Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee Workers Vanguard No. 1034

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.

The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.

The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”

We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).

Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.

Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.

Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)

The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.

At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.

The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.

Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.

The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.

The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.

Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”

In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:

“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”

— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)

The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.

Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.

The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

WRITE LYNNE!

Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!

 

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

 

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

 

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

************

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthersin their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

…and memories of sitting after school in Doc’s Drugstore (the one across from the school not the one up in Adamsville Center-that’s for old people who need medicine or something). Sitting at the soda fountain counter (or better, always better, in the “saved” booths, saved for the couples) dreamily throwing nickels into that jukebox, sipping on a Cherry Coca-Cola, watching an odd couple or two, boys and girls, dancing, no that is too staid a word, jitter-bugging to some bop-bop Benny Goodman swing tune as if the world depended on each and every move. This day she sitting, single, at the counter talking to Doris, single, about, well you know about boys, boys the topic of the day from sixteen- year old teenage girl teenage time eternity, and just then the subject of frets. Great Depression table hungers and World War II rationing or not frets about who liked  who in the social pecking order of the school, who was holding hands with who, and most importantly who was “cheating” on who while Johnnie was in CCC camp or Jimmie was in some wasteland sullen boot camp. The life-blood of teen life like the man said, music humming in the background.

Talking to Doris too about what to do about them, boys, you know about how far to go, or to go at all, or how to hold off some sidewalk Lothario while pining away for that certain guy who was making his eyes sore looking her way (at least that is what he told his boys in the locker room) but was too shy to speak a word to her. And, and, too, hold the presses, whether she should go to the North Adamsville Annual Autumn Frolic with Jimmie from across the street. Jimmy with the smooth moves on the dance floor, and off. Or wait until that shy boy gets up his courage or goes blind looking.  

She figures she can hold Jimmy off on the dance floor part but she has two left- feet and only Doris knows that sad fact and is sworn to eternal secrecy. That is why she is holding out a little for shy boy knowing (knowing through that “intelligence” grapevine only the young can figure out the code to) that he too has two left-feet (or two right she forgot which). Then Jimmy comes in, comes gliding in as if on cue to the last beat and asks her, yes her, to dance….and she does not too badly, not too badly at that. He asks again on that upcoming dance. Okay, yeah was her faux sullen reply. Now she wondered as he headed out the door about her resolve on that off floor stuff…                            

 

 

For Socialized Medicine—Quality Health Care for All!-Obamacare Puts Squeeze on Working People Workers Vanguard No. 1035	29 November 2013

Obamacare Puts Squeeze on Working People

For Socialized Medicine—Quality Health Care for All!

 

News coverage of the botched rollout of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) initially focused on the government’s virtually unusable Web site. But the headlines soon shifted to a bigger story: insurance companies canceling millions of families’ policies. So far, some 4.8 million people who do not get coverage through their employers have received cancellation notices because their plans do not conform to the ACA. Many are being forced to accept policies that impose much higher premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs for inferior coverage.

Obama repeatedly promised: “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan.” In fact, the administration knew from the start that this was false. Though it was practically unreported in the press, the administration estimated as far back as June 2010 that up to two-thirds of privately purchased insurance policies would get canceled when the ACA was introduced. On November 7, Obama apologized to those losing their coverage despite “assurances they got from me.” He insisted that the problem would impact only “about 5 percent of the population who are in what’s called the individual market.”

That new promise by the president is just as false as the previous one. A major component of Obamacare is the drive to scale back employer-paid health plans, which provide health insurance for 156 million people—more than half of the population. By the administration’s own estimate, as many as 80 percent of small-employer plans and 64 percent of large-employer plans could be canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act (Federal Register, 17 June 2010).

When working people got a measure of decent health coverage through employer-paid plans, it was the fruit of hard class struggle by this country’s industrial unions. The years-long attack on those plans is reflected in the increasing medical costs that workers are obliged to pay. Since the financial crisis began six years ago, average family premiums have grown by over 25 percent. The efforts to water down employer-funded health plans are of a piece with the drive initiated under the Ronald Reagan presidency to replace defined-benefit pension plans with 401(k) accounts, to which the bosses make only minimal contributions.

