From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass, John Liang) 1901-1988

...every serious revolutionary movement and cause brings forth all kinds of forces from unexpected sources and draws militants from all places as the case here with Frank Glass. Those international links are precious as the lightening rods to the struggle. Cadre like Glass are hard to find and as this story shows require much cadre development. 
 

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
********

Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass, John Liang)
1901-1988

From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

Part 1: in South Africa

Frank Glass, revolutionary activist, writer and scholar, died in Los Angeles on 21 March 1988, just before his 87th birthday. Better known to international audiences as Li Fu-Jen, or Frank Graves, or John Liang, he worked in three continents, and in each one was a central revolutionary figure. He was a foundation member of the Communist Party of South Africa; a Left Oppositionist when he went to China, and the editor of the premier Trotskyist paper, the Militant in the USA. A revolutionary throughout his life, he lived three full lives; as pioneer and militant in South Africa, as publicist and organiser in China; and as writer and teacher in America. This article deals with the first part of his life.

Frank Glass, a founder of the Communist Party in South Africa is barely remembered there, having been ignored, if not expunged, from the histories of the working class movement. Yet during his stay in South Africa (having arrived as a young lad in l911) he played a leading role in the foundation and organisation of the Communist Party and then in the first black trade union in the country, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, or ICU. One of the first revolutionaries in South Africa to join the ranks of the Left Opposition, he left for China in 1930, where he helped establish the Communist League of China (Trotskyist).
Finding details of Frank Glass’s activities is not easy. He preferred not to talk about himself, claiming that his own personal doings were not relevant for an understanding of the workers’ struggle. There is little written about Glass in South African labour histories, and the accounts by Stalinists dismiss him, or indeed twist facts in order to present him in the worst possible light. Yet, Glass was the youngest delegate at the conference in l921 at which it was decided to launch the CPSA, and he was on the Central Executive before he left the party. But even the factors that led to his resignation are fudged, and this conceals a little-known episode in the history of the Communist movement.
Like many early pioneers, and not a few who followed, Glass had to make difficult decisions on the nature of the working class in South Africa, and following from this, he had to decide on where best a revolutionary could work in South Africa. In the process he made mistakes, and he erred with most early Socialists on several issues. But they pale into insignificance when balanced against his achievements, and in presenting this appraisal I think he would have preferred to have the record as it was, and not sanitised to make him a superman. Frank Glass was a revolutionary, and worked through the problems he faced, making the necessary corrections, as he proceeded.
Glass was a member of the Industrial Socialist League (InSL) in Cape Town, a group which published the Bolshevik, and the first to adopt the name Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The InSL called for the class struggle, the complete overthrow of capitalism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, a soviet system, affiliation to the Communist International, and mass action by the workers as a means of seizing power. The InSL had established close links with the Johannesburg-based International Socialist League (ISL), led by David Ivon Jones, S.P. Bunting and W.H. Andrews, but were opposed to participation in electoral politics. In this they found allies in Johannesburg, with whom to launch their CPSA. The party (like the ISL) was non-racist, and called for the organisation of all workers in one unified movement.
After a period of negotiations several groups agreed to accept the 21 Points of the Communist International, and joined together to form the united Communist Party of South Africa. The one point that proved to be contentious was the provision that the party participate in political (i.e., electoral) activity, and Frank Glass and four others, opposed to this clause, broke away to form the Communist Propaganda Group in April 1921. This was still a hangover from the strong Syndicalist tendency of the pre-war days, and was not at that time based on opposition to participation in all-white government institutions. That decision to boycott such bodies only emerged in South Africa during the early 1940s, and was accepted then only by groups that had some connection with the Trotskyist movement.
In May 1921 190 Israelites (the name chosen by a chiliastic black church group), were massacred by troops at Bulhoek, near Queenstown in the eastern Cape. It was an unpardonable action perpetrated by the Smuts government, and when four members of the united CPSA protested, they were arrested and charged. Members of the Propaganda Group showed their solidarity by participating in joint meetings, and dissolving their group. Union followed, and when the small groups merged to form the official Communist Party of South Africa in August 1921, Frank was one of the four Cape delegates at the conference.
Frank Glass soon emerged as a leading member of the CPSA, and was secretary of the Cape Town branch in 1922. That was the year of the miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand, which erupted into revolt, and only ended when Smuts used aeroplanes to bomb the main mining areas. Caught in the dilemma of supporting workers who were in conflict with the mineowners, and the anti-black action of a sizeable part of the white working class, he sided with the majority (near-unanimous) view of the party which claimed that the miners were striking in defence of living standards and not for the colour bar. This was a move to the right and Glass erred with the party.
The rightward swing in the CPSA was extended in 1923 when the CPSA, in conformity with Comintern policy, accepted the need for the United Front tactic, and applied for affiliation to the South African Labour Party (SALP). Although rejected, the CPSA supported the SALP, then in alliance with the Nationalist Party in the 1924 general election, and again discussed affiliation at its conference that year. Frank was now a full time organiser in the CPSA, and its business administrator, and he voted to renew the application to affiliate. This time the resolution was narrowly defeated and a number of leading members resigned from the party.
There appear to be three factors that led to the decision to join the SALP. The first arose from Lenin’s advice to the British Communists that they should find a place in their Labour Party in order to win the organised working class away from the Social Democrats. The small Communist groups in Australia and South Africa (and possibly elsewhere) debated the issue to see whether this tactic could be applied in their own countries. Secondly, the isolation of these small groups, and in South Africa this was particularly the case after the disastrous conclusion of the (white) mineworker’s strike, left the small Socialist group even more isolated than before. The third factor that influenced some Communists arose from the letter written by Ivon Jones to W.H. Andrews, the former dying in a sanatorium in Yalta, suggesting that the CPSA be dissolved, and that the party reduce its function to publishing a journal and protecting the interests of the black workers. Glass, in one of his last reminiscences (just a few weeks before his death) remarked on the fact that Andrews used to read Jones’ letters to him.
In February 1925 Glass resigned from the Central Executive, and then the party, declaring that the CPSA had become a sect, and was regarded with some justification as being anti-white. He threw himself into the white trade union movement (he was already treasurer of the SA Association of Employees’ Organisations) and became secretary of the Tailors Union. He also joined the SALP, which was now in the Pact government, in alliance with the Nationalist Party.
His stay in the SALP was short-lived. At the party conference in March 1925 he opposed the proposed Emergency Powers Bill, tabled by Creswell the party leader and Minister of Labour, repudiated the proposed legislation, and moved the resolution against it. Once again Glass was in a minority, and it is doubtful whether he could have stayed much longer. We have no information on his next step, but he must have rethought his position, and moved from a position of leadership in the white trade unions to a precarious position in the major African trade union movement – the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa.

