All Honor To General Giap and the Vietnamese Victory Against Imperialism Workers Vanguard No. 1035	29 November 2013

General Giap and the Vietnamese Victory Against Imperialism

On October 12-13, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese gathered all over the country to pay their respects to General Vo Nguyen Giap in two days of national mourning. Giap, who died on October 4 at the age of 102, was the chief architect of the defeat in Vietnam of two world powers: first France, which had colonized Vietnam in the mid 19th century, and then the U.S. The wars in Vietnam, which lasted 30 years (1946-75) and cost some three million lives, were part of the imperialist crusade to “roll back Communism,” aimed at restoring capitalist rule in the Soviet Union and drowning in blood struggles for national liberation and social revolution by workers and peasants elsewhere.

A former history teacher and journalist, Giap was the top military commander of the Vietnamese army that decisively defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The victory of the Vietminh (Vietnam Independence League, a bloc led by Ho Chi Minh’s Communists that included some bourgeois nationalists) resulted in the division of the country between a bureaucratically deformed workers state in the North and a capitalist regime in the South under U.S. imperialist domination. Dien Bien Phu gave tremendous encouragement to independence struggles in France’s remaining colonies, in particular helping spark Algeria’s national liberation struggle, which broke out later that year.

The U.S. would go to meet a stunning defeat at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong). The brutal, seemingly endless war would produce an explosive situation in the U.S., the heartland of world imperialism, and radicalize a whole generation of youth throughout the world. The spectacle of the massive American military machine losing to the workers and peasants of a poor Third World country inspired other oppressed peoples to fight for their own liberation. However, numerous attempts to replicate the peasant-based Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban guerrilla movements failed, at the cost of the lives of many would-be revolutionaries.

The overthrow of capitalist rule in Vietnam was a historic victory for the international working class, whose duty is to defend such conquests tooth and nail against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution. This is despite the rule of a Stalinist regime that from the beginning has politically suppressed the working class and opposed the fight for workers revolution elsewhere. In contrast, the proletarian October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, established the rule of workers and peasants councils (soviets), and two years later the Communist (Third) International was launched in Moscow to promote the fight for world socialist revolution.

Giap was North Vietnam’s defense minister in 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army and NLF, leading to the reunification of North and South Vietnam. For years, U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam constrained the American rulers in pursuing their bloody designs around the world. For his outstanding role in the liberation of Vietnam, we Trotskyists honor Vo Nguyen Giap, whose military genius and dedication will be remembered in history.

Stalinism and the Fight Against Imperialism

Vo Nguyen Giap joined Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in the early 1930s. Building the Vietminh’s military forces from scratch and later leading North Vietnam’s conventional armed forces, he was praised as an outstanding military strategist, even by many of his enemies. Most famous for Dien Bien Phu, Giap was involved in many other key battles and was credited with creating the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” the crucial supply line for the NLF fighters in the South. He also organized the 1979 invasion of Cambodia, which toppled the demented Pol Pot regime. While details about Giap’s early life are sketchy, it is clear that he paid a devastating personal price for his leadership of anti-imperialist struggle, with close relatives, including his wife, killed at the hands of the French.

Even while noting that Giap is often classed among the great military leaders of the 20th century, the New York Times (4 October) obituary harped on his supposed “profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers,” quoting war criminal General William C. Westmoreland’s statement that “any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would not have lasted three weeks.” This is the sneering of the losers in Vietnam, the same imperialists who were willing to inflict any amount of death, destruction and suffering on those fighting for national and social liberation. General Giap waged revolutionary warfare: the workers and peasants who fought under his command were prepared for sacrifice to free themselves from the colonial yoke and the local landlords, oppressors and exploiters. “In the final analysis, victory in any war is determined by the willingness of the masses to shed blood on the battlefield,” Giap once wrote.

In the starkest contrast, the heavily working-class American conscript troops were fighting a war on behalf of their own exploiters and oppressors. Especially as it became clear that the U.S. was losing, they increasingly opposed their own officers and government. When Muhammad Ali made his famous declaration, “No Vietcong ever called me n----r,” he expressed the sentiments of growing numbers of soldiers, particularly black GIs who were aware that the “freedom” they were supposed to be fighting for in Vietnam was denied them at home.

But Giap’s role was contradictory. The program of the ICP and its successors reflected the perversion of Marxism by the Stalinist bureaucratic caste that politically dominated the Soviet workers state beginning in 1923-24. In the vain hope of softening the imperialists’ class hatred of the USSR, the bureaucratic regime abandoned the Bolshevik program of world revolution and adopted the dogma of “socialism in one country.” The Communist International was increasingly transformed into an instrument of the bureaucracy’s search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.

In 1935, the popular front—the codification of the Stalinist policy of seeking alliances with “progressive” bourgeois forces—became the systematic practice of the Third International, leading to the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities throughout the world. As World War II loomed and the USSR faced the deadly menace of Nazi Germany, this policy meant selling the “democratic” credentials of one set of capitalist exploiters and imperialist oppressors (except for the brief period of what is known as the Stalin-Hitler pact). In the name of anti-fascism, Communist parties in countries militarily allied with the USSR became loyal supporters of the capitalist governments, backing their war aims against rival imperialists, opposing strikes and other struggles at home and opposing independence for their “own” colonies. In Vietnam at the time, this meant that the Communist Party did not challenge France’s colonial stranglehold.

In WWII, Trotskyists called for working-class opposition to all the imperialist combatants, continuing to pursue the class struggle at home while fighting for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. In several colonial and semicolonial countries where the Communist parties repudiated the fight for national liberation, Trotskyists as a result gained significant influence in the proletariat. One such country was Vietnam, and this would put the Trotskyists in the crosshairs of not only the imperialists but the Stalinists as well.

Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords

Toward the end of WWII, the Kremlin bureaucracy made a series of agreements with its U.S., British and other wartime imperialist allies, including over control of their colonies and semicolonies. Vietnam, which had been under Japanese occupation, was divided between North and South at the 16th parallel, the North awarded to Chiang Kai-shek’s China and the South to Britain (and subsequently France). However, the Vietminh took over the North when Japan withdrew, and Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). He then accepted the reintroduction of French troops in the North in the framework of limited independence within the “French Union.” But once the French army came back in force, it turned on Ho Chi Minh’s government. In November 1946, the French shelled Haiphong harbor, killing at least 6,000 Vietnamese.

The attack at Haiphong was met with a broad counteroffensive by the Vietminh, touching off a protracted war of liberation. At the end of 1953, the French military command decided to fortify Dien Bien Phu, a small village near the border with Laos. The intent was to create a secure base from which to harry Giap’s Vietminh in the northwest mountains. The French built a formidable entrenched camp and brought in 16,000 troops, among them the Foreign Legion, its elite expeditionary corps. The surrounding forests and mountains were assumed to be impassable for the enemy’s heavy artillery, which would in any case be vulnerable to air attack.

The Vietminh could access Dien Bien Phu only through a narrow, steep 55-mile-long mule path interrupted by scores of mountain streams. In a few months, they built dozens of bridges despite constant attack by French artillery as well as heavy rain and flooding. Thousands of sampans and countless convoys of mules and bicycles using rivers, streams, roads and trails moved 4.5 million tons of materiel. Artillery was moved up the steep path in sections, then reassembled.

