carbon dioxide emitted annually through human activity. While the oceans, topsoil and land vegetation absorb about half of these emissions, the rest accumulate in the atmosphere, where they are available to strengthen the greenhouse effect.
The possible consequences of global warming evoked by a number of scientists are extremely serious. But the workings of the climate system are still only partly understood, so nobody can say that any projection is certain to happen. There is a chance that the impact of human-induced warming will not be as bad as predicted by the IPCC and others, but there also is a chance that the outcome will be worse. The range of possibilities finds its reflection in the scientific community, with a small minority criticizing the 2007 IPCC report as overstated and others disapproving of its “conservatism.”
The report predicts rising sea levels and coastal flooding as the result of melting polar ice sheets and thermal expansion of the oceans. It projects climate shifts that would cause populated areas to become arid or inundated and would bring about the extinction of many marine and terrestrial species. Already the number of “very dry areas” on the planet has more than doubled since the 1970s to about 30 percent of the total landmass. Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past interglacial reductions would cause the sea level to rise ten or more meters, enough to submerge dozens of great world cities, from New York to Shanghai.
Significant warming over decades could also trigger mechanisms that would qualitatively alter the climate. The complete thawing of the Arctic permafrost could unlock gigatons of stored carbon, most of it in the form of methane, a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. An even more remote but far-reaching possibility would be the release of the colossal amounts of methane now enclosed in water-ice crystals (structures known as clathrates) found in the depths of the Arctic and other oceans.
Paradoxically, the warming of the atmosphere might also plunge much of the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze. If a sufficient flow of freshwater from melting ice were dumped into the North Atlantic, the vast ocean conveyor known as the Gulf Stream would collapse. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, this powerful current drags warm water northward and is responsible for heating West Europe, Canada and the Northeast U.S.
A raft of findings since 2007 has refined and altered the IPCC’s predictions—and shown the uncertainties involved with climate modeling. In one case, the latest research by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, earlier one of the leading proponents of a link between global warming and much stronger and more frequent hurricanes, now calls into question that conclusion. Earlier this year, the IPCC acknowledged a series of scientific blunders and retracted the dramatic warning in its 2007 report that most Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035. Scientific rigor is further put at risk by climate researchers who refuse to publish the computer code for their models, a practice that came to light during the University of East Anglia “Climategate” e-mail scandal engineered by right-wingers.
Even the most sophisticated models grossly oversimplify physical processes like the complex dynamics of water vapor. More fundamentally, the accompanying projections presuppose a static social reality. The predictions in the 2007 IPCC report are based on different “storylines” of growth and development. But any number of events could radically alter the story. A Scientific American (January 2010) article titled “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering” concludes that in a conflict between, say, India and Pakistan, 100 nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would produce enough smoke to blot out the sun and cripple global agriculture. This scenario pales in comparison to the threat posed by the massive nuclear arsenal in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. Just one Ohio-class American submarine can launch up to 192 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads.
The Ravages of Imperialism
Whatever the timetable and actual consequences of global warming, one thing is certain: in a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, the human toll—whether measured in famine, dislocation or disease—would overwhelmingly be borne by working people and the poor. The world’s least developed countries, with woeful infrastructure and with the fewest resources available to adapt to new conditions, would be especially hard hit. The real culprit is not climate change as such but rather the world capitalist system, which imposes inhuman conditions on the semicolonial countries and deprives their population of the most elementary provisions, and not only for times of calamity.
Modern imperialism, marked by the export of capital, developed at the end of the 19th century, as the boundaries of the nation-state proved too narrow and confining to satisfy the capitalists’ demand for new markets and sources of cheap labor. With blood and iron, the advanced countries essentially carved up the world into competing spheres of exploitation, a process described by V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The imperialist powers embarked on a series of colonial conquests and wars, culminating in World Wars I and II, as each capitalist ruling class sought to further its interests at the expense of its rivals.
Along with exploiting the working class at home, the capitalist classes of North America, Europe and Japan exploit and oppress the downtrodden masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America, arresting the all-round social and economic development of the vast majority of humanity. Environmentalists cite more than four decades of drought and erratic rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan, as proof positive of the high price of climate change. Rapid desertification in the Sahel, where the population largely consists of pastoral nomads and peasant farmers, has exacerbated competition for land resources among the region’s myriad ethnic groups. But the pushing of the Sahel deeper into poverty, starvation and misery is at bottom a manmade phenomenon—a byproduct of imperialist subjugation.
Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is currently arable. The irrigation projects, drainage of swamps and cleaning of disease-infested areas that would be required to develop Africa’s agricultural potential are unthinkable as long as the continent is squeezed in the vise of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Africa is caught in the blind alley, inherited from colonialism, of concentrating its agriculture on tropical cash crops for sale on the world market to pay off usurious debt—accrued in large part to pay for massive quantities of food imports. The devastation of the African continent was greatly exacerbated by the destruction in 1991-92 of the Soviet degenerated workers state, removing the main counterweight to U.S. imperialism and cutting off a key source of aid for various Third World regimes.
As long as capitalism remains, it will continue to reproduce mass hunger and other scourges, such as epidemics of preventable disease resulting from the lack of sewers, clean water and other basic social infrastructure. Even if human-induced warming were somehow arrested under capitalism, imperialist depredation would continue unabated. Among other things, this renders billions of people vulnerable to “natural” climate change, variations in local weather patterns, “extreme weather events” like hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The January earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. The death toll of some 250,000 people was a product of over a century of imperialist oppression that left the desperately poor country totally exposed to the quake’s impact, as shoddily built structures in Port-au-Prince simply collapsed. Today, some 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tents.
The struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the decaying capitalist order is a matter of human survival. One small indication of the advantages of a collectivized economy over the capitalist system of production for profit is the success the Cuban deformed workers state has had in protecting its population from devastating hurricanes. In 2008, four hurricanes battered Haiti, killing some 800 people. Two of those storms also passed over Cuba, claiming a total of four lives. Despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and the country’s relative poverty, deepened by over four decades of U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is well known for its efficient evacuation of citizens in the face of such disasters. The government provides early forecasting, educates and mobilizes the population and has arrangements in place for shelters, transport, food and medical backup.
Profiteering and Protectionism
Although many green radicals would describe themselves as anti-capitalist, all varieties of environmentalism are an expression of bourgeois ideology, offering fixes predicated on scarcity and class-divided society. Many environmentalists back market-driven “solutions” to global warming favored by capitalist governments the world over. The centerpiece is the “cap and trade” system that now covers the EU economies. Under this scheme, a generous limit is set on the amount of greenhouse gases firms can emit (the “cap”). Those that emit more than the cap must buy credits from others that emit less than they were allocated (the “trade”). At the end of the day, it is the working class that pays for this setup, in the first instance by way of higher energy and fuel costs, as it would also if a carbon tax were levied to make its “price” reflect its “social cost.”
Alternately, companies can avoid cutting their own emissions by investing in “offsets”—projects elsewhere, often in poor countries, that purport to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. One such project supplies poor rural families in India with human-powered treadle pumps for irrigating farmland, while another encourages Kenyans to use dung-powered generators. Tree-planting projects in Guatemala, Ecuador and Uganda have disrupted local water supplies, resulted in the eviction of thousands of villagers from their land and cheated them out of promised payments for upkeep of the trees. Western environmentalists might “offset” their liberal guilt over their comfortable lives by pushing such programs. But in the Third World, the end result is the reinforcement of mass impoverishment.
Cap-and-trade has become a new arena of capitalist profiteering. Some chemical companies, such as DuPont, have ramped up production of a particular refrigerant in order to make a bundle of “offset” money by incinerating the waste by-product HFC-23, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Carbon trading also promises a massive new speculators’ playground for venture capitalists and investment banks, not unlike the one in mortgage-based securities that precipitated the implosion of the global economy. More than $130 billion changed hands in the global carbon market in 2009.
Environmentalism also goes hand in hand with national chauvinism, as seen, for example, in its embrace of trade protectionism. If the major players had come to terms at Copenhagen, a likely result would have been renewed protectionism. As Michael Levi noted in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2009): “The world has few useful options for enforcing commitments to slash emissions short of punitive trade sanctions or similarly unpalatable penalties.” Indeed, environmental regulations have long served as a cover for tariffs, a practice ensconced in the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Historically, protectionism has fueled retaliatory trade wars, which have a way of turning into shooting wars.
Last year, the president of the European Commission threatened to slap tariffs on goods from the U.S. and other non-Kyoto Protocol nations to protect European business. Buried within a House version of a cap-and-trade bill drawn up by the Democrats is a provision for imposing duties against imports from countries that have not limited emissions as of 2020. The U.S. steel industry is already calling for sanctions against Chinese steelmakers if Beijing doesn’t commit to carbon limits. Following suit, the chauvinist, anti-Communist United Steelworkers union bureaucracy has filed a case charging China with violating WTO rules by subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other “clean energy” equipment. Promoting the lie that workers in each country are bound to their exploiters by common “national interests,” protectionism is poison to international working-class solidarity.
Protectionism directed against Brazilian sugar cane ethanol importers and others is also a component part of the Obama administration’s plan for U.S. “energy independence.” As Obama has made clear by describing U.S. reliance on Near Eastern oil as its Achilles heel, “energy independence” is a rallying cry for improving U.S. imperialism’s capacity to pursue its global military and economic ambitions through diversifying and strengthening control of energy sources.