With a Black Union

The industrialisation of South Africa had barely begun in the early 1920s when the ICU was launched. After participating in a dock strike the new union spread out to become a broad general workers union under Clements Kadalie, with an enrolment that was said to have reached 150,000. Members were recruited mainly in the African townships, and also in the countryside. Many of its organisers joined the CPSA and officials of the party (including some of the leading whites) spoke at its meetings. At the end of 1926 the Communists were arbitrarily expelled, and although the reasons are still unclear, it seems that this was partly because the ICU leadership feared an impending criticism of financial irregularities, and partly because white liberals exerted pressure on the leaders to remove all Communists from office. There were also accusations that the ICU leaders were resorting to a crude racism in their attacks on the white Communists. The ICU leaders’ claim was that Communists were overbearing and were prying into the internal affairs of the organisation.

It consequently came as a surprise when Glass (later the liberal’s bête noire) was asked to audit the union’s accounts, and prepare a financial statement, as required by the Department of Labour. Kadalie also wanted Glass appointed as financial secretary of the ICU, but there was opposition to a white occupying the post, and he was only appointed in a temporary capacity until an English adviser (himself obviously white) arrived. It has also been suggested that Glass was not appointed because of liberal pressure. History is not made of ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’, but had he secured this post the history of black workers’ organisation might have been very different. On 28 March, Frank Glass, together with W.H. Andrews (who had not left the CPSA but maintained only nominal membership, and worked almost exclusively in the white trade union movement) spoke on an ICU platform in Johannesburg. The gathering had been called to protest against a new Native Administration Act, that provided the legislation for the government to cripple all black organisation. The newspaper report placed the audience at some 2000 Africans, and a small group of whites, Indians, and Chinese. Frank’s address was interpreted by the police as being potentially illegal, and the issue was raised in the South African parliament. We only have the newspaper report (in the Rand Daily Mail, 28 March 1927) of what he said, but it is enough to show why his words were so bitterly denounced in parliament:

If you will do what the Russian workers have done and what the Chinese workers are doing now you – all the workers of this country, black and white – will be able to secure freedom. We don’t know at the moment how far the government is going in its attempt to restrict the freedom of the native workers; but this we do know, that all capitalist governments in their dealings with the workers act precisely alike. Therefore we have got to be prepared, not merely with demonstrations, but also – if it proves to be necessary – with far more drastic action.

It also seems most likely that the remarkable introduction to the ICU Economic and Political Program for 1928 was written by Glass. Nobody else could have phrased the sentiments so cogently:

Opponents of the ICU have frequently asserted that the organisation is not a trade union in the sense that the term is generally understood in South Africa, but that it is a kind of pseudo-political body ... The new constitution... definitely establishes the ICU as a trade union, albeit one of native workers ... at the same time it must be clearly understood that we have no intention of copying the stupid and futile ‘nonpolitical’ attitude of our white contemporaries. As Karl Marx said, every economic question is, in the last analysis, a political question also, and we must recognise that in neglecting to concern ourselves with current politics, in leaving the political machine to the unchallenged control of our class enemies, we are rendering a disservice to those tens of thousands of our members who are groaning under oppressive laws ... At the present stage of our development it is inevitable that our activities should be almost of an agitational character, for we are not recognised as citizens in our own country, being almost entirely disenfranchised and debarred from exercising a say in state affairs closely affecting our lives and welfare.

To the Left Opposition

There is no further information about Frank Glass in secondary sources. In 1928 he married Fanny Klennerman, a veteran member of the CPSA who had organised waitresses and other women workers in the 1920s. Together they started the Vanguard bookshop that was to become the most important source for Marxist and Trotskyist books in the Transvaal, and a focus for people searching for books or pamphlets on Fascism, on Russia, Spain, and China, and on the coming war. Precisely when Glass first moved to the ranks of the Left Opposition is unknown – but he was one of the first Marxists to support Trotsky in South Africa, and the first to write a letter of support to the American oppositionist paper, the Militant, of 29 March 1930. He provided a brief overview of the racism that divided the country, and the working class, for those who knew little about South Africa. White workers would not work with blacks in certain jobs, and debarred them from their trade unions. The high wages of whites, he said, were possible because of the low wages paid to black workers, and he added, the blacks had started organising their own trade unions. His major criticism of the CPSA was its use of the ‘Black Republic’ slogan, coined by the Comintern in its ‘Third Period’, when it directed every Communist party to prepare for the revolutionary overturn of their governments. Amongst the points Glass made against the slogan was that:

Racial animosity on the part of the native [black] members towards the European members has grown and is developing to an almost incredible degree, the native members logically interpreting the slogan as implying superiority for themselves over the hated oppressor (white Communists are included here).