By January 1954, 55,000 Vietminh troops were positioned in the hills overlooking the garrison, and on March 13 General Giap launched the attack with a massive artillery barrage. “We were all surprised…how the Viets have been able to find so many guns capable of producing an artillery assault of such power,” wrote one of the survivors. What was intended as a display of colonial might turned into a bloody trap for the French. Wading in the mud and muck, hammered relentlessly by artillery, they lost 4,000 men by some estimates. After 55 days of fighting, crushed and humiliated, the French surrendered to the Vietnamese, ending nearly a century of France’s domination of Indochina.

With the Western imperialists seeking a compromise, a conference took place in Geneva that year attended by the Soviet Union, the U.S., France, Britain and China, where capitalist rule had been smashed in 1949. Going into the conference, Communists controlled most of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. But when they left the conference, which redivided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, they controlled only North Vietnam. A U.S. official wrote: “Ironically the agreement written at Geneva benefited all parties except the winners…. Ho Chi Minh somehow was persuaded—apparently by a joint Sino-Soviet effort—to settle for half the country on the grounds that the other half would be his as soon as elections were held.” Since 80 percent of the population in South Vietnam was thought to be in favor of independence, the imperialists saw to it that those elections never took place. But in the North, the capitalists were expropriated and a collectivized economy was introduced, although the working class was denied political power.

The Geneva conference was one of several times that the Vietminh, and later the DRV/NLF, gave away imminent victory at the bargaining table at the behest of Stalin and his successors as well as Mao Zedong’s Chinese Stalinists. But while the North Vietnamese settled for “socialism” in half a country, the relentless persecution of their comrades in the South did not stop, particularly under the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. In 1956, the Stalinists began giving real support to the resistance struggle in South Vietnam.

While it was pretty easy for the Moscow and Beijing bureaucrats to sell out someone else’s revolution, for the Hanoi Stalinists total sellout would have meant cutting their own throats. The Stalinists’ political perspective was an alliance with the native capitalists, but this class was too weak to present a real possibility for power-sharing. Under attack by imperialism and with their own bourgeoisie rebuffing all offers of a coalition, they were forced to rely on the workers and peasants, sometimes acquiescing to revolutionary measures. Thus, the Vietnamese war posed a social revolution from the beginning, with the workers and peasants on one side and the domestic bourgeoisie and the imperialists on the other.

U.S. Sent Packing

After the French departure, the U.S. took over the campaign to crush the Vietnamese Revolution. When the resistance struggle by the NLF picked up once again, President John F. Kennedy turned to covert operations, sending special ops forces (50,000 “advisers”) to South Vietnam. The CIA initiated the Phoenix program of infiltration, torture and assassination.

In February 1965, hoping to force North Vietnam to restrain the NLF, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration launched a full-scale war. Washington unleashed a massive bombing campaign over North Vietnam that lasted three years while massively increasing the number of U.S. troops in the South. At the height of the war, the U.S. had half a million combat troops in Vietnam and another 300,000 in the surrounding region. Over the war’s course, the U.S. dropped more bomb tonnage than the combined total of all combatants in World War II. All told, the U.S. killed at least two million Vietnamese, maiming and wounding millions more and devastating most of the countryside.

To break the will of the American government to continue fighting, on 31 January 1968 the North Vietnamese and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of fierce attacks by some 80,000 men and women on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese puppet forces managed to hold off the attacks, Tet demonstrated the determination of the DRV/NLF fighters and further sapped the morale of their foes.

As it sank in that Vietnam had become a losing war, the U.S. sought negotiations. Peace accords were signed in 1973 in Paris, ending direct U.S. involvement in the war but keeping South Vietnam under imperialist bondage. The formal program of the Stalinists continued to be for a Southern coalition government with bourgeois forces. But unlike the situation resulting from the 1954 sellout, large numbers of DRV/NLF troops remained in the South, and the civil war went on for two more years. Finally, in early 1975 the government of North Vietnam carried out the “Great Spring Offensive” to liberate the South. Giap oversaw the final push on Saigon, and on April 30 DRV and NLF tanks rolled triumphantly into the South Vietnamese capital. Leaders of the defeated puppet regime and the South Vietnamese bourgeoisie fled by every available means; helicopters airlifted the last Americans out of the country.

Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam

As noted above, agreements between the Allied imperialists and the Kremlin bureaucracy at the end of WWII dictated that South Vietnam would be returned to the French. But reimposition of Western colonial rule was resisted by the Trotskyists, who had acquired a mass working-class base, as well as by various nationalists. When the British and the French reoccupied Saigon in September 1945, an insurrection broke out. As people’s committees sprang up, particularly around Saigon, the peasants in the countryside rose up, burning the villas of large landowners. The Trotskyists called for the people’s committees to take power, for arming the people and for nationalization of industry under workers’ control. (For more, see the 1976 Spartacist pamphlet Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam.)

This program was a threat to the Stalinists’ aim of accommodation with the bourgeoisie. As Nguyen Van Tao, the Vietminh’s interior minister for the South at the time, declared: “Whoever encourages the peasants to take over the landed properties will be severely and pitilessly punished.... We have not yet carried out a communist revolution, which would bring a solution to the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic government, and therefore it cannot undertake this task.”

The best-known Trotskyist leader, Ta Thu Thau, was arrested on the orders of the Vietminh. Tried three times by people’s committees, he was acquitted each time. Finally, he was shot on the orders of southern Stalinist leader Tran Van Giau. As the French reinvaded the South in October 1945, the Stalinists stood by, concentrating their fire on the Trotskyists, whose leaders were all killed. Shortly thereafter, the Vietminh were forced out of Saigon by the Allies. Once Ho Chi Minh had physically liquidated the Trotskyist leadership with the aid of Giap, then the North’s interior minister, he capitulated to the Allies in the North.

In this conflict the French Communist Party, which had several ministerial posts in the capitalist government in Paris, illustrated the lengths to which the Stalinists would go in attempting to ingratiate themselves with the bourgeoisie. While Ho Chi Minh was dissolving the Indochinese Communist Party and agreeing to permit French troops into the North, his French comrades were busy explaining why the right of national self-determination did not apply to Vietnam and voting war credits to finance the French expeditionary force! On 20 December 1946, a month after the French bombed Haiphong, Communist deputies in the French Assembly voted to send congratulations to the Expeditionary Corps and its lead executioner, General Leclerc.

The Vietnamese Communists were caught between their program of seeking to share power with the bourgeoisie—in accordance with the Stalinist schema of “two-stage revolution”—and the needs of their own survival, which ultimately meant a struggle to the end against the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie. As Leon Trotsky explained in developing the theory of permanent revolution, in the imperialist epoch the weak bourgeoisies of economically backward countries, closely intertwined with imperialism and mortally afraid of the worker and peasant masses, are incapable of carrying out the democratic tasks of national liberation and agrarian revolution. Those tasks can be achieved only through smashing bourgeois rule and establishing a proletarian dictatorship supported by the poor peasantry.

Despite their official program, the Vietnamese Stalinists, like Mao’s forces in China, were compelled to take power in their own name and, either immediately or in the short term, break rotted-out bourgeois rule. The fact that those petty-bourgeois guerrilla movements could carry out social revolutions was conditioned by highly exceptional historic circumstances, including the extreme weakness of the domestic bourgeoisie, the absence of the working class as a contender for power and the counterweight to imperialism provided by the Soviet Union. Against ostensible Trotskyists and other leftists who saw these guerrilla movements as a substitute for mobilizing the proletariat in revolutionary struggle, the Spartacist League has always insisted that the most that these forces could achieve, under extraordinarily favorable conditions, was the creation of deformed workers states.