In our previous article on Obamacare (“U.S. Rulers Intensify War on Workers, Poor,” WV No. 1031, 4 October), we laid out several ways that the ACA further undermines company health plans. One key provision is the tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans, which actually comprise up to three-quarters of all employer-paid plans. An economist who helped draft the ACA called the tax “one of the most significant provisions” of the law (New York Times, 27 May). Companies—as well as local and state government agencies—are putting unions under intense pressure to accept whittled-down health benefits before the tax goes into effect in 2018.

The Obama administration has trumpeted the fact that, with the expansion of Medicaid, millions of currently uninsured poor people will have access to health insurance under the ACA. As is traditional in racist capitalist America, even that improvement is being denied to many black people and others on the bottom. Since the Supreme Court gave the green light, a total of 26 states—including every state of the former Confederacy except Arkansas—have rejected the expansion of Medicaid, which was supposed to help finance the extension of coverage to the poorest layers of society. Those states are home to more than two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers nationwide who lack insurance. A Mississippi doctor pointed to the legacy of segregation: “If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It’s a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit” (New York Times, 2 October).

The low-cost insurance plans obtainable under the ACA require such high out-of-pocket payments in the form of copayments and deductibles that many of those covered will still not be able to afford doctor’s examinations or medical tests. In reality, these so-called “bronze” plans offer little more than catastrophic care insurance: If you run up major hospital bills, you will be much less likely to lose everything in bankruptcy than is now the case. In opposing the ACA from the outset, we noted that “Obama invokes the plight of the uninsured, with promises of a level of care not much above a pledge to pick up the dead bodies” (“For Socialized Medicine!” WV No. 943, 25 September 2009). With the population mandated to purchase coverage, the insurance companies expect to collect an additional annual bonanza of $60 billion.

Access to health care should be an elementary right for everyone, not just those who can pay for the highly advanced care that can be found in the U.S. The allocation of skilled personnel, medical facilities, equipment and medicines entails a cost to society. That cost should be borne not by individuals out of pocket but by the government. At the point of delivery of health care, the service should be free of charge. The U.S. government throws plenty of money—collected through taxes—at its police, prisons, army and other repressive state institutions to protect capitalist profits and rule. But it will take fierce class struggle for workers to win even a modicum of the quality health care everyone needs. This requires fighting the class-collaborationist outlook of the trade-union bureaucrats, who have acceded to countless givebacks in the service of capitalist profitability. The labor traitors went all out to help ensure passage of the ACA, whatever their current misgivings about the “reform.”

Under the capitalist system, fully satisfying basic human necessities—including good education, decent housing and stable, well-paid jobs—inevitably runs up against the drive by corporations to generate profits. For the capitalist bosses of the U.S. insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies, health care is essentially a commodity trade in human lives. These parasites should be expropriated, a task that points straight to the need to overturn the capitalist order through socialist revolution. To achieve this goal requires forging a workers party that champions the cause of all the exploited and oppressed.

Socialism and Health Care

That the U.S. is the only major industrialized country in the world without a national health care program is, in large part, testimony to how successfully America’s rulers have wielded anti-black racism and anti-immigrant nativism to divide and weaken the working class and its struggles. Those divisions have been a major roadblock to the development of elementary class consciousness—that is, the understanding that the multiracial proletariat has distinct class interests that require political expression in its own party. In Europe, the rise of mass workers parties beginning in the late 19th century went side by side with the introduction of national health care.

Europe’s first compulsory social health insurance program was introduced in Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. A major concern of the “Iron Chancellor” and his advisers was to avoid any repeat in Germany of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the French workers briefly seized power during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1883, shortly after passing the Anti-Socialism Laws to squash the German Social Democratic Party, Bismarck introduced the Health Insurance Act. Bismarck declared that government policy “cannot be expressed simply by the repression of Social Democratic excesses, but that this must be accompanied by the positive enhancement of the workers” (Vicente Navarro, “Why Some Countries Have National Health Insurance, Others Have National Health Services, and the U.S. Has Neither,” Social Science and Medicine, 1989).

Insurance plans soon spread to Austria (1888), Hungary (1891), Luxembourg (1901), Norway (1909) and Serbia (1910) after social-democratic parties had been established in most of those countries. In Russia, where the tsarist regime had survived workers revolution in 1905, state insurance was introduced in 1912 during a period of explosive strike battles and spreading influence of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The outbreak of World War I split the workers movement between the social-democratic parties that supported the war effort of their own capitalist ruling classes and revolutionary elements and organizations, prominently including the Bolsheviks, that opposed all sides in this interimperialist conflict.