He also maintained that there had been a ‘wholesale desertion of the white proletarian members who would not subscribe to the abandonment of the Marxian slogan “Workers of all lands, unite!”’.

He did not seem to have had much success in building a group in South Africa, and it was two years later (on 4 June 1932) that a letter from ‘four Africans’ in the Transvaal appeared in the Militant. There were also small groups in Cape Town, one of which included one of Glass’s close friends, Manuel Lopes (who later moved to the right). Details of that period are not readily available: none to indicate what happened to Glass’s connections with the ICU, or within the CPSA. Fanny Glass, who had remained in the CPSA, was expelled with other dissidents (including Andrews and Bunting) in 1931. Fanny worked with members of the Left Opposition, but men like Bunting and Andrews did not make the crucial break with Stalinism, and the latter returned during the war as chairman of the CPSA.
The history of the left groups in the Transvaal during the 1930s is only now being rediscovered. Later generations of Trotskyists in Johannesburg knew of Glass because of his one time association with Fanny Klennerman, but all we knew was that he had gone to China, had been involved there in the work of the Trotskyist groups, and (we suspected, correctly) wrote under the name of Li Fu-Jen. We read his articles in the journals that came through to Johannesburg.
It is only now, after Glass’s death, that details have become generally known about his remarkable career. Glass went to China soon after writing his letter to the Militant, and there he met with the American journalist Harold Isaacs. Together they saw the brutal executions of suspected Communists by the Kuomintang more than three years after the blood bath in Shanghai in 1927, and the extermination of most of the Chinese Communist Party. And when Isaacs wrote his classic Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution Glass read the manuscript and suggested changes and additions to the text. This work became the main source of information for several decades on the nature of Comintern policies that led to the defeat of the Chinese revolution.
Glass worked briefly for the Soviet Tass news agency in China, but quit ‘... because of the meaningless content of Tass news’. He then worked as a correspondent for the Anglo-Asiatic Telegraphic Agency. For the remainder of the ’30s Glass worked for several newspapers, edited the China Weekly Review, was a political commentator on radio, and was a member of the Provisional Central Committee, of the Communist League of China (Trotskyists) in the mid 1930s. He wrote the section on China for the programme of the Fourth International.
Glass had now entered the select group that worked with Trotsky, visiting him in 1937, edited some of his English articles, and returned to China, where he was able to find some refuge in the Shanghai French Concession. However, he was compelled to maintain a low profile, fearing betrayal, and persecution from the Stalinists, the French Concession police, and Kuomintang agents. He fled Shanghai a few days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (7 December 1941) and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. After a circuitous and dangerous route he returned to New York, and established a home with Grace Simons.
A serious appraisal of Frank Glass’s writings will be the most appropriate memorial for a man who devoted so much of his life to the overthrow of capitalism in three continents.
There the account must rest for now. He was a living legend. We must not allow that legend to die.

Baruch Hirson
April 1988

References

The more easily accessible sources in which Glass is mentioned in the South African context are: Sheridan Johns, The Birth of the Communist Party of South Africa, International Journal of African Historical Studies, IX, 2, 1976; P.L. Wickens, The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, OUP, Cape Town 1978; and H.J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950, Penguin, 1969 (republished by International Defence and Aid Fund, London).

---

Part 2: In China and the USA

Frank Glass, veteran of the communist movement on three continents, died in Los Angeles on 21 March, three days before his 87th birthday.

Glass moved to China in 1930, earning his living as a journalist in Shanghai (where he once met Richard Sorge, the German journalist and heroic Soviet spy later executed by the Japanese government). While in China Glass recruited Harold Isaacs to Trotskyism. Isaacs, also a journalist, later wrote, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.
These years in China were the most important of Glass’ political career. In 1934, after a trip to New York where he met with the American Trotskyists, Glass was able to make contact with the Chinese Left Opposition. He was elected to their Provisional Central Committee in 1935. Wang Fan-hsi, who worked with Glass at this time, noted in his book Chinese Revolutionary that this Committee ‘... occupied an important position in the history of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. It was the most enduring and productive of all the bodies we established, reviving and expanding the organisation, both in Shanghai and nationally.’
Glass served for a number of years as the secretary and treasurer of the Chinese organisation. Under the name Li Fu-jen Glass corresponded periodically with the International Secretariat in Europe and with Martin Abern in New York. Glass also performed important courier work for the section and the leading committee of the Shanghai organisation often met in Glass’ apartment. Glass played a crucial role in the publication of the section’s monthly newspaper, Struggle (Tou-cheng), which was financed by Glass donating one half of his journalist’s salary. The regular publication of this voice of Chinese Trotskyism was a remarkable accomplishment given the fierce repression and debilitating underground conditions in which the section was forced to function.
In l937 Glass again visited the US and made a national speaking tour. In August he visited Trotsky in Mexico to discuss the current political situation in China (the transcript of his discussion with Trotsky is printed as A Discussion on China in Pathfinder Press’ Leon Trotsky on China. In New York Glass began writing articles on China for New International, and he was a fraternal delegate to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Chicago in 1938. Glass returned to China in 1938 to continue his organisational and literary work but the impending Pacific War soon made it impossible for him to function politically in Asia. He left China a few weeks before Pearl Harbour and spent most of the Second World War years in New York where, still using the pen name Li Fu-jen, he contributed articles on China, Japan and the Far East to the Fourth International.
After the war Glass moved to Los Angeles and spent a number of years as a leading member of the LA Branch and SWP national committee. The 1960s, however, found him succumbing along with other leading members of the SWP, to the political disease of Pabloist impressionism. Under the name of John Liang he co-wrote a number of internal discussion documents with Arne Swabeck, abandoning the Trotskyist perspective of political revolution against the Stalinist regime in Peking. Ironically, some of the best arguments against Swabeck/Liang’s liquidationism can be found in the powerful Li Fu-jen articles written for the Trotskyist press in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Swabeck was expelled from the SWP in 1967 but Glass was not, and indeed Glass never formally quit the Socialist Workers Party, now led by the cynical anti-Trotskyist Jack Barnes clique.
In the last year of his life Frank Glass granted two sets of interviews with a representative of the Prometheus Research Library. On 14 April 1987, Comrade Glass told us: ‘I have been a revolutionary since I was 18 and have no regrets. I wouldn’t change a thing. All one can do is put your oar in the water and stroke as hard as you can for life’s most important task – social revolution.’ Frank Glass will be remembered as part of the founding generation of Trotskyist cadres, and especially for his courageous work as one of the leaders of the early Chinese Trotskyist movement.

