From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broue -In Honor Of Slain Trotskyist Leader Rudolf Klement
 

…Most social and political organizations, and communist vanguard parties, national sections and international configurations alike above all, depend on the education and preservation of cadre for continuity and for preparation for the tasks at hand. For the revolutionary surge in the final analysis. Occasional militancy in good times by individuals who then go off and something else does not made revolutions in the modern era, successful ones anyway. (Yes, I have resurrected the Bolshevik-Menshevik split here, and with good reason.) That was why Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, hell even Kautsky and Bernstein, stressed the role of cadre. And that is where the sliver of cadre who adhered to the Fourth International, or rather the decimation of that sliver of cadre, including the murders of Trotsky and the man honored here, Rudolf Clements, in the late 1930s tells a lot of the story about the essential stillbirth of that organization. A hard lesson to draw, but a necessary one.     

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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Rudolf Klement

This short biographical sketch, or rather obituary, of Klement is translated by Ted Crawford from a piece entitled Quelques Proches Collaborateurs de Trotsky by Pierre Broué in the Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No.1, January, 1979, and is published herewith the author’s permission for the first time in English.

Rudolf Alois Klement was born in 1908. Originally active in the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) he was student of philosophy at Hamburg in 1933 and from 1932 was active in the Left Opposition when Georg Jungclas, the leader of the local group asked him to go to Prinkipo to replace Jan Fraenkel and then Otto Schüssler at about the same time that Jean van Heijenoort went there. Klement could already speak five languages and immediately started to learn Russian: six months later he could do German translations from the Russian, including particularly difficult pieces, which LD thought “good”. He arrived at Prinkipo at the beginning of May 1933 and left with the Old Man in mid-July since he was allowed to stay in France with Trotsky. He then stayed with him for the whole of the latter’s legal residence in France, first in the village of Saint-Palais and afterwards in the villa Ker-Monique at Barbizon. He was one of the delegates of the LCI at the “Pre-conference of the four” on 30 December 1933 in Paris and took the minutes of the meeting which have recently been found in the Sneevliet papers in Amsterdam. At Barbizon he often drove into Paris to make contacts and to meet the courier who arrived with the mail at the office in the Rue de Louvre. We know that on 17 April his motorbike lights failed. The Police at Ponthierry arrested him and then discovered that he had not got proper documentation for his motorbike -unaware of Trotsky’s presence, they had been watching the house full of suspicious foreigners whom they feared were about to disturb the peace of the good people of Barbizon. It was this incident that revealed to the press and the public the presence of Trotsky at Barbizon and this then served as the pretext for his expulsion from France, which was ordered on 18 April but which was only put into effect when he left for Norway on 18 June 1935.
Klement did not accompany Trotsky in his wanderings after the latter left France but stayed in Paris with a short break in Brussels before coming back to the French capital to take over the headquarters of the International Secretariat, of which he had become the administrative secretary while frequently changing his pseudonym (Frédéric, Ludwig, Walter Steen, Camille, Adolphe). He did an enormous amount of work both in translating, corresponding with the sections, keeping the files and writing articles for the press and internal bulletins. As one of the leaders of the IKD (International Communists of Germany) in exile he fought against the Johre-Fischer group and ran from afar the editorial work of Der Einzige Weg. Since he was deeply involved in the internal work of the organisation he was somewhat isolated from the local French activists. The Pole, Herschl Mendel (Stockfisch), remembers him with affection in his autobiography. The portrait painted by Georges Vereeken, “Tall and pale, slightly stooped, an unexpressive face, impenetrable, with dull, half closed eyes” is at the same time both similar to, yet rather different from, that of Gérard Rosenthal: “A large man, sharp featured, rather pale, a little bent … with a short-sighted gaze behind his glasses … like his smile a little forced. He spoke little and when he did it was slowly and with an effort. He put up with discomfort without complaint. He was reserved and withdrawn, so much so that this revolutionary seemed rather timid. He was precise and tidy.”
Absolutely loyal to Trotsky he fought against LD’s adversaries in the movement, Vereeken, Raymond Molinier and Henricus Sneevliet, who all used him as a convenient Aunt Sally. In his polemics he was hard and sharp if not savage. His risky position as both an immigrant and political refugee together with the weight of his responsibilities condemned him to almost complete clandestinity. He did not seem to know how to protect himself against shifty individuals in his personal relationships – the Lithuanian Kauffman who lived with him, and who disappeared at the same time, was in all probability “the man from Grodno” whom Herschl Mendel met with Klement and whom Mendel regarded as highly suspect. After the death of Leon Sedov and then that of Erwin Wolf, the circle regrouped round him and he was really the only one who drove forward the work of the International Secretariat and in particular the task of preparing for the Founding Conference of the Fourth International. In retrospect we can perceive the shadow of the GPU close to him at this time: first when he met the agent of the GPU, Mercader, who under the name of Mornard posed as an American sympathiser or, secondly at the beginning of July when he had his briefcase stolen on the Metro which contained documents on the Fourth International. He does not seem to have sensed his danger. On 12 July he left his French comrades. Several days later, worried not to have seen him, several of them went to his flat at Maisons-Alfort where he lived under the name of Roger Bertrand: all was in order and the table was laid for an uneaten meal.
On 16 July, Jean Rous, Pierre Naville, Sneevliet and Vereeken received copies of a letter which Trotsky also got on 4 August. All had been posted in Perpignan. It seemed to be in his handwriting but the signature was a pseudonym that he had long ceased to use and it contained several possible minor clues which Trotsky thought pointed to the presence of the GPU. Later macabre events seem to disprove the fable of a "political break” with Trotsky: for on the 26th a headless human trunk with arms was fished out of the Seine at Meulan and two days later a sack containing the legs. Despite the sarcasms of l’Humanitéand the averted gaze of others who should have known better, these were the mortal remains of Klement. This story is too well known to require further elaboration.
Some years ago in his book La Guépeou dans le movement trotskyiste, Georges Vereeken opened a posthumous case against Klement which ended with the verdict, “Rudolf Klement - Agent? Certainement un lache”. None of this carries any conviction whatsoever. The only certainty is that Klement was murdered because he had been Trotsky’s secretary and a member of the International Secretariat and his murderers have never been discovered.
Pierre Broué
1. Georg Jungclas (1902-1975) an active in young socialist in Altona in 1916, in the KPD in 1919, played a notable part in the Hamburg insurrection of 1923. Expelled from the KPD in 1927, then a member of the Leninbund. He took part in September 1930 in the founding of the United Left Opposition in Germany (VLO) and led that group in Hamburg until his emigration to Copenhagen in 1933.
2. A full report of the discovery is given in Oeuvres3, novembre 1933-avril 1934, pp.132-149.
3. The police report is in the Trotsky dossier in the French National Archives.
4. Hersch Mendel, Stockfisch (1890-1968) was also known as Katz, Nathan, Belman, Victor, Karl, etc. A Jewish worker and Old Bolshevik from Poland, he founded the Left Opposition in Poland in 1932. He emigrated to Israel after the war where he wrote his autobiography, Zichrones fun a Yiddischer Revolutsioner. He had lived for a time in Paris in 1934 and returned in 1938 just before Klement’s murder.
5. Georges Verecken, La Guépeou dans le movement trotskyiste, Paris, Pensee Universelle, 1975 p.244. [English translation The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, London, 1976]
6. Gérard Rosenthal, Advocat de Trotsky, Paris, R Laffont 1975, p,276. A facsimile of this letter has been published in the relevant volume of the Oeuvres.
8. Letter from Trotsky - 18 July 1938 - which has been published in the Oeuvres. [English translation: The Disappearance of Rudolf Klement, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38, New York 1976 p63. See also A ‘Letter’ from Rudolf Klement, ibid., pp.399-400 and On the Fate of Rudolf Klement, ibid., pp.401-409.]
9. For the full account of the Klement affair read the relevant chapter in Gérard Rosenthal’s book which deals in a definitive way with this whole question.
10. Vereeken, op. cit., pp.244-321. “Rudolf Klement – An Agent? Certainly a Careless Individual.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WRITE LYNNE!