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks led the working class in seizing state power. As reported in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), one of the Soviet government’s early decrees, issued months before the expropriation of capitalist industry, declared:

“The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, relying upon the support of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, announces to the working-class of Russia and to the town and village poor, that it will immediately prepare laws on Social Insurance based on the formulas proposed by the Labour organisations:

“1. Insurance for all wage-workers without exception, as well as for all urban and rural poor.

“2. Insurance to cover all categories of loss of working capacity, such as illness, infirmities, old age, childbirth, widowhood, orphanage, and unemployment.

“3. All the costs of insurance to be charged to employers.

“4. Compensation of at least full wages in all loss of working capacity and unemployment.

“5. Complete workers’ self-government of all Insurance institutions.”

The subsequent development of a collectivized, planned economy assured access to health care for all. This gain remained despite the degeneration of the October Revolution under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Workers in the Soviet Union had guaranteed health care, housing and jobs up until the workers state was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The value of the collectivized economy can be seen today in the Cuban deformed workers state, where despite an imperialist embargo and limited resources, health care outshines in many respects what is generally available in the U.S.

Nationalized health systems introduced in capitalist West Europe following World War II were themselves a response to the appeal the Soviet Union held for militant workers. The USSR, and by extension the mass Communist parties in capitalist Europe, gained enormous authority for having borne the brunt of the fighting to defeat the Nazi armies. As a wave of working-class militancy swept the continent, the capitalist rulers were willing to surrender a portion of their profits and grant social benefits in order to contain the powerful workers movements and prevent them from going further in a revolutionary direction.

In Britain, the Labour Party government under Clement Attlee instituted the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. Even at its best, the NHS did not provide adequate care for the needs of the population. But the legal obligation for the state to provide universal health care, free to everyone at the point of delivery, was one of the most significant gains ever won by working people from British capitalism. Attempts by the British bourgeoisie to roll back that gain by privatizing health care repeatedly ran up against massive popular opposition. It was the Labour government of Tony Blair, using plans hatched in the 1980s under Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, that succeeded in introducing the first significant measures opening the NHS to the penetration of private capital and the generation of corporate profits. That set the stage for the substantial shift of medical care toward the private sector under current Conservative prime minister David Cameron (see “Britain: Nationalized Health Care Under Attack,” WV No. 1023, 3 May).

Class, Race and American Medicine

In the U.S., the campaign in the early 20th century for government-organized health insurance was spearheaded by the bourgeois Progressives. The high point of the Progressive Era was the presidential election of 1912, when the Progressives bolted from the Republican Party and nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt supported government health insurance on the basis that no country could lord it over other nations if its people were in poor health, i.e., the rank and file of the armed forces had to be in shape to project U.S. military might around the world.

Nevertheless, the campaign for state insurance was defeated by an alliance of capitalists seeking to lower wages and benefits, insurance companies reaping cash from insecurity and fear, pharmaceutical companies hungering for profits and doctors in the American Medical Association (AMA) defending their incomes and social status. Lacking their own class party, workers were led by the likes of American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, who denounced compulsory health insurance. This stalwart of U.S. capitalism (who also opposed legislation for the eight-hour day, the minimum wage and unemployment insurance) hypocritically intoned that government-paid health care would stand in the way of the workers struggling “for their own emancipation through their own efforts”!

In the 1930s, the issue of state-sponsored health insurance arose again in response to the working-class upsurge that led to the creation of the mass, integrated industrial unions of the CIO. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to head off class struggle and the deepening leftist political radicalization by proposing a New Deal of palliative reforms. The racist Dixiecrats, who controlled the Democratic Party in the South and had a stranglehold in Congress, imposed a veto on any government intrusion in the health care system because they feared that it could ultimately threaten Jim Crow segregation of Southern hospitals and other health care services. The Dixiecrats did not block FDR’s social security program, though they insisted that the mostly black agricultural and domestic workforce be excluded from its benefits. However, national health insurance did not survive the final draft of the 1935 Social Security Act.

The sharp class battles in the 1930s created an opening to form an independent workers party in the U.S. But that potential was stymied by the Communist Party and social democrats who used their influence in the CIO unions to help channel the workers’ upsurge into support for FDR’s Democratic Party. The working class has paid for this class-collaborationist alliance ever since.

