Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his political obituary for German Social- Democratic Party and pre- World War I Second International leader, and a former co-thinker, the "pope" of Marxism in that era, Karl Kautsky. This is a good example of a model for the way to deal with the contributions of political opponents.
Markin comment:
First question: What do the murdered heroic Kansas abortion provider, Doctor George Tiller, the 17th century Puritan revolutionary poet and propagandist, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and the early 20th century labor and civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, defender of “Big” Big Haywood and John Scopes, among others, have in common? Similar expertise in similar fields? No. Common political vision? Hell, no. Could it be that they, each in their own way, contributed to the store of our human progress? Well, yes. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Second question: What do the pre-World War II American communist renegade from Marxism, Max Shachtman, the old English socialist and novelist turned British imperial informer, George Orwell, and the German “pope” of pre- World War I Marxism in the Second International , Karl Kautsky have in common? I will not prolong the agony on this one because I have to make my point before the next millennium so it is that they have made contributions to our common socialist movement before they went over to the other, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist side (one way or the other). And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Third question: What do the old-fashioned 19th century French revolutionary and Paris Commune member, Louis–August Blanqui, the iconic American black liberation fighter, Malcolm X, and the old Industrial Workers of World (IWW-Wobblies) organizer extraordinaire, Vincent St. John, have in common? Again, I will cut to the chase; they were all, one way or the other, political opponents of Marxism. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.
Okay, by my count I see zero legendary Bolshevik names listed above. Names like Leon Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, N. Krupskaya, J. Sverdlov, Jim Cannon, John Reed, “Big” Bill Haywood, and so on. Oh, they have been honored in this space, profusely. Of course. (Although I do not believe that there was a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them either, that was pure bourgeosi propaganda, always). And that is exactly my point here.
Let me back track on this one, a little. Recently I did a series of reviews of the work of American detective fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. (see blogs, dated August 15-18, 2010). Beyond a review of his outstanding literary work I noted that Hammett was a prominent supporter of the Stalinized American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In that dead night of the "red scare", which many from that time and since would prefer to obliterate from American "democratic" memory, especially the memory of their own silence and complicity, just said no to the committees that wanted him to “name names.” He didn’t and paid the price for his courageous act. Others, including long time Stalinists and fellow–travelers squawked to high heaven before those committees, sometimes without the least bit of pressure. A simple acknowledgement of Hammett’s deed, noting along the way, that Hammett and our Trotskyist forbears were still political opponents at the end of the day seemed less than controversial.
Not so, at least from an e-mail that I received, claiming (for me) the mantle of Stalinophile for such a “tribute”. First, I assume that the person, for good or ill, had not read my "tributes” to arch-Stalinist American Communist Party supporters, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who I have termed “heroic” for their deeds in behalf of the Soviet Union, when those deeds counted. Or that if the person had deeds, like Hammett's, involving less than going to meet death fearlessly by Stalinists are not worthy of kudos. In any case, this person is all wrong.
Go back to the first question above where basically non-political types were noted for their contributions to human progress. That is the “missing link” to this person’s mistaken position. I could have gone on and on about various persons that have been honored in this American Left History blog. But that seemed to me to be unnecessarily hammering home the point. Here is the real point. We have had few enough occasions when our fellows get it right to narrow the parameters of what contributes to human progress. If we get too picky we are left with honoring Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Bolsheviks. Oh yes, and, of course, those few of us who claim to be contemporary Bolsheviks- including, I presume, the heroic, non-Stalinophile, e-mail sender. Enough said.
Note: I did not mention this e-mail sender’s political affiliation although it was provided. Let us just put it this way. The organization that the person belongs to (and I am not sure the person knows all the organization’s history, it didn’t seem so) has a history of “bailing water” (my term)for the “progressive" wing of the Democratic party (whatever that is?) and wondered out loud why I did not honor the likes of California’s’ current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,and so on. Jesus, give me a break. But, wait a minute, if the shades of old Dashiell Hammett were around today or those of some of his fellow reprobate Stalinists, those are the same kindreds that they would be kowtowing to, as well. Hey, I just tipped my hat to old Hammett I did not try to "steal" his "progressive/ popular front" political strategy. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Double, Jesus give me a break.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"-"Notes from Besieged Gaza" - A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a SteveLendmanBlog entry-Notes from Besieged Gaza.
Markin comment:
End the blockade of Gaza now! Defend the Palestinian people!
Markin comment:
End the blockade of Gaza now! Defend the Palestinian people!
*From "The Rag Blog"-Protesters at Fort Hood in Killeen Block buses deploying troops to Iraq- All Honor To These Anti-War Fighters
Click on the headlines to link to a The Rag Blog entry- Protesters at Fort Hood in Killeen Block buses deploying troops to Iraq.
Markin comment:
All Honor To These Anti-War Fighters! Make Every Military Base An Anti-War Fortress!
Markin comment:
All Honor To These Anti-War Fighters! Make Every Military Base An Anti-War Fortress!
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain"- Fight For "The Big Rock" Dream- Fight For A Workers Party!
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Harry McClintock performing his classic Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
************
Big Rock Candy Mountain- Harry McClintock
One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
....
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
************
Big Rock Candy Mountain- Harry McClintock
One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
....
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Woody Guthrie's "Deportees"- Full Citizenship Rights For All Those Who Make It To The U.S.!
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris performing his father's Deportee.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Markin comment:
Woody's words were written long ago but they definitely resonate today. This is a "no-brainer" for us- Full citizenship rights for all who make it to the United States!
**********
Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie
Music by Martin Hoffman
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are piled in their cresote dumps
They're flying you back to the Mexico border
To pay all your money to wade back again
My father's own father, he wanted that river
They took all the money he made in his life
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
And they rode the truck till they took down and died
CHORUS
Good-bye to my Juan, good-bye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maris
You won't have a name when you ride the big air-plane
And all they will call you will be deportees.
Some of us are illega, and others not wanted
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
But it's six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like theives.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys and died on your plains
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
CHORUS
A sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos canyon
Like a fireball of lightning, it shook all our hills
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?
©1961 (renewed) & 1963 Ludlow Music Inc., New York,NY (TRO)
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
****
Markin comment:
Woody's words were written long ago but they definitely resonate today. This is a "no-brainer" for us- Full citizenship rights for all who make it to the United States!
**********
Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie
Music by Martin Hoffman
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are piled in their cresote dumps
They're flying you back to the Mexico border
To pay all your money to wade back again
My father's own father, he wanted that river
They took all the money he made in his life
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
And they rode the truck till they took down and died
CHORUS
Good-bye to my Juan, good-bye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maris
You won't have a name when you ride the big air-plane
And all they will call you will be deportees.
Some of us are illega, and others not wanted
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
But it's six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like theives.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys and died on your plains
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
CHORUS
A sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos canyon
Like a fireball of lightning, it shook all our hills
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?
©1961 (renewed) & 1963 Ludlow Music Inc., New York,NY (TRO)
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty"- Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Arlo Guthrie performing his father's Pastures Of Plenty.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Markin comment:
Woody's words were written long ago but they resonate today. We better get to the task at hand- Fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. And pronto.
********
Pastures Of Plenty
It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win
It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Markin comment:
Woody's words were written long ago but they resonate today. We better get to the task at hand- Fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. And pronto.
********
Pastures Of Plenty
It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win
It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free
*Writer's Corner- The Life And Times Of Jack London- A Guest Book Review/Interview
Click on the headline to link to National Public Radio's On Point for an interview with a new Jack London biography, Wolf: The Lives Of Jack London, by James Haley
Markin comment:
I don't know that I have still gotten over the sense of hunger, hard, right to the nub hunger, after reading Jack London's Call Of The Wild (or the look of food in the same way afterwards). Whoa! Stand back this guy London can write. His politics, ostensibly socialist, were a little more problematic. More on that later, for now though listen to this informative interview.
Markin comment:
I don't know that I have still gotten over the sense of hunger, hard, right to the nub hunger, after reading Jack London's Call Of The Wild (or the look of food in the same way afterwards). Whoa! Stand back this guy London can write. His politics, ostensibly socialist, were a little more problematic. More on that later, for now though listen to this informative interview.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
*Poet's Corner- Marilyn Buck's' "Black August"- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Black August
Would you hang on a cliff’s edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
“let go! die, damn you, die!”
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?
20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist: Black August
Nat Turner insurrection chief executed: Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle’s light: Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered: Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead: Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore – their last breaths drawn fighting death: Black August
Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles
light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life
-- Marilyn Buck, 2000
Would you hang on a cliff’s edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
“let go! die, damn you, die!”
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?
20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist: Black August
Nat Turner insurrection chief executed: Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle’s light: Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered: Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead: Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore – their last breaths drawn fighting death: Black August
Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles
light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life
-- Marilyn Buck, 2000
*From The Rag Blog- The Late Class-War Prisoner And Poet Marilyn Buck Honored In Texas- "Black August"
Click on headline to link to a The Rag Blog entry- The Late Class-War Prisoner Marilyn Buck Honored In Texas.
Markin comment:
Honor Marilyn Buck! Fight to Free All Class-War Prisoners from A to Z Now!
**********
Black August
Would you hang on a cliff’s edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
“let go! die, damn you, die!”
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?
20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist: Black August
Nat Turner insurrection chief executed: Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle’s light: Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered: Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead: Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore – their last breaths drawn fighting death: Black August
Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles
light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life
-- Marilyn Buck, 2000
Markin comment:
Honor Marilyn Buck! Fight to Free All Class-War Prisoners from A to Z Now!
**********
Black August
Would you hang on a cliff’s edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
“let go! die, damn you, die!”
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?
20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist: Black August
Nat Turner insurrection chief executed: Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle’s light: Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered: Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead: Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore – their last breaths drawn fighting death: Black August
Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles
light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life
-- Marilyn Buck, 2000
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S.- Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter-Spring, 1996, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
******************
Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense
We print below an edited speech by Deborah Mackson, executive director of the Partisan Defense Committee, prepared for April 7995 regional educationals in New York, Chicago and Oakland as part of a series of meetings and rallies sponsored by the PDC to mobilize support for Mum/a Abu-Jamal and the fight against the racist death penalty.
Mumia Abu-Jamal describes his current conditions of incarceration on death row at the State Correctional Institution at Greene County, Pennsylvania as "high-tech hell." When Governor Tom Ridge assaults all of the working people and minorities of this country by initiating the first execution of a political prisoner in America since the Rosenbergs, he must hear a resounding "No!" from coast to coast. Because Jamal is an articulate voice for the oppressed, this racist and rotting capitalist state wants to silence him forever. He is indeed dangerous. He is indeed a symbol. He is, indeed, innocent. Hear his powerful words, and you will begin to understand the hatred and fear which inspires the vendetta against this courageous fighter:
"Over many long years, over mountains of fears, through rivers of repression, from the depths of the valley of the shadow of death, I survive to greet you, in the continuing spirit of rebellion.... As America's ruling classes rush backwards into a new Dark Age, the weight of repression comes easier with each passing hour. But as repression increases, so too must resistance.... Like our forefathers, our fore-mothers, our kith and kin, we must fight for every inch of ground gained. The repressive wave sweeping this country will not stop by good wishes, but only by a counterwave of committed people firm in their focus."
We of the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League and the Labor Black Leagues are committed to a campaign to free this former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and supporter of the controversial MOVE organization who was framed for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman. Our aim is to effect an international campaign of protest and publicity like that which ultimately saved the nine Scottsboro Boys, framed for rape in Alabama in 1931, from the electric chair. We must mobilize the working class and all the oppressed in the fight to free this class-war prisoner framed by the government's murderous vendetta.
As Marxists, we are opposed to the death penalty on principle. We say that this state does not have the right to decide who lives and who dies. Capital punishment is part of the vast arsenal of terror at the hands of this state, which exists to defend the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. America's courts are an instrument of the bourgeoisie's war on the working people and the poor; they are neither neutral nor by any stretch of the imagination "color blind."
To us, the defense of America's class-war prisoners— whatever their individual political views may be—is a responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard party which must champion all causes in the interest of the proletariat. The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated by the Spartacist League in 1974 in the tradition of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense, under its founder and first secretary from 1925 to 1928, James P. Cannon. Today, I want to talk to you about how that tradition was built in this country by the best militants of the past 100 years—the leaders of class-struggle organizations like the pre-World War I Industrial Workers of the World, the early Socialist and Communist parties and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
The Roots of Black Oppression
To forge a future, one has to understand the past. The modern American death penalty is the barbaric inheritance of a barbaric system of production: chattel slavery. Like the capitalists who hold state power today, the slavocracy used the instruments of their power, special bodies of armed men and the "justice" system— the laws, courts and prisons—to control people for profit. Directly descendant from the slavocracy's tradition of property in black people is the death penalty. A trail through history illustrates this truth. The "slave codes" codified a series of offenses for which slaves could be killed but for which whites would receive a lesser sentence. In Virginia, the death penalty was mandatory for both slaves and free blacks for any crime for which a white could be imprisoned for three years or more. In Georgia, a black man convicted of raping a white woman faced the death penalty; a white man got two years for the same crime, and punishment was "discretionary" if the victim was black. Slaves could not own property, bear arms, assemble or testify against whites in courts of law. Marriage between slaves was not recognized; families were sold apart; it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. Slaves were not second- or third-class citizens—they were not human, but legally "personal, movable property," chattel.
William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner has the fictional character T.R. Gray explain the slaveowners' rationale to Turner:
"The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain't a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how come you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy. "He paused, then said softly without emotion: 'And hung by the neck until dead'."
While the slave codes were a Southern institution, legal and extralegal terror were never exclusive to the South. As early as 1793, fugitive slave laws were on the federal books. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in response to the growing abolitionist influence which had inspired several Northern states to pass "personal liberty laws," giving some protection to slaves who had successfully negotiated the Underground Railroad. The 1850 law, seeking to protect the private property of slaveholders, put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom—no right to habeas corpus, no right to a jury trial, no right even to testify on their own behalf.
Many blacks were caught in the clutches of this infamous law, which had no bounds. For example, a man in southern Indiana was arrested and returned to an owner’ who claimed he had run away 79 years before. The law knew no pretense. A magistrate's fee doubled if he judged an unfortunate black before the bench a runaway slave instead of a tree man. And fugitives were pursued with vigor. In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson recounts the story of Anthony Burns, a slave who stowed away from Virginia to Boston in 1854. The feds spent the equivalent of $2.3 million in current dollars to return him to his "owner." That is approximately equal to what an average death penalty case costs today.
Any hope that "blind justice" could be sought from the U.S. Supreme Court was dashed with the 1856 Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was adopted, Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."
While slavery itself was overthrown in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the needs of the American capitalists for compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. A new, semi-capitalistic mode of agriculture developed, in which the semi-slave condition of the freed blacks was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relations of slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.
After the Civil War the slave codes became the "black codes," a separate set of rules defining crime and punishment for blacks and limiting their civil rights. They were enforced by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan; in the last two decades of the 19th century, lynching vastly outnumbered legal executions. As W.E.B. Du Bois said of lynching:
"It is not simply the Klu Klux Klan; it is not simply weak officials; it is not simply inadequate, unenforced law. It is deeper, far deeper than all this: it is the in-grained spirit of mob and murder, the despising of women and the capitalization of children born of 400 years of Negro slavery and 4,000 years of government for private profit."
The promise of Radical Reconstruction, equality, could only be fulfilled by attacking the problem at its very root: private property in the means of production. Neither Northern capitalists nor Southern planters could abide that revolution, so they made a deal, the Compromise of 1877, in their common interest. That's why we call on American workers, black and white, to finish the Civil War—to complete, through socialist revolution, the unfinished tasks of the Second American Revolution!