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

 

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Markin comment:

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

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

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

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

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

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The Socialist League (Great Britain)

...sometimes it is hard to figure out among the many groups that have historically claimed kinship with the efforts of the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in his efforts to save the Russian Revolution and the international one as well who was serious and who was merely posturing. No question the degeneration of the Russian Revolution under Stalin left many sincere leftists rudderless but as Trotsky found out, and a situation that had him scratching his head, or worse, putting together a cadre organization in those days was tough, tough (and deadly) work.   

 

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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The Socialist League

Reg Groves, born in 1908, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the mid-1920s and was a member of the Balham Group, a number of CPGB members critical of the party leadership in the early 1930s. Contacting the Trotskyist movement in 1931, Groves was expelled from the CPGB in 1932 and was subsequently, a member of the Communist League and the Marxist League. In the meantime he wrote material for the Socialist League and was elected to its executive in 1936. After its dissolution Groves stood as the Labour candidate in the 1938 Aylesbury by-election – a story, in itself! His account of his break from Stalinism appears in his book The Balham Group, London, 1974. The following article was intended to be the preface to a collection of Socialist League documents, which, however, was not published.

The Socialist League held its inaugural meeting on Sunday 2 October 1932 at the Co-operative Hall, Leicester, on the day before the Labour Party’s annual Conference opened in the same town.
It was at Leicester, too, nearly five years later, that the Socialist League held its final Conference, and brought its short life to an end. Its brief existence had begun in the wake of world depression, and the ignominious fall of Britain’s Labour Government, and its life had spanned years of momentous events, uncertainty and confusion; years that saw German and Italian Fascism and Japanese militarism advancing triumphantly, saw the most powerful of Europe’s social democratic and communist parties routed and crushed without serious resistance, saw the causes of democracy and socialism everywhere in retreat. And, adding to the perplexities and discomforts of the time, saw an already repressive regime in Russia embarking on a series of government and ruling party purges, imprisonments, trials and executions accompanied by the vilification of revolutionaries and of revolutionary ideas and traditions not only in Russia but in every place where Russian-controlled communist parties operated.
The scale and pace of events – so cumulatively ominous in what was portended – may explain why some who helped to found the SL to promote a socialism based firmly on the needs, struggles and aspirations of the working people, free from obligations to, or entanglements with, capitalist parties, institutions and beliefs, and committed to a reaffirmation of the internationalism of the common peoples, should wilfully destroy the organisation they had created and go on to become champions of alliance and coalition with capitalist parties, and advocates of minor reform instead of socialist revolution.
Explain it, maybe, but not excuse it. Regarded by many then and since as merely another unsuccessful attempt to convert the British Labour Party to a leftwing policy, some of us looked upon the SL differently; and saw its dissolution as yet one more defeat for groups struggling for the survival and rehabilitation of revolutionary socialist ideas and ideals.
For the bureaucrats of social democracy and communism could on occasion be at one at least in this – the determination to rid themselves of the Marxist and social democrat left. Not that such groups were numerically important, but they did echo, though feebly, hopes and ideals deeply rooted in the thoughts and affections of labouring peoples everywhere, and inimical to all that official social democracy and communism had come to represent. To some of us, therefore, it seemed useful to renovate and restate these beliefs, before the flood waters of world war engulfed all and the last landmarks were washed away. The dissolution of the Socialist League can be regarded then, as an act of immolation on the altar of the “United Front”, or as an of murder. Judgement on this will depend upon the estimate made of the SL at the time when it was sidled by its leaders into the Unity Campaign – was it in process of becoming a group of revolutionary socialists or was it no more than a small, left-wing section of the Labour Party?
Towards the making of an accurate assessment, these documents and notes are offered. The limitations of the collection will be clear to everyone – it is a personal one, accumulated day-by-day at the time, and put together in haphazard fashion for use and reference in current campaigns and controversies; it is too factional, and here and there too local, too much of one area. It may, however, catch up the mood of the time all the better because of such limitations, and for this reason everything in the box has been included. For greater clarity and completeness, some missing key documents have been replaced by copies.
To understand the genesis of the SL it will help to know something of the structure of the British Labour Party, and a little of its history.
From its foundation in 1900 (as the Labour Representation Committee) the Labour Party was a federation of trade unions and socialist societies, allied to promote labour representation and legislation in Parliament and on municipal bodies.
Its organisation was made up of a yearly conference, a national executive and local committees, all consisting of representatives from the affiliated unions and societies. Not until 1918 were individual LP membership sections established, as part of the party’s organisation in the Parliamentary electoral districts. But local and national control of the party continued to be by local councils of delegates, by a national delegate conference, and by executive committees and officials elected or appointed by these bodies. The affiliated trade union members outnumbered the individual members by around six to one – union votes (in the hands of union leaders) controlled the annual. conference decisions, the policy of the party, the, elections to the executive committee; union money constituted the major part of the party’s funds.