As we wrote in hailing U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Indochina (“Capitalist Class Rule Smashed in Vietnam, Cambodia!” WV No. 68, 9 May 1975): “Because their rule is based on the political expropriation of the working class, these petty-bourgeois bureaucratic castes are incapable of mobilizing the proletarian masses for an international revolutionary assault on the bastions of world capitalism, since it would simultaneously mean their own demise.” The nationalist Stalinist regimes from Havana to Hanoi and Beijing must be overthrown by workers political revolutions led by Trotskyist parties in order to open the road to socialist development.

America: The War Comes Home

Throughout the U.S. war in Vietnam and the mass antiwar protests, the Spartacist League called for unconditional defense of North Vietnam and for military victory to the NLF in the South while giving no political support to the Stalinist leadership. Our slogan “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution!” expressed our understanding of the class nature of the war. While our slogans were attractive to many young people in this period of leftward motion, we had to swim against the stream, combating the false ideologies popular among the more radical activists, particularly Maoism and the adulation of Ho Chi Minh. We opposed antiwar rallies being made into platforms for bourgeois politicians, stressing that imperialist war is inherent in the capitalist system and can be fought effectively only on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.

In early propaganda, we criticized the bureaucratic regimes in the USSR and China for their inadequate military aid to the Vietnamese and demanded: “Soviet nuclear shield must cover China, North Vietnam!” We denounced the Sino-Soviet split—a falling-out driven by the competing national interests of the two regimes—and called for Communist unity against imperialism. In response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, the SL raised the call, “All Indochina Must Go Communist!”

The U.S. Army was seething with discontent, while those back home were becoming increasingly alienated from the war, its Cold War rationale and economic costs, as well as from the lying government. Although the AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy headed by George Meany remained a bastion of support for the government until the end, the war was mostly unpopular among workers, and all the more so as it became widely perceived as an endless quagmire. Students were becoming radicalized as the Democratic Johnson administration escalated the military engagement. Many activists were breaking away from the official antiwar leadership of liberal pacifists and such reformist leftists as the Communist Party (CP) and Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who did donkey work for Democratic Party “doves” preaching about the need for negotiations and saving America’s image.

The Vietnam antiwar movement arose on the heels of the mass, plebeian civil rights struggles that had punctured the smug political climate of 1950s anti-Communism. By the late 1960s, the antiwar protests coincided with an upturn in strikes as well as explosions of anger in the urban ghettos over police brutality, segregation and poverty. Despite the students’ petty-bourgeois elitism and the best efforts of the racist AFL-CIO Cold Warriors, soldiers and young workers were open to radical arguments.

A Spartacist leaflet widely distributed at one of the massive marches on Washington (“From Protest to Power,” 21 October 1967) noted that “the anti-war movement can force Johnson to withdraw U.S. troops only if he is more afraid of it than of the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution. No demonstration, however effective and militant, can do this. Only a movement capable of taking state power can. The anti-war movement has no future except as a force for building a party of revolutionary change.” The leaflet called on militants to break out of the student milieu and orient to the proletariat. This would mean ceasing to build support for strikebreaking “antiwar” capitalist politicians and sellout black leaders like Martin Luther King, who backed the suppression of ghetto upheavals.

The Spartacist League opposed draft resistance and college student deferments, an example of class privilege that also had the effect of keeping antiwar students from impacting the views of working-class draftees. We called for mobilizing a one-day general strike against the war and for a labor party built through linking discontent over the war to the rising labor militancy and the explosiveness of the ghettos, charting a course for fighting against the entire capitalist system. The SL gained a hearing for these views and recruited substantially from the antiwar movement and New Left. But the official, pro-Democratic Party leaders (with the assistance of the CP and SWP) kept most of those who hated the war within the framework of social-patriotic, pro-imperialist politics.

A more far-sighted wing of the establishment was becoming defeatist from their own class standpoint: they had ceased to believe the U.S. could win in Vietnam and were increasingly alarmed at the war’s social consequences. They especially feared that the Army was being destroyed as an effective fighting force, rife with drug addiction and with rank-and-file soldiers often more hostile to their officers than to the “enemy.” Opening the road to bourgeois defeatism over Vietnam were the events in Indonesia in 1965, when the “progressive” Sukarno regime was toppled by a reactionary coup instigated by the CIA. The coup ushered in the massacre of over a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese. With the world’s largest non-ruling Communist Party utterly destroyed, elements in the U.S. ruling class could more easily talk about cutting their losses in Vietnam.

Vietnam Was a Victory!

For years, many self-described socialists and ex-radicals nostalgic for the massive demonstrations of the Vietnam War era have peddled the myth that the antiwar movement ended the war. But it was the heroism and tenacity of the Vietnamese on the battlefield that broke the imperialists’ will and drove them out of the country.

Today Vietnam, a country still scarred by pitiless bombing and devastating defoliation, continues to be squeezed by the far more powerful economies of the imperialists and by their massive military might. The diplomatic rapprochement of the Vietnamese Stalinists with the U.S. over the past decade reflects the country’s isolation following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the continuing pressures of poverty and the nationalist antipathy pitting the Beijing and Hanoi bureaucracies against each other (see “Stirring Up the South China Sea—U.S. Imperialism Tightens Military Vise on China,” WV No. 1005, 6 July 2012). The Stalinist regime has also spurred widening social inequality stemming from its version of “market socialism.”

It remains the duty of revolutionaries in the belly of the imperialist beast to unconditionally defend Vietnam and the other remaining deformed workers states—China, Cuba, North Korea and Laos—against imperialist and domestic counterrevolutionary forces. The struggle for workers political revolutions to sweep away the Stalinist regimes in those countries is inseparable from the fight to mobilize the proletariat to overthrow capitalist rule in North America, Japan and West Europe—the prerequisite for building a world socialist society of material abundance. This requires the construction of Leninist-Trotskyist revolutionary parties.

When the U.S. launched air attacks against North Vietnam on 7 February 1965, we sent a telegram to Ho Chi Minh, stating: “Spartacist in fullest solidarity with defense of your country against attack by United States imperialism. Heroic struggle of Vietnamese working people furthers the American revolution.” When the workers of this country take power from the murderous rulers of decaying capitalism, they will surely tear down the monuments to the imperialist war criminals (and Confederate generals) and erect in their place memorials to Vo Nguyen Giap and others who fought to rid this planet of exploitation and oppression.

Boston-Reinstate Fired School Bus Union Leaders! Workers Vanguard No. 1035	29 November 2013

Boston-Reinstate Fired School Bus Union Leaders!

 

Boston school bus drivers, organized in United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751, are fighting a vendetta against union leaders for a brief job action last month provoked by labor-hating Veolia Transportation (see “Boston Job Action: No Reprisals Against School Bus Drivers!” WV No. 1033, 1 November). Since it took over management of the buses in June, the company had trampled on the union contract, threatening safety, shortchanging drivers on their paychecks and effectively forcing them to reapply for their jobs. When on October 8 drivers refused to roll out the buses unless management agreed to a meeting with the union, the bosses locked out the workforce for the day, bringing in police to help clear the yards. Veolia sought to make special examples of the “School Bus Union 5.” Grievance committee chairman Stevan Kirschbaum, vice president Steve Gillis, recording secretary Andre Francois, stewards Garry Murchison and Richard Lynch were suspended. Except for Lynch, all were later fired.