It is no accident that groups like Greenpeace echo the call for “energy independence.” The main political organizations of the environmentalists, the Green parties, are small-time capitalist parties hostile to the proletariat. In the U.S., the Greens act as a liberal pressure group on the Democratic Party, home to such environmental evangelists as Al Gore, who as Bill Clinton’s vice president helped carry out starvation sanctions against Iraqis and the bombing of Serbia. In Germany, the Green Party was part of a capitalist coalition government with the Social Democratic Party from 1998 to 2005. During this time, German environmentalists commingled with the far right, whose anti-immigrant racism was echoed by the Greens in the name of combating overpopulation. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed the German military outside of its borders—for the first time since Hitler’s Third Reich—to participate in U.S.-led wars against Serbia and Afghanistan.
The Rise of Green Capitalism
Environmentalism is not in the least antagonistic to production for private profit. A New York Times (21 April) article under the headline “At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business” commented: “So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins ‘to challenge corporate and government leaders.’ Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.”
There is more “green” rhetoric than ever emanating from corporate boardrooms. Reflecting competing interests in the American bourgeoisie, in 2009 a legion of big-name companies quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over its policy of outright denial of global warming. Several major companies have opted to go “carbon neutral,” such as Internet giant Google, which prides itself on building energy-efficient data centers and investing in corporate solar installations and wind farms.
The former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), Lord Browne, helped set the fashion in the mid 1990s by restyling gains in efficiency as emissions cuts and trumpeting them in press releases. At a time when his counterparts in the U.S. were pouring millions into the coffers of the “Global Climate Coalition,” one of the most outspoken industry groups battling reductions in emissions, Browne anticipated a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from the emerging Western consensus to treat carbon emissions as a problem. He renamed his company “Beyond Petroleum” and adopted a new “environmentally conscious” logo as he went about transforming BP from a regional producer of petroleum into a global oil enterprise that also dabbled in “alternative” energy. All the while, BP was slashing costs by using cheap construction materials and cutting back on safety mechanisms on oil rigs, setting the stage for numerous “accidents” such as the blowout in April that took the lives of eleven workers and dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (see “Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills,” WV No. 961, 2 July).
While liberal environmentalists and the ISO reformists wag their fingers at BP for “greenwashing” its fossil fuel operations, Browne has, in fact, been something of a trendsetter for the “go green” movement. Media attention surrounding an energy consumption calculator placed on BP’s Web site in 2005 helped popularize the notion of reducing individual “carbon footprints.” The following year, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth instructed people to abandon allegedly wasteful lifestyles by consuming less, using less hot water, changing incandescent light bulbs to CFLs at home and properly inflating their car tires. The London Economist (31 May 2007), a mouthpiece of finance capital, wryly observed, “Individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.” Gore’s lectures about cutting consumption certainly haven’t stopped him from enjoying the luxury of his Nashville mansion or his private jet.
“Doing more with less” is hardly an option for unemployed workers in the industrial wasteland of Detroit or the teeming masses housed in the enormous slums of Calcutta. Companies going “carbon neutral” will not improve conditions for workers on assembly lines, where the bosses threaten life and limb by speeding up production to extract the utmost profit. The use of “alternative” energy will not diminish the concentration of pollution in poor and working-class neighborhoods. The corporations producing energy will, however, be raking in the money.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Markin comment:
Maybe one hundred years or so ago one could have rationally assumed that the Earth would survive with some kind of hodge-podge, off-handed, afterthought economic and social planning among the major imperialist capitalist powers and those actions would, more or less, lift all boats. World War I definitively put an end to that notion. And should have put an end to the notion (and the capitalist system that supports it) that the Earth could survive; survive well and fruitfully, without international centralized planning through workers democracy.
But, alas, we are almost back to square one and the current intense question of climate change is only the most pressing question of the day that requires international centralized planning. I could add about fifty other issues that require that same kind of attention from agriculture production to international labor standards. But to get anyway with those pressing issues we need parties committed to centralized planning. More importantly, we need parties that fight for workers governments who will take power and implement that planning principle. And no, it is not some Green party, spare us that, please. In any case read this article in order to see one more reason why we have to fight, and fight like hell, for our common communist future right now.
*****
Workers Vanguard No. 965
24 September 2010
Production for Profit: Anarchy and Plunder
Capitalism and Global Warming
For Socialist Revolution!
For an Internationally Planned Economy!
Part One
The Earth as a whole is without question heating up. According to figures released in July by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since monitoring began in 1880—the 304th consecutive month above the 20th-century average—while Arctic sea ice melted at a record-breaking pace. Undoubtedly, the heat can be attributed in good part to periodic and natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure. But there is some other factor at work behind the overall warming trend. A vast majority of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but the national scientific academies of the U.S. and most other countries, identifies that factor as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.
In league with liberal environmentalists, reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) have seized on “climate change” to beg the major capitalist powers to join hands in cutting back heat-trapping gases—a goal that significant sections of the ruling capitalist classes have laid claim to. Thus the ISO, Greenpeace et al. put great stock in the climate talks that took place last December in Copenhagen under the sponsorship of the UN, which is, simply, a den of imperialist thieves and their victims.
A new “international climate justice movement” was proclaimed after tens of thousands flocked to the Danish capital, in the main to demand that the world powers agree to curb greenhouse gas emissions and give financial support to Third World countries. The protests included a 100,000-strong demonstration in the middle of the two-week summit, during which heavily armed police squads arrested some 1,000 people. Soon after, thousands of observer delegates, including from such mainstream groups as Greenpeace, were locked out of the conference on its final days.
What some had dubbed “Hopenhagen” ended without reaching its stated goals of renewing the emissions-reduction commitments made by industrialized countries that signed on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the U.S. never ratified) and setting emissions targets for all other countries. This was a predictable outcome. For one thing, the world’s capitalist classes are divided internally over this issue. More fundamentally, each capitalist government is charged with protecting its own “national interests.” The handful of imperialist countries that dominate the world market are in competition with each other for spheres of exploitation around the world, and have already carried out two devastating world wars in their insatiable drive for profit.
Significant emissions shifts would almost certainly mean substantial economic costs, which few capitalist governments want to incur, especially in the face of a global economic slowdown. The main human activity contributing to the release of heat-trapping gases is also the main activity turning the wheels of the modern economy: the combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. Given the importance of cheap energy sources, imperialist competition for fossil fuels, especially oil, has played a part in sparking numerous military conflagrations in the last century. Countries with a hand on the oil spigot or access to ample coal reserves have a vested material interest in maintaining the status quo.
The example of the United States, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, is illustrative. Giant American companies like ExxonMobil are central to the global oil cartel, while the core European Union (EU) powers of Germany and France cannot make the same claim. Hence an increase in the world market price of oil not only enriches a dominant sector of corporate America but also increases the energy costs of rival French and German capitalists. For years, the U.S. clashed with the EU over carrying out the Kyoto Protocol, because the nominal emissions caps included in the accord would have affected the U.S. most directly.
Whatever their differences with each other, the imperialists, led by the U.S., have joined together in recent climate talks to pressure China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, largely in order to throttle its growing industrial strength. After winning EU backing to shift the burden of emissions-reduction agreements onto the more backward countries, the U.S. refused to support any deal at Copenhagen that did not include stringent monitoring of China’s emissions. Behind such maneuvers lies the imperialists’ strategic goal of smashing the Chinese workers state and once again subjecting the country to untrammeled capitalist exploitation. Against the environmentalists and fake socialists who join in the China-bashing, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution.
For Marxists, addressing the human-derived aspect of global warming is fundamentally not a technical but a social problem. Marxism is opposed to environmentalist ideology, which accepts the inviolability of capitalist class rule, in which production is profit-driven and society’s wealth is monopolized by a tiny bourgeois ruling class. We fight for a society that will provide more, not less, for the working people and the impoverished masses of the world. Our goal is to eliminate material scarcity and qualitatively advance the living standards of all. To this end, we fight for socialist revolutions in the capitalist countries to expropriate the bourgeoisie and for proletarian political revolutions in China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, laying the basis for the construction of a planned, collectivized world economy. With production liberated from the profit motive, humans’ creative powers will be unleashed to build a society in which poverty, malnutrition, inequality and oppression are things of the past.
When the workers of the world rule, energy will be generated and used in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing new energy sources. We do not rule out in advance the use of fossil fuels or any other energy source—nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc. Simply to promote modernization and all-round development in the Third World, where today billions are locked in desperate poverty, would almost certainly involve far greater energy production on a global scale.
It is futile to attempt to deal with climate-related problems within the boundaries of the anarchic, nationally based capitalist system. The climate is the outcome of interactions among the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice sheets, living organisms and the soils, sediments and rocks, which all affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of heat around the surface of the Earth. The best prospect for positively influencing something as dynamic, large and complex as the climate system is to undertake coordinated global action based on the latest science and technology.
With the world economy reorganized on a socialist basis, a plan on a scale unimaginable under capitalism for minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the impacts of warming could be worked out and implemented. If necessary, a concerted effort could be undertaken to retool entire industries and transform their operations, whether in energy production and distribution, transportation, construction, manufacturing or agriculture.
Crucially, increasing abundance also will eliminate the material factors—and backward social values, such as those expounded by religions—that fuel population growth. As we will develop in Part Two of this article, a socialist reorganization of society would lay the basis for a prolonged, mild population shrinkage, helping to ensure that there are enough resources for the well-being of all.
Climate Science and Global Warming
The climate of the Earth naturally undergoes constant change, driven by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbital motions and axial tilt as well as variations in sunlight intensity and volcanic activity. Analysis of ice and ocean sediment cores has shown periods of prolonged ice ages and interglacial periods over the past few million years. The interglacials include times when the world was warmer than today and cold-intolerant reptiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The geological record indicates that the transition from the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, to the warmth of today was no gentle change but rather the wildest of roller-coaster rides. The beginning and end of some climate spikes took place over mere decades.