In the wake of the Compromise of 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction period. One landmark decision was Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896, which permitted "separate but equal" treatment of black and white in public facilities. But separate is never equal. This was simply the legal cover for the transformation of the "black codes" into "Jim Crow"—the "grandfather clause," poll tax, literacy test, all designed to deny blacks the vote, and the institution of separate facilities from schools to cemeteries. This legal and practical segregation, instituted in the South and transported North, was a tool to divide and rule.
America's Racist Death Penalty
The death penalty was applied at will until 1972. From 1930 to 1967 the U.S. averaged 100 or more executions per year. In 1972, following a decade of civil rights protests, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" because of its arbitrary and capricious application. But the hiatus lasted only four years.
In 1976-the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty and has been expanding it ever since. In 1986 the court ruled it unconstitutional to execute the insane, but gave no criteria for defining insanity; in 1988 it approved the execution of 16-year-olds; in 1989 it ruled for the execution of retarded persons. Since 1976, 276 people have been executed in this country. Between January and April of 1995, 17 were killed. And innocence is no barrier, as the Supreme Court recently decreed in the case of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, executed in Texas in January 1995 after the prosecution submitted that he had not committed the crime for which he had been sentenced. The Supreme Court said it didn't matter, he'd had a "fair trial." What an abomination!
Perhaps the most telling case in recent history was the 1987 McCleskey decision. The evidence submitted to the courts illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism ruled the application of the death penalty. Overall, a black person convicted of killing a white person is 22 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is black. When the McCleskey case went to court, liberals across the country hoped for a Brown v. Board of Education decision in regard to the death penalty. The evidence of racial bias was clear and overwhelming. But while the Supreme Court accepted the accuracy of the evidence, it said it doesn't matter. The court showed the real intention of the death penalty when it stated that McCleskey's claim "throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system" and "the validity of capital punishment in our multi-racial society." Or as a Southern planter wrote in defense of the slave codes, "We have to rely more and more on the power of fear.... We are determined to continue masters" (quoted in Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution).
Let's take a look for a moment at "our multi-racial society." The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world: 344 per 100,000. It is one of the two "advanced" industrial countries left in the world which employs capital punishment. As of January 1995, 2,976 men, women and children occupied America's death rows; 48 are women, 37 are juveniles. According to the latest census, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, yet 51 percent of the people awaiting execution are minorities and 40 percent are black.
Eighty-four percent of all capital cases involve white victims even though 50 percent of murder victims in America are black. Of a total of 75 people executed for interracial murders, three involved a black victim and a white defendant, 72 involved a white victim and a black defendant. The death penalty is truly an impulse to genocide against the black population for whom the ruling class no longer sees any need in its profit-grabbing calculations.
Understanding this and understanding the broader importance of the black question in America, we take up Jamal's case as a concrete task in our struggle for black freedom and for proletarian revolution in the interests of the liberation of all of humanity.
Early History of Class-Struggle Defense
From the beginning of the communist movement, a commitment to those persecuted by the ruling classes, whether "on the inside" or out, has been recognized as an integral part of the class struggle. Marx and Engels spent years defending and supporting the refugees of-the Paris Commune.
As Trotskyists, we feel this responsibility keenly because we inherited some of the finest principles for class-struggle defense from James R Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism. The traditions which inspired the International Labor Defense (ILD) were forged in hard class struggle, dating back to the rise of the labor movement after the Civil War. One of the first acts of the Republican government following the Compromise of 1877 was to pull its troops from the South and send them to quell the railway strikes that had broken out throughout the Northern states. The federal strikebreakers tipped the scales in the hard-fought battles of the time, many of which escalated into general strikes, and the workers were driven back in defeat. But united struggle against the bosses had been launched, and less than a decade later the workers movement had taken up the fight for an eight-hour day.
In the course of this struggle, workers in Chicago amassed at Haymarket Square in early May of 1886. The protest was just winding down when a bomb went off, likely planted by a provocateur. The cops opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding many. The government’s response was to frame up eight workers, who were sympathetic to anarchist views, on charges of murder. They were tried and convicted, not for the bombing but for their agitation against the employers. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, three were finally pardoned in 1891.
The period from the turn of the century to America's entry into World War I was one of intense social struggle; militant strikes were more numerous than at any time since. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) led union organizing drives, anti-lynching campaigns and a free speech movement. The level of struggle meant more frequent arrests, which gave rise to the need for defense of the class and individuals. The left and most labor currents and organizations rallied to the defense of victims of the class war. Non-sectarian defense was the rule of the day. The Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all," was taken to heart by the vast majority of the workers.
This was Cannon's training ground. One of his heroes was Big Bill Haywood, who conceived the ILD with Cannon in Moscow in 1925. As Cannon said, the history of the ILD is "the story of the projection of Bill Haywood's influence—through me and my associates—into the movement from which he was exiled, an influence for simple honesty and good will and genuine non-partisan solidarity toward all the prisoners of the class war in America."
Big Bill Haywood came from the Western Federation of Miners, one of the most combative unions this country has ever produced. The preamble to their constitution was a series of six points, beginning, "We hold that there is a class struggle in society and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions." It goes on to note, "We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product," and it asserts that the working class and it alone can and must achieve its own emancipation. It ends, "we, the wage slaves...have associated in the Western Federation of Miners."
Not all labor organizations of the time had this class-struggle perspective. Contrast the tract of Samuel Rompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL), "Labor's Bill of Grievances," which he sent to the president and Congress in 1908:
"We present these grievances to your attention because we have long, patiently and in vain waited for redress.
There is not any matter of which we have complained but for which we nave in an honorable and lawful manner submitted remedies. The remedies for these grievances proposed by labor are in line with fundamental law, and with progress and development made necessary by changed industrial conditions."
The IWW, whose constitution began, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," was founded in 1905. Haywood was an initiator and one of its most aggressive and influential organizers. As a result of that and his open socialist beliefs, in 1906 he, along with George Pettibone and Charles Moyer, were arrested for the bombing murder of ex-governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho (the nemesis of the combative Coeur d'Alene miners). The three were kidnapped from Colorado, put on a military train and taken to Idaho.
The Western Federation of Miners and the IWW launched a tremendous defense movement for the three during the 18 months they were waiting to be tried for their lives. Everyone from the anarchists to the AFL participated. Demonstrations of 50,000 and more were organized all across the country. It was this case that brought James Cannon to political consciousness.
The case was important internationally, too. While they were in jail, Maxim Gorky came to New York and sent a telegram to the three with greetings from the Russian workers. Haywood wired back that their imprisonment was an expression of the class struggle which was the same in America as in Russia and in all other capitalist countries.
On a less friendly note, Teddy Roosevelt, then president of America, publicly declared the three "undesirable citizens." Haywood responded that the laws of the country held they were innocent until proven guilty and that a man in Roosevelt's position should be the last to judge them until the case was decided in court.
The Socialist Party (founded in 1901) also rallied to the defense. While in jail, Haywood was nominated as the party's candidate for governor of Colorado and got 16,000 votes. The leader of the SP, Eugene Debs, wrote his famous "Arouse, Ye Slaves" for the SP's Appeal to Reason:
"If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.... Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution....
"Get ready, comrades, for action!... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat...would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising."
Haywood's trial began in May of 1907. It was Clarence Darrow for the defense and the infamous Senator William E. Borah for the frame-up (prosecution). That this was a political trial was clear to everybody. The prosecution, for example, introduced into evidence issues of the anarchist journal Alarm from 1886, when Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons was its editor. Haywood thought that Dar-row's summary to the jury in his case was the best effort Darrow ever made in the courtroom. But Haywood also got a bit exasperated with his lawyer. In his autobiography, he tells the story of Darrow coming to jail depressed and worried. The defendants would always try to get him to lighten up. Finally Pettibone got tired of this and told Darrow they knew it would be really hard on him to lose this great case with all its national and international attention, but, hey! he said, "You know it's us fellows that have to be hanged!"
Every day of the trial the defense committee packed the courtroom with what Haywood called "a labor jury of Socialists and union men." This is a practice we proudly follow today. On the stand, Haywood told the story of the Western Federation of Miners and its battles against the bosses, putting them on trial. He refused to be intimidated by Senator Borah. When Borah asked whether Haywood had said that Governor Steunenberg should be exterminated, Haywood replied that to the best of his remembrance, he said he should be "eliminated."
On June 28 Haywood was acquitted. Soon thereafter, so were his comrades. At a Chicago rally organized to greet him upon his release, he told the crowd of 200,000, "We owe our lives to your solidarity." Haywood knew that innocence was not enough. It is that kind of solidarity we are seeking to mobilize today for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Labor Movement and World War I
Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1908, during its most left-wing period. In 1910, he was one of the party's delegates to the Socialist Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen. Shortly after, the SP moved to the right, and in 1912 (the year Debs polled nearly a million votes in his campaign for president) a number of leftists, including the young Jim Cannon, left the Socialist Party. A year later, when Haywood was purged from the executive board, there was another mass exodus.
The IWW, in which Haywood and Cannon remained active, expanded the scope of its activities. This was the period of the free speech movement and anti-lynching ' campaigns. One Wobbly pamphlet, "Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It," discusses the question of integrated struggle and how to stop lynchings:
"The workers of every race and nationality must join in one common group against their one common enemy—the employers—so as to be "able to defend themselves and one another. Protection for the working class lies in complete solidarity of the workers, without regard to race, creed, sex or color. 'One Enemy—One Union!' must be their watchword."
They almost got it right: as syndicalists, they didn't understand the need for a vanguard party to fight for a revolutionary program.
With the beginning of World War I and preparations for U.S. involvement, the government declared political war on the IWW and the left. Thousands of Wobblies were imprisoned under "criminal syndicalism" laws—100 in San Quentin and Folsom alone. In response, the IWW adopted the slogan, "Fill the jails." It was a misguided tactic, but unlike many so-called socialists today, the Wobbliest had a principled position where it counted: they'd go to jail before they'd cross a picket line.
1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution. A month after that world-historic event, Haywood was back on trial in Chicago with some 18 other Wobblies. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in Leaven worth prison. In 1919 he was released on bail pending appeal and devoted his time to the IWW's General Defense Committee, launching a campaign to raise bail money for those in prison. When the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids began, Haywood learned that he was a primary target. So, as his appeal went to the Supreme Court, he sailed for the Soviet Union. A student of history, he had no illusions in "blind justice."
Cannon was also heavily influenced by the case of California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. In 1916, as America was preparing to go to war, Mooney and Billings were framed up for a bombing at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco. The Preparedness Movement was a bourgeois movement of "open shop" chamber of commerce, right-wing vigilante groups, who were very serious about getting the U.S. into World War I. They went into Mexico to fight Pancho Villa as practice. The Preparedness Movement was opposed by labor, and in fact two days before the bombing there had been a 5,000-strong labor demonstration in San Francisco.
Mooney and Billings were convicted. Mooney was sentenced to hang, Billings got a life sentence. At first, their case was taken up only by the anarchists. The official AFL labor movement took a hands-off position. But when it became clear that they had been framed with perjured testimony, a "Mooney movement" swept the country.
The Mooney case had a big impact on Russian immigrant workers, among others. Thus the Mooney case was carried back to Russia, and in April of 1917 the Russian anarchists led a Mooney defense demonstration in Petrograd at the American consulate. Worried about Russia pulling out of World War I at that point, Woodrow Wilson personally interceded on behalf of Mooney and Billings. It didn't get them out of jail, but the effect of international pressure was not lost on Cannon.
In the U.S., the cops broke up Mooney defense meetings and arrested those present. The class-struggle nature of the defense movement, involving such actions as one-day strikes, was a felt threat to the ruling class, especially in the face of a war. In a conscious effort to dissipate this movement, the state commuted Mooney's death sentence to life in prison. In combination with the domestic repression following the war, this took the life out of the Mooney movement. Mooney and Billings stayed in prison for 22 years. They were released in 1939, and Mooney spent two and a half of the next three years in the hospital and then-died.
In his eulogy "Good-by Tom Mooney!" Cannon wrote:
"They imprisoned Mooney—as they imprisoned Debs and Haywood and hundreds of others—in order to clear the road of militant labor opposition to the First World War, and they kept him in prison for revenge and for a warning to others."
As World War II began, Cannon would find himself in the same position.
The Tradition of International Labor Defense
The parties of the Second International backed their own ruling classes in World War I, and the Bolsheviks fought for a new international party committed to the Marxist movement's call, "Workers of the World Unite!" In 1919, the leaders of the Russian Revolution founded the Third International, the Comintern, to build revolutionary parties which could take up the struggle against capitalist rule. 1919 was also a year of massive strike activity in the U.S. This wave of class struggle swelled the ranks of the Socialist Party, which then split in September. The most left-wing workers regrouped, giving birth to the American Communist movement, and Cannon was among them.
America in the 1920s was not a nice place to be. Warren Harding was elected in a landslide victory on the slogan of "Return to Normalcy." And "normal" was racist and repressive. His attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a war on the left inspired by fear of the Russian Revolution, which resulted in massive deportations of leftists and jailing of American radicals. The young Communist Party went underground. 1920 saw more lynchings and anti-black pogroms than any time in recent memory. The Klan grew like wildfire, and the government passed anti-immigration legislation that would give Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson wet dreams.
When it was clear that the IWW was for all practical purposes broken, many of its jailed members, including Eugene Debs, were pardoned. The Communists, however, remained in jail. The union movement took it on the chops as well, and by the end of the 1920s only 13 percent of the workforce of this country was unionized.
The 1921 Third Congress of the Comintern was held under the watchword "To the Masses." In the U.S., the newly formed party had been underground and could hardly make a turn to the masses. At the Comintern's urging, the Workers (Communist) Party emerged in December of 1921 with Cannon as its first chairman and main public spokesman.
By the time of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the tactic of the united front had been defined; the Fourth Congress detailed its application. The need for the united front grew out of the post-World War I ebbing of the revolutionary tide following the Russian Revolution. The offensive by the capitalists against the proletariat and its parties was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to save their very lives.
The slogan "march separately, strike together" encapsulated the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program. The Comintern sought both to achieve the maximum unity of the working masses in their defensive struggles and to expose in action the hesitancy of the leadership of the reformist organizations of the Second International to act in the interests of the proletariat and the inability of its program to win against the ruling class.
The united front is a tactic we use today. Our call for labor/black mobilizations to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty has brought together many different organizations and individuals to save Jamal's life. At these rallies and demonstrations, we
have insisted on the right to argue for our program to put an end to racist injustice and capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.
In line with the policies hashed out at the Third and Fourth Congresses, the Communist International founded an international defense organization, the International Red Aid. These events had a substantial effect on the young American party, and one of the direct results was the foundation in 1925 of the International Labor Defense (ILD).
Cannon's goal was to make the ILD the defense arm of the labor movement. Cannon wrote to Debs on the occasion of his endorsement of the ILD:
"The main problem as I see it is to construct the ILD on the broadest possible basis. To conduct the work in a non-partisan and non-sectarian manner and finally establish the impression by our deeds that the ILD is the defender of every worker persecuted for his activities in the class struggle, without any exceptions and without regard to his affiliations."
From 1925 to 1928, the ILD was pretty successful in achieving that goal. It established principles to which we adhere today:
• United-front defense: The ILD campaigns were organized to allow for the broadest possible participation.
• Class-struggle defense: The ILD sought to mobilize the working class in protest on a national and international scale, relying on the class movement of the workers and
placing no faith in the justice of the capitalist courts, while using every legal avenue open to them.