Large numbers of the heavily Haitian and Cape Verdean drivers and their supporters mobilized for protests outside the disciplinary hearing for the School Bus Union 5 at the end of October. In response to the subsequent firings of the Local 8751 officials, some of whom have long been supported by the reformist Workers World Party (WWP), a day of solidarity was held on November 9. Hundreds of people, including trade unionists from other cities, rallied at the Freeport bus yard and marched to company headquarters, chanting “Union! Union!” Management, though, has thus far proved intransigent. Not one of the demands presented by the union right after the work stoppage, which the company deemed illegal, has been met. To help beat back this open union-busting, all of labor must stand behind the drivers. Reinstate Kirschbaum, Gillis, Francois and Murchison! An injury to one is an injury to all!

Although the USW regional office renounced the job action at the time, providing ammunition for Veolia, the union’s top leadership has since stepped up to the plate to underwrite the defense effort. The San Francisco Labor Council and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 in New York City are among the union bodies that have issued solidarity statements, helping counter the redbaiting and union-bashing emanating from all quarters of the Boston elite. Such statements need to be turned into whatever actions are necessary to defeat the attack on Local 8751 by Veolia, an international outfit holding over 200 transportation contracts with cities, transit authorities and airports across North America. Wherever it sets up, this company’s first order of business is to attempt to bring the unions to heel. Impressed by its anti-union record, other employers have paid top dollar for its services, such as Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which hired Veolia’s Thomas Hock to squeeze its unions in contract negotiations earlier this year.

The attacks on the poorly paid school bus drivers are the latest in the nationwide anti-labor barrage. In NYC, school bus drivers and matrons in ATU Local 1181 carried out a month-long strike earlier this year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg sought to strip them of job protections, only to see 100 of the strikers fired upon returning to work. On the West Coast, BART union members went on strike twice in recent months in an attempt to fend off major concessions. Everywhere, workers are under pressure to keep surrendering hard-won gains of the past, even as the capitalist exploiters pocket ever greater profits.

A major barrier to reversing this course is labor officialdom’s embrace of capitalist Democratic Party politicians. Unions nationwide contributed millions to help elect “friend of labor” Martin J. Walsh, the next mayor of Boston. But the reaction of this former head of the city’s Building and Construction Trades Council to the October 8 job action was barely distinguishable from that of current Democratic mayor Thomas Menino. Not mincing words, Walsh declared: “This is illegal, the actions taken by the drivers. I don’t condone it in any shape, manner, or form.” According to the Boston Globe (8 October), Walsh “has continuously insisted that he would be able to oversee tough negotiations with unions despite their heavy contributions to his campaign.” This stand underlines the fact that the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, is a party of the bosses.

Some Democrats on the City Council, notably Charles Yancey, have attended union rallies and expressed sympathy for the drivers. Yancey, whom WWP extols as a fighter for labor and black rights, offered to mediate on October 8 but was rebuffed by the company. A press release issued by his office the next day explained that “his immediate concern was to persuade bus drivers to return to work.” Seeking to divert workers struggle into bourgeois political channels, he orchestrated a November 21 City Council hearing on Veolia’s anti-union practices. Predictably, the event was snubbed by the mayor, school officials and the bus contractor, although the galleries were packed to overflowing by union members and their supporters.

The basis for the contention that the work stoppage was illegal, which was also the pretext for the firings, is the no-strike clause in the union contract—the only provision that Veolia and the city rulers consider binding. Such pledges by the union bureaucrats, which today are standard practice, bury labor’s most effective weapon in fighting the bosses. With the line drawn in Boston, all of labor should back Local 8751 as part of revitalizing the unions as fighting organizations against the bosses.

From The Marxist Archives -Medicine in U.S. Capitalist Society

Vanguard No. 1035	29 November 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

Medicine in U.S. Capitalist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Writing in the mid 20th century, James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, pointed to the contradiction besetting doctors in the capitalist U.S. between the delivery of medicine as a social service and its rendering into a commodity for profit. As he observed elsewhere in the same article: “Socialism will be good medicine for the doctors who just want to be doctors.”

Medicine as a science is progressive and revolutionary, constantly sharpening its theoretical tools, bold and thoroughgoing in its increasingly successful search for new techniques. Medical science is benign, by its very nature social-minded, humane and out-giving, committed to the most ennobling ideal—the service of others. Who can be more deserving of the grateful acclaim of the people than those who heal the sick and make human life more livable? The doctors—as doctors—belong to the Order of the Friends of Man.

But the way things are, the doctor, who shouldn’t have to bother with anything but his profession, must also be a businessman who has to make a living, charge all the traffic will bear and try to get rich in competition with others. This side of the picture is not so attractive. Medicine as a business, self-centeredly working for its own pocket, is no better than any other business. In some respects it is even worse, for the unnatural mixing up of a profession designed for service with the business of making money entails a special corruption of its own, which merits nobody’s veneration.

Commercialized medicine leads to discrimination against those who need medical service most in favor of those who can pay best....

The Oath of Hippocrates obligates the doctor to visit the sick wherever they may be and to serve anyone whatever, on the sole condition that he needs medical care.

That ideal of the legendary founder of the medical profession must govern its future too. But that can be fully realized only when the practice of medicine as a social service—its justification and its glory—is completely separated from sordid business considerations and shabby politics—its degradation and disgrace.

That will require a change and reorganization of our social system, as revolutionary as any changes that have been made in the practice of medicine.

—James P. Cannon, “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Militant, June 1952, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)

European Gypsies Under Siege-French Government Crackdown on Roma, Immigrants Workers Vanguard No. 1035	29 November 2013

European Gypsies Under Siege-French Government Crackdown on Roma, Immigrants

 

In recent months, there has been a dramatic increase in vicious attacks against Roma (Gypsies) across Europe, where the 10 to 12 million Roma make up the largest and one of the most oppressed minority populations. Hounded by ingrained racism, Roma are routinely excluded from employment and housing and made to live in conditions with little or no sanitation. In the context of the ongoing economic crisis, the European capitalist governments are offering up the Roma as scapegoats for worsening conditions and rising unemployment—taking aim at an easy target, a marginalized and defenseless people persecuted for centuries. The capitalists’ chauvinist media has whipped up a storm recalling medieval lies about Roma stealing children, now repackaged under the rubric of “human trafficking.”

In mid October, cops raided a Roma camp in central Greece on a drug sweep and snatched up a 4-year-old girl with fair hair and blue eyes, arresting her parents. The girl, Maria, doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Roma, so the media christened her the “Blonde Angel” and splashed her photo around the world. It turns out that her biological mother is a Bulgarian Roma who had been living in Greece. Forced to return to Bulgaria, the mother had arranged for Maria to be brought up by a different Roma family in Greece.

But these mundane facts of a childcare arrangement common in every culture did not prevail against the chauvinist hysteria that spread like wildfire across Europe. Within days, two pale-skinned Roma children in Ireland were abducted from their parents by state authorities and subjected to DNA tests to “prove” they were who their parents said they were. For the Irish capitalist state, anti-Roma racism is part and parcel of its longstanding oppression of Irish Travellers, a distinct ethnic group with their own language and culture whose historically itinerant way of life is associated with the Roma.

The expressed concern of the Greek state for the welfare of Maria is breathtaking hypocrisy. In September, a prosecutor in Greece called to reopen an investigation into the disappearance of over 500 Albanian Roma children who had been in the state’s “care.” The government rounded up these children in the years prior to the 2004 Athens Olympics in the guise of a campaign to protect children begging on the streets. The children disappeared and their whereabouts remain unknown. As for Maria, she has been wrenched from the family that raised her and is reportedly to be deported to Bulgaria, not to live with her biological parents but to be put in foster care.