The individual membership sections were organised primarily in wards, that is, electoral sub-districts; and were often little more than fund-raising, subscription-collecting, vote-canvassing groups. Active political life was to be found mostly in the socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party, by far the largest and most important of which was the Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893 and chief promoter of the socialist-trade union alliance that brought the Labour Party into existence.
As the active partner in the political life of the movement, the ILP stimulated debate and discussion in the movement, and its addiction to, the promotion of specific policies brought frequent clashes with the Parliamentary and trade union leaders.
With Labour’s electoral victory in 1929, when, with 287 seats won it became the largest single party in the House of Commons, and took office though without an absolute majority over the two other parties, conflict between the LP leaders and the ILP grew. As industrial stagnation spread with world depression, and unemployment in Britain rose to two million, then to nearly three; and, as the Labour Cabinet and most of its MPs clung to the economic orthodoxies of the very capitalism that was in collapse, and retreated abjectly from even minor reforms and relief measures, the more intransigent ILPers in the House, and a few rebel Labour MPs, spoke and voted against the Government, and were roundly abused and denounced for it by all the Cabinet Ministers and almost all the Labour MPs.
Financial crisis, manufactured and manipulated by the very people the Government were trying to placate, and connived at or acquiesced to by Prime Minister MacDonald and Chancellor of the Exchequer Snowden, split the Cabinet, with more than half the Ministers still prepared to abase themselves before capital and enforce the cuts in living standards and social services demanded by British and foreign financiers, and Liberal and Conservative politicians. In August 1931, the Labour Government ended with barely a whimper, when MacDonald and Snowden and a few others formed a coalition government with the two other parties to enforce the cuts.
An apologetic, confused, and hopelessly compromised Labour Party met a crushing defeat at the polls in October, its MPs reduced to 46. Five ILPers only were returned, all intransigents, and these rejected attempts to curtail their right to speak and vote freely, particularly as these attempts were made by the very men who had supported and applauded the MacDonald administration, and who were now trying to refurbish their reputations by bawling abuse at the renegade leaders. At its conference held in 1932, the ILP decided by 255 votes to 120 to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. The dissenting minority seceded from the ILP, determined to remain in the LP.
What had been wrong, they argued, was the MacDonald leadership and its policy of slow, piece-by-piece reform – then known as “gradualism”, though some called it “MacDonaldism”, thereby diverting criticism and blame from themselves and their colleagues on to the departed leaders. What was needed to make certain that gradualism had departed with MacDonald was a campaign to win over the LP to a detailed, socialist policy for every public problem and every economic and financial eventuality, and so commit any future Labour Government in advance to a socialist programme. Socialism was, of course, variously interpreted, but to most of those urging such policies on the labour movement it meant State control and planning in varying proportions; and at that time planners, with their import boards, export boards, investment boards, public corporations and the rest, were finding encouragement in the reported successes of Russia’s Five Year Plan, and were to find further support for then arguments in Roosevelt’s New Deal Middle class socialists, holding such views. wanted an organisation in the LP to fill the gap left by the departed ILP.
Suitable organisations seemed to be at hand, ready made for the situation: the New Fabian Research Bureau, to research and present discussion material on policy, with Clement Attlee as Chairman; and the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, with powerful trade union chief Ernest Bevin as Chairman, to disseminate in pamphlet and lecture form the results of such material through local branches, had been founded in the winter of 1930/31 by GDH Cole and others. By not sponsoring or nominating Parliamentary candidates nor putting critical resolutions to LP Conference, Cole and his colleagues hoped that the SSIP would avoid the conflict with authority that had driven the ILP from the LP.
Cole’s own account is relevant here: “A section of the ILP which desired to remain inside the Labour Party called on the SSIP to abandon the NFRB to join them in making a new inclusive socialist society, affiliated to the Labour Party, to replace the ILP … The NFRB … refusing to become involved in ‘politics’ outside the sphere of research, maintained its separate existence … SSIP, on the other hand, being a propagandist body with branches, was placed in a difficulty, for it either had to come to terms with the ex-ILP group or to enter into rivalry with them in a field in which there could hardly be room for both to do good work. SSIP accordingly agreed to negotiate; but difficulties at once arose. The ex-ILP group was determined on having a body which would be affiliated to the Labour Party and free to engage in Parliamentary activities; and it was also determined not to accept Ernest Bevin as Chairman of any combined body, and to insist on Frank Wise … I regarded it as indispensable to carry Bevin into the new body … I accordingly voted against the fusion of SSIP with the Wise group; but I was outvoted and agreed to go with the majority – a yielding of which I was soon to repent … At the time, however, I tried to make the best of a bad business by giving full support to the Socialist League; I spoke hopefully at its inaugural Conference at Leicester and for a year served on the Executive. By the end of the year a number of us had become convinced that it was heading for disaster very like that which had befallen the ILP by putting forward a programme of its own in opposition to that of the Labour Party, instead of trying to work for improving the official Labour Party programme. I resigned …”