Prometheus Research Library New York

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Leave It To The Professionals  

 As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story.  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Dick and Dora Francis were strictly amateurs, very strictly amateurs, if there is such a term, in hard-nosed, rough-edged, seen-it-all professional private investigator Michael Philip Marlin’s eyes. Yes, they were in way over their heads by the time Marlin stepped in to try to unravel what they had knotted and then trace the cold leads to figure out what the hell happened, and who did it. The “what the hell happened” being an unsolved murder, maybe. The jury, no, not the court-room kind, but those who knew what went down, is still out that one. The only thing for sure was that Dick and Dora didn’t do it, and of course Marlin, otherwise everybody else had reason, had the chance, and the desire to do the deed. And to keep you from suspense the suspected deed was the killing of Charles Wyatt, yes, that Wyatt who invented half the stuff that goes into airplanes and make them passenger- friendly, and who made and lost fortunes in doing so. Lately the former and therefore entered the Francis duo.     

Marlin and Dick Francis had gone back a long way, back to the time that he was a Detective Sergeant on the robbery detail for the Los Angeles Police Department and Marlin was just getting kicked off , or left, the force depending on whose story you wanted to believe. He had set himself up as a private- eye and thereafter every once in a while would wind up working in tandem with Dick on some tough case that the department was ready to put in cold storage. Dick in his turn had left the force, walking away without a regret. The reason for that no regret was that he had landed one Dora Sweeney, heiress to the Sweeny lumber fortune, after investigating a robbery at her home in Bel Air. The robbery was never solved but as Dora said “she liked the cut of his jibe” and that was that. He left the force to “suffer” the tough life of the rich. And that was how Dick and Dora lammed onto (and fouled up) the Wyatt case.     

Dora had been boarding school friends with Elizabeth Wyatt (no Betty or Liz stuff strictly Elizabeth here), Charles Wyatt’s daughter and had kept in touch over the years especially the years before Dora’s marriage. When Charles Wyatt went missing, or had fled the home scene, or had been murdered, or any number of other possibilities once he disappeared without leaving word, or a trance Elizabeth frantically called Dora to see if she and Dick could find some information out, find it out on the quiet. Especially on the quiet since the current Wyatt fortune was at stake, and Wyatt Industries was just then in a precarious position in the markets and such new made public might tip things the wrong way.    

The reason that Elizabeth beseeched Dick and Dora was because in their little rarified circle Dick and Dora had developed a reputation for solving some society crimes, you know, which servant ran off with the family china, or who crashed the Smith’s automobile, or other little squabbles like that. Kid stuff really, even though Dick had once been a pro, stuff to do while they were waiting to have children to take up their spare time. Dick and Dora agreed, agreed too that the important thing was to keep the thing hushed up, hushed up big.   

Of course while you are trying to hush things up, and not offend anybody by being so crass as to ask pointed questions of one’s social set you are going wind up with dust. For example there had been a rumor, a persistent rumor, that Wyatt was having an affair with his secretary, Gladys Pitts. They had been seen together at odd working hours hanging around Spider Greb’s Club Deluxe over in Malibu, and at other watering holes. Gladys had also not been seen for a couple of weeks, although she had cashed a check at her bank drawn on Wyatt’s account a couple of days before Dick and Dora were handed the case. Naturally nobody wanted to upset his long-suffering, unknowing wife, Liz (not Elizabeth, just Liz, in that democratic generation) and so no question was directed that way and none answered, period.         

So the weeks passed and Dick and Dora were spinning their wheels, trying with might and main to not get to Charles’ whereabouts, or what might have happened to him despite the mounting evidence that he had either fled the country, alone or in company, or somebody had done him harm. That last part was not excluded when another sizable check was drawn from Wyatt’s account the day after he was last seen. They were at an impasse and that is when Dick cried “uncle” and called in his old pal Marlin.

Marlin, to his credit, agreed to work the case but with no promises and with the right to walk away if he got stonewalled by the society crowd. But even Marlin could not work miracles, except one. He found Gladys out in Fresno in about two days just by looking up her employment application information. Yes, I know. What he found out was that Gladys had quit Wyatt a few days before his disappearance and gone back to her husband the next day, all verifiable. As for the affair she mockingly laughed at the idea since Charles Wyatt was a drunk, crazy, and obsessive about his work. That was why they had spent time at the Club Deluxe and other watering holes. Overtime that she bitterly complained he never paid her before she left. As for Charles Wyatt there is a reward out for information about his whereabouts but Marlin has walked away from the case muttering under his breathe “leave this stuff to the professionals.” Yeah, that’s right.        