• Non-sectarian defense: When it was founded, the ILD immediately adopted 106 prisoners, instituting the practice of financially assisting these prisoners and their
families. Many had been jailed as a result of the "criminal syndicalism" laws; some were Wobblies, some were anarchists, some were strike leaders. Not one was a member of the Communist Party. The ILD launched the first Holiday Appeal. Of course, the ILD also vigorously defended its own, understanding the vital importance of the legal rights of the Communist Party to exist and organize.
Social Defense and Union Struggle
The ILD's most well-known case was the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The frame-up for murder and robbery of these two immigrant anarchist workers, who were sent to their deaths by the state of Massachusetts in 1927, grew directly out of the "red scare" of the early '20s. The ILD applied with alacrity the main lines of its program: unity of all working-class forces and reliance on the class movement of the workers. Thousands of workers rallied to their cause, and unions around the country contributed to a defense fund set up by Italian workers in the Boston area. But the level of class struggle is key to the outcome of defense cases, and the ILD's exemplary campaign proved insufficient to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.
As the case drew to a close, one of the feints used by the state was to start rumors that Sacco and Vanzetti's death penalty sentence would be commuted to life without parole. This was designed to dissipate the Sacco and Vanzetti movement and prepare their execution. Cannon rang the alarm bells from the pages of the Labor Defender, rallying ILD supporters to mass demonstrations and warning them of the devious and two-faced nature of the bourgeoisie. Cannon had not forgotten the demobilization of the Mooney movement after his sentence had been commuted nor the living death that Mooney and Billings were enduring in their 22 years of internment.
This has significance for us today as we fight against the threatened execution of Jamal. Life in prison is hell. Think about the "life" of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another former Panther, jailed for a quarter of a century for a crime the state knows he did not commit. While some call upon Pennsylvania governor Ridge to convert Jamal's sentence to life without parole, we demand the freedom of both these innocent men.
The ILD also worked in defense of the class as a whole. In 1926, about 16,000 textile workers hit the bricks in Passaic, New Jersey. Their strike was eventually defeated, but it drew sharp lessons on the role of the state and demonstrated for Cannon the absolute necessity for a permanent, organized and always ready non-partisan labor defense organization. Cannon wrote in the Labor Defender:
"Our I.L.D. is on the job at Passaic. Not a single striker went into court without our lawyer to defend him. There was not a single conviction that was not appealed. Nobody had to remain in jail more than a few days for lack of bail.... A great wave of protest spread thru the labor movement and even the most conservative labor leaders were compelled to give expression to it."
In 1928, the Trotskyist Left Opposition (including Cannon) was expelled from the Communist Party. The ILD remained under the control of the Communist Party and thus became subject to the zigzags of Stalinist policies throughout the 1930s, including the perversion of the united front from a tactic for class unity into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution.
In 1929, Stalin declared the "Third Period," an ultraleft shift, the main tactic of which was to smash the Social Democratic and other leftist parties by creating what the Stalinists called "united fronts from below." The Comintern charged the reformists with "social fascism"; the real fascists were to be dealt with secondarily. In Germany, this policy contributed to Adolph Hitler's seizure of power— there was no united fight against fascism by the workers in the mass Communist and Social Democratic parties. This policy had an effect on the U.S. party and its defense work.
Legal Lynching in the American South
One result of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression was that 200,000people made the rails their home as they moved from place to place looking for work. On 25 March 1931, nine black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, were riding the Memphis to Chattanooga freight train. Two young white women, fearful of being jailed for hoboing when the train was stopped after reports that there had been a fight with some white boys, accused the blacks of rape. Among the nine were Olen Montgomery—blind in one eye and with 10 percent vision in the other—headed for Memphis hoping to earn enough money to buy a pair of glasses; Willie Roberson, debilitated by years-long untreated syphilis and gonorrhea—which is important if you're going to be talking about a rape case; and Eugene Williams and Roy Wright, both 13 years old.
The group were nearly lynched on the spot. The trial began in Scottsboro, Alabama on April 6. Four days later, despite medical evidence that no rape had occurred—not to mention gross violations of due process—eight were sentenced to death and one of the 13-year-olds to life in prison. The Communist Party issued a statement condemning the trial as a "legal" lynching. That night, the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys began.
Freedom was a long time coming. A series of trials and appeals all went badly for the defendants. In 1933, one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but it wasn't until 1937 that four of the defendants were freed. Three more were paroled in the 1940s, and in 1948 Haywood Patterson escaped from Angola prison to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him. The last, Andy Wright, who had had his 1944 parole revoked, was finally released in 1950. The nine had spent 104 years in jail for a "crime" that never happened.
The ILD made the word "Scottsboro" synonymous, nationally and internationally, with Southern racism, repression and injustice. Their campaign was responsible for saving the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair. As Haywood Patterson's father wrote in a letter to his son, "You will burn sure if you don't let them preachers alone and trust in the International Labor Defense to handle the case."
The CP's publicity was massive and moving. They organized demonstrations in Harlem and across the country, appealing to the masses to put no confidence in the capitalist courts and to see the struggle for the freedom of these youths as part of the larger class struggle. Young Communists in Dresden, Germany marched on the American consulate, and, when officials refused to accept their petition, hurled bottles through windows. Inside each was the note: "Down with American murder and Imperialism. For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians. An end to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers."
In the South, the defense effort faced not only the racist system but the homegrown fascists of the Ku Klux Klan as well, which launched a campaign under the slogan "The Klan Rides Again to Stamp Out Communism."
The ILD's success in rallying the masses to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys happened despite their sectarian "Third Period" tactics. The ILD denounced the NAACP, the ACLU and most of the trade-union movement as "social fascists" and threw the "Trotskyite" likes of Jim Cannon out of Scottsboro defense meetings. But fascism was on the rise in Europe, and, seeking now to make as many allies as he could, in 1935 Stalin' declared the "Third Period" at an end. A Comintern resolution urged the Communist parties to form "popular fronts" with any and all for progressive ends. In the U.S. this meant supporting Roosevelt and abandoning the struggle to link the defense of black people with the fight against the capitalist system. You can imagine the surprise of the NAACP, who were now greeted warmly by the ILD as "comrades"! This comradeship did not extend to the Trotskyists. The Scottsboro Defense Committee was formed, and a lot of the life went out of the movement as the case dragged on.
Cannon and his party, the Communist League of America, supported the efforts of the ILD to free the Scottsboro Boys. The Trotskyists insisted on the importance of an integrated movement to fight in their defense. Cannon pointed out that it was wrong to view the Scottsboro case solely as a "Negro issue" and agitated in the pages of the Militant for the organization of white workers around the case.
When Clarence Darrow refused to work on the case unless the ILD withdrew because he didn't like its agitation methods, Cannon wrote:
"The ILD was absolutely right in rejecting the presumptuous demands of Darrow and Hays, and the Scottsboro prisoners showed wisdom in supporting the stand of their defense organization. Any other course would have signified an end to the fight to organize the protest of the masses against the legal lynching; and with that would have ended any real hope to save the boys and restore their freedom."
Darrow's big argument was: "You can't mix politics with a law case." Cannon replied:
"That is a reactionary lie. It is father to the poisonous doctrine that a labor case is a purely legal relation between the lawyer and client and the court.... It was the influence of this idea over the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which paralyzed the protest mass movement at every step and thereby contributed to the final tragic outcome. Not to the courts alone, and not primarily there, but to the masses must the appeal of the persecuted of class and race be taken. There is the power and there is the justice."
Communists on Trial
During the time that the Scottsboro Boys were languishing in their Southern jails, World War II began in Europe. The American workers had gone through the experience of one of the biggest union organizing drives in the history of the country, resulting in the formation of the CIO, and many of the new industrial unions had won significant victories. Communists, including the Trotskyists, Jim Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party, had participated in and led many of these struggles. War is great for capitalist economies—the destruction creates constant demand, and if you win, you get new markets to exploit. But to go to war, you have to regiment the population at home, and that begins with the suspension of civil liberties.
On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring the fingerprinting and registering of all aliens residing in the United States and making it a crime to advocate or teach the "violent overthrow of the United States government" or to belong to a group advocating or teaching it.
For public consumption, this act was billed as an antifascist measure, but the Socialist Workers Party (successor to the Communist League of America) and Minneapolis Teamsters were the first victims of the Smith Act prosecutions. Why did the head of the Teamsters Union, Daniel J. Tobin, the U.S. attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, conspire to take away the First Amendment rights of a small Trotskyist party, a party with maybe a couple thousand members and influence in one local of one union?
Part of the answer is that the SWP was effective. The party had led some hard class struggle; it was their comrades who had provided the leadership for the Minneapolis strike of 1934 which led to the formation of Teamsters Local 544. Another part of the answer is politics: the SWP was forthright in its opposition to the coming war. This was a calculated government attack designed to cripple the SWP where it had the most influence in the proletariat as America girded for imperialist war.
In the courtroom, the SWP's goal was to put the capitalist system on trial, a tradition we carry forward in our own cases. On the stand, Cannon pedagogically explained the positions of the SWP on the questions of the day and Marxism in general. But the Minneapolis defendants went to jail for 16 months—sentenced on the same day that Congress voted to enter the war. The ruling class hoped that the party would be leaderless and pass from the stage. But at that time the SWP was still a revolutionary party with a revolutionary program and a collective leadership—so that hope was, in the main, dashed.
A number of CIO unions issued statements in defense of the Minneapolis defendants, as did numerous black organizations. The American Communist Party, however, issued the following statement: "The Communist Party has always exposed, fought against and today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite fifth column from the life of our nation." In line with their support for Roosevelt and the war, the CP aided the government in the Smith Act prosecution of the SWP and aided the FBI in their persecution of the Trotskyists in the trade unions. The CP's disgusting collaboration did not prevent them from being prosecuted under the very same Smith Act, beginning in 1948. The Trotskyists, of course, defended the CP unequivocally against the government prosecution while criticizing the CP's Stalinist politics.
Years later the attorney general, Francis Biddle, apologized for prosecuting the Trotskyists. The bourgeoisie sometimes apologizes when its crisis is safely over. Fifty years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government "apologized" for the wartime roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, offering a token compensation to those whose homes were seized and livelihoods ruined. They say whatever outrageous trampling of civil liberties occurred was an "excess" or "wrong" and of course it will "never happen again." But the Reagan government drew up plans to intern Arab Americans in concentration camps in Louisiana after the bombing of Libya. Those camps are ready and waiting for the next time the bourgeoisie feels its rule is substantially threatened.
Class-Struggle Defense Work
The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated in 1974 by the Spartacist League with the goal of re-establishing in the workers movement united-front, non-sectarian defense principles in the tradition of Cannon's ILD.
This was not anticipated to be, nor has it been, an easy task. Unlike the ILD, which inherited the rich and principled defense traditions of the IWW and the personal authority of mass leaders like Cannon and Haywood, we were the immediate inheritors of a tradition of Stalinist perversion of defense work. In addition, the ILD was founded as a transitional organization, seeking to organize the masses for class-struggle defense work under the leadership of the party. By its second conference, the ILD had 20,000 individual members, a collective, affiliated membership of 75,000, and 156 branches across the country. The PDC attempts to conduct its work in a way that will make the transformation to such an organization possible.
The PDC program of raising money for monthly stipends for class-war prisoners is an example of an ILD practice to which we adhere. We currently send stipends to 17 prisoners, including Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga and other former supporters of the Black Panther Party, victims of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO frame-ups; Jerry Dale Lowe, a miner condemned to eleven years in prison for defending his picket line; and members of the MOVE organization locked up because they survived the racist cop assaults on their homes and murder of their family. We also follow the ILD's policy of strict accounting of finances and have modeled our journal, Class-Struggle Defense Notes, on the ILD's Labor Defender.
We take to heart Cannon's point:
"The problem of organization is a very significant one for labor defense as a school for the class struggle. We must not get the idea that we are merely 'defense workers' collecting money for lawyers. That is only a part of what we are doing. We are organizing workers on issues which are directly related to the class struggle. The workers who take part in the work of the ILD are drawn, step by step into the main stream of the class struggle. The workers participating begin to learn the ABC of the labor struggle."
Class-struggle defense is a broad category. We are a small organization and must pick and choose our cases carefully, with an eye to their exemplary nature. The case of Mario Munoz a Chilean miners' leader condemned to death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta, is a good example. This was the PDC's first major defense effort. Co-sponsored with the Committee to Defend Workers and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, the international campaign of protest by unions and civil libertarians won asylum for Munoz and his family in France.
Some of our work has been in defense of the revolutionary party. The Spartacist League takes its legality— the right to exist and organize—very seriously, and has been quick to challenge every libel and legal attack. The party successfully challenged the FBI's slanderous description of the SL as "terrorists" who covertly advocate the violent’ Overthrow of the government. A 1984 settlement forced them to describe the SL as a "Marxist political organization."
The PDC takes up not only the cases but the causes of the whole of the working people. We have initiated labor/black mobilizations against the Klan from San Francisco to Atlanta to Philadelphia to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts to stop the fascists from spewing their race hate.
In 1989, we broadened our thinking about how the PDC could champion causes of the international proletariat and offered to organize an international brigade to Afghanistan to fight alongside the forces of the left-nationalist Kabul regime against the imperialist-backed, anti-woman Islamic fundamentalists on the occasion of the withdrawal of Soviet troops. When our offer of a brigade was declined, we launched a successful campaign to raise money for the victims of the mullah-led assault on Jalalabad. To reflect this, we expanded the definition of the PDC to one of a legal and social defense organization. To carry out this campaign, it was necessary to expand the PDC internationally. Sections of the International Communist League initiated fraternal organizations in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Currently we focus our efforts on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. Our actions in the Jamal case embody many of the principles of our defense work and the integral relationship of that work to the Marxist program of the Spartacist League, in this case particularly in regard to the fight for black liberation, which is key to the American revolution. This is a political death penalty case which illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its crudest, most vicious form and lays bare the essence of the state.
Throughout the very difficult period ahead, we will put all our faith in the mobilization of the working class and none in the capitalist courts. We embark now on exhausting every legal avenue open to Jamal, but we know the result hinges on the class struggle.
We hope you will join us in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, to abolish the racist death penalty and finish the Civil War. Forward to the third American revolution! •
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter-Spring, 1996, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense
We print below an edited speech by Deborah Mackson, executive director of the Partisan Defense Committee, prepared for April 7995 regional educationals in New York, Chicago and Oakland as part of a series of meetings and rallies sponsored by the PDC to mobilize support for Mum/a Abu-Jamal and the fight against the racist death penalty.
Mumia Abu-Jamal describes his current conditions of incarceration on death row at the State Correctional Institution at Greene County, Pennsylvania as "high-tech hell." When Governor Tom Ridge assaults all of the working people and minorities of this country by initiating the first execution of a political prisoner in America since the Rosenbergs, he must hear a resounding "No!" from coast to coast. Because Jamal is an articulate voice for the oppressed, this racist and rotting capitalist state wants to silence him forever. He is indeed dangerous. He is indeed a symbol. He is, indeed, innocent. Hear his powerful words, and you will begin to understand the hatred and fear which inspires the vendetta against this courageous fighter:
"Over many long years, over mountains of fears, through rivers of repression, from the depths of the valley of the shadow of death, I survive to greet you, in the continuing spirit of rebellion.... As America's ruling classes rush backwards into a new Dark Age, the weight of repression comes easier with each passing hour. But as repression increases, so too must resistance.... Like our forefathers, our fore-mothers, our kith and kin, we must fight for every inch of ground gained. The repressive wave sweeping this country will not stop by good wishes, but only by a counterwave of committed people firm in their focus."