Outside of the “climate skeptics” (including those in the pay of Big Oil), it is widely accepted that human activities are also influencing the climate. The 2007 report of the IPCC, arguably the world’s most authoritative climate body, concludes: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The report adds: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.” Written and reviewed by thousands of scientists worldwide, this report draws on the latest scientific and technical data and represents a broad consensus within the scientific community.
“Anthropogenic greenhouse gases” impact the climate by enhancing what is called by inaccurate analogy the atmospheric “greenhouse effect.” As mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Fourier first described in the 1820s, energy in the form of light from the sun mostly passes through the atmosphere to reach the surface of the Earth and heats it, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. The air absorbs a significant fraction of the total infrared radiation (what Fourier called “dark heat”) emitted by the Earth, and some of this thermal energy is radiated back down to the surface, helping it to stay warm. The surface of an Earth-like planet with no atmosphere would be on average roughly 59°F (33°C) colder than the Earth actually is, and the contrast in temperature between night and day and between summer and winter would be very large, as suggested by the case of the Moon.
However, not all gases in the atmosphere are equal in keeping the Earth warm. The most abundant atmospheric constituents, diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, are almost transparent to infrared radiation, which is strongly absorbed by molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Outside of water vapor, carbon dioxide is the most abundant of these “greenhouse gases,” presently constituting about 390 parts per million (ppm) by volume and amounting to a total mass of roughly 3,000 metric gigatons (three trillion tons). This concentration has risen significantly in a relatively short time from a level of 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution, as determined by ice-core measurements. Carbon dioxide is presently accumulating at a rate of over two ppm per year.
Humans through a variety of activities contribute significantly to the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels and wood releases carbon dioxide; livestock, oil production and coal mining add methane; agricultural processes and the production of nitric acid contribute nitrous oxide. Other practices, such as logging, also play a role because forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it. But the spotlight has fallen on fossil fuel combustion, which accounts for the vast majority of carbon dioxide emitted annually through human activity. While the oceans, topsoil and land vegetation absorb about half of these emissions, the rest accumulate in the atmosphere, where they are available to strengthen the greenhouse effect.
The possible consequences of global warming evoked by a number of scientists are extremely serious. But the workings of the climate system are still only partly understood, so nobody can say that any projection is certain to happen. There is a chance that the impact of human-induced warming will not be as bad as predicted by the IPCC and others, but there also is a chance that the outcome will be worse. The range of possibilities finds its reflection in the scientific community, with a small minority criticizing the 2007 IPCC report as overstated and others disapproving of its “conservatism.”
The report predicts rising sea levels and coastal flooding as the result of melting polar ice sheets and thermal expansion of the oceans. It projects climate shifts that would cause populated areas to become arid or inundated and would bring about the extinction of many marine and terrestrial species. Already the number of “very dry areas” on the planet has more than doubled since the 1970s to about 30 percent of the total landmass. Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past interglacial reductions would cause the sea level to rise ten or more meters, enough to submerge dozens of great world cities, from New York to Shanghai.
Significant warming over decades could also trigger mechanisms that would qualitatively alter the climate. The complete thawing of the Arctic permafrost could unlock gigatons of stored carbon, most of it in the form of methane, a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. An even more remote but far-reaching possibility would be the release of the colossal amounts of methane now enclosed in water-ice crystals (structures known as clathrates) found in the depths of the Arctic and other oceans.
Paradoxically, the warming of the atmosphere might also plunge much of the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze. If a sufficient flow of freshwater from melting ice were dumped into the North Atlantic, the vast ocean conveyor known as the Gulf Stream would collapse. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, this powerful current drags warm water northward and is responsible for heating West Europe, Canada and the Northeast U.S.
A raft of findings since 2007 has refined and altered the IPCC’s predictions—and shown the uncertainties involved with climate modeling. In one case, the latest research by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, earlier one of the leading proponents of a link between global warming and much stronger and more frequent hurricanes, now calls into question that conclusion. Earlier this year, the IPCC acknowledged a series of scientific blunders and retracted the dramatic warning in its 2007 report that most Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035. Scientific rigor is further put at risk by climate researchers who refuse to publish the computer code for their models, a practice that came to light during the University of East Anglia “Climategate” e-mail scandal engineered by right-wingers.
Even the most sophisticated models grossly oversimplify physical processes like the complex dynamics of water vapor. More fundamentally, the accompanying projections presuppose a static social reality. The predictions in the 2007 IPCC report are based on different “storylines” of growth and development. But any number of events could radically alter the story. A Scientific American (January 2010) article titled “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering” concludes that in a conflict between, say, India and Pakistan, 100 nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would produce enough smoke to blot out the sun and cripple global agriculture. This scenario pales in comparison to the threat posed by the massive nuclear arsenal in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. Just one Ohio-class American submarine can launch up to 192 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads.
The Ravages of Imperialism
Whatever the timetable and actual consequences of global warming, one thing is certain: in a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, the human toll—whether measured in famine, dislocation or disease—would overwhelmingly be borne by working people and the poor. The world’s least developed countries, with woeful infrastructure and with the fewest resources available to adapt to new conditions, would be especially hard hit. The real culprit is not climate change as such but rather the world capitalist system, which imposes inhuman conditions on the semicolonial countries and deprives their population of the most elementary provisions, and not only for times of calamity.
Modern imperialism, marked by the export of capital, developed at the end of the 19th century, as the boundaries of the nation-state proved too narrow and confining to satisfy the capitalists’ demand for new markets and sources of cheap labor. With blood and iron, the advanced countries essentially carved up the world into competing spheres of exploitation, a process described by V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The imperialist powers embarked on a series of colonial conquests and wars, culminating in World Wars I and II, as each capitalist ruling class sought to further its interests at the expense of its rivals.
Along with exploiting the working class at home, the capitalist classes of North America, Europe and Japan exploit and oppress the downtrodden masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America, arresting the all-round social and economic development of the vast majority of humanity. Environmentalists cite more than four decades of drought and erratic rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan, as proof positive of the high price of climate change. Rapid desertification in the Sahel, where the population largely consists of pastoral nomads and peasant farmers, has exacerbated competition for land resources among the region’s myriad ethnic groups. But the pushing of the Sahel deeper into poverty, starvation and misery is at bottom a manmade phenomenon—a byproduct of imperialist subjugation.
Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is currently arable. The irrigation projects, drainage of swamps and cleaning of disease-infested areas that would be required to develop Africa’s agricultural potential are unthinkable as long as the continent is squeezed in the vise of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Africa is caught in the blind alley, inherited from colonialism, of concentrating its agriculture on tropical cash crops for sale on the world market to pay off usurious debt—accrued in large part to pay for massive quantities of food imports. The devastation of the African continent was greatly exacerbated by the destruction in 1991-92 of the Soviet degenerated workers state, removing the main counterweight to U.S. imperialism and cutting off a key source of aid for various Third World regimes.
As long as capitalism remains, it will continue to reproduce mass hunger and other scourges, such as epidemics of preventable disease resulting from the lack of sewers, clean water and other basic social infrastructure. Even if human-induced warming were somehow arrested under capitalism, imperialist depredation would continue unabated. Among other things, this renders billions of people vulnerable to “natural” climate change, variations in local weather patterns, “extreme weather events” like hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The January earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. The death toll of some 250,000 people was a product of over a century of imperialist oppression that left the desperately poor country totally exposed to the quake’s impact, as shoddily built structures in Port-au-Prince simply collapsed. Today, some 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tents.
The struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the decaying capitalist order is a matter of human survival. One small indication of the advantages of a collectivized economy over the capitalist system of production for profit is the success the Cuban deformed workers state has had in protecting its population from devastating hurricanes. In 2008, four hurricanes battered Haiti, killing some 800 people. Two of those storms also passed over Cuba, claiming a total of four lives. Despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and the country’s relative poverty, deepened by over four decades of U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is well known for its efficient evacuation of citizens in the face of such disasters. The government provides early forecasting, educates and mobilizes the population and has arrangements in place for shelters, transport, food and medical backup.
Profiteering and Protectionism
Although many green radicals would describe themselves as anti-capitalist, all varieties of environmentalism are an expression of bourgeois ideology, offering fixes predicated on scarcity and class-divided society. Many environmentalists back market-driven “solutions” to global warming favored by capitalist governments the world over. The centerpiece is the “cap and trade” system that now covers the EU economies. Under this scheme, a generous limit is set on the amount of greenhouse gases firms can emit (the “cap”). Those that emit more than the cap must buy credits from others that emit less than they were allocated (the “trade”). At the end of the day, it is the working class that pays for this setup, in the first instance by way of higher energy and fuel costs, as it would also if a carbon tax were levied to make its “price” reflect its “social cost.”
Alternately, companies can avoid cutting their own emissions by investing in “offsets”—projects elsewhere, often in poor countries, that purport to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. One such project supplies poor rural families in India with human-powered treadle pumps for irrigating farmland, while another encourages Kenyans to use dung-powered generators. Tree-planting projects in Guatemala, Ecuador and Uganda have disrupted local water supplies, resulted in the eviction of thousands of villagers from their land and cheated them out of promised payments for upkeep of the trees. Western environmentalists might “offset” their liberal guilt over their comfortable lives by pushing such programs. But in the Third World, the end result is the reinforcement of mass impoverishment.
Cap-and-trade has become a new arena of capitalist profiteering. Some chemical companies, such as DuPont, have ramped up production of a particular refrigerant in order to make a bundle of “offset” money by incinerating the waste by-product HFC-23, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Carbon trading also promises a massive new speculators’ playground for venture capitalists and investment banks, not unlike the one in mortgage-based securities that precipitated the implosion of the global economy. More than $130 billion changed hands in the global carbon market in 2009.