The day after the inauguration of the SL, the LP Conference opened. Sorties by members of the new organisation brought modest successes.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, who had resigned from the Labour Government in protest at its supineness, persuaded the Conference to decide “that the leaders of the next Labour Government and the Parliamentary Labour Party be instructed by the National Conference that, on assuming office, either with or without power, definite socialist legislation must be immediately promulgated, and that the party should stand or fall in the House of Commons on the principles in which it has faith”.
A policy report from the Executive on currency and finance, moved by Hugh Dalton, recommended public ownership of the Bank of England, but omitted reference to joint stock banks. Frank Wise moved an amendment that joint stock banks be nationalised as well. Seconded by Stafford Cripps, this was carried by a narrow majority. Reports on the “socialisation” of transport and power were withdrawn by the Executive for further consideration after protests from delegates that no provision had been made in the plans for workers’ representation on the governing boards.
At its first National Conference, held in Derby at Whitsun, 1933, the SL began shaping its constitution and rules, and its programme for the campaign in the LP. At Hastings, in October, SL spokesmen secured support among the delegates to the LP Conference for a number of its proposals. One theme, discussed at the SL’s Conference, and dealt with frequently by Stafford Cripps in lectures and publications, was brought forward by him at the LP Conference – the next Labour Government was instructed to proceed at once to abolish the House of Lords, and to pass into law an Emergency Powers Act, giving it authority to “takeover or regulate the financial machine, and to put into force any measures that the situation may require for the immediate control or socialisation of industry and for the safeguarding of the food supply and other necessities”; to revise Parliamentary procedure “so that a rapid transition to socialism may be carried through constitutionally, and dictatorship avoided”; and “an economic plan for industry, finance and foreign trade designed rapidly to end the present system and thus to abolish unemployment and poverty”.
This was not opposed directly by the Executive, nor was it rejected by the Conference. It, and a whole series of other resolutions – for collaboration “with Russia and other socialist Governments in order to form a nucleus for international socialist co-operation”; that, “in the event of a Parliamentary Labour majority, the Government should immediately proceed to bring into operation the socialist programme on which it has been elected”; that the Executive should prepare for the next General Election, “a concise declaration of the measures which a Labour Government will endeavour to place on the Statute Book” and “produce at once a short and readable publication for popular use outlining the definite party policy in plain and unmistakeable terms” – were referred to the Executive for them to act upon. If it was plain that the labour movement was determined to commit its leaders to definite policies, it was also plain that the Executive and the leaders of the party were playing for time. It should be noted that in the electoral holocaust of October 1931, practically all the party leaders and members of the former Government had lost their seats – Cripps, Attlee and the aged Lansbury alone survived to lead the tiny group of Labour MPs against the National Government.
In the months that followed, the Nazis consolidated their power in Germany; Japanese militarism continued its expansionist activities unchecked; and in Vienna, Austrian social democratic workers went down fighting against the forces of the Austrian dictator Dolfüss, and stirred their fellow workers in the rest of Europe as no other event had done for years. In July 1934, French socialists and communists agreed to form a United Front; the Spanish parties followed suit in September. In Britain, proposals from the Communist Party for a United Front were rejected by the LP; but an uneasy agreement for united action on specific issues was reached between the ILP and the CP with the CP still applying the old tactic of “the United Front from below”, making plain its determination to split away as many ILP members as it could. (Not for some months did the British communists succeed in adjusting themselves adequately to the changes in Russian policy to United Fronts with anyone and everyone and at any price. Pollitt’s Report of January 1935, to the Central Committee probably marks the beginning, of complete change-over.)
Unemployment, and the treatment of the unemployed, remained a major issue, but in the struggle against the “National” Government’s treatment of the unemployed, LP leaders and trade union chiefs played little or no part – it took place in the streets, and it was rank-and-file socialists and trade unionists of all sections or of none who waged the war against poverty and unemployment, and against the provocative parades of Mosley's Fascists.
Cripps, Chairman of the SL following the death in November 1933, of Frank Wise, told the SL’s 1934 Whitsun Conference at Leeds, that the League’s function was now “to concentrate upon the general direction and tempo of policy rather than the detailed steps that may be necessary to achieve it” and the Conference went on to discuss, amend and approve the SL’s programme statement, Forward to Socialism. Its position now more coherently stated, its membership beginning to rise – it had reached 2,000 in the previous year – the SL prepared to make its most formidable assault of all on the policy of gradualism at the Labour Party Conference, being held at Southport in October 1934.
No less than 75 amendments (reduced at Conference to 12 composite ones) were tabled to the Executive Committee’s “comprehensive and concise statement of policy”, For Socialism and Peace. The party leaders – all former followers of MacDonald – had regained their confidence, and were now firmly in control of the Party apparatus, the big unions were backing them with votes, and the SL amendments were overwhelmingly defeated. Of key policy amendments, the one on Labour–s Aims went down by 2,146,000 to 206,000; the one on international policy, put to the vote without discussion, and defeated on a show of hands, would have been as heavily beaten had a card vote been taken; and an amendment concerned with compensation to owners of industries taken over by the State was defeated by 2,118,000 to 149,000. Labour’s policy, if now more specific, was in essence unchanged. MacDonald had departed but in the ranks of Labour his soul went marching on.