We of the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League and the Labor Black Leagues are committed to a campaign to free this former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and supporter of the controversial MOVE organization who was framed for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman. Our aim is to effect an international campaign of protest and publicity like that which ultimately saved the nine Scottsboro Boys, framed for rape in Alabama in 1931, from the electric chair. We must mobilize the working class and all the oppressed in the fight to free this class-war prisoner framed by the government's murderous vendetta.
As Marxists, we are opposed to the death penalty on principle. We say that this state does not have the right to decide who lives and who dies. Capital punishment is part of the vast arsenal of terror at the hands of this state, which exists to defend the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. America's courts are an instrument of the bourgeoisie's war on the working people and the poor; they are neither neutral nor by any stretch of the imagination "color blind."
To us, the defense of America's class-war prisoners— whatever their individual political views may be—is a responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard party which must champion all causes in the interest of the proletariat. The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated by the Spartacist League in 1974 in the tradition of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense, under its founder and first secretary from 1925 to 1928, James P. Cannon. Today, I want to talk to you about how that tradition was built in this country by the best militants of the past 100 years—the leaders of class-struggle organizations like the pre-World War I Industrial Workers of the World, the early Socialist and Communist parties and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
The Roots of Black Oppression
To forge a future, one has to understand the past. The modern American death penalty is the barbaric inheritance of a barbaric system of production: chattel slavery. Like the capitalists who hold state power today, the slavocracy used the instruments of their power, special bodies of armed men and the "justice" system— the laws, courts and prisons—to control people for profit. Directly descendant from the slavocracy's tradition of property in black people is the death penalty. A trail through history illustrates this truth. The "slave codes" codified a series of offenses for which slaves could be killed but for which whites would receive a lesser sentence. In Virginia, the death penalty was mandatory for both slaves and free blacks for any crime for which a white could be imprisoned for three years or more. In Georgia, a black man convicted of raping a white woman faced the death penalty; a white man got two years for the same crime, and punishment was "discretionary" if the victim was black. Slaves could not own property, bear arms, assemble or testify against whites in courts of law. Marriage between slaves was not recognized; families were sold apart; it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. Slaves were not second- or third-class citizens—they were not human, but legally "personal, movable property," chattel.
William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner has the fictional character T.R. Gray explain the slaveowners' rationale to Turner:
"The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain't a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how come you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy. "He paused, then said softly without emotion: 'And hung by the neck until dead'."
While the slave codes were a Southern institution, legal and extralegal terror were never exclusive to the South. As early as 1793, fugitive slave laws were on the federal books. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in response to the growing abolitionist influence which had inspired several Northern states to pass "personal liberty laws," giving some protection to slaves who had successfully negotiated the Underground Railroad. The 1850 law, seeking to protect the private property of slaveholders, put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom—no right to habeas corpus, no right to a jury trial, no right even to testify on their own behalf.
Many blacks were caught in the clutches of this infamous law, which had no bounds. For example, a man in southern Indiana was arrested and returned to an owner’ who claimed he had run away 79 years before. The law knew no pretense. A magistrate's fee doubled if he judged an unfortunate black before the bench a runaway slave instead of a tree man. And fugitives were pursued with vigor. In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson recounts the story of Anthony Burns, a slave who stowed away from Virginia to Boston in 1854. The feds spent the equivalent of $2.3 million in current dollars to return him to his "owner." That is approximately equal to what an average death penalty case costs today.
Any hope that "blind justice" could be sought from the U.S. Supreme Court was dashed with the 1856 Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was adopted, Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."
While slavery itself was overthrown in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the needs of the American capitalists for compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. A new, semi-capitalistic mode of agriculture developed, in which the semi-slave condition of the freed blacks was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relations of slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.
After the Civil War the slave codes became the "black codes," a separate set of rules defining crime and punishment for blacks and limiting their civil rights. They were enforced by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan; in the last two decades of the 19th century, lynching vastly outnumbered legal executions. As W.E.B. Du Bois said of lynching:
"It is not simply the Klu Klux Klan; it is not simply weak officials; it is not simply inadequate, unenforced law. It is deeper, far deeper than all this: it is the in-grained spirit of mob and murder, the despising of women and the capitalization of children born of 400 years of Negro slavery and 4,000 years of government for private profit."
The promise of Radical Reconstruction, equality, could only be fulfilled by attacking the problem at its very root: private property in the means of production. Neither Northern capitalists nor Southern planters could abide that revolution, so they made a deal, the Compromise of 1877, in their common interest. That's why we call on American workers, black and white, to finish the Civil War—to complete, through socialist revolution, the unfinished tasks of the Second American Revolution!
In the wake of the Compromise of 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction period. One landmark decision was Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896, which permitted "separate but equal" treatment of black and white in public facilities. But separate is never equal. This was simply the legal cover for the transformation of the "black codes" into "Jim Crow"—the "grandfather clause," poll tax, literacy test, all designed to deny blacks the vote, and the institution of separate facilities from schools to cemeteries. This legal and practical segregation, instituted in the South and transported North, was a tool to divide and rule.
America's Racist Death Penalty
The death penalty was applied at will until 1972. From 1930 to 1967 the U.S. averaged 100 or more executions per year. In 1972, following a decade of civil rights protests, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" because of its arbitrary and capricious application. But the hiatus lasted only four years.
In 1976-the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty and has been expanding it ever since. In 1986 the court ruled it unconstitutional to execute the insane, but gave no criteria for defining insanity; in 1988 it approved the execution of 16-year-olds; in 1989 it ruled for the execution of retarded persons. Since 1976, 276 people have been executed in this country. Between January and April of 1995, 17 were killed. And innocence is no barrier, as the Supreme Court recently decreed in the case of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, executed in Texas in January 1995 after the prosecution submitted that he had not committed the crime for which he had been sentenced. The Supreme Court said it didn't matter, he'd had a "fair trial." What an abomination!
Perhaps the most telling case in recent history was the 1987 McCleskey decision. The evidence submitted to the courts illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism ruled the application of the death penalty. Overall, a black person convicted of killing a white person is 22 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is black. When the McCleskey case went to court, liberals across the country hoped for a Brown v. Board of Education decision in regard to the death penalty. The evidence of racial bias was clear and overwhelming. But while the Supreme Court accepted the accuracy of the evidence, it said it doesn't matter. The court showed the real intention of the death penalty when it stated that McCleskey's claim "throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system" and "the validity of capital punishment in our multi-racial society." Or as a Southern planter wrote in defense of the slave codes, "We have to rely more and more on the power of fear.... We are determined to continue masters" (quoted in Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution).
Let's take a look for a moment at "our multi-racial society." The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world: 344 per 100,000. It is one of the two "advanced" industrial countries left in the world which employs capital punishment. As of January 1995, 2,976 men, women and children occupied America's death rows; 48 are women, 37 are juveniles. According to the latest census, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, yet 51 percent of the people awaiting execution are minorities and 40 percent are black.
Eighty-four percent of all capital cases involve white victims even though 50 percent of murder victims in America are black. Of a total of 75 people executed for interracial murders, three involved a black victim and a white defendant, 72 involved a white victim and a black defendant. The death penalty is truly an impulse to genocide against the black population for whom the ruling class no longer sees any need in its profit-grabbing calculations.
Understanding this and understanding the broader importance of the black question in America, we take up Jamal's case as a concrete task in our struggle for black freedom and for proletarian revolution in the interests of the liberation of all of humanity.
Early History of Class-Struggle Defense
From the beginning of the communist movement, a commitment to those persecuted by the ruling classes, whether "on the inside" or out, has been recognized as an integral part of the class struggle. Marx and Engels spent years defending and supporting the refugees of-the Paris Commune.
As Trotskyists, we feel this responsibility keenly because we inherited some of the finest principles for class-struggle defense from James R Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism. The traditions which inspired the International Labor Defense (ILD) were forged in hard class struggle, dating back to the rise of the labor movement after the Civil War. One of the first acts of the Republican government following the Compromise of 1877 was to pull its troops from the South and send them to quell the railway strikes that had broken out throughout the Northern states. The federal strikebreakers tipped the scales in the hard-fought battles of the time, many of which escalated into general strikes, and the workers were driven back in defeat. But united struggle against the bosses had been launched, and less than a decade later the workers movement had taken up the fight for an eight-hour day.
In the course of this struggle, workers in Chicago amassed at Haymarket Square in early May of 1886. The protest was just winding down when a bomb went off, likely planted by a provocateur. The cops opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding many. The government’s response was to frame up eight workers, who were sympathetic to anarchist views, on charges of murder. They were tried and convicted, not for the bombing but for their agitation against the employers. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, three were finally pardoned in 1891.
The period from the turn of the century to America's entry into World War I was one of intense social struggle; militant strikes were more numerous than at any time since. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) led union organizing drives, anti-lynching campaigns and a free speech movement. The level of struggle meant more frequent arrests, which gave rise to the need for defense of the class and individuals. The left and most labor currents and organizations rallied to the defense of victims of the class war. Non-sectarian defense was the rule of the day. The Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all," was taken to heart by the vast majority of the workers.
This was Cannon's training ground. One of his heroes was Big Bill Haywood, who conceived the ILD with Cannon in Moscow in 1925. As Cannon said, the history of the ILD is "the story of the projection of Bill Haywood's influence—through me and my associates—into the movement from which he was exiled, an influence for simple honesty and good will and genuine non-partisan solidarity toward all the prisoners of the class war in America."
Big Bill Haywood came from the Western Federation of Miners, one of the most combative unions this country has ever produced. The preamble to their constitution was a series of six points, beginning, "We hold that there is a class struggle in society and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions." It goes on to note, "We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product," and it asserts that the working class and it alone can and must achieve its own emancipation. It ends, "we, the wage slaves...have associated in the Western Federation of Miners."
Not all labor organizations of the time had this class-struggle perspective. Contrast the tract of Samuel Rompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL), "Labor's Bill of Grievances," which he sent to the president and Congress in 1908:
"We present these grievances to your attention because we have long, patiently and in vain waited for redress.
There is not any matter of which we have complained but for which we nave in an honorable and lawful manner submitted remedies. The remedies for these grievances proposed by labor are in line with fundamental law, and with progress and development made necessary by changed industrial conditions."
The IWW, whose constitution began, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," was founded in 1905. Haywood was an initiator and one of its most aggressive and influential organizers. As a result of that and his open socialist beliefs, in 1906 he, along with George Pettibone and Charles Moyer, were arrested for the bombing murder of ex-governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho (the nemesis of the combative Coeur d'Alene miners). The three were kidnapped from Colorado, put on a military train and taken to Idaho.
The Western Federation of Miners and the IWW launched a tremendous defense movement for the three during the 18 months they were waiting to be tried for their lives. Everyone from the anarchists to the AFL participated. Demonstrations of 50,000 and more were organized all across the country. It was this case that brought James Cannon to political consciousness.
The case was important internationally, too. While they were in jail, Maxim Gorky came to New York and sent a telegram to the three with greetings from the Russian workers. Haywood wired back that their imprisonment was an expression of the class struggle which was the same in America as in Russia and in all other capitalist countries.
On a less friendly note, Teddy Roosevelt, then president of America, publicly declared the three "undesirable citizens." Haywood responded that the laws of the country held they were innocent until proven guilty and that a man in Roosevelt's position should be the last to judge them until the case was decided in court.
The Socialist Party (founded in 1901) also rallied to the defense. While in jail, Haywood was nominated as the party's candidate for governor of Colorado and got 16,000 votes. The leader of the SP, Eugene Debs, wrote his famous "Arouse, Ye Slaves" for the SP's Appeal to Reason:
"If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.... Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution....
"Get ready, comrades, for action!... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat...would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising."
Haywood's trial began in May of 1907. It was Clarence Darrow for the defense and the infamous Senator William E. Borah for the frame-up (prosecution). That this was a political trial was clear to everybody. The prosecution, for example, introduced into evidence issues of the anarchist journal Alarm from 1886, when Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons was its editor. Haywood thought that Dar-row's summary to the jury in his case was the best effort Darrow ever made in the courtroom. But Haywood also got a bit exasperated with his lawyer. In his autobiography, he tells the story of Darrow coming to jail depressed and worried. The defendants would always try to get him to lighten up. Finally Pettibone got tired of this and told Darrow they knew it would be really hard on him to lose this great case with all its national and international attention, but, hey! he said, "You know it's us fellows that have to be hanged!"
Every day of the trial the defense committee packed the courtroom with what Haywood called "a labor jury of Socialists and union men." This is a practice we proudly follow today. On the stand, Haywood told the story of the Western Federation of Miners and its battles against the bosses, putting them on trial. He refused to be intimidated by Senator Borah. When Borah asked whether Haywood had said that Governor Steunenberg should be exterminated, Haywood replied that to the best of his remembrance, he said he should be "eliminated."
On June 28 Haywood was acquitted. Soon thereafter, so were his comrades. At a Chicago rally organized to greet him upon his release, he told the crowd of 200,000, "We owe our lives to your solidarity." Haywood knew that innocence was not enough. It is that kind of solidarity we are seeking to mobilize today for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Labor Movement and World War I
Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1908, during its most left-wing period. In 1910, he was one of the party's delegates to the Socialist Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen. Shortly after, the SP moved to the right, and in 1912 (the year Debs polled nearly a million votes in his campaign for president) a number of leftists, including the young Jim Cannon, left the Socialist Party. A year later, when Haywood was purged from the executive board, there was another mass exodus.
The IWW, in which Haywood and Cannon remained active, expanded the scope of its activities. This was the period of the free speech movement and anti-lynching ' campaigns. One Wobbly pamphlet, "Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It," discusses the question of integrated struggle and how to stop lynchings:
"The workers of every race and nationality must join in one common group against their one common enemy—the employers—so as to be "able to defend themselves and one another. Protection for the working class lies in complete solidarity of the workers, without regard to race, creed, sex or color. 'One Enemy—One Union!' must be their watchword."
They almost got it right: as syndicalists, they didn't understand the need for a vanguard party to fight for a revolutionary program.
With the beginning of World War I and preparations for U.S. involvement, the government declared political war on the IWW and the left. Thousands of Wobblies were imprisoned under "criminal syndicalism" laws—100 in San Quentin and Folsom alone. In response, the IWW adopted the slogan, "Fill the jails." It was a misguided tactic, but unlike many so-called socialists today, the Wobbliest had a principled position where it counted: they'd go to jail before they'd cross a picket line.
1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution. A month after that world-historic event, Haywood was back on trial in Chicago with some 18 other Wobblies. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in Leaven worth prison. In 1919 he was released on bail pending appeal and devoted his time to the IWW's General Defense Committee, launching a campaign to raise bail money for those in prison. When the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids began, Haywood learned that he was a primary target. So, as his appeal went to the Supreme Court, he sailed for the Soviet Union. A student of history, he had no illusions in "blind justice."
Cannon was also heavily influenced by the case of California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. In 1916, as America was preparing to go to war, Mooney and Billings were framed up for a bombing at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco. The Preparedness Movement was a bourgeois movement of "open shop" chamber of commerce, right-wing vigilante groups, who were very serious about getting the U.S. into World War I. They went into Mexico to fight Pancho Villa as practice. The Preparedness Movement was opposed by labor, and in fact two days before the bombing there had been a 5,000-strong labor demonstration in San Francisco.
Mooney and Billings were convicted. Mooney was sentenced to hang, Billings got a life sentence. At first, their case was taken up only by the anarchists. The official AFL labor movement took a hands-off position. But when it became clear that they had been framed with perjured testimony, a "Mooney movement" swept the country.