Environmentalism also goes hand in hand with national chauvinism, as seen, for example, in its embrace of trade protectionism. If the major players had come to terms at Copenhagen, a likely result would have been renewed protectionism. As Michael Levi noted in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2009): “The world has few useful options for enforcing commitments to slash emissions short of punitive trade sanctions or similarly unpalatable penalties.” Indeed, environmental regulations have long served as a cover for tariffs, a practice ensconced in the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Historically, protectionism has fueled retaliatory trade wars, which have a way of turning into shooting wars.
Last year, the president of the European Commission threatened to slap tariffs on goods from the U.S. and other non-Kyoto Protocol nations to protect European business. Buried within a House version of a cap-and-trade bill drawn up by the Democrats is a provision for imposing duties against imports from countries that have not limited emissions as of 2020. The U.S. steel industry is already calling for sanctions against Chinese steelmakers if Beijing doesn’t commit to carbon limits. Following suit, the chauvinist, anti-Communist United Steelworkers union bureaucracy has filed a case charging China with violating WTO rules by subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other “clean energy” equipment. Promoting the lie that workers in each country are bound to their exploiters by common “national interests,” protectionism is poison to international working-class solidarity.
Protectionism directed against Brazilian sugar cane ethanol importers and others is also a component part of the Obama administration’s plan for U.S. “energy independence.” As Obama has made clear by describing U.S. reliance on Near Eastern oil as its Achilles heel, “energy independence” is a rallying cry for improving U.S. imperialism’s capacity to pursue its global military and economic ambitions through diversifying and strengthening control of energy sources.
It is no accident that groups like Greenpeace echo the call for “energy independence.” The main political organizations of the environmentalists, the Green parties, are small-time capitalist parties hostile to the proletariat. In the U.S., the Greens act as a liberal pressure group on the Democratic Party, home to such environmental evangelists as Al Gore, who as Bill Clinton’s vice president helped carry out starvation sanctions against Iraqis and the bombing of Serbia. In Germany, the Green Party was part of a capitalist coalition government with the Social Democratic Party from 1998 to 2005. During this time, German environmentalists commingled with the far right, whose anti-immigrant racism was echoed by the Greens in the name of combating overpopulation. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed the German military outside of its borders—for the first time since Hitler’s Third Reich—to participate in U.S.-led wars against Serbia and Afghanistan.
The Rise of Green Capitalism
Environmentalism is not in the least antagonistic to production for private profit. A New York Times (21 April) article under the headline “At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business” commented: “So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins ‘to challenge corporate and government leaders.’ Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.”
There is more “green” rhetoric than ever emanating from corporate boardrooms. Reflecting competing interests in the American bourgeoisie, in 2009 a legion of big-name companies quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over its policy of outright denial of global warming. Several major companies have opted to go “carbon neutral,” such as Internet giant Google, which prides itself on building energy-efficient data centers and investing in corporate solar installations and wind farms.
The former CEO of British Petroleum (BP), Lord Browne, helped set the fashion in the mid 1990s by restyling gains in efficiency as emissions cuts and trumpeting them in press releases. At a time when his counterparts in the U.S. were pouring millions into the coffers of the “Global Climate Coalition,” one of the most outspoken industry groups battling reductions in emissions, Browne anticipated a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from the emerging Western consensus to treat carbon emissions as a problem. He renamed his company “Beyond Petroleum” and adopted a new “environmentally conscious” logo as he went about transforming BP from a regional producer of petroleum into a global oil enterprise that also dabbled in “alternative” energy. All the while, BP was slashing costs by using cheap construction materials and cutting back on safety mechanisms on oil rigs, setting the stage for numerous “accidents” such as the blowout in April that took the lives of eleven workers and dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (see “Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills,” WV No. 961, 2 July).
While liberal environmentalists and the ISO reformists wag their fingers at BP for “greenwashing” its fossil fuel operations, Browne has, in fact, been something of a trendsetter for the “go green” movement. Media attention surrounding an energy consumption calculator placed on BP’s Web site in 2005 helped popularize the notion of reducing individual “carbon footprints.” The following year, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth instructed people to abandon allegedly wasteful lifestyles by consuming less, using less hot water, changing incandescent light bulbs to CFLs at home and properly inflating their car tires. The London Economist (31 May 2007), a mouthpiece of finance capital, wryly observed, “Individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.” Gore’s lectures about cutting consumption certainly haven’t stopped him from enjoying the luxury of his Nashville mansion or his private jet.
“Doing more with less” is hardly an option for unemployed workers in the industrial wasteland of Detroit or the teeming masses housed in the enormous slums of Calcutta. Companies going “carbon neutral” will not improve conditions for workers on assembly lines, where the bosses threaten life and limb by speeding up production to extract the utmost profit. The use of “alternative” energy will not diminish the concentration of pollution in poor and working-class neighborhoods. The corporations producing energy will, however, be raking in the money.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
*Out In The Be-Bop Night- Fragments On The Ethos Of Working Class Culture- The Old "Beat" Town, Circa 2010-For Barbara, Class Of 1964
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry, Fragments On The Ethos Of Working Class Culture–Frankie’s Big Summer’s Day Walk, Circa 1960, dated Friday, August 13, 2010, the first entry in this series, to read the introduction to the series.
Markin comment:
Crossing the Neponset River Bridge from the Boston side these days, walking-sore-footed, ankle-ached, worn-out, scuffed leather shoes, rounded-heel shoes, soles thinned-out shoes walking-just as was almost always my mode of transportation, and maybe yours, in the old days, and sometimes for me in the not so old days-ain’t like it used to be. That new (1970s new, anyway), higher-standing , pot-holed patched, unevenly asphalt-paved even on good days, uninviting, if not just plain dangerous, walk-way, ugly slab-concreted, built by the lowest bidder, bridge that routes traffic, hither and yon, is not like the old one, “ walking to think things over friendly."
Not today, anyway, as I brace myself for a serious look see at our beat-up, beat-down, beaten-back, back-seat-taking, smudged-up, blood and sweat-stained, bitter-teared (very bitter-teared), life-drained, seen better days (although I do not, personally, remember having seen those better days, but people keep saying, even now, there was a such a time so let’s leave it at that), almost genetically memory embedded , character-building (yes, that old chestnut, as well), beautiful (yes, beautiful too, oddly, eerily beautiful, or as mad, shamanic poet Yeats, he of that that fine Anglo-Irish word edge, would put it, "terrible beauty a-borning" beautiful ), old working class home town.
It’s silly, I know, to get misty-eyed over it but I miss the old archaic pre-1970s drawbridge bridge with its ghastly-green gates to stop car traffic (how else could you describe that institutional color that no artist would have on his or her palette, and no serious professional business painter would stoop to brush on anything much less a gate) and the lonely stony-eyed concrete medieval fortress of a tower (and its poor, bored, had to be bored, keeper, or tender or whatever you call that “look out for the big boats coming and going” guy, and it was always some old guy who looked like he could swap stories, buddy to buddy, with King Neptune, and probably did) to let the bigger boats, courtesy of the law of the seas, make their way to dock.
Or, better, I hope, I fervently hope, for the boats to get clearance from that old codger, old Neptune’s brother, to race, to crawl, to put-put, to hoist sail or whatever such boats do to get to the open sea, the wide open blue-grey, swirling, mad, rushing, whirling dervish of a sea, out to beyond the breakwaters, out to beyond the harbor islands, to the land becoming mere speck, and then mere vanish, and more adventure than I could even dream of, or think of dreaming of. At least I hope those oil-stained, diesel-fuelled (including those awful faint-producing fumes), powerfully-engined, deep-drafted, fully–stocked boats that drove river traffic and stopped car traffic came back or went out in search of those adventures away from the placid wooden-lumbered doldrums docks up along the Quincy side of the river.
But, one thing is for sure, whatever happened to the boats, or on them, that old bridge, that old green-gate painted monster of a drawbridge, gave you a chance to pause mid-bridge, fright-free, not-having-to-watch-your-back-for-fast-cars-caroming-by free even, to look up and down midstream; to dream, perhaps, of tidal drifts and fair winds to the far reaches of this good, green planet, as far as you could carry yourself and your backpacked, bed-rolled belongings, or as long as the money held out; to bestir yourself afresh to think of oneness with the seventy-eight trillion life forms (hey, I didn’t count them, alright, this is just an estimate, a very rough estimate) that flow in the murky, and on some days very murky, depths right before your eyes down to our homeland, the sea; to dream vista dreams of far away picture postcard cooling ports-of-call in the sweaty, sultry summer day airs or churn madly with the flow of wild summer night airs that led from the old home town west, north, south, somewhere, anywhere; to dream the dream of dreams of misspent (no way, no way misspent), suggestive, very suggestive, radio-blared Lets Spend The Night Together or The Night Time Is The Right Time, whiskey-bottle in hand (or, maybe, beer-canned if dough was tight, or way back when and you were underage if your wino buyer didn't show that night), best-gal swinging (quaint, okay, but we are all adults and you know what I mean) Saturday nights; and, to think that one thought, that one midstream on the bridge-driven thought that would spring you from the woes of woe begotten, troubled-filled (for me, and, maybe, you) dear, (now dear, anyway) beat, ancient-ached, old timey, presidential graveyard of a growing-up home town.