It was in the country that the Government met resistance; and new Government plans for dealing with the long-term unemployed, due to come into operation on 5 January 1935, met with such a fury of protest and so widespread a public outcry that they were withdrawn after a few weeks. While most of Labour’s leaders looked on, or disapproved, local socialists, communists, co-operators and trade unionists, together with the unemployed, led the protests; like many others, the SL members were busy in all this, and learning at least some of their revolutionary socialism in action; inside the SL’s organisation, at branch discussions, in public debate, and at its National Conference, the SL was defining its political attitude with increasing certainty.
At the SL’s 1935 Whitsun Conference, held at Bristol, the major debate was on the darkening international situation, and the growing danger of war, though time was spent also on SL policies for and activities in the trade unions, the labour parties, the co-operatives and trades councils, and among the youth. During 1934, the Russian Government had abandoned its hostility to the League of Nations. and had joined it, seeking allies and supporters among governments and public opinion in the non-fascist countries. The SL policy resolution, published subsequently as Forward Against War, whilst urging the widest possible support for Russia, distinguished quite specifically between the policy that might be right for the Russian Government, and the policy to be pursued by the workers in capitalist countries. This distinction (made even more sharply at the SL’s Conference the following year) had much relevance to subsequent events.
The SL had decided on a series of conferences and public meetings at places all over the country to arouse the labour movement to awareness of the dangers of the international situation; and to win support for SL policy of resistance to capitalist war. As Italy’s threats to Abyssinia grew more menacing, the conferences assumed an additional urgency, and were everywhere well attended. The response in London was startling – due partly to the London Trades Council’s decision to support the conference, but mainly to the urgency of the situation, for the London Trades Council’s subsequent withdrawal of its support appeared to make no difference at all to the attendance. Over 1,500 delegates from union branches, co-operative guilds, labour parties and socialist societies, packed the large Memorial Hall, and two ‘overflow’ halls, scores being turned away, unable to gain admission. Main opposition to SL policy on war resistance and on the Abyssinian crisis was led by the CP, which, in obedience to the shift in Russian Government policy, was now in favour of the League of Nations’ collective action against Italy.
So was the Labour Party. At the Brighton Labour Party Conference in October, Hugh Dalton moved the official resolution on the crisis. It called on the Government, “in co-operation with other nations represented at the Council and Assembly of the League to use all the necessary measures provided by the Covenant to prevent Italy’s unjust and rapacious attack upon the territory of a fellow member of the League” and pledged Labour’s support of such measures. It meant support for the Government, even to the point of war, and ultimately meant acceptance of increased armaments for Britain.
Opposition to it was voiced by Lord Ponsonby, who had resigned as party leader in the House of Lords, by the aged George Lansbury, who was about to resign as party leader in the House of Commons, and by Cripps, who had resigned from the party Executive in order to speak against Executive policy. Lansbury and Ponsonby opposed on pacifist argument, Cripps on the lines of SL policy. He pleaded with the delegates ”not to ordain that the labour movement shall join without power in the responsibility for capitalist and imperialist war that sanctions may entail” but to achieving “the defeat of that very capitalism and imperialism which is represented in this country by our class-enemies masquerading under the title of a ‘National’ Government”. Mellor, too, spoke for SL policy, closing his speech with the words: “there are times when it is well to remember that the positive action of fighting your enemy at home is greater in value than the negative disaster of defending your home enemy abroad. Our enemy is here.”
In the event, the critics were amply justified. A few days later, Italian invasion of Abyssinia began: Labour pressed the Government to secure League of Nations action. The Government went through the motions of doing so, whilst in reality conniving at Italian victory. In November, virtuously parading as champions of collective security, the Government went to the country, and emerged from the election with a substantial majority in Parliament. By May 1936, Mussolini had completed the conquest and annexation of Abyssinia.
Discussions and agitations over the war were by no means all, or even the greater part, of SL members’ activities at the time. They were busy during the General Election, and in local and national campaigns over a score of good causes, including unemployment, and the claim of the miners for a pay rise. In the movement itself, the SL can be seen in its records discussing such matters as the need for more democracy in the London Labour Party, the role of trades councils in the struggle for socialism, and the need to create a socialist youth movement. At the 1936 Whitsun Conference at Hanley, a much-strengthened statement of SL policy on war was overwhelmingly supported by the delegates, against CP-style amendments and arguments for peace fronts and Popular Fronts and all the latest trappings of communist policy. A National Council resolution noted “the significant change in the immediate policy of the Communist Party of Great Britain” towards the Labour Party as a strong argument for “the unification of all the forces of the working class”. The increasingly independent role of the SL in the struggles of the time was the subject of another very important resolution.
In July the Spanish Civil War broke out and it was soon clear that General Franco’s forces were being helped by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; and that the Spanish Republican Government was being refused the right to buy arms.
A policy of “non-intervention” was proposed by the French “Popular Front” Government, led by the socialist Leon Blum, and by the British Government, in which Eden was Foreign Secretary. Supposedly aimed at preventing the Fascist powers from sending arms, plans, equipment and men to Franco, instead it stopped supplies only to the Spanish Government. Protests grew.