The Mooney case had a big impact on Russian immigrant workers, among others. Thus the Mooney case was carried back to Russia, and in April of 1917 the Russian anarchists led a Mooney defense demonstration in Petrograd at the American consulate. Worried about Russia pulling out of World War I at that point, Woodrow Wilson personally interceded on behalf of Mooney and Billings. It didn't get them out of jail, but the effect of international pressure was not lost on Cannon.
In the U.S., the cops broke up Mooney defense meetings and arrested those present. The class-struggle nature of the defense movement, involving such actions as one-day strikes, was a felt threat to the ruling class, especially in the face of a war. In a conscious effort to dissipate this movement, the state commuted Mooney's death sentence to life in prison. In combination with the domestic repression following the war, this took the life out of the Mooney movement. Mooney and Billings stayed in prison for 22 years. They were released in 1939, and Mooney spent two and a half of the next three years in the hospital and then-died.
In his eulogy "Good-by Tom Mooney!" Cannon wrote:
"They imprisoned Mooney—as they imprisoned Debs and Haywood and hundreds of others—in order to clear the road of militant labor opposition to the First World War, and they kept him in prison for revenge and for a warning to others."
As World War II began, Cannon would find himself in the same position.
The Tradition of International Labor Defense
The parties of the Second International backed their own ruling classes in World War I, and the Bolsheviks fought for a new international party committed to the Marxist movement's call, "Workers of the World Unite!" In 1919, the leaders of the Russian Revolution founded the Third International, the Comintern, to build revolutionary parties which could take up the struggle against capitalist rule. 1919 was also a year of massive strike activity in the U.S. This wave of class struggle swelled the ranks of the Socialist Party, which then split in September. The most left-wing workers regrouped, giving birth to the American Communist movement, and Cannon was among them.
America in the 1920s was not a nice place to be. Warren Harding was elected in a landslide victory on the slogan of "Return to Normalcy." And "normal" was racist and repressive. His attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a war on the left inspired by fear of the Russian Revolution, which resulted in massive deportations of leftists and jailing of American radicals. The young Communist Party went underground. 1920 saw more lynchings and anti-black pogroms than any time in recent memory. The Klan grew like wildfire, and the government passed anti-immigration legislation that would give Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson wet dreams.
When it was clear that the IWW was for all practical purposes broken, many of its jailed members, including Eugene Debs, were pardoned. The Communists, however, remained in jail. The union movement took it on the chops as well, and by the end of the 1920s only 13 percent of the workforce of this country was unionized.
The 1921 Third Congress of the Comintern was held under the watchword "To the Masses." In the U.S., the newly formed party had been underground and could hardly make a turn to the masses. At the Comintern's urging, the Workers (Communist) Party emerged in December of 1921 with Cannon as its first chairman and main public spokesman.
By the time of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the tactic of the united front had been defined; the Fourth Congress detailed its application. The need for the united front grew out of the post-World War I ebbing of the revolutionary tide following the Russian Revolution. The offensive by the capitalists against the proletariat and its parties was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to save their very lives.
The slogan "march separately, strike together" encapsulated the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program. The Comintern sought both to achieve the maximum unity of the working masses in their defensive struggles and to expose in action the hesitancy of the leadership of the reformist organizations of the Second International to act in the interests of the proletariat and the inability of its program to win against the ruling class.
The united front is a tactic we use today. Our call for labor/black mobilizations to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty has brought together many different organizations and individuals to save Jamal's life. At these rallies and demonstrations, we
have insisted on the right to argue for our program to put an end to racist injustice and capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.
In line with the policies hashed out at the Third and Fourth Congresses, the Communist International founded an international defense organization, the International Red Aid. These events had a substantial effect on the young American party, and one of the direct results was the foundation in 1925 of the International Labor Defense (ILD).
Cannon's goal was to make the ILD the defense arm of the labor movement. Cannon wrote to Debs on the occasion of his endorsement of the ILD:
"The main problem as I see it is to construct the ILD on the broadest possible basis. To conduct the work in a non-partisan and non-sectarian manner and finally establish the impression by our deeds that the ILD is the defender of every worker persecuted for his activities in the class struggle, without any exceptions and without regard to his affiliations."
From 1925 to 1928, the ILD was pretty successful in achieving that goal. It established principles to which we adhere today:
• United-front defense: The ILD campaigns were organized to allow for the broadest possible participation.
• Class-struggle defense: The ILD sought to mobilize the working class in protest on a national and international scale, relying on the class movement of the workers and
placing no faith in the justice of the capitalist courts, while using every legal avenue open to them.
• Non-sectarian defense: When it was founded, the ILD immediately adopted 106 prisoners, instituting the practice of financially assisting these prisoners and their
families. Many had been jailed as a result of the "criminal syndicalism" laws; some were Wobblies, some were anarchists, some were strike leaders. Not one was a member of the Communist Party. The ILD launched the first Holiday Appeal. Of course, the ILD also vigorously defended its own, understanding the vital importance of the legal rights of the Communist Party to exist and organize.
Social Defense and Union Struggle
The ILD's most well-known case was the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The frame-up for murder and robbery of these two immigrant anarchist workers, who were sent to their deaths by the state of Massachusetts in 1927, grew directly out of the "red scare" of the early '20s. The ILD applied with alacrity the main lines of its program: unity of all working-class forces and reliance on the class movement of the workers. Thousands of workers rallied to their cause, and unions around the country contributed to a defense fund set up by Italian workers in the Boston area. But the level of class struggle is key to the outcome of defense cases, and the ILD's exemplary campaign proved insufficient to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.
As the case drew to a close, one of the feints used by the state was to start rumors that Sacco and Vanzetti's death penalty sentence would be commuted to life without parole. This was designed to dissipate the Sacco and Vanzetti movement and prepare their execution. Cannon rang the alarm bells from the pages of the Labor Defender, rallying ILD supporters to mass demonstrations and warning them of the devious and two-faced nature of the bourgeoisie. Cannon had not forgotten the demobilization of the Mooney movement after his sentence had been commuted nor the living death that Mooney and Billings were enduring in their 22 years of internment.
This has significance for us today as we fight against the threatened execution of Jamal. Life in prison is hell. Think about the "life" of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another former Panther, jailed for a quarter of a century for a crime the state knows he did not commit. While some call upon Pennsylvania governor Ridge to convert Jamal's sentence to life without parole, we demand the freedom of both these innocent men.
The ILD also worked in defense of the class as a whole. In 1926, about 16,000 textile workers hit the bricks in Passaic, New Jersey. Their strike was eventually defeated, but it drew sharp lessons on the role of the state and demonstrated for Cannon the absolute necessity for a permanent, organized and always ready non-partisan labor defense organization. Cannon wrote in the Labor Defender:
"Our I.L.D. is on the job at Passaic. Not a single striker went into court without our lawyer to defend him. There was not a single conviction that was not appealed. Nobody had to remain in jail more than a few days for lack of bail.... A great wave of protest spread thru the labor movement and even the most conservative labor leaders were compelled to give expression to it."
In 1928, the Trotskyist Left Opposition (including Cannon) was expelled from the Communist Party. The ILD remained under the control of the Communist Party and thus became subject to the zigzags of Stalinist policies throughout the 1930s, including the perversion of the united front from a tactic for class unity into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution.
In 1929, Stalin declared the "Third Period," an ultraleft shift, the main tactic of which was to smash the Social Democratic and other leftist parties by creating what the Stalinists called "united fronts from below." The Comintern charged the reformists with "social fascism"; the real fascists were to be dealt with secondarily. In Germany, this policy contributed to Adolph Hitler's seizure of power— there was no united fight against fascism by the workers in the mass Communist and Social Democratic parties. This policy had an effect on the U.S. party and its defense work.
Legal Lynching in the American South
One result of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression was that 200,000people made the rails their home as they moved from place to place looking for work. On 25 March 1931, nine black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, were riding the Memphis to Chattanooga freight train. Two young white women, fearful of being jailed for hoboing when the train was stopped after reports that there had been a fight with some white boys, accused the blacks of rape. Among the nine were Olen Montgomery—blind in one eye and with 10 percent vision in the other—headed for Memphis hoping to earn enough money to buy a pair of glasses; Willie Roberson, debilitated by years-long untreated syphilis and gonorrhea—which is important if you're going to be talking about a rape case; and Eugene Williams and Roy Wright, both 13 years old.
The group were nearly lynched on the spot. The trial began in Scottsboro, Alabama on April 6. Four days later, despite medical evidence that no rape had occurred—not to mention gross violations of due process—eight were sentenced to death and one of the 13-year-olds to life in prison. The Communist Party issued a statement condemning the trial as a "legal" lynching. That night, the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys began.
Freedom was a long time coming. A series of trials and appeals all went badly for the defendants. In 1933, one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but it wasn't until 1937 that four of the defendants were freed. Three more were paroled in the 1940s, and in 1948 Haywood Patterson escaped from Angola prison to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him. The last, Andy Wright, who had had his 1944 parole revoked, was finally released in 1950. The nine had spent 104 years in jail for a "crime" that never happened.
The ILD made the word "Scottsboro" synonymous, nationally and internationally, with Southern racism, repression and injustice. Their campaign was responsible for saving the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair. As Haywood Patterson's father wrote in a letter to his son, "You will burn sure if you don't let them preachers alone and trust in the International Labor Defense to handle the case."
The CP's publicity was massive and moving. They organized demonstrations in Harlem and across the country, appealing to the masses to put no confidence in the capitalist courts and to see the struggle for the freedom of these youths as part of the larger class struggle. Young Communists in Dresden, Germany marched on the American consulate, and, when officials refused to accept their petition, hurled bottles through windows. Inside each was the note: "Down with American murder and Imperialism. For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians. An end to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers."
In the South, the defense effort faced not only the racist system but the homegrown fascists of the Ku Klux Klan as well, which launched a campaign under the slogan "The Klan Rides Again to Stamp Out Communism."
The ILD's success in rallying the masses to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys happened despite their sectarian "Third Period" tactics. The ILD denounced the NAACP, the ACLU and most of the trade-union movement as "social fascists" and threw the "Trotskyite" likes of Jim Cannon out of Scottsboro defense meetings. But fascism was on the rise in Europe, and, seeking now to make as many allies as he could, in 1935 Stalin' declared the "Third Period" at an end. A Comintern resolution urged the Communist parties to form "popular fronts" with any and all for progressive ends. In the U.S. this meant supporting Roosevelt and abandoning the struggle to link the defense of black people with the fight against the capitalist system. You can imagine the surprise of the NAACP, who were now greeted warmly by the ILD as "comrades"! This comradeship did not extend to the Trotskyists. The Scottsboro Defense Committee was formed, and a lot of the life went out of the movement as the case dragged on.
Cannon and his party, the Communist League of America, supported the efforts of the ILD to free the Scottsboro Boys. The Trotskyists insisted on the importance of an integrated movement to fight in their defense. Cannon pointed out that it was wrong to view the Scottsboro case solely as a "Negro issue" and agitated in the pages of the Militant for the organization of white workers around the case.
When Clarence Darrow refused to work on the case unless the ILD withdrew because he didn't like its agitation methods, Cannon wrote:
"The ILD was absolutely right in rejecting the presumptuous demands of Darrow and Hays, and the Scottsboro prisoners showed wisdom in supporting the stand of their defense organization. Any other course would have signified an end to the fight to organize the protest of the masses against the legal lynching; and with that would have ended any real hope to save the boys and restore their freedom."
Darrow's big argument was: "You can't mix politics with a law case." Cannon replied:
"That is a reactionary lie. It is father to the poisonous doctrine that a labor case is a purely legal relation between the lawyer and client and the court.... It was the influence of this idea over the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which paralyzed the protest mass movement at every step and thereby contributed to the final tragic outcome. Not to the courts alone, and not primarily there, but to the masses must the appeal of the persecuted of class and race be taken. There is the power and there is the justice."
Communists on Trial
During the time that the Scottsboro Boys were languishing in their Southern jails, World War II began in Europe. The American workers had gone through the experience of one of the biggest union organizing drives in the history of the country, resulting in the formation of the CIO, and many of the new industrial unions had won significant victories. Communists, including the Trotskyists, Jim Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party, had participated in and led many of these struggles. War is great for capitalist economies—the destruction creates constant demand, and if you win, you get new markets to exploit. But to go to war, you have to regiment the population at home, and that begins with the suspension of civil liberties.
On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring the fingerprinting and registering of all aliens residing in the United States and making it a crime to advocate or teach the "violent overthrow of the United States government" or to belong to a group advocating or teaching it.
For public consumption, this act was billed as an antifascist measure, but the Socialist Workers Party (successor to the Communist League of America) and Minneapolis Teamsters were the first victims of the Smith Act prosecutions. Why did the head of the Teamsters Union, Daniel J. Tobin, the U.S. attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, conspire to take away the First Amendment rights of a small Trotskyist party, a party with maybe a couple thousand members and influence in one local of one union?
Part of the answer is that the SWP was effective. The party had led some hard class struggle; it was their comrades who had provided the leadership for the Minneapolis strike of 1934 which led to the formation of Teamsters Local 544. Another part of the answer is politics: the SWP was forthright in its opposition to the coming war. This was a calculated government attack designed to cripple the SWP where it had the most influence in the proletariat as America girded for imperialist war.
In the courtroom, the SWP's goal was to put the capitalist system on trial, a tradition we carry forward in our own cases. On the stand, Cannon pedagogically explained the positions of the SWP on the questions of the day and Marxism in general. But the Minneapolis defendants went to jail for 16 months—sentenced on the same day that Congress voted to enter the war. The ruling class hoped that the party would be leaderless and pass from the stage. But at that time the SWP was still a revolutionary party with a revolutionary program and a collective leadership—so that hope was, in the main, dashed.
A number of CIO unions issued statements in defense of the Minneapolis defendants, as did numerous black organizations. The American Communist Party, however, issued the following statement: "The Communist Party has always exposed, fought against and today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite fifth column from the life of our nation." In line with their support for Roosevelt and the war, the CP aided the government in the Smith Act prosecution of the SWP and aided the FBI in their persecution of the Trotskyists in the trade unions. The CP's disgusting collaboration did not prevent them from being prosecuted under the very same Smith Act, beginning in 1948. The Trotskyists, of course, defended the CP unequivocally against the government prosecution while criticizing the CP's Stalinist politics.
Years later the attorney general, Francis Biddle, apologized for prosecuting the Trotskyists. The bourgeoisie sometimes apologizes when its crisis is safely over. Fifty years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government "apologized" for the wartime roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, offering a token compensation to those whose homes were seized and livelihoods ruined. They say whatever outrageous trampling of civil liberties occurred was an "excess" or "wrong" and of course it will "never happen again." But the Reagan government drew up plans to intern Arab Americans in concentration camps in Louisiana after the bombing of Libya. Those camps are ready and waiting for the next time the bourgeoisie feels its rule is substantially threatened.
Class-Struggle Defense Work
The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated in 1974 by the Spartacist League with the goal of re-establishing in the workers movement united-front, non-sectarian defense principles in the tradition of Cannon's ILD.
This was not anticipated to be, nor has it been, an easy task. Unlike the ILD, which inherited the rich and principled defense traditions of the IWW and the personal authority of mass leaders like Cannon and Haywood, we were the immediate inheritors of a tradition of Stalinist perversion of defense work. In addition, the ILD was founded as a transitional organization, seeking to organize the masses for class-struggle defense work under the leadership of the party. By its second conference, the ILD had 20,000 individual members, a collective, affiliated membership of 75,000, and 156 branches across the country. The PDC attempts to conduct its work in a way that will make the transformation to such an organization possible.