Following World War II, a massive strike wave broke out. When the United Mine Workers (UMW) walked off the job in 1946 demanding employer-funded health care benefits, Democratic president Harry Truman seized the mines and ordered striking miners back to work. They refused. The nationwide strike ended when Truman agreed to endorse the miners’ demand for lifetime health benefits. In 1947, Congress passed the slave-labor Taft-Hartley law, which specifically forbade company-funded welfare plans directly controlled by the unions. When the miners struck again in 1950 in defiance of government threats, they won an unprecedented cradle-to-grave union-controlled health plan. Miners paid a big price for their victory: UMW head John L. Lewis made a deal with the coal bosses not to protest the loss of thousands of jobs to mechanization. Nevertheless, the miners opened the way for the United Auto Workers and other unions to win health benefits, helping lay the basis for the employer-funded health plans that today are under attack.

While the bourgeoisie’s ongoing class battle with the miners was playing out, Truman’s platform for the 1948 presidential election included a proposal for national health insurance. Truman’s electoral promises soon foundered in the sweeping tide of anti-Communist witchhunting, as the AMA mounted what was at the time the most expensive lobbying effort in American history to stop this “creeping socialism.” Congressional Republicans denounced “socialized medicine” as a communist-inspired assault on personal freedoms, sounding a theme that has been taken up by today’s Tea Party yahoos as they fulminate against Obamacare.

Wall Street Bullish on Obamacare

The neo-Confederates of the Tea Party are part of a long tradition of right-wing demagogues railing against “big government.” That is coded language for a call to ax social programs portrayed as a “redistribution” of income from hard-working folks to “undeserving” blacks and immigrants. Ironically, as the media increasingly reports on—and Republicans seize upon—examples of families overwhelmed by increased insurance costs, liberal backers of Obama’s health plan are putting forward their own version of the redistribution theme. For example, columnist John Harwood argued in the New York Times (23 November) that “the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law” because some must pay higher insurance costs so that coverage can be extended to those with pre-existing medical conditions and others who suffered discrimination at the hands of the insurance companies.

Some working people have bought in to that reasoning, which feeds on the populist notion that “we’re all in this together.” In our recent subscription drive, comrades encountered unionized black workers in the South who were willing to take a hit on their health care costs—to pay their “fair share”—if it meant that their impoverished relatives might see an improvement in their conditions. In those Southern Republican-controlled states, this sentiment is reinforced by a sense of racial solidarity with the president, particularly as the ACA comes under attack from overt racists. In reality, the fundamental problem in medical care is the obscenely rich owners of the insurance, pharmaceutical and other health care corporations who prey upon the working people and poor.

Almost 20 percent of the entire economic output of the U.S. goes to pay for health care, about twice the level of spending in most industrialized countries. Yet that enormous expenditure does not come close to resulting in a corresponding level of health and welfare of the population. A study by the Institute of Medicine in January compared the health of the U.S. population to that in other economically advanced countries. Americans fared worse in a broad range of categories, including infant mortality, heart disease, chronic lung disease, HIV/AIDS infection, obesity and diabetes. Not surprisingly, life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than in all other advanced industrial countries, and that gap continues to grow.

Like all businesses, for-profit health care companies exist to generate the maximum possible return on their owners’ investments. In that regard, those corporations have been spectacularly successful. They are raking in such fabulous profits that the S&P stock index for the health care sector is up 38 percent this year, more than for any other sector of the economy. Big investors are definitely bullish on Obamacare.

A valuable window into the parasitic dealings of this industry was provided by investigative journalist Steven Brill in a Time (20 February) cover story. Brill noted: “When medical care becomes a matter of life and death, the money demanded by the health care ecosystem reaches a wholly different order of magnitude, churning out reams of bills to people who can’t focus on them, let alone pay them.” He documented cases of hospitals charging patients two and a half times the purchase price of an implantable device, $77 for a box of gauze pads and $1,200 per hour for nursing services. As for the pharmaceutical industry, Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary movie Sicko showed a woman in Cuba paying a nickel for the same inhaler that in the U.S. cost $120.

Make no mistake: When the capitalist rulers speak of cutting health care costs, they are not referring to the elimination of such obscene examples of the heartless exploitation of working people’s suffering. In the interest of swelling profits, the bourgeoisie means to further slash the medical care that is provided to the working population. As the New York Times (27 May) put it, companies that are cutting health benefits “are right in line with the administration’s plan: To encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests.”