This new one, this new bridge, as I stand mid-bridge and peek back to my left routes, if you can even call it that, traffic via a Daytona race track-worthy, curvy-swurvy ramp to the beach, Wollaston Beach, down the now, in places anyway, three lane-wide, freshly-paved and white-lined Quincy Shore Drive. That’s our old Wollaston Boulevard, down by shore everything’s alright, of sacred ashy memory. And as I watch the traffic flow, the car traffic I think not of vanilla, too bright, too light, too slight day time beach, for now, because I am flooded with visions of the “real” beach of my manic dreams- “the night time is the right time" beach. Enough of daytime, kiddish, bucket and shovel whines and childish butterfly daydreams, enough. Alright?
I just now, and you can follow along too, float dream of teenaged Saturday nights, or maybe even Friday nights, or both, cruising, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, to the pink- blue, cloud-swollen, sun-devouring, Western nightdream skies, always just beyond our reach. Of you riding "shotgun" in your buddy’s car, a be-bop car, or, I hope, at least bop, late 1950s, and pray hard for a ’57 Chevy or something “cool” like that, borrowed from his old man, stopped at close by high school (remember), Merit gas station and filled, two-dollars-worth-of-gas-check the oil-please-filled. Or his own car, your buddy's, the old man's, leavings, given gratis, when that self-same old man stepped up to a new, bigger-finned, power-steered, rumble-engined, airplane of a car, a new sign that he had “made it” in hard dollar America. Of stolen sickly-sweet wines or breathe-soured whiskeys to ward off the night-forebodings, made sweeter or more sour by the stealing from that same old man’s, or maybe your old man's, liquor cabinet, if they had such an upscale thing, or else just from some dusty high cupboard shelf so the kids can’t get at it place. And, and, oh boy, visions of those moon-beamy, dreamy, seamy, steamy Saturday night beach parking, car-fogged, car-wrestled, “submarine races” watchings that were the subject of Monday morning boys’ rest room (okay, “lav”) roll call, recital and retailing (or, hell, probably in the girls’ room too, I bet, but the now women can tell their own tales). Whoa!
Beatified night-dreamed beach Quincy Shore Drive also routes, now that my blood pressure has returned to normal, to daydream summer sunbathing, or maybe even before summer sunbathing for early tans to drive away the fierce, ghost-like New England winter pales, in the real sun daytime down by the weather-beaten yacht clubs (tumbleweedy, seedy, paint-needy Wollaston and Squantum). Away, well a little away, from the early encountered mephitic sea grass marshes near the Causeway (you know where, right?-the old First National supermarket, now CVS drugs-for all occasions-store location), away from the deadened, fetid, scattered sea grasses and the muck, and in plain kid talk, away from the “stinks”, away from the tepid waves apologetically splashing on the ocean smooth-stoned dunes, away too from the jelly-fish (are they poisonous, or not?) spawning and spattered along the edges of the low tide line, and, most fervently, away, away from the oil-slicked mud flats of childish shovel and pail clam-digging adventures, clams squirting and screaming from their sand hovels that need not detain us here, that story has been told elsewhere by me, and often.
Once you have passed the fetid swamps, the mephitic marshes…, but wait a minute, who knows such un-childlike, or un-teenager-like, for that matter, words like fetid and mephitic and where, as a child, even if you knew the words, would you connect those words with pail and shovel digging to China, or some faraway place, beach; with tide-melting, furtive but fevered, sand castle-making, beach; with coolly and focused looking for treasure, somebody’s leavings, some body’s rich leavings so you think, beach; with learning about the fury of Mother Nature and the pull and push of tides first hand when old Mother (like womb mother) turns her fury on, beach; with later finger (or stick) sand-tracing of your name defying the tides to erase your brand as you fight, and fight hard, for your place in the sun (and maybe linking up your sweetie’s name, just for good measure, in that struggle with eternity), beach; with fellaheen digging for clams for fun or profit (or food for table, who knows) down at the Merrymount end, beach; with family barbecue outings, hot dogs and hamburgers, extra ketchup, please, beach. With, well, beach, beach. No, fetid and mephitic will not do, I like my dreams, my child remembrance dreams, cloud puffy and silky.
This bridge, this too far bridge, this man-standing memory bridge, or however you named it, or whatever you thought of it, or wherever you were heading, destiny-heading, heading to your growing-up-like-a-weed town, heading just like a-lemming-to-the-sea town pushes the brain in a couple of directions. Heading south anyway, shore drive south, south to the rivieras, south to the old time kid’s Paragon Park. Rickety, always needed, desperately needed, fresh paint coat, landlocked, off-limits showboat bar-entranced (gay place, before gay word existed as a social category, but what did we know then, or care, just quarters for skeets, please, ah, please), ocean-aired, between-the toes-sanded, sun glass-visioned against the furious midday sun Paragon Park. Roller coaster Paragon Park (hey, maybe sick, before you got the hang of it, right), wild mouse (kid's stuff, ya I know) Paragon Park, cheap, colorful skeet ball points trinket prize, sugar high, lips smacked cotton-candy, stuck to the roof of your mouth, roof of the world, salt water taffy-twisted, hot-dogged (hold the mustard, no onions), pin ball wizard’d, take your baby to the carnival feel the tunnel of love, Paragon Park.(Or later, coming of another age, the Surf, and a whole other memory bridge of dreams, not for now though.) Or south of that south to some old time, unnamed, misty adventure, some ancient Pilgrim-etched mayflower rocky shored adventure, some ancient forebear's praise Jehovah plainsong heard whistling through some weed-filled granite slate graveyards, not mine; mine is of shanty Irish "famine" ships and old kicked out of England convict labor, hell-hole, "hillbilly" Appalachia work the coal mines, boats. Down along that old slow as molasses, take your time, wait at every just barely red stoplight, watch out for side-glanced cop cars, two-laned, white stripped, no passing (hardly), ocean-touched (in places) road. Memory-washed, memory-etched, memory south youth road, ah.
Yes, that cotton-candy dream is enough to stir even a hardened soul, but as I shift, stiffly shift, weight on my tired old high-soled, age-qualified, age-necessary, bop-bop shoes(no more of "young" fashionista statement, skinny-soled, fire engine red Chuck Taylor’s, now of sturdy, new age, aero-flow, aero-glow, aero-know, aero-whatever, for this heavy work, this airy memory work, bop-bop shoes), I stand straight up in mid-bridge balance and veer my head to the right. That move makes me focus my mind’s eye to the heart, the soul, the guts of the old growing-up town via a narrow, straight and narrow, slit in the road, a road constructed in such a way as if to say no cuts-ups, fops (quaint, again), or oddballs wanted here, as it swerves to the edgings, the bare edgings, amidst the gathering flotsam and jetsam as it piles up on riverside old Hancock Street and as it meanders along like some far-removed river of its own, river of its own sorrows, river of its own pent-up angers, toward the Square.
But more than sorrows, ancient sorrows, more than angers, angers of whatever age, I am attacked, and not just in my mind’s eye either, by the myriad mirror-glassed buildings, mostly office buildings, maybe some apartments or condos but I hope not, that reflect off each other in some secret Bauhaus bright light, dead of night pact, post-post-modern architecture I am sure, functional I am sure, although when future, future generations dig up the artifacts I am also sure they will be as puzzled by the idea of such forms of shelter and commerce as I am. And beyond those future subjects of artifact a picture, a picture to feed the hungry buildings, of tactless, thoughtless pizza shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, donut shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, hamburger shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, Applebee’s family-friendly food named, now you-name-it-for-me, please, fast-food shop, mini-mart shop, fill-up gas-station of many names, Hess named, that dot, no, deluge strip mall-heavy Hancock Street up pass our sanctified raider red-bled high school. And beyond to dowdy, drowsy, dusty–windowed (really, I actually touched one once, not a white glove inspection but it, the window that is, didn’t pass muster even by my liberal standards), how do they stay in business against the pull of the major chains (or their chains), small-stored, small-dreamed business ownership, Norfolk Downs.
Norfolk Downs, the good old “Downs” (although we just called it plain, old, ordinary, vanilla-flavored, one-horse Norfolk Downs back in the day) anchored still by named pizza shop, Balducci’s. Balducci’s of after school pizza slices or after nightime across the street hang-around underground bowling alley hungers. Plain, please, no one hundred and one choice toppings, thank you, and coke (bluish-green bottled Coca-Cola, okay, for the evil-minded): of nickels and dimes dropped in one-armed-bandit jukebox to hear the latest Stones (or Beatles) tune, or whatever struck a chord in those jumping-jack times, maybe some mopey thing if girl desire was high; yes, but also of weary, so weary, lonely, so lonely night time standings up against the front door wall, waiting, waiting for...(and, maybe, someone, some guy, some long side-burned, engineer-booted guy, cigarette pack, unfiltered, rolled in tee-shirt guy, some time machine guy, is still waiting, still holding up that wall today. Nobody told him the world, the world that counts, the teen world, had moved to the malls). And beyond Norfolk Downs, up that asphalt river, on to the fate of a million small city centers, ghost-towned, derelict, seen better days, for sure, no question, no question, Quincy Center.
But I find myself , just now, as a stream of cooling air, finally, finally crosses my bridge-stuck, bridge-dreamed path, not in thoughts of jumbled mist of time high school-hood Saturdays nights (nor Friday nights either) in Norfolk Downs pizza parlors or bowling alleys, but of whirling past anciently walked, shoe leather-beaten (always leather-beaten, crooked-heeled, thinning-soled shoes that could be the subject of their own separate bridge-like dream thoughts), oceaned-breezed (just like the breeze crossing over me now , ‘cause that is where it is coming from, it has to be), sharp-angled memories: some of hurt, some of high-hatted hurt, worse, a few, too few, of funny kiddish, ding-dong dumb done things (ever when too old to hide under that womb-like kiddish umbrella), the memories that is, of Atlantic streets, of breezing Quincy bays, of oceans-abutted streets etched deep, almost DNA deep.