The PDC program of raising money for monthly stipends for class-war prisoners is an example of an ILD practice to which we adhere. We currently send stipends to 17 prisoners, including Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga and other former supporters of the Black Panther Party, victims of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO frame-ups; Jerry Dale Lowe, a miner condemned to eleven years in prison for defending his picket line; and members of the MOVE organization locked up because they survived the racist cop assaults on their homes and murder of their family. We also follow the ILD's policy of strict accounting of finances and have modeled our journal, Class-Struggle Defense Notes, on the ILD's Labor Defender.
We take to heart Cannon's point:
"The problem of organization is a very significant one for labor defense as a school for the class struggle. We must not get the idea that we are merely 'defense workers' collecting money for lawyers. That is only a part of what we are doing. We are organizing workers on issues which are directly related to the class struggle. The workers who take part in the work of the ILD are drawn, step by step into the main stream of the class struggle. The workers participating begin to learn the ABC of the labor struggle."
Class-struggle defense is a broad category. We are a small organization and must pick and choose our cases carefully, with an eye to their exemplary nature. The case of Mario Munoz a Chilean miners' leader condemned to death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta, is a good example. This was the PDC's first major defense effort. Co-sponsored with the Committee to Defend Workers and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, the international campaign of protest by unions and civil libertarians won asylum for Munoz and his family in France.
Some of our work has been in defense of the revolutionary party. The Spartacist League takes its legality— the right to exist and organize—very seriously, and has been quick to challenge every libel and legal attack. The party successfully challenged the FBI's slanderous description of the SL as "terrorists" who covertly advocate the violent’ Overthrow of the government. A 1984 settlement forced them to describe the SL as a "Marxist political organization."
The PDC takes up not only the cases but the causes of the whole of the working people. We have initiated labor/black mobilizations against the Klan from San Francisco to Atlanta to Philadelphia to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts to stop the fascists from spewing their race hate.
In 1989, we broadened our thinking about how the PDC could champion causes of the international proletariat and offered to organize an international brigade to Afghanistan to fight alongside the forces of the left-nationalist Kabul regime against the imperialist-backed, anti-woman Islamic fundamentalists on the occasion of the withdrawal of Soviet troops. When our offer of a brigade was declined, we launched a successful campaign to raise money for the victims of the mullah-led assault on Jalalabad. To reflect this, we expanded the definition of the PDC to one of a legal and social defense organization. To carry out this campaign, it was necessary to expand the PDC internationally. Sections of the International Communist League initiated fraternal organizations in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Currently we focus our efforts on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. Our actions in the Jamal case embody many of the principles of our defense work and the integral relationship of that work to the Marxist program of the Spartacist League, in this case particularly in regard to the fight for black liberation, which is key to the American revolution. This is a political death penalty case which illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its crudest, most vicious form and lays bare the essence of the state.
Throughout the very difficult period ahead, we will put all our faith in the mobilization of the working class and none in the capitalist courts. We embark now on exhausting every legal avenue open to Jamal, but we know the result hinges on the class struggle.
We hope you will join us in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, to abolish the racist death penalty and finish the Civil War. Forward to the third American revolution! •
Saturday, August 21, 2010
*From The Rag Blog- The Looming Spectre Of A Strike On Iran- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a The Rag Blog entry- The Looming Spectre Of A Strike On Iran- A Guest Commentary
Markin comment:
Hand Off Iran!
Below is a re-post of a commentary on Iran from a couple of years ago but still contains the key anti-imperialist points that need to be made as the United States and its allies (particularly Israel on this one) gear up their provocations.
************
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Hands Off Iran!
Commentary
U.S. Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan Now! Hands Off Iran!
Correct me if I am wrong but I smell gunpowder in the air these days and it is not clear who is getting ready to ignite the fuse. No, I am not talking about any old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hell, those efforts are old hat and, according to the putative Republican presidential candidate John McCain , at least in Iraq, will last about 100 years-so it is way too early to even worry about ending that little beauty. I assume by his lights we are to let our great- grandchildren end it. Moreover, President Bush is playing the eternal optimist on Iraq, a role that he has perfected to a tee in his disastrous presidency, by being authoritatively reported as saying that it would only take forty years to straighten out things there. His scenario would permit our grandchildren to conclude the war. Again, that is music for the future. Nothing to get nervous about now, right? What exercises me today though is that little recent buildup of talk pointing toward some off-the-wall adventure aimed at Iran either by American imperialism itself or, I believe, more probably by air strikes from the American surrogate in the area, Israel.
I have been harping on Iran, off and on, for a couple of years now ever since reading Seymour Hersh’s informative April 2006 article in the New Yorker (and later additions and updates to the core of that argument by Hersh and others). Nothing since that time has led me to believe that the White House, the American military or Israel has given up the dream of smashing Iran’s future capacities to develop nuclear weapons. Capacities, by the way, even some hostile conservative critics have recognized that Iran needs in order to defend itself in an increasingly hostile world, especially as it remains in the cross hairs of American imperialism.
Certainly it was not the little ‘diplomatic’ maneuver over the weekend of July 19th where a high ranking American diplomat actually sat in on the six nation talks, despite previous American disdain for such efforts, on the question of what the international response to Iran’s alleged nuclear buildup should be. And certainly it was not any rhetoric on the part of the cowboys who control the inner sanctum in Washington about trying to find non-lethal ways to curb Iran. The minute they start with that talk in Washington, hold onto your wallets- you are about to be fleeced.
The events of the past several weeks have brought my concerns into some focus. Israel’s air strikes against a target in Syria, the American drumbeat campaign to denigrate any finding that Iran is not within striking distance of being capable of making at least one nuclear bomb and, of course, the defiant, if comical, attempt of Iran to saber rattle with the testing of short-range missiles. Six months, for a Bush Administration that has nothing to lose, is a long time in politics, a long time to prepare and launch surgical attacks and a long time to create an American ‘public opinion’ committed to nipping Iran’s buildup in the bud. Every militant leftist in the world, while holding his or her nose at the political regime in Tehran, better prepare now to defend Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons in this crazy old world. That said, we better dust off those old posters- U.S. Hands Off Iran- And Keep Them Off!
Markin comment:
Hand Off Iran!
Below is a re-post of a commentary on Iran from a couple of years ago but still contains the key anti-imperialist points that need to be made as the United States and its allies (particularly Israel on this one) gear up their provocations.
************
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Hands Off Iran!
Commentary
U.S. Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan Now! Hands Off Iran!
Correct me if I am wrong but I smell gunpowder in the air these days and it is not clear who is getting ready to ignite the fuse. No, I am not talking about any old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hell, those efforts are old hat and, according to the putative Republican presidential candidate John McCain , at least in Iraq, will last about 100 years-so it is way too early to even worry about ending that little beauty. I assume by his lights we are to let our great- grandchildren end it. Moreover, President Bush is playing the eternal optimist on Iraq, a role that he has perfected to a tee in his disastrous presidency, by being authoritatively reported as saying that it would only take forty years to straighten out things there. His scenario would permit our grandchildren to conclude the war. Again, that is music for the future. Nothing to get nervous about now, right? What exercises me today though is that little recent buildup of talk pointing toward some off-the-wall adventure aimed at Iran either by American imperialism itself or, I believe, more probably by air strikes from the American surrogate in the area, Israel.
I have been harping on Iran, off and on, for a couple of years now ever since reading Seymour Hersh’s informative April 2006 article in the New Yorker (and later additions and updates to the core of that argument by Hersh and others). Nothing since that time has led me to believe that the White House, the American military or Israel has given up the dream of smashing Iran’s future capacities to develop nuclear weapons. Capacities, by the way, even some hostile conservative critics have recognized that Iran needs in order to defend itself in an increasingly hostile world, especially as it remains in the cross hairs of American imperialism.
Certainly it was not the little ‘diplomatic’ maneuver over the weekend of July 19th where a high ranking American diplomat actually sat in on the six nation talks, despite previous American disdain for such efforts, on the question of what the international response to Iran’s alleged nuclear buildup should be. And certainly it was not any rhetoric on the part of the cowboys who control the inner sanctum in Washington about trying to find non-lethal ways to curb Iran. The minute they start with that talk in Washington, hold onto your wallets- you are about to be fleeced.
The events of the past several weeks have brought my concerns into some focus. Israel’s air strikes against a target in Syria, the American drumbeat campaign to denigrate any finding that Iran is not within striking distance of being capable of making at least one nuclear bomb and, of course, the defiant, if comical, attempt of Iran to saber rattle with the testing of short-range missiles. Six months, for a Bush Administration that has nothing to lose, is a long time in politics, a long time to prepare and launch surgical attacks and a long time to create an American ‘public opinion’ committed to nipping Iran’s buildup in the bud. Every militant leftist in the world, while holding his or her nose at the political regime in Tehran, better prepare now to defend Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons in this crazy old world. That said, we better dust off those old posters- U.S. Hands Off Iran- And Keep Them Off!
*On The Death Of The "Old Man"- James P. Cannon's Political Obituary For Leon Trotsky
Click on title to link to American Socialist Workers Party founder and Leon Trotsky co-thinker James P. Cannon's appreciation of the life of Trotsky at a memorial meeting held in New York City in 1940 immediately after the assassination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent.
*On The “Completion” Of The American Combat Troops Withdrawal From Iraq- A Note From A Carping “Professional Leftist”
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry-Hey, Even “Non-Professional Leftist” Senator John Kerry Gets It On Afghanistan, Kinda, dated Wednesday, August 18, 2010, referred to in this entry.
Markin comment:
This week they have been uncorking the champagne bottles at the Obama White House and bringing out the bottom desk drawer Scotch bottles out at the Pentagon over the completion, a little ahead of schedule, of the American combat troop withdrawal from Iraq. Of course, that little matter of 50,000 hostages (oops) troops still remaining should make anyone who has even a minimum grasp of what the words "total withdrawal" mean or the minimum math skills(or has a good graphic calculator) scratch their heads. Oh well, the debt-piling American governmental executive branch and its bottomless pit Pentagon allies never let numbers get in the way of a little military adventure- mission accomplished, part two, sir. (We will speculate on "part three" if things unravel a little more in Iraq when the insurgents put some “heat” on the Iraqi government, if the parties ever get around to putting one together). But that is music for the future. Right now I want to look at this situation from our side, our anti-war side. Why? Well, after over seven years of war only the most hardened leftist opportunist, or benighted Pollyannaish pacifist, can claim that any of our anti-war actions played a role in this draw-down.
A few years ago, around 2005 and early 2006, at a time when in the post-Bush re-election period the situation in Iraq, for a whole series of reasons, was unraveling and rank-and-file soldier discontent posed a real, if time limited, possibility that the war could have been ended then I had, on several occasion, headlined my commentaries with the slogan (roughly put here) - Rev Up The Troop Transports, Gas Up The Troop Trucks, Hell, Pass Out The Sneakers, Cut and Run Now! The gist of that slogan was predicated on the idea that we (meaning a then slightly resurgence anti-war movement combined with that palatable, if unfocused, troop discontent) has a shot at ending the war on our terms- immediate, unconditional withdrawal. Or at least to give them a hellish fight around that possibility. Well, this week the last combat units were trucked across the Iraq border to Kuwait with all due ceremony. Although, every leftist, hell, everyone to the left of the unlamented Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush cabal, should rejoice that the American troops are being withdrawn from one of the world's hot spots, even if not completely, we can gather no succor from our failure to get those exit trucks and planes revved up on our dime. So the slogan, the now bitter-tasting slogan, is still in play- Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq!
Needless to say the shell game withdrawal in Iraq only frees up additional troops for the Afghan quagmire and that is where we of the anti-war movement still have a shot at affecting history, especially with recent polls trending (nice word, right)to opposition to that war among the general American populace. And here is where déjà vu comes in, as I reflect on our anti-war struggle over the past several years. I can remember in the late summer of 2002, as the Bush war-drums were being beaten for Iraq war, I was at an early, small anti-war demonstration trying, trying like hell, trying vainly nevertheless, along with others to avoid the Iraq quagmire. One of the other protesters at that demonstartion held a poster with the slogan–Down With The Bush-Kerry War Drive! I thought that odd at the time because, not being totally up-to-date with the inner workings of bourgeois politics, I did not realize that well-known anti-Vietnam warrior, Massachusetts Senator Kerry, had the presidential “fire in his belly” and was planning, seriously planning, to run for the Democratic nomination in 2004. As part of that posture in 2002 Kerry was ambiguous (hell his name defines that term, “on the one hand and then on the other” is his mantra), at least in public about whether he was going to support an upcoming (October 2002) Bush-inspired war resolution. This fellow protester, no radical as it turned out, had as it also turned out good “inside” information that he was going to support the resolution, as part of his emerging post-9/11 hard anti-terrorist presidential profile.
Now the reason that I have brought all this up is that this week we have been treated to another Kerry grandstand play in Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from his 2002 vote (or subsequent 2004 aborted presidential bid, based in part on that vote and his wishy-washy maneuvers away from it)dove-hawk, ploughshares/swordsman (you can fill in additional dichotomies at your leisure) Senator Kerry provided key support for the December 2009 Obama-initiated Afghan troop escalation strategy. In a recent post(see linked post above)I noted that now as Senate Foreign Relations Committee czar, Kerry is starting to get “queasy” over the quicksand situation in Afghanistan and has sat down with Afghan puppet Karzai to give him the “skinny”-shape up, or we (the U.S. government) will ship out, maybe.
As I said in that post no one would ever, at least since the minute that he got before the cameras in 1971 at the Senate hearings on Vietnam, accuse old Senator Kerry of being a “professional leftist”, a thorn in anyone’s side. But, I will take the Senator word as good coin TODAY (I will not, nor should you, speculate on tomorrow) about getting out and give him the slogan to fight around (when he is ready, of course) Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! That, my friends, is the slogan that we desperately need to fight around, with or without Kerry, if we are going to get those exit troop transports and troop trucks revved up in Afghanistan. And this time on our dime. Forward!
Markin comment:
This week they have been uncorking the champagne bottles at the Obama White House and bringing out the bottom desk drawer Scotch bottles out at the Pentagon over the completion, a little ahead of schedule, of the American combat troop withdrawal from Iraq. Of course, that little matter of 50,000 hostages (oops) troops still remaining should make anyone who has even a minimum grasp of what the words "total withdrawal" mean or the minimum math skills(or has a good graphic calculator) scratch their heads. Oh well, the debt-piling American governmental executive branch and its bottomless pit Pentagon allies never let numbers get in the way of a little military adventure- mission accomplished, part two, sir. (We will speculate on "part three" if things unravel a little more in Iraq when the insurgents put some “heat” on the Iraqi government, if the parties ever get around to putting one together). But that is music for the future. Right now I want to look at this situation from our side, our anti-war side. Why? Well, after over seven years of war only the most hardened leftist opportunist, or benighted Pollyannaish pacifist, can claim that any of our anti-war actions played a role in this draw-down.
A few years ago, around 2005 and early 2006, at a time when in the post-Bush re-election period the situation in Iraq, for a whole series of reasons, was unraveling and rank-and-file soldier discontent posed a real, if time limited, possibility that the war could have been ended then I had, on several occasion, headlined my commentaries with the slogan (roughly put here) - Rev Up The Troop Transports, Gas Up The Troop Trucks, Hell, Pass Out The Sneakers, Cut and Run Now! The gist of that slogan was predicated on the idea that we (meaning a then slightly resurgence anti-war movement combined with that palatable, if unfocused, troop discontent) has a shot at ending the war on our terms- immediate, unconditional withdrawal. Or at least to give them a hellish fight around that possibility. Well, this week the last combat units were trucked across the Iraq border to Kuwait with all due ceremony. Although, every leftist, hell, everyone to the left of the unlamented Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush cabal, should rejoice that the American troops are being withdrawn from one of the world's hot spots, even if not completely, we can gather no succor from our failure to get those exit trucks and planes revved up on our dime. So the slogan, the now bitter-tasting slogan, is still in play- Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq!