That same logic is fueling the drive to cap Medicaid spending by turning millions of recipients over to private “managed-care organizations.” Those outfits are typically paid a fixed sum for providing (grossly inadequate) care. Since 2000, the number of Medicaid enrollees covered by managed care has increased from 19 million to 30 million and now accounts for some 40 percent of beneficiaries.

Growing popular anger at the Wall Street and health insurance robber barons has helped fuel the rise of a number of liberal Democratic Party politicians, such as New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Playing the populist card, they reinforce the illusion that the system can be made to work for the little guy. Of course, when the Republican Party revels in union-bashing as well as racist, anti-woman, anti-immigrant reaction, it is easy for a Democrat to appear as the lesser evil. This is despite the fact that “illegal” immigrants and their families are excluded from the ACA, which also will not put a dollar toward abortion services. And that many poorer people who find themselves shelling out more for health care are seeing their food stamp benefits cut by bipartisan agreement.

Populist nostrums help obscure the fundamental class divide between the capitalists—the coterie of families who own the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. As such, the working class is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system. The interest of the capitalist class in the health of the population comes down to maintaining a workforce fit enough to be exploited and to fight in their imperialist wars. To put the immense wealth generated by the labor of working people at the service of human need will require the expropriation of the bourgeoisie through workers revolution and the establishment of a workers state as part of a socialist world.

Donations matched one to one for the month of December! Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Today is Chelsea's 4th birthday behind bars Attorney David Coombs makes 3 public presentations Watch the presentation by attorney David Coombs on Youtube Today, December 17th, is Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning's fourth birthday behind bars. Last weekend, Courage to Resist and the Private Manning Support Network sponsored three exclusive events in Los Angeles, Oakland, CA, and Seattle, WA, featuring presentations from Chelsea’s attorney, David Coombs. Drawing hundreds in attendance, these events provided supporters with a personal, in-depth report back of this past summer’s historic trial as well as a look forward to the next phase in the fight to win justice for Manning. He spoke on the problem of government overclassification: “We have a complete section of our government — that is funded by us — that’s classified… That is a lot of information that is kept out of our public debate. And when you see that you have that lack of transparency in a democratic government that prides itself on being the beacon of democracy for the entire world, you have to ask yourself what’s wrong with that picture.” On Manning’s intelligence and understanding of Iraq: “She became kind of the go-to person for the unit, prior to their deployment, if you wanted to know something about Iraq, if you wanted to know something about the area they were going to. This young specialist — actually at the time a PFC, she got promoted when she was deployed — knew more than her superiors, her officers, about where they were going” “The things she was struggling with was having a conscience.” Help us continue to cover 100% of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donations matched one to one throughout the month of December. Donate today. On wartime secrecy: “...one thing that Chelsea has shown is that we need whistleblowers like her to ensure that when we do commit our nation’s resources, we do so knowing all the facts, we do so knowing true information… Because 7,678 human lives — and that’s just American soldiers — is too much to lose over lies, over incomplete truths.” Finally, he thanked Courage to Resist and the Private Manning Support Network for standing behind Chelsea and himself for three long years, and he challenged the public to stay engaged moving forward: “...she released that information because she was hoping that it would spark debates, it would spark worldwide reforms. And now our challenge here today is, ‘Is her hope going to come to fruition? Are we going to have public debates? Are we going to demand accountability? Are going to demand transparency in our government?’ I hope the answer to that is yes.” Read the entire transcript of his Oakland presentation. See the video of the Seattle presentation. Help us continue to cover 100% of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donations matched one to one throughout the month of December. Donate today.

follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend unsubscribe from this list| view email in browser

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Sam Gordon-Paul Lafargue

...Paul Lafargue had it just about right in his vision of the socialist future based on laziness, not sloth laziness but the absence of having to struggle hourly, daily, yearly. for a lifetime against hunger and other basic wants and pursue, well, pursue  whatever. Engels once remarked, and it is rather a truism when you thing about it but worth noting anyway, that humankind is lazy as species. Lazy in the sense that he or she is always looking for things to make existence easier, always inventing short-cuts. Praise be. That should be the proper measure of humankind.       