A resolution denouncing this policy was discussed at the SL Executive Committee. Cripps, returning from a meeting with Government Ministers, surprised everyone by supporting non-intervention. It would, he thought, stop supplies reaching Franco’s forces. “I have Eden’s word on it”, he added. The other members of the EC did not share Cripps’ faith in Eden’s word and the resolution was carried. (The two draft resolutions, one by Horrabin, the other by Groves, were presented on different occasions, but cannot be accurately dated. Both represent a fair approximation of the general view in the SL). At this or another EC meeting, Groves presented a draft for a leaflet on Spain, A Workers’ or a Fascist Spain?, which was distributed in large numbers throughout the country. One vital amendment only was made in the draft-lines 7 ,8 and 9 in paragraph seven read originally: “… smash the militarists so that they and their fellows may rule Spain. The defeat of the militarists is a necessary part of the struggle to win full economic and political power for the Spanish workers and peasants.” The words “afterwards” and “a necessary preliminary” give a different tone indeed to the passage – and indicate a difference of policy that was the subject of bitter controversy in Spain and elsewhere in subsequent months.
Jack Winocour’s article in the October Socialist defined the Spanish situation from a revolutionary standpoint. Its appearance there; other articles such as the ones Fabianism and the Class Struggle and Workers of the World Unite; the more agitational, more rank-and-file and trade union orientation of the paper, as compared with its predecessor The Socialist Leaguer; the policies expounded in the paper and on public platforms, are evidence of the extent to which the SL was fast growing into a consciously revolutionary socialist group, along the lines laid down in the Resolution on the Present Situation in the Labour Movement and the Role of the Socialist League at the SL Conference earlier in the year at Hanley. It was at this time, too, that the SL’s National Council established contact with the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity, and gave support to the Bureau's call for an independent investigation into the Moscow Trials.
Enthusiastic demonstrations were held during the late summer in support of the Spanish Republican Government and the Spanish workers. But, despite the support for the Spanish people’s cause shown by the mass of Labour supporters, the Trades Union Congress, in September, voted in favour of the pro-Franco policy of non-intervention, by 3,029,006; to 51,000; and at the Edinburgh Labour Party Conference in October, 1,836,000 votes were cast for non-intervention and only 519,000 against.
It may have been the shock of these votes-together with the defeat of a resolution calling for acceptance of the CP’s latest application for affiliation to the Labour Party, by 1,728,000 to 592,000,and of another asking for a meeting of “representatives of all working class bodies to bring about a United Front” by 1,805,000 to 435,000 – that led to the talks between the ILP, CP, and SL on a joint national campaign for unity in the labour movement.
The evidence is contradictory. Michael Foot dates the talks as commencing “soon after the (Edinburgh) Conference was over”; Ralph Miliband and R.E. Dowse place them as commencing “early in 1936” but give no sources for the statement; ILP Secretary John McNair offers no date at all; and when Cripps and Mellor first reported the negotiations to the governing bodies of the SL, they spoke of negotiations having “followed the Edinburgh Conference”. It is more likely that informal conversations had been going on for some months before Edinburgh, and that the decisions of the Conference had given impetus and urgency to the talks.
In the preliminary talks, some of which were attended by Aneurin Bevan, Cripps and Mellor represented the SL, Maxton and Brockway the ILP, and Pollitt and Dutt the CP. The meetings took place, says McNair, in Cripps’ chambers in the Middle Temple, at which “there were frequently serious differences between the ILP and the CP which were only surmounted by the pertinacity and legal skill of Cripps. They were not finally solved but were at least smoothed over …
Serious differences existed, too, between the SL and the CP. In acting as arbitrator to the conflicting parties, Cripps jettisoned the policy of the SL; as in his legal practice, he passed from one brief to another, from a brief for revolutionary socialism to a new brief for the United Front, without any noticeable difficulty. But it was not just the interests of clients involved here – but principles and policies affecting many people. The price paid for putting expediency above principle was high, the return for the socialist cause, nil. The SL became involved in the erection of an unreal façade of unity, behind which the brutal realities of Russian Government policy operated unseen and unchecked; and the SL found itself recruited into a conspiracy of silence about the misdoings of the Russian Government in which had already been enlisted an impressive array of British intellectuals – writers, publishers, academics and politicians.
In this connection, the documents of the Unity Campaign, with their “addendums of explication” are most revealing. It should be remembered that these were seen only by the Executives of the three organisations. Members and supporters and the public, would see only the Unity Manifesto with its deceptions and ambiguities.
The negotiations on the Unity Campaign were kept from the SL membership and governing committees until almost complete agreement had been reached. Executive and National Council members were swiftly embroiled in hurried, amending discussions of the unity document, and any consideration of the campaign as a whole or its implications and consequences for the SL was brushed aside. The procedure at the National Council meeting of 7 and 8 November 1936, provided a good example of this. There were initial protests from provincial members at the failure of the Executive to secure Council approval for the campaign before commencing negotiations. These were heard, then the meeting went on to examine the unity document. No discussion took place at all on the merits of the campaign, nor on its likely consequences for the SL. Cripps argued his new brief, Mellor, Brailsford, Mitchinson, Horrabin and others of the Executive supported him. The provincial members were almost all uneasy about the proposed campaign, but were manoeuvred into a detailed discussion of the unity agreement, and so into an implied approval of the campaign itself.