Needless to say the shell game withdrawal in Iraq only frees up additional troops for the Afghan quagmire and that is where we of the anti-war movement still have a shot at affecting history, especially with recent polls trending (nice word, right)to opposition to that war among the general American populace. And here is where déjà vu comes in, as I reflect on our anti-war struggle over the past several years. I can remember in the late summer of 2002, as the Bush war-drums were being beaten for Iraq war, I was at an early, small anti-war demonstration trying, trying like hell, trying vainly nevertheless, along with others to avoid the Iraq quagmire. One of the other protesters at that demonstartion held a poster with the slogan–Down With The Bush-Kerry War Drive! I thought that odd at the time because, not being totally up-to-date with the inner workings of bourgeois politics, I did not realize that well-known anti-Vietnam warrior, Massachusetts Senator Kerry, had the presidential “fire in his belly” and was planning, seriously planning, to run for the Democratic nomination in 2004. As part of that posture in 2002 Kerry was ambiguous (hell his name defines that term, “on the one hand and then on the other” is his mantra), at least in public about whether he was going to support an upcoming (October 2002) Bush-inspired war resolution. This fellow protester, no radical as it turned out, had as it also turned out good “inside” information that he was going to support the resolution, as part of his emerging post-9/11 hard anti-terrorist presidential profile.
Now the reason that I have brought all this up is that this week we have been treated to another Kerry grandstand play in Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from his 2002 vote (or subsequent 2004 aborted presidential bid, based in part on that vote and his wishy-washy maneuvers away from it)dove-hawk, ploughshares/swordsman (you can fill in additional dichotomies at your leisure) Senator Kerry provided key support for the December 2009 Obama-initiated Afghan troop escalation strategy. In a recent post(see linked post above)I noted that now as Senate Foreign Relations Committee czar, Kerry is starting to get “queasy” over the quicksand situation in Afghanistan and has sat down with Afghan puppet Karzai to give him the “skinny”-shape up, or we (the U.S. government) will ship out, maybe.
As I said in that post no one would ever, at least since the minute that he got before the cameras in 1971 at the Senate hearings on Vietnam, accuse old Senator Kerry of being a “professional leftist”, a thorn in anyone’s side. But, I will take the Senator word as good coin TODAY (I will not, nor should you, speculate on tomorrow) about getting out and give him the slogan to fight around (when he is ready, of course) Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! That, my friends, is the slogan that we desperately need to fight around, with or without Kerry, if we are going to get those exit troop transports and troop trucks revved up in Afghanistan. And this time on our dime. Forward!
Friday, August 20, 2010
*In Honor Of Leon Trotsky-Bolshevik Leader Of The Red Army On The 70th Anniversary Of His Death
Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, founder, organizer, and leader of the Russian Red Army against the Whites in th ecivil war, on the 70th anniversary of his death.
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky
Click on the title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1923 article, "The Tasks Of Communist Education"
This is a repost of an entry from January 2009 used here to honor of the memory of this great communist internationalist revolutionary on the anniversary of his death.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
*****
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
Markin comment:
The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right? Thanks, Comrade Trotsky.
This is a repost of an entry from January 2009 used here to honor of the memory of this great communist internationalist revolutionary on the anniversary of his death.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
*****
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
Markin comment:
The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right? Thanks, Comrade Trotsky.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
*Growing Up Absurd in 1950's Texas- Larry Mc Murtry's "The Last Picture Show"-The Movie- An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the movie version of Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show.
DVD Review
The Last Picture Show, written by Larry McMurtry, starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Sheppard, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1971
Having just recently re-watched this great movie and after having kind of panned its sequel, Texasville (see post dated August 14, 2010), for no other reason (although there were more) that I liked the coming-of-age story of Last Picture better than the more recently experienced mid-life crisis (mine, and Duane’s) of Texasville I want to expand a little on the movie. A couple of years ago I gave it a few lines as an addendum to a review of Larry McMurtry’s book. Some of the points made there apply to both works, some to the film itself, especially in light of Jeff Bridge’s recent (2010) Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts as Bad Blake-basically Last Picture’s Duane at 57.
****
There has been no shortage of coming of age stories in modern American literature. The late J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is merely the most famous and probably widely known of the genre. Here Larry McMurtry, the Texas bibliophile, Old West aficionado and flea market pack rat gives us his take on growing up absurd in a faded, dust-blown, one-horse (and one movie theater) semi-boom (and bust)town Texas during the Korean War era in the early 1950's with his central cast of Duane, Sonny and the femme fatale, Jacy.
Although the locale is different from Catcher in the Rye, the issues raised by the teenagers who drive the stories and those of their perplexed and clueless parents are the same. And what do those issues entail? Sex, the meaning of existence, sex, what to do on Friday night, sex, what to do on Saturday night, sex- well you get the drift. And those dilemmas of youth and its fight for recognition as presented through the main male characters, Sonny and Duane, are in McMurtry's hands well thought out and, at times, poignant. The attention to detail that McMurtry is noted for is on full display in the interplay between the “jock” students (Duane), the nerds (Sonny, kinda) and the “in” crowd (Jacy). High school football, the whys and wherefores of the high school classroom and the sheer fight to find one's own identity in this mix all contribute to a very strong trip “down memory lane” for this watcher.
From my own personal experience I know how tough it was to grow up in the 1950's (the later part) and it is good to see that there are indeed some universal ailments that are common, like those mentioned above, to the “tribal community” called youth in America. Moreover, watch this movie because it also has a few things to say about the adults, especially Sonny's lover, the older woman and the football coach's wife Ruth (played by Cloris Leachman in a mostly understated but powerful role), and their dilemmas as well. Damn, McMurtry is singing my song here.
The film version of this book strongly evokes visually the points that McMurtry tries to make in the book. It helps that he was the screenwriter in this effort. Fine performances were turned in by the young Timothy Bottoms, who story is more central in the movie than in the book. Jeff Bridges, at the start of his illustrious career, is tailor-made for these "bad", misunderstood man/boy roles (see his role as Bad Blake in Crazy Hearts) and who gets less play here than in Texasville. And Cybil Sheppard as, frankly, a very “hot”, sex-crazed (maybe), high school teaser as the object of Sonny and Duane's attentions (and of a fierce rivalry for her “attentions”). Also a very fine old cowboy, symbolic dying Old West performance by Ben Johnson. Also by Cloris Leachman as, the above-mentioned, neglected abused dish rag of a coach’s wife and as Sonny's genteel influence, older woman lover. And all in black and white to highlight the dusty, main street is the only street, small Texas town grit and boom-bust oil patch ambience. This is high plebeian art.
DVD Review
The Last Picture Show, written by Larry McMurtry, starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Sheppard, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1971
Having just recently re-watched this great movie and after having kind of panned its sequel, Texasville (see post dated August 14, 2010), for no other reason (although there were more) that I liked the coming-of-age story of Last Picture better than the more recently experienced mid-life crisis (mine, and Duane’s) of Texasville I want to expand a little on the movie. A couple of years ago I gave it a few lines as an addendum to a review of Larry McMurtry’s book. Some of the points made there apply to both works, some to the film itself, especially in light of Jeff Bridge’s recent (2010) Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts as Bad Blake-basically Last Picture’s Duane at 57.
****
There has been no shortage of coming of age stories in modern American literature. The late J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is merely the most famous and probably widely known of the genre. Here Larry McMurtry, the Texas bibliophile, Old West aficionado and flea market pack rat gives us his take on growing up absurd in a faded, dust-blown, one-horse (and one movie theater) semi-boom (and bust)town Texas during the Korean War era in the early 1950's with his central cast of Duane, Sonny and the femme fatale, Jacy.
Although the locale is different from Catcher in the Rye, the issues raised by the teenagers who drive the stories and those of their perplexed and clueless parents are the same. And what do those issues entail? Sex, the meaning of existence, sex, what to do on Friday night, sex, what to do on Saturday night, sex- well you get the drift. And those dilemmas of youth and its fight for recognition as presented through the main male characters, Sonny and Duane, are in McMurtry's hands well thought out and, at times, poignant. The attention to detail that McMurtry is noted for is on full display in the interplay between the “jock” students (Duane), the nerds (Sonny, kinda) and the “in” crowd (Jacy). High school football, the whys and wherefores of the high school classroom and the sheer fight to find one's own identity in this mix all contribute to a very strong trip “down memory lane” for this watcher.
From my own personal experience I know how tough it was to grow up in the 1950's (the later part) and it is good to see that there are indeed some universal ailments that are common, like those mentioned above, to the “tribal community” called youth in America. Moreover, watch this movie because it also has a few things to say about the adults, especially Sonny's lover, the older woman and the football coach's wife Ruth (played by Cloris Leachman in a mostly understated but powerful role), and their dilemmas as well. Damn, McMurtry is singing my song here.
The film version of this book strongly evokes visually the points that McMurtry tries to make in the book. It helps that he was the screenwriter in this effort. Fine performances were turned in by the young Timothy Bottoms, who story is more central in the movie than in the book. Jeff Bridges, at the start of his illustrious career, is tailor-made for these "bad", misunderstood man/boy roles (see his role as Bad Blake in Crazy Hearts) and who gets less play here than in Texasville. And Cybil Sheppard as, frankly, a very “hot”, sex-crazed (maybe), high school teaser as the object of Sonny and Duane's attentions (and of a fierce rivalry for her “attentions”). Also a very fine old cowboy, symbolic dying Old West performance by Ben Johnson. Also by Cloris Leachman as, the above-mentioned, neglected abused dish rag of a coach’s wife and as Sonny's genteel influence, older woman lover. And all in black and white to highlight the dusty, main street is the only street, small Texas town grit and boom-bust oil patch ambience. This is high plebeian art.
*Once Again On Jeff Bridges- The Songs Of "Crazy Heart"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Townes Van Zandt performing If I Needed You.
CD Review
Crazy Hearts: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Jeff Bridges and various artists, New West 2010
I have already give kudos to Jeff Bridges for his Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts elsewhere so we need not go into that one in detail. That one was easy. See it. Why? Well, if for no other reason that Jeff Bridges finally won an Academy Award for his lead role as Bad Blake in it, a role that he has been waiting for about forty years to cash in on. Every since I first saw Bridges as Duane Jackson in the screen version of Larry McMurtry’s great novel of the New West, The Last Picture Show, I have known that he had the righteous, good-hearted, hard-drinking, devil-take-the-hinter post, sexually energetic and troubled “old geezer” that he personifies in the Blake role in him. He has done other fine performances but there is something just a little extra that he brings to that good-ole-boy role, young or old.
Frankly Bridges, through the character of Bad Blake, an alcoholic, back roads traveling, down on his luck, hard living country singer, an “outlaw” singer for sure, carries the film. The story line, in film and in real life (think Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and half of male Nashville), has been done to death. So Bridges’ performance and the soundtrack are the important in redeeming the production. And part of that excellent performance by Bridges was his actually singing some of the material. That in itself was refreshing (and brave), somewhat akin to actors doing their own stunts.
Of course having legendary music man T-Bone Burnett on board never hurts. The CD is a mix of Bridges film songs (including variations on some of the songs, as was done in the film, including by Ryan Bingham on I Don't Know0 and other country and blues artists. Outstanding other songs, as always, are done by Lightnin’ Hopkins (Sam Phillips) and Townes Van Zandt (an outlaw singer/songwriter who could have been put of that list above, as well). If you are in an “outlaw” country mood get this. Hey, watch the film too, okay.
CD Review
Crazy Hearts: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Jeff Bridges and various artists, New West 2010
I have already give kudos to Jeff Bridges for his Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts elsewhere so we need not go into that one in detail. That one was easy. See it. Why? Well, if for no other reason that Jeff Bridges finally won an Academy Award for his lead role as Bad Blake in it, a role that he has been waiting for about forty years to cash in on. Every since I first saw Bridges as Duane Jackson in the screen version of Larry McMurtry’s great novel of the New West, The Last Picture Show, I have known that he had the righteous, good-hearted, hard-drinking, devil-take-the-hinter post, sexually energetic and troubled “old geezer” that he personifies in the Blake role in him. He has done other fine performances but there is something just a little extra that he brings to that good-ole-boy role, young or old.
Frankly Bridges, through the character of Bad Blake, an alcoholic, back roads traveling, down on his luck, hard living country singer, an “outlaw” singer for sure, carries the film. The story line, in film and in real life (think Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and half of male Nashville), has been done to death. So Bridges’ performance and the soundtrack are the important in redeeming the production. And part of that excellent performance by Bridges was his actually singing some of the material. That in itself was refreshing (and brave), somewhat akin to actors doing their own stunts.
Of course having legendary music man T-Bone Burnett on board never hurts. The CD is a mix of Bridges film songs (including variations on some of the songs, as was done in the film, including by Ryan Bingham on I Don't Know0 and other country and blues artists. Outstanding other songs, as always, are done by Lightnin’ Hopkins (Sam Phillips) and Townes Van Zandt (an outlaw singer/songwriter who could have been put of that list above, as well). If you are in an “outlaw” country mood get this. Hey, watch the film too, okay.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
*Hey, Even “Non-Professional Leftist” Senator John Kerry Gets It On Afghanistan, Kinda
Click on the headline to link to a National Public Radio report on Senator John Kerry's meeting with Afghan President Karzai.
Markin comment:
Of course part of the headline to this entry refers to the “tempest in a teapot” comment by White House publicity flak, Robert Gibbs, concerning the “unfair” heat that the “professional left” (whatever that is in his universe) has been giving his boss over little things like the almost total abandonment of anything a progressive could stand for, including that nasty little over-the-top dramatic escalation in Afghanistan last year that has Obama’s signature all over it. The other part refers to recent news (see linked post) that Senate Foreign Relations Committee czar, Senator John Kerry, is starting to get “queasy” over the quicksand situation in Afghanistan and has sat down with Afghan puppet Karzai to give him the “skinny”-shape up, or we (the U.S. government) will ship out, maybe.
Now no one would ever, at least since the minute that he got before the cameras in 1971 at the Senate hearings on Vietnam, accuse old Senator Kerry of being a “professional leftist”, a thorn in anyone’s side. Not at least to the Obama’s administration where he provided key support for the December 2009 troop escalation strategy. But, I will take the Senator's word as good coin TODAY (I will not, nor should you, speculate on tomorrow) about getting out and give him the slogan to fight around (when he is ready, of course) Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Of course part of the headline to this entry refers to the “tempest in a teapot” comment by White House publicity flak, Robert Gibbs, concerning the “unfair” heat that the “professional left” (whatever that is in his universe) has been giving his boss over little things like the almost total abandonment of anything a progressive could stand for, including that nasty little over-the-top dramatic escalation in Afghanistan last year that has Obama’s signature all over it. The other part refers to recent news (see linked post) that Senate Foreign Relations Committee czar, Senator John Kerry, is starting to get “queasy” over the quicksand situation in Afghanistan and has sat down with Afghan puppet Karzai to give him the “skinny”-shape up, or we (the U.S. government) will ship out, maybe.
Now no one would ever, at least since the minute that he got before the cameras in 1971 at the Senate hearings on Vietnam, accuse old Senator Kerry of being a “professional leftist”, a thorn in anyone’s side. Not at least to the Obama’s administration where he provided key support for the December 2009 troop escalation strategy. But, I will take the Senator's word as good coin TODAY (I will not, nor should you, speculate on tomorrow) about getting out and give him the slogan to fight around (when he is ready, of course) Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. / Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*Victory To The South African Public Workers- Break With The ANC- For A Workers Government
Click on the headline to link to a site thta has information about the South Africa public workers strike, August 18, 2010.