One factor currently driving the hysteria against the Roma is related to the expansion of the imperialist European Union (EU). When Romania and Bulgaria, which both have significant Roma minorities, joined the EU in 2007, their citizens were restricted from working in several EU countries, including Britain, France and Germany. Restrictions on the right to work and the persecution and deportations of Roma show the true face of the European imperialist “democracies.” On 1 January 2014, these restrictions will be lifted, putting an end to this formal discrimination in employment. However, even when Roma have the legal right to work, they will continue to face acute obstacles to getting work.

We in the International Communist League have always been implacably opposed to the EU, an imperialist trade bloc within which the major European imperialists cooperate to further the exploitation and immiseration of the working class, including its immigrant component. Within the EU, Germany, France and Britain dominate the poorer member states. The “second tier” includes East European countries used as a source of cheap labor and markets by the EU powers.

In Britain, there is a furor over the supposed influx of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants to descend on the country next year. During the summer, a Roma camp near London was cleared out and nearly all the residents were deported to Romania. Former Labour Party home secretary David Blunkett chided the current government for not being harsh enough on immigrant Roma, stating in a radio interview earlier this month: “We have got to change the behavior and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise.” Such incitement gives legitimacy to fascist and state-backed terror.

In France, the government of Socialist Party president François Hollande (which includes Green Party housing minister Cécile Duflot) evicted over 10,000 Roma in the first six months of this year alone. Despite attempts to sound less racist, the reformist Communist Party’s mayor of Saint Ouen, near Paris, wrote to Interior Minister Manuel Valls at the end of October demanding that Roma be expelled from a camp in her jurisdiction. Fueled by the government’s anti-immigrant crackdown, fascist gangs have been assaulting veiled women and in June skinheads murdered leftist anti-fascist activist Clément Méric. Meanwhile, electoral support to the fascist National Front is growing.

As our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France explained in “SP-Green Government’s Racist Campaigns Swell Fascists’ Sails” (Le Bolchévik No. 205, September 2013): “Racist terror is inherent in the capitalist system, whether it is fascist terror or the ordinary terror of the bourgeois state, whether it is Sarkozy’s rightist government terror or Valls-Duflot’s ‘left’ version, whether it targets Roma, veiled women or minority youth more generally. To do away with racist oppression once and for all, it is necessary to destroy its causes, which are found in the basic mechanisms of the system of capitalist exploitation.”

We print below a translation of an October 29 leaflet issued by our comrades in France protesting racist deportations and demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

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In the presidential election last year, we called for people not to vote for Hollande. Among other things, we pointed to his vowing to wage an “implacable” struggle against undocumented immigrants and to put the Roma in “encampments of our own choosing” to stop them from moving around “over and over” (Le Monde, 15 February 2012). His chief cop minister, Valls, was only following through on these campaign promises when on October 9 he sent the cops onto a school bus looking for Leonarda Dibrani and had her deported for good to Kosovo. She speaks neither Albanian nor Serbian—but she does speak French! Leonarda courageously denounced Hollande’s proposal to let her back into France…without her family.

The lesson Valls draws from this incident is that the processing of asylum requests must be accelerated, for the explicit purpose of being able to deport people before they have the time to settle in the “country of the rights of man.” Reactionaries and fascists of all sorts have seized the opportunity to urge revision of jus soli [the right of the soil], which under certain conditions grants citizenship to those who were born on French soil.

Around the same time, the cops deported Khatchik Kachatryan to Armenia. He is the first Parisian high school student deported since 2006—when Sarkozy was in charge of the ministry of police. We demand the immediate return of Leonarda and all her family, as well as Khatchik, and we demand they be granted full legal status: Full citizenship rights for everyone who made it here! Down with the racist witchhunt against the Roma!

The Hollande/Valls Government’s Racist Campaign

The outrageous treatment of Leonarda epitomizes the violent government campaign against the Roma, who are made scapegoats more than ever in this period of deep economic crisis in order to forestall workers struggle. In France, there are at most a few tens of thousands of Roma from the Balkans, and they are essentially excluded from the proletariat. But for the workers movement to accept attacks against the Roma would make it vulnerable to efforts to divide the working class itself along ethnic, racial and sexual lines, while reinforcing the arsenal of police repression directed against workers.

Manuel Valls, forever in search of a new racist provocation, declared that the Roma were incapable of “integrating” into a civilized society like France. During World War II, the Nazis characterized them as “subhuman,” but here in France the laws invoked to lock up the Roma in camps under the Vichy government were in fact enacted by the Third Republic [1870-1940] before the Nazi occupation. Some Roma remained interned until 1946 under capitalist governments that included Gaullists, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats of the Second International and Stalinists from the French Communist Party (PCF) [see “France: Down With Racist Anti-Roma Campaign!” WV No. 965, 24 September 2010 and Black History and the Class Struggle No. 21, February 2011].

The Roma have been persecuted for centuries, driven from one country to another. In a precapitalist economy, the Gypsies occupied a marginal economic niche as artisans, peddlers and artists. With the development of capitalism, they were pushed to the margins of society, enduring abuses that culminated in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Gypsies by the Nazis. The truth is that decaying capitalism is incapable of “integrating” the Roma and all the more so in periods of crisis. The French state, including its PCF mayors, chases them from one shantytown to another and then uses the pretext that they are not official residents to refuse to enroll the children in school. When, in spite of these difficulties, children like Leonarda manage to attend school, the state deports them. It refuses the Roma the right to work and then accuses them of living by their wits! Down with restrictions on the right to work imposed by the European Union on Bulgarian and Romanian citizens!

Only socialist revolution will make possible the full integration of Roma into society with equal rights, as shown by the example of the October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia that overthrew capitalist rule. The October Revolution destroyed the tsarist empire—that prison house of peoples—and laid the basis for freeing the oppressed nations and ethnic minorities, including the Roma, from the jackboot of Great Russian chauvinism.

Romania, including under the grotesque Stalinist regime of Ceausescu, and Tito’s Yugoslavia (where Leonarda’s family came from) were bureaucratically deformed workers states. The capitalist ruling class had been driven from power and the resulting collectivized, nationalized economy guaranteed the Roma an improved standard of living and an unprecedented ethnic and national integration. Their level of education began to approach that of the rest of the population and they had not only jobs but also housing and health care. The Roma were recognized as a national minority with the right to be educated in their own language. They were settled and relatively integrated into the proletariat and into the military and state apparatus. When Yugoslavia existed, there were radio and TV programs in the Romany language in Kosovo.

The counterrevolutionary destruction of these workers states turned the Balkans, East Europe and the former Soviet Union into a living hell, replete with interethnic massacres, genocidal nationalism and utter poverty. Emigration of Roma from Romania or Kosovo often represented a desperate attempt to flee horrible racist persecution and indescribable misery. Our organization, the International Communist League, fought to the end for unconditional military defense of the USSR and the deformed workers states against capitalist counterrevolution and for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracies and put in place governments of workers councils (soviets).

There is bitter irony to the fact that groups like Lutte Ouvrière and the New Anti-Capitalist Party (formerly the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) today decry the persecution of the Roma, after having supported various champions of capitalist “democracy” in Poland and the USSR. The final victory of counterrevolution between 1989 and 1992 has led to new and terrible suffering for the Roma of East Europe and the Balkans.

Immigration and Capitalism

Leonarda and Khatchik were deported, but how many asylum seekers and refugees do not succeed in even reaching the European continent? It is estimated that over the last twenty years more than 6,000 people trying to get into racist Fortress Europe drowned just in the seas around the little Italian island of Lampedusa [see “Mass Drowning of Refugees in Mediterranean,” WV No. 1034, 15 November].