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover”the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible. 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
********

Paul Lafargue

Sam Gordon, born in 1910, joined the Communist League of America after hearing Trotskyist leader James Cannon speak on internationalism. He was in Germany prior to Hitler’s victory and his reports served as a basis for Trotsky's writings on Germany, many of which Gordon translated into English. He was the emergency secretary of the Fourth International at its special conference held in New York in May 1940. He played an important role in uniting the British Trotskyist movement during the Second World War and was an important representative of the US Socialist Workers Party in Europe during the ensuing Cold War, living permanently in Britain from 1952. This article, written in 1971, was to have been the introduction to a selection of essays by Paul Lafargue including his famous work The Right to be Lazy. Unfortunately the selection was never published. Sam Gordon died in 1982.

In the current wave of literary discovery of Marx and Marxism, the earlier popularisers of scientific socialism have generally be overlooked. It almost seems as though the two founders of this school of thought, Karl Marx himself and Friedrich Engels, and until the advent of George Lukacs, for instance, some fifty to a hundred years later, there was a complete trough in which there was no substantial interpretative Marxian comment, nor commentator aside from political theoreticians and innovators in their own right like Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, perhaps Gramsci or Karl Korsch, worthy of note.
And yet a whole generation of powerful and distinguished popularisers followed the founders of this Weltanschauuing Among them – besides Karl Kautsky, whose political leadership (or misleadership) in the history of the Second International tends to eclipse his much more considerable literary contributions – were Franz Mehring, Eugene Dietzgen, Eduard Fuchs, Antonio Labriola, Daniel De Leon above all, Paul Lafargue.
Few of Lafargue’s writings have appeared in English for over sixty years, that is, ever since he died. And yet, some of Lafargue’s acute observations of bourgeois society and prescriptions for the liberatory struggle of the working class against it have about them a ring of actuality; of timeliness that the years have not withered. Among these there is, first of all, his essay, famous in its day, on The Right To Be Lazy. His slashing attacks on capitalist hypocrisy about the sacredness of toil, are apropos today. They could almost have been a direct riposte to the great hand-wringing in the venal press today about the many million “man-hours wantonly lost” strikes, alongside complete silence, of course, about the greater number of such hours lost in genuine wanton industrial accidents and illness.
The immense strides in labour-saving machinery made by automation in the so-called “third industrial revolution” provide a particularly apt realisation of Lafargue’s forecast of the trend and illuminate his bold proposal in the 1880s for a three-hour day: at a time when women and children, let alone men, were still working more than ten hours a day, and often more than 70 hours a week!
A few lines about Lafargue the man are in place.
Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago, Cuba, on 16 June 1842, the son of a planter. His paternal grandmother was a mulatto from Santo Domingo, who fled from there during the French Revolution. His paternal grandfather was French, killed in the risings in Haiti. His maternal grandfather, Abraham Armagnac, was a French Jew and his maternal grandmother a Carib Indian. He was truly a born internationalist.
In 1851 his family took the young Paul to France, where he studied in the lycées of Bordeaux and Toulouse before taking up medicine in Paris.
As a student there he became interested in socialism and a follower of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the mutualiste.
He went to London, in 1865, to present a report on the French working class movement to the General Council of the First International. On this occasion he first came into contact with Marx. After many heated but friendly arguments he eventually became convinced that Marx’s views were superior to Proudhon’s.
He married Marx’s daughter Laura in 1868 and thereafter, despite getting his degree in medicine and various ingenious but unfruitful efforts at business enterprises, never really got a grasp on the art of making a living.
His first allegiance and preoccupation was always the international working class movement which he served as a member of the International’s General Council, as its representative in Spain and eventually as one of the founders of the Marxist-inspired French Workers Party.
Engels, fond of the Lafargues and appreciative of Paul’s political capacity, provided them with funds as he did Marx himself over the years, and left them a tidy sum in his will.
Three children that Laura bore Paul died tragically in infancy, Thereafter Laura and Paul devoted themselves exclusively to revolutionary work in a unique political partnership which ended only with their joint suicide in 1911.
Lafargue and Laura died as they lived. By 1911 the small legacy that Engels had left them was almost exhausted,
On 26 November 1911, the gardener at the country house in Draveil, which belonged to the Lafargues, found Paul and Laura, fully dressed, each sitting upright in an armchair, motionless, dead.
Lafargue explained why they committed suicide (and how), in a note left behind:

Healthy in body and mind, we are enjoying us lives before pitiless old age which has been depriving us of the pleasures and joys one after another, and which has been stripping us of our physical and mental powers, paralyses our energy and breaks our will, making us a burden to ourselves and to others. For some years we had promised ourselves not to live beyond 70, arid we fixed the exact year for our departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, It was a hypodermic of cyanide acid.