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – The China Doll

 As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story.  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

No question Michael Philip Marlin, hard-headed, no nonsense, tough as nails private investigator was a “homer,” was a guy who felt right at home in the sun-drenched back streets and alleys of his native Los Angeles. He knew the players, the bit players too, he knew the cops good and bad, mostly bad or indifferent, he knew the hot spots and the low- life dens, knew Hollywood, knew Inglewood, knew all the vastness of the city in the days before the tourists and Okies came and ate up the land. Knew it before the ill-winds of World War II and the vast monies hanging around to be spent by those money-starved Okies. Knew it to be exact.

Time were tough though all around in those years before the war money came booming into his city of angels, his east of Eden, and the private- eye game was no exception. So every once in a while to keep himself in coffee and cakes he needed to take an outside job. Sometimes it was grabbing the graveyard shift as a house- peeper over at Jackie Craig’s Taft Hotel and sometimes he had to take out of town jobs. This one is about one of those out- of- town jobs, about a Frisco town job, always a tough dollar and this time was no exception. Worst it involved dealing with the denizens of that town’s bustling and crowded Chinatown district, also always a very tough dollar. After the last episode, the Yellow Dog case he called it, he had avoided chop suey joints in LA like the plague.      

It wasn’t like Marlin had something against the yellow race, against the Chinese, although he probably if he thought about it shared the same bewilderment at that exotic race, and the same prejudices as the average Anglo- Californian when confronted with a swarm of them. What bothered him was they were so secretive, so clannish that you could not get a straight answer from them to push your investigation forward. That was the case here, the case he called the China Doll case.

He had been hired by a woman, a young Chinese woman, Lillian Chou who wanted to know why her house, her summer house over in Pacifica had been vandalized not once but twice. Although she did not live there much she had a caretaker for the place who had been beaten within an inch of his life on the second invasion, and the thieves had taken everything that was not nailed down, everything including some priceless rare jade jewelry handed down from her mother. She wanted Marlin’s services because he had done similar work on that Yellow Dog case and Freddie Ching had recommended him to her after the cops had essentially blown off the case as just another tong war episode. (Miss Chou’s late father, an importer, was well known to the San Francisco police for his various, uh, enterprises, stolen jewelry, sex- trafficking, opium, coolie laborers, whatever could be sold in the import-export market.

   

That is where things started right off to get dicey. Miss Chou gave him little information since she had spent most of her time back East becoming increasingly Anglicized. Marlin pulled a few connections through Freddie Ching and was able to find out that Miss Chou’s father made enemies in his time but also many friends, among them Sonny Dell. Sonny the number one Anglo drug trafficker in Northern California, the number one guy in the lucrative opium and heroin market. Her father had made arrangements with Sonny to allow him to use his beachfront house in Pacifica to bring in his materials from the Far East in return for a big cut of the profits. That arrangement extended beyond her father’s death. That caretaker though was the weak link in the chain. He wanted to tell Miss Chou about the set-up but Sonny would not let him. And for his efforts he got beaten within an inch of his life and the house was ransacked to make it look like a robbery was the motivation.        

Marlin came this information the hard way as usual having to run up against Sonny’s guns, and those of Lee Chang another powerful figure in Chinatown who also had an arrangement with Sonny. Par for the Frisco course. Here is the screwy part though Miss Chou was privy to what was happening at her estate. She in fact had an arrangement with Sonny where he could use the premises in exchange for shipping weapons and other materials to China to aid in the struggle against the Japanese who had occupied the main areas of China. She used Marlowe as a shield to find out what had happened to her caretaker who not only worked for Sonny but as a patriotic Chinaman for Miss Chou’s operation. Marlin thought that a couple of lives could have been saved, a lot of trouble could have been avoided if Miss Chou another one of those damn secretive members of the yellow race had leveled with him. In any case, since Lee Chang had some unfinished business with Marlin as a result a certain Chinatown shoot-out, he was avoiding chop suey joints in Frisco, staying far away indeed.       

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

 

…Yeah, we know his hard luck story, ten thousand returning guys’ hard luck stories, know he was privately beside himself with the turn of events once he got off that god-awful troop transport in New York, and headed hopefully north (after a three day drunk just to even things out, although don’t tell her that) and so we pick him up after he got to that north he was headed for. He had not been back a year, most of that year spent sullenly, quietly in a rage, in a rage that having served, served well, had done his duty, had done his job from what his discharge papers said, he was unable to find work, real work, found that in heading north he had avoided no traps, there was no need for coal-miners or a cold-miner’s son in the Olde Saco labor market.

Damn, and those recurring nightmares, that feeling that he would always be unclean after what he did overseas, didn’t help either. But he stayed silent (and would like many in his generation remain silent, silent unto the grave, keep his hurts to himself, about went on over there), took the first low-rent job that came along, floor-sweeper in the MacAdams Mills just down the street from their house. Well not really their house, their home such as it was, in the quickly built Olde Saco Veterans Housing Project, built to ease the housing crunch with all the boys coming back home from overseas and hungry to get started on their dreams. Took that job, well, because with the baby, and another on the way, he could not do otherwise. And he thought just at that moment, that moment as he swept up the leavings from the mill floor that things had to get better, hadn’t they.