The capitalists manage the ebbs and flows of immigration according to their own manpower needs. In periods of expansion, they will look for workers from abroad; in periods of crisis, they turn off the tap. With the deepening recession in the European Union—notably in Greece, Portugal and East Europe, which are oppressed by the German and French capitalists and their banks—even the recent shipwrecks off Lampedusa are pretexts for the imperialists to further reinforce police barriers to immigration. The cops of the European surveillance agency “Frontex” are marauding in the Mediterranean as walls go up along the Greek-Turkish border. Down with the imperialist European Union! Down with its financial instrument, the euro!

However, the only perspective reformists like the PCF have is to call for new laws making slight modifications to immigration policy. Similar politics were on display during a lengthy 2009-10 strike of several thousand undocumented workers in Paris and the surrounding region. These workers were mostly left to go it alone as the bureaucrats from the CGT and SUD union federations who supervised this campaign did next to nothing to mobilize their co-workers who had papers. All the bureaucrats demanded was a decree setting standardized criteria for processing immigration applications. They wanted criteria that would give papers to immigrants if they had jobs, thus only benefiting undocumented workers and their families—in other words, too bad for the unemployed, for Roma like Leonarda, for [foreign] high school students like Khatchik who are no longer minors.

At the time of the strike, the campaign got unambiguous support from Lutte Ouvrière and other reformist groups. Their aim was to slightly “humanize” the policy of Sarkozy, who openly said he wanted to regulate immigration according to the capitalists’ need for manpower. In contrast, we are for full citizenship rights for everyone who is here.

Workers Must Defend Minority Youth!

In the framework of this anti-Roma campaign, it is heartening that high school students have fought for the return of Leonarda and Khatchik. High school and college students have often been the spark for working-class struggle. But the closing of high schools, even for weeks, won’t hurt the capitalists’ profits. The mass youth protest movement of 2006 succeeded against the [rightist] Chirac government’s stubborn determination to impose substandard job contracts on young workers only because hundreds of thousands of workers, in growing numbers, went on strike and took to the streets in solidarity. Only the working class has the social power to paralyze the country (the factories, transportation, utilities) and make the bosses back down, as well as the power to ultimately do away with their decaying rule.

The struggle in defense of undocumented immigrants is crucial for the unity of the proletariat, particularly in construction but more generally in industries that use temporary workers on a large scale. The proletariat must fight against all maneuvers by the capitalists and their government to divide workers by ethnicity, race, sex or sexual orientation. Most of the minority high school students who are targets of racist cop violence have papers and were born in France. Many of their older brothers and sisters are part of the proletariat, largely toiling in the most precarious, worst paid and lowest status jobs.

That directly poses the question of a fight for full-time, permanent jobs for all through redividing the available work among all with no loss in pay. This situation cries out for a new union leadership that will not cave in to the bosses or accept new sacrifices in the name of “saving French industry,” a revolutionary leadership forged in opposition to the sellout leaders who called for voting for Hollande. Such a leadership would refuse to play by the bosses’ rules and not limit itself to what the bosses are ready to grant. It would fight to satisfy the vital needs of the working class. If capitalism cannot satisfy these demands, let it perish! The workers movement must defend minority youth! For worker/immigrant mobilizations to crush the fascists!

As revolutionary Marxists, our task is not to advise the government nor to beg it to adjust its policies to favor the workers and oppressed. But we welcome all gains the workers are able to wrest from the capitalists through their struggles. Our task is to fight to build a workers party modeled on the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, which led the only victorious socialist revolution in history to date. This party would be a “tribune of the people” that denounces all forms of oppression, no matter the class or social layer of the victims, whether Roma, gays, etc. The ICL fights for socialist revolution and its international extension. This is the only road to building a society of abundance for all on the basis of a collectivized planned economy and the power of workers councils. It will take a socialist revolution to put an end once and for all to exploitation, poverty and racist oppression. For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Obamacare Puts Squeeze on Working People For Socialized Medicine—Quality Health Care for All! 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.

 

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Brief notes on the history of the Left Fraction (British Section Of Trotsky's Fourth International

...somebody, Raymond Chaillinor I believe, wrote a very well-written book, the name of which escapes me right now about the stillborn nature of British communism coming after the First World War and gave lots of reasons from the late blooming of an independent labor party in Britain to the "Irish Question" and then some. If the British Communist Party was stillborn then, as detailed here, any left opposition, any Trotskyist opposition would face those same problems, the problem for our purposes of cadre selection and education.  

 

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 worthwhile from the chaff.
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Brief notes on the history of the Left Fraction

The following article was written by, Harry Selby in or around 1964 as an internal document of the Left Fraction, which was at that time publishing the monthly paper Politics. The Left Fraction ceased its activities in 1967. This article is interesting in that it gives a view of the history, of Trotskyism in Britain that is entirely, different to any, so far published, especially, in respect of the conduct of the Trotskyists during the Second World War and the role of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International A similar view was expressed by, the exiled Spanish Trotskyist Grandizo Munis, see Munis and James Cannon, Defense policy, in the Minneapolis Trial, International Bulletin, June 1942. Other material on the Trotskyist movement and the Second World War will be published in Revolutionary History. Details on the Left Fraction during the 1940s are contained in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, London, 1987, pp.41-42, 106-108 and 145-149.

Harry, Selby, who had been expelled from Glasgow Labour Party, on more than one occasion, later. accepted nomination as the Labour candidate for Glasgow Govan when it became vacant in 1973. Losing the by-election to Scottish National Party, leader, Margo Macdonald, he won the seat in the February, 1974 general election and increased his majority in the subsequent general election in the October of that year. He died in January 1984.