Name names. Okay. Well-trodden Appleton Street sidewalks, drawn like a moth to flame to some now-forgotten she, by flickering, heart-quickening, unrequited, just barely teenage, but self-consciously teenage anyhow, romantic trance longings, doggedly working up non-courage, yes non-courage a very common thing in those days, to speak, or better, to write that one word, that one word still now not easily come by, that would spark interest (her interest), as I turned from boy to the buddings of manhood; of the close-quartered, no space, no space for anything but small pinched, tightly pinched, dreams , no room to breathe, no room to breathe anything but small breathe, hacked up, asphalted-up, lawn-free yards to quench driveway car thirsting, two and three-decked Atlantic Street houses passed on quick high school cross country practice runs; of family relative-burdened, just getting-started in adult life, small, cramped five room and tiny bath apartment dotted Walker and Webster Streets; of the closely-cornered, well-kept small manicured-lawn’d, busily repair-worked, no beach parking on the street in summertime, working class cottage-mansions of Bayfield Road (I always forget which is North and which is South, but no matter the description fits both as they feed to the endless sea stopped by that infernal stop light that keeps you waiting, waiting beyond impatience, to cross to the much repaired and replaced seawall and view of seaward homeland.); of Atlantic Junior High School’d (ya, I know, Middle School) teen angst (under either junior or middle school names), mad, hormonally mad, teen-brokered years, world wised-up with some twists, but also world sorry, straight-up, Hollis Avenue; and on and on, through to the beach-drained, tree-named streets. Sanctified beyond name streets all; beat, beatified streets all; mist-filled dream streets all; memory-soaked streets all; be-bop, then real gone daddy, now hip-hop, big old pie-in-the-sky looking for the universe somewhere, streets all.
But enough of old dog-eared memories let me get moving, after all with this bridge, this “new” bridge, one has to cross with purpose, serious purpose, and maybe a wing and a pray that one can get back to the old home town in one piece or, at least, be able to think that one precious thought that drove me, lemming-like, here in the first place. I walk down the broken hand-railed, dirt-piled , drift winds-sent littered steps to get off the bridge and immediately stretched before me ; one million water-logged, stubbed cigarette-butts; one thousand stray, crushed, empty, cellophaned cigarette-packages blown around seeking their rightful owners; one hundred infinite brand-named (ice cold something pictured Bud Lite seems like the winner), crushed (or at least dented) beer cans; assorted, unnumbered, brown whiskey(or were they gin) bottles, mainly cheap from the look of them, a drunkard’s feast at one time; high gloss advertisement mailings(endless CVS drugs to take your world’s pain away, Shaw’s food to curb that incurable hunger that gnaws away at your stomach, Wal-Mart back-to-school trinkets, gadgets and throw-aways when the kids find out, and find out fast, that this crap is not “cool”, K-Mart holiday bargains, three for a dollar); yellowing, dated, newspapers (local this-and-that news, distant war drum news, more war drum news from some other earth corner, bad news badder, and celebrity relief news, Lady GaGa, or some such doings, that’s the ticket for our times) strewn every which way, discarded fast food packages of all descriptions that I have no time to describe. On to the street I step, the hard-scrabble growing up street. Home.
Markin comment:
Crossing the Neponset River Bridge from the Boston side these days, walking-sore-footed, ankle-ached, worn-out, scuffed leather shoes, rounded-heel shoes, soles thinned-out shoes walking-just as was almost always my mode of transportation, and maybe yours, in the old days, and sometimes for me in the not so old days-ain’t like it used to be. That new (1970s new, anyway), higher-standing , pot-holed patched, unevenly asphalt-paved even on good days, uninviting, if not just plain dangerous, walk-way, ugly slab-concreted, built by the lowest bidder, bridge that routes traffic, hither and yon, is not like the old one, “ walking to think things over friendly."
Not today, anyway, as I brace myself for a serious look see at our beat-up, beat-down, beaten-back, back-seat-taking, smudged-up, blood and sweat-stained, bitter-teared (very bitter-teared), life-drained, seen better days (although I do not, personally, remember having seen those better days, but people keep saying, even now, there was a such a time so let’s leave it at that), almost genetically memory embedded , character-building (yes, that old chestnut, as well), beautiful (yes, beautiful too, oddly, eerily beautiful, or as mad, shamanic poet Yeats, he of that that fine Anglo-Irish word edge, would put it, "terrible beauty a-borning" beautiful ), old working class home town.
It’s silly, I know, to get misty-eyed over it but I miss the old archaic pre-1970s drawbridge bridge with its ghastly-green gates to stop car traffic (how else could you describe that institutional color that no artist would have on his or her palette, and no serious professional business painter would stoop to brush on anything much less a gate) and the lonely stony-eyed concrete medieval fortress of a tower (and its poor, bored, had to be bored, keeper, or tender or whatever you call that “look out for the big boats coming and going” guy, and it was always some old guy who looked like he could swap stories, buddy to buddy, with King Neptune, and probably did) to let the bigger boats, courtesy of the law of the seas, make their way to dock.
Or, better, I hope, I fervently hope, for the boats to get clearance from that old codger, old Neptune’s brother, to race, to crawl, to put-put, to hoist sail or whatever such boats do to get to the open sea, the wide open blue-grey, swirling, mad, rushing, whirling dervish of a sea, out to beyond the breakwaters, out to beyond the harbor islands, to the land becoming mere speck, and then mere vanish, and more adventure than I could even dream of, or think of dreaming of. At least I hope those oil-stained, diesel-fuelled (including those awful faint-producing fumes), powerfully-engined, deep-drafted, fully–stocked boats that drove river traffic and stopped car traffic came back or went out in search of those adventures away from the placid wooden-lumbered doldrums docks up along the Quincy side of the river.
But, one thing is for sure, whatever happened to the boats, or on them, that old bridge, that old green-gate painted monster of a drawbridge, gave you a chance to pause mid-bridge, fright-free, not-having-to-watch-your-back-for-fast-cars-caroming-by free even, to look up and down midstream; to dream, perhaps, of tidal drifts and fair winds to the far reaches of this good, green planet, as far as you could carry yourself and your backpacked, bed-rolled belongings, or as long as the money held out; to bestir yourself afresh to think of oneness with the seventy-eight trillion life forms (hey, I didn’t count them, alright, this is just an estimate, a very rough estimate) that flow in the murky, and on some days very murky, depths right before your eyes down to our homeland, the sea; to dream vista dreams of far away picture postcard cooling ports-of-call in the sweaty, sultry summer day airs or churn madly with the flow of wild summer night airs that led from the old home town west, north, south, somewhere, anywhere; to dream the dream of dreams of misspent (no way, no way misspent), suggestive, very suggestive, radio-blared Lets Spend The Night Together or The Night Time Is The Right Time, whiskey-bottle in hand (or, maybe, beer-canned if dough was tight, or way back when and you were underage if your wino buyer didn't show that night), best-gal swinging (quaint, okay, but we are all adults and you know what I mean) Saturday nights; and, to think that one thought, that one midstream on the bridge-driven thought that would spring you from the woes of woe begotten, troubled-filled (for me, and, maybe, you) dear, (now dear, anyway) beat, ancient-ached, old timey, presidential graveyard of a growing-up home town.
This new one, this new bridge, as I stand mid-bridge and peek back to my left routes, if you can even call it that, traffic via a Daytona race track-worthy, curvy-swurvy ramp to the beach, Wollaston Beach, down the now, in places anyway, three lane-wide, freshly-paved and white-lined Quincy Shore Drive. That’s our old Wollaston Boulevard, down by shore everything’s alright, of sacred ashy memory. And as I watch the traffic flow, the car traffic I think not of vanilla, too bright, too light, too slight day time beach, for now, because I am flooded with visions of the “real” beach of my manic dreams- “the night time is the right time" beach. Enough of daytime, kiddish, bucket and shovel whines and childish butterfly daydreams, enough. Alright?
I just now, and you can follow along too, float dream of teenaged Saturday nights, or maybe even Friday nights, or both, cruising, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, to the pink- blue, cloud-swollen, sun-devouring, Western nightdream skies, always just beyond our reach. Of you riding "shotgun" in your buddy’s car, a be-bop car, or, I hope, at least bop, late 1950s, and pray hard for a ’57 Chevy or something “cool” like that, borrowed from his old man, stopped at close by high school (remember), Merit gas station and filled, two-dollars-worth-of-gas-check the oil-please-filled. Or his own car, your buddy's, the old man's, leavings, given gratis, when that self-same old man stepped up to a new, bigger-finned, power-steered, rumble-engined, airplane of a car, a new sign that he had “made it” in hard dollar America. Of stolen sickly-sweet wines or breathe-soured whiskeys to ward off the night-forebodings, made sweeter or more sour by the stealing from that same old man’s, or maybe your old man's, liquor cabinet, if they had such an upscale thing, or else just from some dusty high cupboard shelf so the kids can’t get at it place. And, and, oh boy, visions of those moon-beamy, dreamy, seamy, steamy Saturday night beach parking, car-fogged, car-wrestled, “submarine races” watchings that were the subject of Monday morning boys’ rest room (okay, “lav”) roll call, recital and retailing (or, hell, probably in the girls’ room too, I bet, but the now women can tell their own tales). Whoa!