Jesus he knew he was no hell on wheels, no big wheel guy, never expected to be, had expected to dig coal like a couple or three generations of forbears down in those Harlan hills when the war freed him up from all that. Freed him up to see outside the hills and hollows of home, liked what he saw and never looked back. Liked what he saw of a black-haired gal too. He knew he had no skills, no skills except as a crackerjack marksman but what was that worth in civilian life, no skills for the northern market and what with his seventh grade education (all that was necessary to dig coal, hell, his father never went to school at all and his grandfather was illiterate signing his name with a simple X) he didn’t expect to be President. (Ha, that was a joke, he wouldn’t want to.) But didn’t his hunger to learn some skill (join the ten thousand other guys, buddy), didn’t his small dream, a little house of his own, a house not a tumbled down shack like back home in the hollows, a few kids and her growing old together figuring out things as they went along count. And he still stuck sweeping somebody else’s leavings, stalling his small dream, it wasn’t fair, not fair at all.         

Yeah it wasn’t fair at all that he drew a wrong number, came out of those lung-choke coal hills and hollows only to be dropped, dropped quickly once the MacAdams Textile Mills went south, south to cheap labor North Carolina (not far from his home Kentuck border) to seek the same poor whites hungry for dough that he had left behind, thought he had left behind. But no way, no way on god’s good green earth, was he going back the way he came. No way, if anybody was asking. And so he, his black-haired gal, and his now brood of four, four growing hungry (regular food hungry as befits kids not that gnawing hunger that ate at him, and her) struggled to get from one week to the next, paying off one bill one week, another the next, never getting even, not close. Living in that so-called temporary veterans housing well after the first crowd that they had come in with had moved to their single family dream cottages on the other side of town. Stuck, stuck bad, stuck to take a man’s pride away. So, no, please do not speak to him of streets of dreams, his small dreams, a little house of his own, a house not a tumbled down shack like back home in the hollows, a few kids and her growing old together figuring out things as they went along. Just don’t.            

 

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

 

 

… he had not been back a year, most of that year spent sullenly, quietly in a rage, in a rage that having served, served well, had done his duty, had done his job, from what his discharge papers said, he was unable to find work, real work. Found that he in heading north, north for her met at a USO dance in Portland, headed north to share his fate with her like he promised if he made it back, had avoided no traps, there was no need for coal-miners or a cold-miner’s son, in the Olde Saco labor market. Damn, and those recurring nightmares, that feeling that he would always be unclean after what he did (and seen done by his fellows) overseas, over in that island-hopping Marine splash didn’t help either.

But he stayed silent (and would like many in his generation remain silent, silent unto the grave, keep his hurts to himself, about went on over there), took the first low-rent job that came along, floor-sweeper in the MacAdams Mills just down the street from their house. Well not really their house, their home such as it was, in the quickly built Olde Saco Veterans Housing Project, built to ease the housing crunch with all the boys coming back. Took that job, well, because with the baby, and another on the way, he could not do otherwise. And he thought just at that moment, that moment as he swept up the leavings from the mill floor that things had to get better, hadn’t they …                 

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

 

 

…it was as simple as this. He had asked her, asked her quite politely although she could tell that he had liquor on his breathe, for a dance, a slow one, at the weekly USO dance held up in Portland (Maine, okay) about twenty miles from her Olde Saco home. And yes she, along with her best friend Lillian, took the rumble-tumble Greyhound bus up old ten thousand traffic light stop Route One to get there to save gas ration money and help the war effort. That weekly dance organized by those who were keeping the home fires burning in order to keep up the morale of the boys getting ready to go overseas, to go east to preparation places in order to take back Europe from the night-takers, to go west and island by island to take back the Pacific from the night-takers on that side of the world. But that night like every USO dance night such talk, such thoughts were set aside for those few hours before the ships and planes took off to their appointed destinations.

She, well, she was as patriotic as any other red-blooded American girl, young woman, and had volunteered to be one of the hostesses (and Lilian too).  And he, nothing but a country boy he from down in Appalachia, down in deep down coal slag country, Mister Peabody’s country bought and paid for by the sweat of generations of back country denizens who never left as others headed west to greener pastures. He up north for the first time, had spied her from his bashful corner, spied her all flowing black hair, sweets smiles, simply dressed for the occasion, no flash but an allure, something that struck his down to earth country ways and spoke of soul-mate (although he would have dismissed such term out of hand as too city-such words would be left to his sons to describe their love).

After fortifying himself with some store-bought liquor, he had asked for a dance and she had accepted. Something about him, about the way he held her on the dance floor, about how he despite having been a battled-tested participant in all the hard-shell Marine Pacific landings nevertheless softy held her hand for just a moment at the end of the dance, about their talk afterward about how he been sent to Portsmouth down in New Hampshire for temporary relief duty got her going, although she sensed that what was ahead for him, for them, would not be the pretty dreams of her younger girlish days, not the pretty dreams at all.

But that was later, the not pretty dreams part, that night, and for the rest of the nights before he took a plane west to take a ship to once again join in on that desperate island by island fight in the Pacific they flowered, there is no other way to express it, their burgeoning love heated up the night, they would, if he came back (and she was sure he would, he was more fatalistic) share whatever dreams came their way, together. Would share their small inexpensive dreams together …            

The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – The Club Tijuana

 

 

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story.  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Los Angeles private investigator Michael Philip Marlin hated to go south of the border, south down into sunny fetid Mexico, faux Mexico really. Tijuana. He hated the squalor he found just over the border after the immigration station told him he was in hablo espanol country. He hated the bracero looks, stares, eternal stares, piercing right through you, from the sun-blackened Mexican fellahin, and the blank stares, the hungry stares from his children. He hated once he entered dusty, disheveled, loud honky-tonk (gringo honky-tonk) Tijuana leaving the two or three streets that made up tourista Tijuana. And most of all he hated what could and could not be sold, cheaply, cheap like the value of human life there. Anything perverse or illegal could be had for a price, and not much, un-bonded whiskey, seven kinds of dope, women willing to do anything, ditto for guys if it came to it and that was your preference, somebody’s sister, hell, somebody’s brother, guns, all the guns you would ever need enough to outfit Pancho Villa’s army if it came to it.