The Left Fraction, British Section of the Fourth International (In Opposition) is the development of the struggle commenced by Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist disrupters of the world revolution and their successors in the ranks of the FI.
The Fourth International was founded in September 1938 at the instigation of Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. The history of this development can be found in articles written by Pablo in the Fourth International and in a pamphlet together with the thesis published at that time. There is no need then to go into details here when all the relevant facts can be got elsewhere. But there is one outstanding part in the history by Pablo and that is his exaggeration of the part played by the “Trotskyists” in this country during the war. The part played by the British Section in the struggle against the war was pitiful and completely barren. The reason for this was the defencist and opportunist policy pursued by the “Trotskyists” as will be understood better when the details of the history are expressed.
As a consequence of the inauguration of the Fourth International a fusion of groupings expressing revolutionary and anti-Communist Party policies and calling themselves Left Oppositionists brought about the formation of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). This was composed in the main of tendencies which had been advocating revolutionary policies inside the Labour Party, the ILP and others who had been openly advocating Trotskyist ideas at street corners and by selling papers. The RSL was recognised as the British Section of the FI and all members and groups placed their publications and resources at the service of the leading body of the RSL in conformity with Bolshevik practice. Minority rights were respected as were differences of tactic. An entry tactic was agreed upon and the RSL turned to work inside the Labour Party, it being accepted that the ILP had failed to develop any further to the left. A concession was allowed for a period to those who did not wish to enter the LP and two papers were published, one ostensibly for sale inside the LP and the other for sale to the public. From the outset an error was made in allowing a minority to have rights outside the organisation. But since it was to be for a limited period only it was felt that no great harm would be done and that those who subscribed to open work would be won round to an acceptance through experience of the true nature of the struggle.
Two groups found themselves unable to take advantage of the concession, the Lane Group and the Lee Group (Workers International League (WIL), both of which refused to hand over to the newly appointed leadership their resources as did the other groupings. In other words they rejected democratic centralism and Bolshevism. The Lane group had little influence outside of one London area and soon departed the political scene. The WIL (Lee Group) had among its leading members, Haston, Grant, Healy and Levy, all of whom had a CP background and showed all the characteristics of the policy referred to as third Period Stalinism. That is the policy of attacking everyone who did not accept the CP as being fascists of various kinds. Labour Party leaders were social-fascists, Trotskyists were Trotsky-fascists, etc. As a result of this policy the CPs succeeded in not only isolating themselves from the working class but in demoralising them as well. Unity was made impossible by such attacks on the accepted leaders of the workers and stupid appeals to the workers to unite from below which split the advanced elements from the more backward. As a consequence of the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the working class parties in Germany the CPs acting on the instructions from the Stalinists in Moscow changed the line to one of allying themselves with all “progressive” forces - not only the erstwhile social-fascists but even liberal bourgeois were now regarded as being comrades. From one demoralising policy to another. Bourgeois democracy became the end and all those who did not accept the need to defend this conception became in turn the “supporters of fascism”. A complete reversal of the previous position. Stalinists found themselves alongside social-democrats defending capitalism. This was too much for many of the most active rank and file propagandists of Third Periodism and some of them tagged on to the tendency going towards Trotskyism just as after the Hungarian Rising in 1957 a number of leading members defected and without shedding their Stalinism came into the periphery of the Fourth. Among those who rejected the new “Popular Front” line were the aforesaid leaders of the WIL. Not only did this grouping refuse to accept the discipline of the Fourth International it continued to call itself Trotskyist and internationalist when it was neither. It was condemned not only by the RSL but by the whole International as being disruptive, opportunist and a menace. Nevertheless it continued to intrude into the affairs of the RSL and the FI. Unfortunately all of the members of the FI were not so disciplined themselves and instead of sending the WIL packing they continued to regard it as a sympathetic body. Because of their intense activity the WIL gave the impression of sincerity which fooled many people into believing them to be Trotskyists. Even the IS and the editor’s of the International accepted them. Meanwhile inside the RSL, because of the war which commenced almost immediately on the morrow of the founding of the RSL, all the latent tendencies which had kept the various tendencies apart in the past. expressed themselves. The pressure of war and the isolation of the revolutionary cadres affected many. We had therefore the expression of pacifist tendencies, both plain and revolutionary as well as the exposition of the classical Leninist position of desiring the defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie. A revolutionary class in an imperialist war desires the defeat of its national army in order to utilise the situation of the humbling of its masters to overthrow them irrespective of the nature of the enemy.
Inside, the. RSL the slogan of “Arming the Workers” was challenged as being Defencist, Similarly was the slogan of “Deep Shelters” (See Bolshevism or Defencism). Both these slogans while. appearing to be leading the workers against the bosses were in fact directing the struggle of the workers into defencist channels..
As a result of this, the Leicester group of the RSL issued a document calling upon the RSL to rescue Bolshevism from its disrupters. This opened up inside the RSL a discussion on the nature of the war and the role of the party. The CC dominated by the weak centrists denied the elementary rights of democratic centralism and used all kinds, of evasions to cover up for its anti-Bolshevik position. The Centre had previously shown its disregard for democratic centralism, by trying to put an interpretation on it that the leadership had the right to change policy. As a result of this struggle from 1940 on the elements inside the RSL crystallised round three tendencies, the Left Fraction, based on Bolshevism or Defencism, the Centre occupying a position of balance between the Left and Right Wing which had openly come out in favour of a Defencist position similar to that adopted by the WIL. Confusion was made worse by the fact that the International Secretariat (IS) based in the USA followed a defencist line put forward by the SWP there. This was based on a travesty called the American Military Policy which purported to be the line advocated by Trotsky, It was not so. Trotsky had formulated a policy to be used in the USA based upon the non-entry of the USA into the world conflict. This was a policy which placed the emphasis on the working class getting arms and training by demanding this from the capitalist class as a transitional demand during peacetime and the emphasis was that the training and arms would be used for the defence of the workers not against a foreign but their own bourgeoisie. But the US “Trotskyists” turned this into a demand that the workers be armed to fight Hitler since the capitalists were not good at doing so. This was openly expressed in the defence position at the Minneapolis trial of leading members of the SWP. Munis, of the Spanish section in exile, objected along similar lines to that of the Left Fraction. Unfortunately no one else in the International took up the struggle. The WIL adopted word for word the line of the SWP and the IS as they did on every other erroneous one in order to win the support of the International for recognition as the British Section. The Right Wing inside the RSL was in constant touch with the WIL, one of the leaders, Lawrence, actually taking a job as organiser for the WIL with which he could see nothing wrong. By such means the kernel of British FI policy was eliminated
The Reconstitution Conference, was held on 1 January 1944 and the, motion to fuse, was carried by 74 with the Left abstaining with 29.
In this way the British Section of the Fourth International was liquidated into the WIL. The Left Fraction, accepted all International instructions under protest pointing out what would inevitably happen.
The subsequent Conference took place between the RSL and the WIL wherein the WIL supported by the Right Wing and partially by the Centre carried all their policies and proposals into the new, PARTY (?). The Revolutionary Communist Party was launched. It was not revolutionary nor communist nor a party but it carried on the fight against the Left Fraction. It adopted the open party tactic spending all its time attacking the CP and the LP outside of both of them. Needless to say its progress was negligible. It set about building up oppositional organisations to the existing Shop Stewards movement even further isolating themselves from the working class. By this time the war was, as far as this country was concerned, past the Defeatist stage, the weight of US arms was telling and Germany while still holding out was on the run. Nevertheless the adventurers inside the Fourth International were not content to smash the RSL. They now wanted to smash the Left Fraction. The Left Fraction had set itself up as a disciplined grouping with two professionals and it continued to print the Militant Miner. This was as a consequence of the fact that the name of the Pioneer Publishing Association was in the hands of a member of the Left Fraction. The Left had been producing the official paper in this country based on the LP tactic and used the allocation of newsprint (which was rationed) to build up support for the policies of the FI inside the ranks of the organised workers. The centre was mainly in the coalfields and the paper was used on behalf of the miners.
The new RCP wanted the paper ration for their own ends and the Left Fraction refused through their nominee to disrupt the work of the paper. Ultimately the RCP acted and demanded the Left act in a disciplined way (the RCP conception of discipline) which meant that the Left should desert the miners. They were offered a duplicated sheet instead of the printed paper. But the Left Fraction placed the primary needs of the International above the demands of the usurpers of the RCP.