Beatified night-dreamed beach Quincy Shore Drive also routes, now that my blood pressure has returned to normal, to daydream summer sunbathing, or maybe even before summer sunbathing for early tans to drive away the fierce, ghost-like New England winter pales, in the real sun daytime down by the weather-beaten yacht clubs (tumbleweedy, seedy, paint-needy Wollaston and Squantum). Away, well a little away, from the early encountered mephitic sea grass marshes near the Causeway (you know where, right?-the old First National supermarket, now CVS drugs-for all occasions-store location), away from the deadened, fetid, scattered sea grasses and the muck, and in plain kid talk, away from the “stinks”, away from the tepid waves apologetically splashing on the ocean smooth-stoned dunes, away too from the jelly-fish (are they poisonous, or not?) spawning and spattered along the edges of the low tide line, and, most fervently, away, away from the oil-slicked mud flats of childish shovel and pail clam-digging adventures, clams squirting and screaming from their sand hovels that need not detain us here, that story has been told elsewhere by me, and often.
Once you have passed the fetid swamps, the mephitic marshes…, but wait a minute, who knows such un-childlike, or un-teenager-like, for that matter, words like fetid and mephitic and where, as a child, even if you knew the words, would you connect those words with pail and shovel digging to China, or some faraway place, beach; with tide-melting, furtive but fevered, sand castle-making, beach; with coolly and focused looking for treasure, somebody’s leavings, some body’s rich leavings so you think, beach; with learning about the fury of Mother Nature and the pull and push of tides first hand when old Mother (like womb mother) turns her fury on, beach; with later finger (or stick) sand-tracing of your name defying the tides to erase your brand as you fight, and fight hard, for your place in the sun (and maybe linking up your sweetie’s name, just for good measure, in that struggle with eternity), beach; with fellaheen digging for clams for fun or profit (or food for table, who knows) down at the Merrymount end, beach; with family barbecue outings, hot dogs and hamburgers, extra ketchup, please, beach. With, well, beach, beach. No, fetid and mephitic will not do, I like my dreams, my child remembrance dreams, cloud puffy and silky.
This bridge, this too far bridge, this man-standing memory bridge, or however you named it, or whatever you thought of it, or wherever you were heading, destiny-heading, heading to your growing-up-like-a-weed town, heading just like a-lemming-to-the-sea town pushes the brain in a couple of directions. Heading south anyway, shore drive south, south to the rivieras, south to the old time kid’s Paragon Park. Rickety, always needed, desperately needed, fresh paint coat, landlocked, off-limits showboat bar-entranced (gay place, before gay word existed as a social category, but what did we know then, or care, just quarters for skeets, please, ah, please), ocean-aired, between-the toes-sanded, sun glass-visioned against the furious midday sun Paragon Park. Roller coaster Paragon Park (hey, maybe sick, before you got the hang of it, right), wild mouse (kid's stuff, ya I know) Paragon Park, cheap, colorful skeet ball points trinket prize, sugar high, lips smacked cotton-candy, stuck to the roof of your mouth, roof of the world, salt water taffy-twisted, hot-dogged (hold the mustard, no onions), pin ball wizard’d, take your baby to the carnival feel the tunnel of love, Paragon Park.(Or later, coming of another age, the Surf, and a whole other memory bridge of dreams, not for now though.) Or south of that south to some old time, unnamed, misty adventure, some ancient Pilgrim-etched mayflower rocky shored adventure, some ancient forebear's praise Jehovah plainsong heard whistling through some weed-filled granite slate graveyards, not mine; mine is of shanty Irish "famine" ships and old kicked out of England convict labor, hell-hole, "hillbilly" Appalachia work the coal mines, boats. Down along that old slow as molasses, take your time, wait at every just barely red stoplight, watch out for side-glanced cop cars, two-laned, white stripped, no passing (hardly), ocean-touched (in places) road. Memory-washed, memory-etched, memory south youth road, ah.
Yes, that cotton-candy dream is enough to stir even a hardened soul, but as I shift, stiffly shift, weight on my tired old high-soled, age-qualified, age-necessary, bop-bop shoes(no more of "young" fashionista statement, skinny-soled, fire engine red Chuck Taylor’s, now of sturdy, new age, aero-flow, aero-glow, aero-know, aero-whatever, for this heavy work, this airy memory work, bop-bop shoes), I stand straight up in mid-bridge balance and veer my head to the right. That move makes me focus my mind’s eye to the heart, the soul, the guts of the old growing-up town via a narrow, straight and narrow, slit in the road, a road constructed in such a way as if to say no cuts-ups, fops (quaint, again), or oddballs wanted here, as it swerves to the edgings, the bare edgings, amidst the gathering flotsam and jetsam as it piles up on riverside old Hancock Street and as it meanders along like some far-removed river of its own, river of its own sorrows, river of its own pent-up angers, toward the Square.
But more than sorrows, ancient sorrows, more than angers, angers of whatever age, I am attacked, and not just in my mind’s eye either, by the myriad mirror-glassed buildings, mostly office buildings, maybe some apartments or condos but I hope not, that reflect off each other in some secret Bauhaus bright light, dead of night pact, post-post-modern architecture I am sure, functional I am sure, although when future, future generations dig up the artifacts I am also sure they will be as puzzled by the idea of such forms of shelter and commerce as I am. And beyond those future subjects of artifact a picture, a picture to feed the hungry buildings, of tactless, thoughtless pizza shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, donut shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, hamburger shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, Applebee’s family-friendly food named, now you-name-it-for-me, please, fast-food shop, mini-mart shop, fill-up gas-station of many names, Hess named, that dot, no, deluge strip mall-heavy Hancock Street up pass our sanctified raider red-bled high school. And beyond to dowdy, drowsy, dusty–windowed (really, I actually touched one once, not a white glove inspection but it, the window that is, didn’t pass muster even by my liberal standards), how do they stay in business against the pull of the major chains (or their chains), small-stored, small-dreamed business ownership, Norfolk Downs.
Norfolk Downs, the good old “Downs” (although we just called it plain, old, ordinary, vanilla-flavored, one-horse Norfolk Downs back in the day) anchored still by named pizza shop, Balducci’s. Balducci’s of after school pizza slices or after nightime across the street hang-around underground bowling alley hungers. Plain, please, no one hundred and one choice toppings, thank you, and coke (bluish-green bottled Coca-Cola, okay, for the evil-minded): of nickels and dimes dropped in one-armed-bandit jukebox to hear the latest Stones (or Beatles) tune, or whatever struck a chord in those jumping-jack times, maybe some mopey thing if girl desire was high; yes, but also of weary, so weary, lonely, so lonely night time standings up against the front door wall, waiting, waiting for...(and, maybe, someone, some guy, some long side-burned, engineer-booted guy, cigarette pack, unfiltered, rolled in tee-shirt guy, some time machine guy, is still waiting, still holding up that wall today. Nobody told him the world, the world that counts, the teen world, had moved to the malls). And beyond Norfolk Downs, up that asphalt river, on to the fate of a million small city centers, ghost-towned, derelict, seen better days, for sure, no question, no question, Quincy Center.
But I find myself , just now, as a stream of cooling air, finally, finally crosses my bridge-stuck, bridge-dreamed path, not in thoughts of jumbled mist of time high school-hood Saturdays nights (nor Friday nights either) in Norfolk Downs pizza parlors or bowling alleys, but of whirling past anciently walked, shoe leather-beaten (always leather-beaten, crooked-heeled, thinning-soled shoes that could be the subject of their own separate bridge-like dream thoughts), oceaned-breezed (just like the breeze crossing over me now , ‘cause that is where it is coming from, it has to be), sharp-angled memories: some of hurt, some of high-hatted hurt, worse, a few, too few, of funny kiddish, ding-dong dumb done things (ever when too old to hide under that womb-like kiddish umbrella), the memories that is, of Atlantic streets, of breezing Quincy bays, of oceans-abutted streets etched deep, almost DNA deep.
Name names. Okay. Well-trodden Appleton Street sidewalks, drawn like a moth to flame to some now-forgotten she, by flickering, heart-quickening, unrequited, just barely teenage, but self-consciously teenage anyhow, romantic trance longings, doggedly working up non-courage, yes non-courage a very common thing in those days, to speak, or better, to write that one word, that one word still now not easily come by, that would spark interest (her interest), as I turned from boy to the buddings of manhood; of the close-quartered, no space, no space for anything but small pinched, tightly pinched, dreams , no room to breathe, no room to breathe anything but small breathe, hacked up, asphalted-up, lawn-free yards to quench driveway car thirsting, two and three-decked Atlantic Street houses passed on quick high school cross country practice runs; of family relative-burdened, just getting-started in adult life, small, cramped five room and tiny bath apartment dotted Walker and Webster Streets; of the closely-cornered, well-kept small manicured-lawn’d, busily repair-worked, no beach parking on the street in summertime, working class cottage-mansions of Bayfield Road (I always forget which is North and which is South, but no matter the description fits both as they feed to the endless sea stopped by that infernal stop light that keeps you waiting, waiting beyond impatience, to cross to the much repaired and replaced seawall and view of seaward homeland.); of Atlantic Junior High School’d (ya, I know, Middle School) teen angst (under either junior or middle school names), mad, hormonally mad, teen-brokered years, world wised-up with some twists, but also world sorry, straight-up, Hollis Avenue; and on and on, through to the beach-drained, tree-named streets. Sanctified beyond name streets all; beat, beatified streets all; mist-filled dream streets all; memory-soaked streets all; be-bop, then real gone daddy, now hip-hop, big old pie-in-the-sky looking for the universe somewhere, streets all.