We die with the supreme joy of being certain that in the near future the cause for which we devoted 45 years will triumph.

Long live Communism, long live international socialism!

The death, devised with medical skill, was obviously fairly painless.
The Lafargues were buried shortly thereafter in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Representatives from socialist parties all over Europe attended their funeral. V.I. Lenin represented the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Among other things, he said in his graveside oration:

Long before the Russian revolution [of 1905] the class-conscious workers and all the Social Democrats of Russia had come to cherish Lafague as one of the most talented and penetrating disseminators of Marxism.

Franz Mehring, for the German party said:

He was a born dialectician, the dialectic was the most solid link uniting him with Marx.

The “Right to Work” flayed by Lafargue so mercilessly, was first proclaimed on the barricades of 1848 in the Proudhonist guise, and was again and again revived as a rallying call at times of low ebb in the business cycle, once called “depression” but now more fashionably, minimisingly dubbed “recession”.
It would be fatuous to compare the lot of the workers today with that of Lafargue’s day. And yet, the alienation of labour is seized upon as characteristic of our age by sociologists and socio-psychologists after rediscovering the very words of the concept in the early writings of Marx (and, after discovering his Grundrisse, in his later ones as well).
Work, perhaps less arduous in one occupation than in another, is no less onerous than it was before under the capitalist whip. The greatest part of leisure for workers, for the bulk of humanity, that is, still remains leisure to starve, or at least to skimp, brought about in the business cycle by overwork in prosperity, by “overproduction”.
Only a few farsighted academics and trade unionists, inspired in part by Marxist thought, have given the problem consideration in the light of the advance of automation.
At a conference held in the University of California at Santa Barbara in the summer of 1964 they came to the conclusion that the wage system as such had outlived all sense of reality. In what became known as the Santa Barbara Declaration, they boldly called for a guaranteed annual subsistence income to be established as the right of every US citizen regardless of work.
They backed up this demand and the voluntary allocation of work tied to it, by a host of arguments from the American industrial scene of the day and the trend it was setting.
Among the hard-headed practical trade union leaders Walter Reuther had earlier on called for “a guaranteed annual wage” in negotiation with the automobile barons, but this was based on the forced labour of capitalism.
Needless to say, neither the watered down trade union demand nor the bold Santa Barbara proposition has made actual headway.
For the natural “right to be lazy”, that is, for the right of human beings to lead a life of their choice (instead of the deadly, monotonous and stultifying wage slavery), there still remains no other option but the one Lafargue put forward in his time: the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Lafargue had a brief look into that type of solution in the great Paris Commune of 1870, in which he was involved as one of its delegates-at-large in France, a role for which he was hounded and exiled until 1880.
Thus “the right to be lazy”, was entirely in the spirit of the Commune, which was one of those lightning flashes of history that illuminates mankind’s future. If it is not proclaimed today explicitly by any political organisation, it remains implicit in the programme of all who are faithful to the teachings of Marxism.
The “guaranteed national income” may well become the concrete form which this right will take on in the years to come.
There is at present also a negative illumination of the timeliness of this human demand. It is, the widespread opting out of considerable millions of youth in the Western world, the so-called “hippies”. Certainly there some anti-social aspects of this phenomenon. But roundly it must be assessed as a warning to society; the bell is tolling for wage slavery. To live and prosper, society must cast aside capitalist exploitation and establish the right to leisure for all, which advanced technology has made entirely realistic. More than ever before Lafargue is proven correct in his call for “the right to be lazy”
I am sure that, the new generation of workers and students will sense the same joy, in discovering Lafurgue that we older ones did in the thirties and even before that and that Lafargue’s message will help them join with pleasure as well as ardour in helping to put an end to this iniquitous, rotten and outlived capitalist system.
Sam Gordon
1. Lenin Works, 4th Russion edition Vol.IV, p.269
2. See the Triple Revaluation International Socialist Review, Summer 1964
3. Some signatories were: Linus Pauling, (Nobel Laureate), Michael Harrington, James Boggs, Brigadier General Hugh B. Hester, Gunnar Myrdal and many other prominent Americans and other figures.
4. James P. Cannon, What Socialist America Will Look Like, in Speeches for Socialism (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1971) pp.301-424.