Arising out of this act and of a further act of where the Left Fraction refused permission to two of its fraction members to be withdrawn from LP work to do open work for which they were not expelled but threatened, etc., without charges being preferred, the Left Fraction was called upon to give an undertaking not to break discipline in future. This the Left could not do since signing such an undertaking was an admission of guilt in the past.
The RCP taking full advantage of its power expelled the Left Fraction. This the Left had forecast at the time of the Fusion. It was only a question of when and how. In actual fact one of the conditions that the WIL had laid down to its allies inside the RSL was that the Left be expelled. So it came as no surprise. Stalinist gangsters do not change their methods. Theirs is the job of destroying Bolshevism.
In September 1945 the Left Fraction was expelled again. It once again appealed to the IS but got no reply or satisfaction. The Left had taken full cognisance of being so excluded from the British Section of the FI and that it would have to reconstitute itself as the FI section in opposition. We recognised the degeneration that had taken place inside the FI itself mirrored by the RCP during the war was not confined to this country. On no issue did the leadership of the opportunist and indisciplined elements of the WIL/RCP cross swords with the IS whose support it was seeking in order to get recognition for the purpose of destroying Bolshevism entirely in this country.
The Left Fraction then set about reconstituting itself as an independent entity, fighting to build the British Section of the FI and at the same time fighting on a world scale to get rid of the disrupters of the IS. It appealed to the World Party and to the national sections but failed to get any response. The World Party was too busy trying to build sections at any price and of any kind that it had also given up any pretence of Bolshevism. It continued to deny elementary rights to maltreated minorities, but nevertheless it had not as a party failed the workers, so we continued to give it our support.
Meanwhile the RCP was undergoing upheavals internally. It had the authority and it had to determine tactics. It split open over the question of Entrism versus open work. Since they were no good at either, in their open work they were ultra-left Stalinists and in their entry work they were bad centrists. So it was only a question of time till a split occurred. The Open tacticians led by Grant disappeared, the Entrists led by Healy found themselves with a raiding tactic inside the LP. They sought after positions as councillors and MPs under the belief that by being better sham-lefts they could advance the struggle. Ultimately they became undercover agents for the Tribune. Their latest end is known as the Socialist Labour League whose adventurist tactics once again befoul the name of Trotskyism. 8
The Left Fraction left to its own set about establishing itself, carrying out the LP Tactic in conformity with the conception worked out that the struggle for the revolutionary party would be fought inside the LP in the forthcoming period for reasons explained elsewhere (see Once More the Tactic).
A National Committee was set up with our two professionals and a duplicated paper The Voice of Labour 10 was produced. After the first two issues two of the leading members Mercer11 and Selby were expelled from the LP for contributing to the paper. The expulsion was an act of bureaucratic violence against the elementary rights of the members of the working class. As a consequence of this attack by the bureaucrats of the LP differences arose inside the Fraction as to what the attack was and what should be the best method of fighting it. These differences were ultimately to prove fundamental. A section led by JLR considered that the leading members, the professionals were guilty of desertion by their attitude to the attack and by their non-production of the Voice of Labour on the scheduled date. An extraordinary Conference was held but no definite decision was arrived at, rather a compromise which while condemning the professionals for their mistake did not condemn them as being guilty of desertion. A re-arrangement was made and the centre was transferred to London but the seeds of disunity had been planted and general fatigue took its toll. The members of the Fraction had undergone a struggle for years inside the RSL then the RCP and now flung into a fight against the right wing of the Labour Party on the basis of an elementary right in this demoralised condition proved too much for most. Internal disputes reached a level of personal recrimination. Together with this differences arose as to the nature of the states being set up by the Stalinists in the occupied territories, producing a polemic which was not conducted in the friendliest of terms. The Fraction finally collapsed when the leadership tried to direct the Fraction into the newly-formed Socialist Fellowship. This organisation was set up by some members of the LP – erstwhile Lefts who were feeling the growing frustration of the Labour Party in office which to them was departing from “socialist” policies. This was in 1948. The Healyites jumped on this bandwagon and the leaders of the Left advised the Fraction to join. Since this was in contradiction to the policy of the Left previously determined a conflict expressed itself. The Fraction split, those who joined the Fellowship sinking themselves entirely into it. 12 Therein the differences between the tendencies expressed themselves, some ending up in the CP as an “opposition” others faded out of politics and the rest succumbed to Healy. Ultimately the Fellowship died, the Socialist Outlook, the paper, was banned and the rump set about selling Tribune which used their efforts to increase its circulation in return for an occasional article or letter from the Healyites as payment.
Meanwhile the remainder of the Fraction, which had constituted a majority, deprived of the resources which had been taken over entirely by the professionals and no doubt given to Healy, was in great difficulty. They, dependent on the professionals and without much technical ability, crumbled. Attempts were made to continue by printing leaflets to be handed out at LP meetings, etc., but the lack of morale as well as frustration finally caused most of the members to give up the fight.
With great difficulty the spark was kept alive. But as soon as new contacts were made, Hardie in conjunction with Coms Low, Gilmour and Brannigan 13 set about rebuilding the Fraction on the basis and tradition of the Old Left Fraction in its struggles inside the RSL and Seq. New comrades were developing and Hardie 14 who had been in constant receipt of FI material was approached by the IS in the person of Tampoe 15 of the Ceylon Section. We were invited to join the newly reformed British Section of the Fl. This was being done under the leadership of Grant. We objected to Grant’s past and pointed out that we could not join unless we were permitted to conduct the LP Tactic as we saw it and not as Grant and Co did. This was accepted by Tampoe. We pointed out the indisciplined position but since it was imperative to try to rebuild the Left Fraction we were prepared to tolerate the indiscipline of the IS.
For four years during which we tried to get the new RSL to act as principled Bolsheviks, the Glasgow Group, now joined by Nottingham comrades, set about preparing the Left Fraction. We polemicised inside the RSL for the LP Tactic but the dead hand of Grant and his RCP past prevented progress. The Left Fraction broke off association with the RSL and set about building itself up. We tried then to work with the International Group 16 based in Nottingham since they had also split from the RSL. But they, like Grant, had a bad past which they were incapable of overcoming. They had come from the CP and had no conception of Bolshevism at all. They were completely opportunist, lacking even the slightest idea of discipline. After one year during which they failed to reply to Once More the Tactic we broke off having decided that groups with such pasts could only be a hindrance. From then on we built on our own. We commenced to produce Politics. We set up a national organisation and the Left Fraction, the inheritor of Bolshevism in this country, was once again in being. The Fourth International now has a viable group in this country which while it may not yet have the status of a national section, has the tradition, has the capacity and has the will to be it. We are carrying the struggle once again to the international plane and it is hoped that this time we shall get at least a bearing.
Our history is one of constant struggle, of expression of differences, of polemic. We were born to fight for clarity and so long as we continue to fight for principles there is little doubt that the Left Fraction will succeed in its original task, of building the Revolutionary Party of the working class, not only here but throughout the world.
Harry Selby
1. Pablo: Michel Raptis. then International Secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. See his series of articles Twenty Years of the Fourth International, Fourth International, Spring, Summer and Autumn 1958 and M. Pablo, The Fourth International – What It Is, What It Aims At, Fourth International pamphlet, 1958.
2. The Lane Group: the Revolutionary Workers League.
3. A reference to Jock Haston, Ted Grant, Gerry Healy and Sam Levy. Comrade Levy has informed us that he was not previously in the CP nor was he a leading member of the WIL. Grant was never in the CP either.
4. Bolshevism or Defencism, an internal document of the RSL, May 1941, written by John Robinson and Will Dillon,
5. A reference to A Circle or a Party?, published by the Leicester group of the RSL, August 1941.
6. John Lawrence, an RSL leader, associated with the Trotskyist Opposition within it.
7. The Militant Miner was the RSL’s monthly paper. previously Youth Militant and the Militant, subsequently the Militant Scottish Miner.
8. The Socialist Labour League was formed in 1959 and became the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973.
9. Once More the Tactic, an RSL internal document produced by the Left Fraction.
10. The Voice of Labour was the duplicated external paper of the Left Fraction.
11. Tom Mercer, a leader of the Left Fraction.
12. Tom Mercer and Roddy Hood joined the Socialist Fellowship and Healy’s group the ‘Club’.
13. Low, Gilmour and Brannigan were cadre names for Selby, Brian Biggins and another, unidentified, Left Fraction leader.
14. Hardie: probably another cadre name for Selby
15. P.B. Tampoe was a leader of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party – Revolutionary
16. The International Group was comprised of a number of ex-CP members who had joined the Trotskyist movement after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.