As the members of the National Council sat debating the Unity Campaign and other matters, outside in the streets some 2,000 Hunger Marchers from Scotland, Wales and the North of England were walking in several processions, accompanied by supporters, bands, and banners dark against the winter sky, to Hyde Park. 200,000 Londoners were there to greet the cloth-capped, shabby, cheerful ghosts, comrades of a decade and a half of struggle for bread and work and dignity. Some found ironic humour in the sight of Clem Atlee, Labour’s Parliamentary leader, speaking to the vast crowd from the same platform as Wal Hannington, the communist leader of the unemployed; in the fact that the official London Trades Council organised the reception for the marchers, and that in the Park and the procession, the banners of labour parties, co-operatives, trade unions and SL branches mingled with those of the CP and ILP.
A false impression of unanimity on the SL’s governing bodies given to branches by circulars from the centre brought belated resistance – the secrecy imposed had prevented earlier revolt. An unofficial resistance committee emerged in London; and Groves sent the circular to all branches that made it known that there was not unanimity, and that the more serious problems of the proposed Unity Campaign remained undebated.
When the Special SL Conference on the Unity Campaign assembled in London on 17 January 1937, it was already certain that if it endorsed the unity proposals, the League would be disaffiliated from the LP, and membership of the SL made incompatible with LP membership. It was becoming clear, too, that should this happen, Cripps and others had decided that they would urge the dissolution of the SL. What was not known then, nor in the months up to the final Whitsun Conference, was that the proposal for the dissolution of the SL had originated with the CP, and pressed by that organisation as being in the best interests of the Unity Campaign, Had that been known, there can be no doubt at all that many more Executive and National Council members would have stood out against the Cripps policy, and that the National Conference would have voted it down.
As it was, the policy was approved by only a minority of the Conference delegates, 56 voting for it, 35 against, with 23 abstentions. The typewritten leaflet issued to delegates by the Balham and Tooting Branch contained a suggestion whereby the campaign could go on, and the SL survive. Brushed aside by the. leadership, this was to be the policy adopted a few months later, to save the individual SL members from expulsion from the Labour Party – but that was after the CP had achieved their purpose, and shut down the SL.
The rest of the story told in the documents, can be briefly summarised. On 18 January 1937, the day after the SL’s Special Conference, the Unity Campaign was launched. On 27 January the SL was disaffiliated by the LP Executive. In March, the LP declared membership of the SL incompatible with membership of the Labour Party. The SL now had either to retreat from the Unity Campaign, or face the wholesale expulsion of its members from the LP. It now announced its dissolution, a decision that was endorsed at the final SL conference in Leicester, at Whitsun, 1937.
When the LP then forbade its members on pain of expulsion to take part in the Unity Campaign as individuals, the CP suggested that the former SL members should continue working within the LP, and withdraw from public participation in the Unity Campaign. The national and area Unity Campaign Committees would be dissolved; the ILP and CP would go their separate ways once more. This could have been done in January, and the SL saved. But the CP wanted to be rid of the SL, with its dangerous potential as a centre for revolutionary socialist ideas, and it had succeeded. The CP, and many of the prominent supporters of the United Front of working class organisations were now abandoning that United Front in favour of a Popular Front of communist, socialist and bourgeois politicians, with a policy moderate enough to accommodate almost everyone.
By the following year, the CP and its allies were urging people to vote Liberal rather than Labour in some of the Parliamentary by-elections taking place; and Cripps and others who had founded the SL to attack gradualist and reformist policies, were advocating coalition with capitalist as well as Communist politicians for collective action abroad against the Fascist powers and for moderate reform at home.
William Mellor, who with Cripps and several others, had founded Tribune as a socialist weekly and had been its editor since its beginning in January 1937, did not go along on these policies with the others. According to Michael Foot: “More wary or doctrinaire than they about the idea of combination with Communist or capitalist allies, he could not support the Popular Front strategy … But there was another cause of the quarrel. The Tribune board had decided on a much closer association with the Left Book Club and both Cripps and the controllers of the Left Book Club were agreed that a different editor was required to make Tribune’s fortunes prosper in the new circumstances. So Mellor was fired by Cripps in a brusque manner that left many hard feelings … Thereafter, until the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, Tribune became much more uncritically pro-communist in its political line than it had ever been previously or was ever again afterwards.”
John McNair has since revealed that in the privacy of the Unity Campaign Committee, Mellor at first opposed the proposal to dissolve the SL, saying that the dissolution of the League would be a victory for the right wing of the LP, who wanted to be rid of separately organised left organisations. “Time showed how right he was,” wrote McNair. “At that moment, however, a united Communist Party and a divided League, decided the issue and subsequently the Council of the League decided to dissolve … The extinction of the League was a severe blow to the forces working for socialism in the labour movement.”
Had Mellor opposed dissolution in the SL itself, his great influence would have swung sufficient opinion against it to have saved the organisation. But he did not, and the SL went out of existence. “Many were to regret that decision in later years,” wrote Michael Foot, one of the younger SL members at the time of dissolution, “when the left in the party, robbed by their own act of any effective organisation, found themselves hopelessly pitted as individuals against the Executive machine. But Cripps, with the full support of Bevan and Mellor, dominated the League and got his way. Even in the short run, the policy had no success …”
Michael Foot is unique among the prominent survivors of the SL in having remained on the Left. Others like Cripps, Mitchinson, Barbara Castle, trod the path to high office and power, in an LP bereft of an organised left wing. But there was more to the SL at the time of its obliteration than it being a left group inside the LP; and had it survived it might have maintained and renewed the ideas and ideals of revolutionary socialism into the post-war world, and passed its flag on to the new generations, the wandering, questing children of protest.
Reg Groves