Yes, Marlin hated going south of the border, the smell, the dust, the piss, everything but just then, 1940 just then, he was in need of cash bad since business had been off and he had room rent coming due fast (his landlord had padlocked his office and that room rent loomed large) so he had taken the Addington case the minute he had received it via Detective James Foote his friend on the Los Angeles police force who threw business, non-police business discreet business his way. What was desired by a Mrs. Addington was for a missing husband to be found, found by a woman who had the means and wherewithal to find that errant soul. The fleer, one James Addington, late of New York City Riverside high-end digs via that searching wife, had made the tour of the West Coast cities and as Marlin found out to his dismay had headed south of the border to indulge in whatever he had the price for, mainly primo dope and loose women.

Yes, James had slipped down the class ladder a few rungs after he got the taste for cocaine, got the taste for loose women who hovered around the cocaine pits, and so his life turned to the meccas for such tastes and Marlin had to go south and find out where he was, and whether he was coming home to his waiting wife. So naturally Marlin had to stop at the Club Tijuana (don’t get confused the place was owned by Americans and catered to Americans, no fellaheen need apply) the central place where those trying to make dope connections, or anything else sporting could be found. And Marlin found James, James and his woman, his all Spanish sparking eyes, ruby lips and swaying hips woman, Rosita. After some verbal sparring James told Marlin (without the fiery Rosita present) that he would return to the up and up in New York once he got rid of his jones. Marlowe thought that would be never giving the ragged look of James. He reported that news to Mrs. Addington and, go figure on women, she not only bought the excuse but sent money via Marlin to cover James’ expenses.

Marlin figured that would be that, case closed except that a few weeks later Mrs. Addington showed up Los Angeles to be nearby when James was ready. Marlin was sent to deliver that message.  James no nearer to recovery than previously was peeved at the fact Marlin presented to him about his wife. Rosita was furious. Marlin sensed that no good could come from these quarters after his announcement. And he was right because a few days later, a couple of days after he got back from Tijuana, Mrs. Addington was found in her rented suite murdered, cut up by somebody skilled at knife work. Needless to say despite all the pat alibis down in Tijuana this appeared to be a hit ordered by James (probably pushed on by Rosita), and was probably done by a Mex bad boy who went by the name (in Spanish) of  Mack the Knife.

Once Marlin had his proof he would go up against James, who expected to inherit a big wad of dough for his habits (and to keep Rosita in style). When Marlin had his proof (somebody in Mrs. Addington’s apartment building had seen a bad Mex looking like Mack the Knife in the hallway) he went in for the collar. One afternoon he entered the Club Tijuana where James and Rosita were sitting at a back table in the dark. As Marlowe approached a knife whizzed by him, he turned and shot Mack the Knife point blank. James seeing that was ready to face the music but Rosita took a shot, two shots actually, at Marlin hitting him in the left arm. He responded by throwing a couple of slugs into her heart. Dead. As for James, James recently took the big step-off up at Q for the murder of his ever- loving wife. Marlin thought when he heard the news that damn was another reason to hate Tijuana, hate it bad.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Karl Kautsky (Leader of Pre-World War I German Social Democrats and Second International)- The intellectuals and the workers

...Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and all the better historic leaders of the advanced guard of the international working- class always have depended, and rightly so, on contributions to political clarity by non-revolutionary and apolitical sources. Even sources as here  that later fell by the wayside in the struggle. Kautsky has been rightly vilified in the post-World War I period as a political scoundrel but in his early days they called him the "pope" of the social-democracy and then rightly so too. Read on.

 

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
********

The intellectuals and the workers

Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), the ‘Pope of Marxism’, wrote the following article when he was the major theoretician of the German Social Democracy. It first appeared in Die Neue Zeit (Vol.XXII, no.4, 1903), the journal which Kautsky edited from 1883 to 1917, and appeared in English in the April 1946 edition of Fourth International.