But enough of old dog-eared memories let me get moving, after all with this bridge, this “new” bridge, one has to cross with purpose, serious purpose, and maybe a wing and a pray that one can get back to the old home town in one piece or, at least, be able to think that one precious thought that drove me, lemming-like, here in the first place. I walk down the broken hand-railed, dirt-piled , drift winds-sent littered steps to get off the bridge and immediately stretched before me ; one million water-logged, stubbed cigarette-butts; one thousand stray, crushed, empty, cellophaned cigarette-packages blown around seeking their rightful owners; one hundred infinite brand-named (ice cold something pictured Bud Lite seems like the winner), crushed (or at least dented) beer cans; assorted, unnumbered, brown whiskey(or were they gin) bottles, mainly cheap from the look of them, a drunkard’s feast at one time; high gloss advertisement mailings(endless CVS drugs to take your world’s pain away, Shaw’s food to curb that incurable hunger that gnaws away at your stomach, Wal-Mart back-to-school trinkets, gadgets and throw-aways when the kids find out, and find out fast, that this crap is not “cool”, K-Mart holiday bargains, three for a dollar); yellowing, dated, newspapers (local this-and-that news, distant war drum news, more war drum news from some other earth corner, bad news badder, and celebrity relief news, Lady GaGa, or some such doings, that’s the ticket for our times) strewn every which way, discarded fast food packages of all descriptions that I have no time to describe. On to the street I step, the hard-scrabble growing up street. Home.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC) statement in support of groups raided by FBI
APSC statement in support of groups raided by FBI
by Uhuru Solidarity Committee
(No verified email address) 30 Sep 2010
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) denounce the September 24, 2010 subpoenas and raids of the homes and offices of solidarity and anti-war activists in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan.
African People's Solidarity Committee
Published Sep 30, 2010
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) denounce the September 24, 2010 subpoenas and raids of the homes and offices of solidarity and anti-war activists in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan.
These raids, violating the civil rights of the targeted activists, were carried out by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force allegedly as part of an “ongoing investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force into activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”
Groups under attack include the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee and Students for a Democratic Society.
APSC expresses our support for all these groups and individuals under attack by the US government.
We defend the right of all of us to stand in solidarity with all peoples anywhere in the world fighting to throw off the yoke of colonial violence, war and oppression imposed on them by the terrorist US government.
We affirm all of our unalienable rights to raise resources for movements for national liberation and justice.
The US, Europe and the capitalist system itself are the real terrorists!
The US built its wealth and power out of the European assault on Africa that destroyed African freedom and independence at the point of the gun.
African people were brutally kidnapped and violently forced by the millions to become the world’s most lucrative commodity as enslaved laborers for hundreds of years.
The US is the real terrorist, carrying out open policies of genocide against the Indigenous people, through torture, murder and war, stealing Indigenous land and forcing the people into concentration camps called reservations today where the life expectancy is 46 years.
The US is the real terrorist having consistently waged countless open and covert wars of occupation, plunder and extermination against the peoples of the Philippines, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Africa, Occupied Palestine and the Arab world and elsewhere in order to create the highest standard of living on the planet for North America.
The US is the real terrorist and wages a brutal counterinsurgency war against the African, Mexican and Indigenous communities inside this country today with militarized police forces shooting down young black men on a regular basis.
It is currently imprisoning 2.5 million people — mostly African and Mexicans — on designer, Jim Crow laws after imposing an illegal drug economy on those communities.
The US is the real terrorist, hunting down and rounding up Mexican people who have come across the illegal border set up by the US after stealing the land of the Mexican people.
This attack follows history of attacks on the African Liberation Movement
We recognize that this kind of US government attack on white activists is being perpetrated on a history of attacks against African Liberation activists inside this country since the Black Power Movement of the 1960s which was crushed by a terroristic program called COINTELPRO.
This US government secret program was responsible for assassinating and imprisoning movement leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Hutton and Fred Hampton. Some activists of the 1960s are still in prison today, including Sundiata Acoli, Leonard Peltier and so many others.
We recognize that white activists are being attacked on the heels of the frame ups by the FBI and other US government agencies of Mumia Abu Jamal, and more recently on the Liberty City 7 in Miami, the San Francisco 8 activists, the assassination earlier this year of Detroit black activist Imam Luqman and so many others.
We recognize that the white activists are attacked today on the heels of the political conviction of Uhuru Movement organizer Diop Olugbala who protested Barack Obama’s presidential campaign event in 2008 by raising the banner “What about the black community, Obama!” and who was arrested for leading protests against Philadelphia’s planned $1.1 billion war of intensified police repression against the African community there.
These attacks against the progressive organizations on September 24 are happening under the murderous neocolonial regime of US president Barack Obama who is carrying out and intensifying the terroristic imperialist agenda of his predecessors.
We have a right to stand in solidarity with African and other oppressed peoples struggling for justice and liberation
We affirm our right and responsibility to continue to stand in solidarity with African and Indigenous peoples inside this country and with peoples around the world struggling for justice and liberation from US terror!
We uphold our right to stand in material solidarity with those movements by sending resources to support their work and struggle!
The African People’s Solidarity Committee is an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), which leads the Uhuru Movement.
APSC’s work revolves around raising reparations or material support from white people for the liberation movement of African people inside this country and around the world.
For almost 40 years the APSP has led the movement for African Liberation, uniting Africans as one people around the world struggling to liberate and reunite Africa and all its resources as the birthright of African people everywhere.
Stop the US government repression against all solidarity and anti-war activists!
Fight for our right to stand in solidarity with peoples worldwide struggling for national liberation!
Victory and self-determination to African, Afghani, Palestinian, Indigenous, Colombian and oppressed and colonized people around the world!
Down with US imperialism!
by Uhuru Solidarity Committee
(No verified email address) 30 Sep 2010
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) denounce the September 24, 2010 subpoenas and raids of the homes and offices of solidarity and anti-war activists in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan.
African People's Solidarity Committee
Published Sep 30, 2010
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) denounce the September 24, 2010 subpoenas and raids of the homes and offices of solidarity and anti-war activists in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan.
These raids, violating the civil rights of the targeted activists, were carried out by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force allegedly as part of an “ongoing investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force into activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”
Groups under attack include the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee and Students for a Democratic Society.
APSC expresses our support for all these groups and individuals under attack by the US government.
We defend the right of all of us to stand in solidarity with all peoples anywhere in the world fighting to throw off the yoke of colonial violence, war and oppression imposed on them by the terrorist US government.
We affirm all of our unalienable rights to raise resources for movements for national liberation and justice.
The US, Europe and the capitalist system itself are the real terrorists!
The US built its wealth and power out of the European assault on Africa that destroyed African freedom and independence at the point of the gun.
African people were brutally kidnapped and violently forced by the millions to become the world’s most lucrative commodity as enslaved laborers for hundreds of years.
The US is the real terrorist, carrying out open policies of genocide against the Indigenous people, through torture, murder and war, stealing Indigenous land and forcing the people into concentration camps called reservations today where the life expectancy is 46 years.
The US is the real terrorist having consistently waged countless open and covert wars of occupation, plunder and extermination against the peoples of the Philippines, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Africa, Occupied Palestine and the Arab world and elsewhere in order to create the highest standard of living on the planet for North America.
The US is the real terrorist and wages a brutal counterinsurgency war against the African, Mexican and Indigenous communities inside this country today with militarized police forces shooting down young black men on a regular basis.
It is currently imprisoning 2.5 million people — mostly African and Mexicans — on designer, Jim Crow laws after imposing an illegal drug economy on those communities.
The US is the real terrorist, hunting down and rounding up Mexican people who have come across the illegal border set up by the US after stealing the land of the Mexican people.
This attack follows history of attacks on the African Liberation Movement
We recognize that this kind of US government attack on white activists is being perpetrated on a history of attacks against African Liberation activists inside this country since the Black Power Movement of the 1960s which was crushed by a terroristic program called COINTELPRO.
This US government secret program was responsible for assassinating and imprisoning movement leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Hutton and Fred Hampton. Some activists of the 1960s are still in prison today, including Sundiata Acoli, Leonard Peltier and so many others.
We recognize that white activists are being attacked on the heels of the frame ups by the FBI and other US government agencies of Mumia Abu Jamal, and more recently on the Liberty City 7 in Miami, the San Francisco 8 activists, the assassination earlier this year of Detroit black activist Imam Luqman and so many others.
We recognize that the white activists are attacked today on the heels of the political conviction of Uhuru Movement organizer Diop Olugbala who protested Barack Obama’s presidential campaign event in 2008 by raising the banner “What about the black community, Obama!” and who was arrested for leading protests against Philadelphia’s planned $1.1 billion war of intensified police repression against the African community there.
These attacks against the progressive organizations on September 24 are happening under the murderous neocolonial regime of US president Barack Obama who is carrying out and intensifying the terroristic imperialist agenda of his predecessors.
We have a right to stand in solidarity with African and other oppressed peoples struggling for justice and liberation
We affirm our right and responsibility to continue to stand in solidarity with African and Indigenous peoples inside this country and with peoples around the world struggling for justice and liberation from US terror!
We uphold our right to stand in material solidarity with those movements by sending resources to support their work and struggle!
The African People’s Solidarity Committee is an organization of white people working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), which leads the Uhuru Movement.
APSC’s work revolves around raising reparations or material support from white people for the liberation movement of African people inside this country and around the world.
For almost 40 years the APSP has led the movement for African Liberation, uniting Africans as one people around the world struggling to liberate and reunite Africa and all its resources as the birthright of African people everywhere.
Stop the US government repression against all solidarity and anti-war activists!
Fight for our right to stand in solidarity with peoples worldwide struggling for national liberation!
Victory and self-determination to African, Afghani, Palestinian, Indigenous, Colombian and oppressed and colonized people around the world!
Down with US imperialism!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)