Give Chelsea Manning the gift she deserves

Donations matched one to one!

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Give Chelsea Manning the gift she deserves Friends, we are facing a challenge, and we need your help. Donations matched one to one! This year, while people everywhere prepare to spend holidays with their families, taking much-needed breaks from work and everyday life, a humanist and a hero remains imprisoned. As supporters of Army whistleblower Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, you have impressed us for three years with your dedication, and the hope it’s given to Chelsea and those closest to her. Next Tuesday, December 17, marks Chelsea’s fourth birthday in prison, and we are asking you now to help us give her the support she deserves this holiday season. For a limited time only, your donations will be matched by a generous anonymous donor – this means that if you give $100 today, then $200 will go to her Defense Fund. While young, Chelsea has faced many life-altering challenges. She suffered a violent and dysfunctional home environment, bullying for being gay, and even a period of homelessness prior to joining the army at the age of 19. Through all these obstacles, she remained committed to educating herself, asking hard questions, and taking risks in the name of helping other people. That is why upon witnessing injustices in the Iraq War, she felt compelled to show the public the truth about government actions in the Middle East and elsewhere. She now faces up to 35 years in prison for her actions, and was it not for your support, Chelsea might have to face this challenge alone. Your year-end tax-deductible contribution will help Chelsea to: Receive more visits from her mother and aunt, who are themselves of limited financial means Pursue all legal avenues for possible reductions in sentence including clemency applications and appeals based on prosecutor misconduct Enroll in college courses and pursue a degree Receive medically appropriate treatment for her gender dysphoria, in particular Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and a legal name change, things which she has desired for some time and which doctors believe would help her to lead a happier and more fulfilling life We have raised $26,000 so far of the $40,000 needed to sustain these projects. As we approach both her birthday and the holidays, we would love nothing more than to be able to tell Chelsea that these projects were fully-funded. We know that many of you have given before, and we are grateful for that; but we are asking you to give what you can today to help us meet our goal, and give Chelsea some good news this holiday. She has sacrificed much in our interest, and we think it’s the least we can do. Help Support the Defense Fund. For a limited time, donations will be doubled by a matching grant! And if you agree that 35 years is far too long a sentence for showing the public the truth, please share this message widely with your friends!