Part of the very problem which once again so keenly preoccupies our attention is the antagonism between the intellectuals and the proletariat.
My colleagues will for the most part wax indignant at my admission of this antagonism. But it actually exists, and as in other cases, it would be a most inexpedient tactic to try to cope with this fact by ignoring it.
This antagonism is a social one, it relates to classes and not individuals. An individual intellectual, like an individual capitalist, may join the proletariat in its class struggle. When he does, he changes his character too. It is not of this type of intellectual, who is still an exception among his fellows, that we shall deal with in the following lines. Unless otherwise indicated I shall use the word intellectual to mean only the common run of intellectual, who take the standpoint of bourgeois society and who are characteristic of intellectuals as a whole, who stand in a certain antagonism to the proletariat.
This antagonism differs, however, from the antagonism between labour and capital. An intellectual is not a capitalist. True, his standard of life is bourgeois and he must maintain it if he is not to become a pauper; but at the same time he has to sell the product of his labour, and frequently his labour power; and he is himself often enough exploited and humiliated by the capitalists. Hence the intellectual does not stand in any economic antagonism to the proletariat. But his status of life and his conditions of labour are not proletarian, and this gives rise to a certain antagonism in sentiments and ideas.
As an isolated individual, the proletarian is a nonentity. His strength, his progress, his hopes and expectations are entirely derived from organisation, from systematic action in conjunction with his fellows. He feels himself big and strong when he is part of a big and strong organism. The organism is the main thing for him; the individual by comparison means very little. The proletarian fights with the utmost devotion as part of the anonymous mass, without prospect of personal advantage or personal glory, performing his duty in any post assigned to him, with a voluntary discipline which pervades all his feelings and thoughts.
Quite different is the case of the intellectual. He fights not by means of power, but by argument. His weapons are his personal knowledge, his personal ability and his personal convictions. He can attain a position only through his personal abilities. Hence the freest play for these seems to him the prime condition for success. It is only with difficulty that he submits to serving as a part which is subordinate to the whole, and then only from necessity, not from inclination. He recognises the need of discipline only for the masses, not for the select few. And naturally he counts himself among the latter,
In addition to this antagonism between the intellectual and the proletarian in sentiment, there is yet another antagonism. The intellectual, armed with the general education of our time, conceives himself as very superior to the proletarian. Even Engels writes of the scholarly mystification with which he approached workers in his youth. The intellectual finds it very easy to overlook in the proletarian his equal as a fellow fighter, at whose side in the combat he must take his place. Instead he sees in the proletarian the latter's low level of intellectual development, which it is the intellectual's task to raise. He sees in the worker not a comrade but a pupil. The intellectual clings to Lassalle’s aphorism on the bond between science and the proletariat, a bond which will raise society to a higher plane. As advocate of science, the intellectuals come to the workers not in order to co-operate with them as comrades, but as an especially friendly external force in society, offering them aid.
For Lassalle, who coined the aphorism on science and the proletariat, science, like the state, stands above the class struggle. Today we know this to be false. For the state is the instrument of the ruling class. Moreover, science itself rises above the classes only insofar as it does not deal with classes, that is, only insofar as it is a natural and not a social science. A scientific examination of society produces an entirely different conclusion when society is observed from a class standpoint, especially from the standpoint of a class which is antagonistic to that society. When brought to the proletariat from the capitalist class, science is invariably adapted to suit capitalist interests. What the proletariat needs is a scientific understanding of its own position in society. That kind of science a worker cannot obtain in the officially and socially approved manner. The proletarian himself must develop his own theory. For this reason he must be completely self-taught, no matter whether his origin is academic or proletarian. The object of study is the activity of the proletariat itself, its role in the process of production, its role in the class struggle. Only from this activity can the theory, the self-consciousness of the proletariat, arise.
The alliance of science with labour and its goal of saving humanity, must therefore be understood not in the sense which the academicians transmit to the people the knowledge which they gain in the bourgeois classroom, but rather in this sense that every one of our co-fighters, academicians and proletarians alike, who are capable of participating in proletarian activity, utilise the common struggle or at least investigate it, in order to draw new scientific knowledge which can in turn be fruitful for further proletarian activity. Since that is how the matter stands, it is impossible to conceive of science being handed down to the proletariat or of an alliance between them as two independent powers. That science, which can contribute to the emancipation of the proletariat, can be developed only by the proletariat and through it. What the liberals bring over from the bourgeois scientific circles cannot serve to expedite the struggle for emancipation, but often only to retard it.
The remarks which follow are by way of digression from our main theme. But today when the question of the intellectuals is of such extreme importance, the digression is not perhaps without value.
Nietzsche’s philosophy with its cult of superman for whom the fulfilment of his own individuality is everything and the subordination of the individual to a great social aim is as vulgar as it is despicable, this philosophy is the real philosophy of the intellectual; and it renders him totally unfit to participate in the class struggle of the proletariat.
Next to Nietzsche, the most outstanding spokesman of a philosophy based on the sentiments of the intellectual is Ibsen. His Doctor Stockmann (An Enemy of the People) is not a socialist, as so many believe, but rather the type of intellectual who is bound to come into conflict with the proletarian movement, and with any popular movement generally, as soon as he attempts to work within it. For the basis of the proletarian movement, as of every democratic movement, is respect for the majority of one’s fellows. A typical intellectual a la Stockmann regards a “compact majority” as a monster which must be overthrown.
From the difference in sentiment between the proletarian and the intellectual, which we have noted above, a conflict can easily arise between the intellectual and the party when the intellectual joins it. That holds equally even if his joining the party does not give rise to any economic difficulties for the intellectual, and even though his theoretical understanding of the movement may be adequate. Not only the very worst elements, but often men of splendid character and devoted to their convictions have on this account suffered shipwreck in the party.
That is why every intellectual must examine himself conscientiously, before joining the party. And that is why the party must examine him to see whether he can integrate himself in the class struggle of the proletariat, and become immersed in it as a simple soldier, without feeling coerced or oppressed. Whoever is capable of this can contribute valuable services to the proletariat according to his talents, and gain great satisfaction from his party activity. Whoever is incapable can expect great friction, disappointment, conflicts, which are of advantage neither to him nor to the party.
An ideal example of an intellectual who thoroughly assimilated the sentiments of a proletarian, and who, although a brilliant writer, quite lost the specific manner of an intellectual, who marched cheerfully with the rank-and-file, who worked in any post assigned to him, who devoted himself wholeheartedly to our great cause, and despised the feeble whinings about the suppression of one's individuality, as individuals trained in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Ibsen are prone to do whenever they happen to be in a minority - that ideal example of the intellectual whom the socialist movement needs, was Wilhelm Liebknecht. We might also mention Marx, who never forced himself to the forefront, and whose hearty discipline in the International, where he often found himself in the minority, was exemplary.
Karl Kautsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

WRITE LYNNE!

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

 

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Markin comment:

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

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

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

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

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