Markin comment:
As the news indicates the very trade union conscious South African workers are at it again. Victory to the South African Public Workers! That said, South Africa over the past couple of decades is prima facie evidence, if only in the negative, of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The gist of that theory noted that in the age of modern imperialism, and we are certainly deep, knee-deep, in that era, the working class would have to lead the bourgeois democratic struggle in the less advanced countries (in the original specific case, Tsarist Russia) in the process of creating workers states, and then on to our communist future.
Of course the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 confirmed the wisdom of that theory as the Russian bourgeoisie proved to be just barely to the left of the benighted Czar and the working class took power. Equally true, however, is the fact that in now countless other situations in less advanced countries, including South Africa, the counter-posed Stalinist (or some other reformist variety) theory of two-stage revolution has been the norm. That “theory” has posited, in one form or another, that first the democratic stage has to be completed, organized around the demands of all those who can be gathered around democratic demands (bloc of four classes, popular front, etc.) and led by, in effect, and in the end to the benefit of the local bourgeoisie.
Well, in South Africa the bourgeois “gravy-train” African National Congress (ANC) has over the past couple of decades gotten just what they wanted, or most of the what they wanted, a black- run government that truly benefits the white, mainly, capitalist class and a little something for themselves. And the masses. Oh, I forgot to tell you that other part of that two-stage theory of revolution. What about the second part, when does that happen? Ya, you guessed it, never. And that, my friends, is why today’s headline reads as it does. It is time, way beyond time, for the working class, the rural poor, and the various ethnic and racial groups that make up South Africa, along with whatever whites are really to fight, to break with the ANC and fight for a workers government. And from the look of things, pronto. Break with the ANC! Fight for a workers government!
Markin comment:
As the news indicates the very trade union conscious South African workers are at it again. Victory to the South African Public Workers! That said, South Africa over the past couple of decades is prima facie evidence, if only in the negative, of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The gist of that theory noted that in the age of modern imperialism, and we are certainly deep, knee-deep, in that era, the working class would have to lead the bourgeois democratic struggle in the less advanced countries (in the original specific case, Tsarist Russia) in the process of creating workers states, and then on to our communist future.
Of course the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 confirmed the wisdom of that theory as the Russian bourgeoisie proved to be just barely to the left of the benighted Czar and the working class took power. Equally true, however, is the fact that in now countless other situations in less advanced countries, including South Africa, the counter-posed Stalinist (or some other reformist variety) theory of two-stage revolution has been the norm. That “theory” has posited, in one form or another, that first the democratic stage has to be completed, organized around the demands of all those who can be gathered around democratic demands (bloc of four classes, popular front, etc.) and led by, in effect, and in the end to the benefit of the local bourgeoisie.
Well, in South Africa the bourgeois “gravy-train” African National Congress (ANC) has over the past couple of decades gotten just what they wanted, or most of the what they wanted, a black- run government that truly benefits the white, mainly, capitalist class and a little something for themselves. And the masses. Oh, I forgot to tell you that other part of that two-stage theory of revolution. What about the second part, when does that happen? Ya, you guessed it, never. And that, my friends, is why today’s headline reads as it does. It is time, way beyond time, for the working class, the rural poor, and the various ethnic and racial groups that make up South Africa, along with whatever whites are really to fight, to break with the ANC and fight for a workers government. And from the look of things, pronto. Break with the ANC! Fight for a workers government!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- Remembering Leon Trotsky On The 70th Anniversary Of His Death- Raya Dunayevskaya
Click on the headline to link to a review of a biography of Raya Dunayevskaya- whose memories of Leon Trotsky are posted below via the HistMat (Snowball) blog.
Remembering Leon Trotsky
Seventy years ago this week the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was murdered. In 1965, in 'Some Memories of Trotsky', one of Trotsky's secretaries from 1937-38 in Mexico at a time when Stalinist terror was in full swing, the Russian born Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya recollected her thoughts, and I will reprint them below:
Because of the heroism of the former Russian Commissar of War, the rigors of exile when Stalin won the struggle for power, and the tragedy of Trotsky's assassination at the hands of a GPU assassin, much that has been written about Trotsky's later years has a subjective air about it. His last years seem to have provided a field day for psychological approaches even on the part of political analysts. Recently, a novel has been published -- and a TV "special" based on it -- which imputes to Trotsky a change in political outlook which allegedly he was unwilling to admit. Only people who have no thoughts of their own can so misconstrue the thoughts of others.
Leon Trotsky at no time let the subjective factor enter into any of his anaIyses of objective situations. Quite the contrary.
I remember one incident during the Moscow Trials, when "the General Staff of the Revolution" was killed off by Stalin, and Trotsky himself was accused of the most heinous crimes. The Russian bureaucracy had the state power -- and the Lubianka; the money, the brutality, the total disregard for history and, most of all, the time -- a whole decade -- in which to fabricate the greatest frame-up in all history.
The Mexican press would hold open two columns of space for Trotsky to answer the charges levelled against him at the Moscow Trials in 1937-38. He had only a couple of hours in which to write his answers -- and that only by virtue of the fact that President Cardenas intervened on his behalf and asked the press to inform Trotsky of the charges as they came in on the teletype. Trotsky never knew what the accusations would be, nor what the year was in which he was alleged to have done this or that crime. Moreover, the Trials had come at a time of the greatest personal grief in the Trotsky family, for the long arm of the GPU had reached out to kill the only living son of Trotsky, Leon Sedov. It was a predetermined, insidiously planned feat of a master intriguant, calculated to give Trotsky the blow that they hoped would render him incapable of answering the accusation against himself, that they knew would come in two short weeks.
Indeed, the death of Leon Sedov inflicted the deepest wound, and in a most vulnerable spot. Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna Trotsky locked themselves into their room and would see no one. For a whole week they did not come out of their room, and only one person was permitted in -- the one who brought them the mail, and food of which they partook little.
Those were dismal days for the whole secretarial staff. We did not see either L.D. or Natalia. We did not know how they fared, and feared the consequences of the tragedy upon them. We moved typewriters, the telephone, and even doorbells to the guardhouse, out of sound of their room. Their part of the house became deathly quiet. There was an oppressive air, as if the whole mountain chain of Mexico was pressing down upon this one house.
The blow was the harder not only because Leon Sedov had been their only remaining living child, but also because he had been Trotsky's closest literary and political collaborator. When Trotsky was interned in Norway, gagged, not permitted to answer the charges leveled against him in the first Moscow Trials (August 1936), Sedov had penned Le Livre Rouge, which, by brilliantly exposing the Moscow falsifiers, dealt an irreparable blow to the prestige of the GPU.
In the dark days after the tragic news had reached us, when Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna were closeted in their room, he wrote the story of their son's brief life. It was the first time since pre-revolutionary days that Trotsky had written by hand.
On the eighth day, Leon Trotsky emerged from his room. I was petrified at the sight of him. The neat, meticulous Leon Trotsky had not shaved for a whole week. His face was deeply lined. His eyes were swollen from too much crying. Without uttering a word, he handed me the handwritten manuscript, Leon Sedov, Son, Friend, Fighter, which contained some of Trotsky's most poignant writing. "I told Natalia of the death of our son," read one passage, "in the same month of February in which, 32 years ago, she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives....Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us...."
But even this great grief did not dim Trotsky's ardor for the revolutionary cause. The pamphlet was dedicated "to the proletarian youth." If the GPU had counted on this blow to disable him, they counted on the wrong man.
The following morning, the papers carried the announcement of the Third Moscow Trials (March 1938). Trotsky labored late into the night. One day he was up at 7 a.m. and wrote until midnight. The next day he arose at 8 a.m. and worked straight through to 3 a.m. the following morning. The last day of the week he did not go to sleep until five in the morning. He drove himself harder than any of his staff.
"The Old Man," as we called him affectionately, wrote an average of 2,000 words a day. He gave statements to the NANA, the UP, AP, Havas Agence [Agence France-Presse], France, the London Daily Express, and the Mexican newspapers. His declarations were also issued in the Russian and German languages. The material was dictated in Russian. While I transcribed the dictation, the other secretaries checked every date, name and place mentioned at the trials. Trotsky demanded meticulous, objective research work; the accusers had to be turned into the accused.
Yet so unused to subjectivism was this revolutionary that he was deeply incensed when the daily press printed "rumors" that Stalin had, at no time, been a revolutionist, but had always been "agent of the Tsar" and was now "wreaking vengeance." When I brought him the newspapers which carried this explanation of the blood purge resulting from the Moscow Trials, Trotsky exclaimed, "But Stalin was a revolutionist!"
"Wait a moment," he called to me as I was leaving the room, "We'll add a postscript to today's article." Here is what he dictated:
"The news has been widely spread through the press, to the effect that Stalin allegedly was an agent provocateur during Tsarism, and that he is now avenging himself upon his old enemies. I place no trust whatsoever in this gossip. From his youth Stalin was a revolutionist. All the facts about his life bear witness to this. To reconstruct his biography ex post facto means to ape the present reactionary bureaucracy."
Again, when the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky had brought in the verdict: Not Guilty, and a press conference was called, Trotsky was asked: "Do not pessimistic conclusions in regards to socialism flow from the Moscow Trials and the verdict of the Commission?" Trotsky replied:
"No. I do not see any basis for pessimism. It is necessary to take history as it is. Humanity moves forward as did some pilgrims: two steps ahead, one step back. During the time of the backward movement, all seems lost to skeptics and pessimists. But this is an error of historical vision. Nothing is lost. Humanity has developed from the ape to the Comintern. It will advance from the Comintern to actual socialism. The judgment of the Commission demonstrates once more that the correct idea is stronger than the most powerful police force. In this conviction lies the unshakable basis of revolutionary optimism."
Unfortunately, optimism, no more than subjectivism, is at the root of political attitudes. It is theory -- the philosophical premise for it -- which is decisive. Because his theory -- that Russia still remained a workers' state, "though degenerate," and must be "defended" when World War II broke soon after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was concluded -- appeared to me to be at variance with both the reality of state capitalism in Russia and its total perversion of the Humanism of Marxism as a theory of liberation, I broke with Trotsky. My break from Trotsky's politics in no way changed my attitude toward him as one of the greatest revolutionists of our age, one who, with Lenin, led the great October Revolution. He remains "the man of October."
Remembering Leon Trotsky
Seventy years ago this week the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was murdered. In 1965, in 'Some Memories of Trotsky', one of Trotsky's secretaries from 1937-38 in Mexico at a time when Stalinist terror was in full swing, the Russian born Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya recollected her thoughts, and I will reprint them below:
Because of the heroism of the former Russian Commissar of War, the rigors of exile when Stalin won the struggle for power, and the tragedy of Trotsky's assassination at the hands of a GPU assassin, much that has been written about Trotsky's later years has a subjective air about it. His last years seem to have provided a field day for psychological approaches even on the part of political analysts. Recently, a novel has been published -- and a TV "special" based on it -- which imputes to Trotsky a change in political outlook which allegedly he was unwilling to admit. Only people who have no thoughts of their own can so misconstrue the thoughts of others.
Leon Trotsky at no time let the subjective factor enter into any of his anaIyses of objective situations. Quite the contrary.
I remember one incident during the Moscow Trials, when "the General Staff of the Revolution" was killed off by Stalin, and Trotsky himself was accused of the most heinous crimes. The Russian bureaucracy had the state power -- and the Lubianka; the money, the brutality, the total disregard for history and, most of all, the time -- a whole decade -- in which to fabricate the greatest frame-up in all history.
The Mexican press would hold open two columns of space for Trotsky to answer the charges levelled against him at the Moscow Trials in 1937-38. He had only a couple of hours in which to write his answers -- and that only by virtue of the fact that President Cardenas intervened on his behalf and asked the press to inform Trotsky of the charges as they came in on the teletype. Trotsky never knew what the accusations would be, nor what the year was in which he was alleged to have done this or that crime. Moreover, the Trials had come at a time of the greatest personal grief in the Trotsky family, for the long arm of the GPU had reached out to kill the only living son of Trotsky, Leon Sedov. It was a predetermined, insidiously planned feat of a master intriguant, calculated to give Trotsky the blow that they hoped would render him incapable of answering the accusation against himself, that they knew would come in two short weeks.
Indeed, the death of Leon Sedov inflicted the deepest wound, and in a most vulnerable spot. Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna Trotsky locked themselves into their room and would see no one. For a whole week they did not come out of their room, and only one person was permitted in -- the one who brought them the mail, and food of which they partook little.
Those were dismal days for the whole secretarial staff. We did not see either L.D. or Natalia. We did not know how they fared, and feared the consequences of the tragedy upon them. We moved typewriters, the telephone, and even doorbells to the guardhouse, out of sound of their room. Their part of the house became deathly quiet. There was an oppressive air, as if the whole mountain chain of Mexico was pressing down upon this one house.
The blow was the harder not only because Leon Sedov had been their only remaining living child, but also because he had been Trotsky's closest literary and political collaborator. When Trotsky was interned in Norway, gagged, not permitted to answer the charges leveled against him in the first Moscow Trials (August 1936), Sedov had penned Le Livre Rouge, which, by brilliantly exposing the Moscow falsifiers, dealt an irreparable blow to the prestige of the GPU.
In the dark days after the tragic news had reached us, when Lev Davidovich and Natalia Ivanovna were closeted in their room, he wrote the story of their son's brief life. It was the first time since pre-revolutionary days that Trotsky had written by hand.
On the eighth day, Leon Trotsky emerged from his room. I was petrified at the sight of him. The neat, meticulous Leon Trotsky had not shaved for a whole week. His face was deeply lined. His eyes were swollen from too much crying. Without uttering a word, he handed me the handwritten manuscript, Leon Sedov, Son, Friend, Fighter, which contained some of Trotsky's most poignant writing. "I told Natalia of the death of our son," read one passage, "in the same month of February in which, 32 years ago, she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives....Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us...."
But even this great grief did not dim Trotsky's ardor for the revolutionary cause. The pamphlet was dedicated "to the proletarian youth." If the GPU had counted on this blow to disable him, they counted on the wrong man.
The following morning, the papers carried the announcement of the Third Moscow Trials (March 1938). Trotsky labored late into the night. One day he was up at 7 a.m. and wrote until midnight. The next day he arose at 8 a.m. and worked straight through to 3 a.m. the following morning. The last day of the week he did not go to sleep until five in the morning. He drove himself harder than any of his staff.
"The Old Man," as we called him affectionately, wrote an average of 2,000 words a day. He gave statements to the NANA, the UP, AP, Havas Agence [Agence France-Presse], France, the London Daily Express, and the Mexican newspapers. His declarations were also issued in the Russian and German languages. The material was dictated in Russian. While I transcribed the dictation, the other secretaries checked every date, name and place mentioned at the trials. Trotsky demanded meticulous, objective research work; the accusers had to be turned into the accused.
Yet so unused to subjectivism was this revolutionary that he was deeply incensed when the daily press printed "rumors" that Stalin had, at no time, been a revolutionist, but had always been "agent of the Tsar" and was now "wreaking vengeance." When I brought him the newspapers which carried this explanation of the blood purge resulting from the Moscow Trials, Trotsky exclaimed, "But Stalin was a revolutionist!"
"Wait a moment," he called to me as I was leaving the room, "We'll add a postscript to today's article." Here is what he dictated:
"The news has been widely spread through the press, to the effect that Stalin allegedly was an agent provocateur during Tsarism, and that he is now avenging himself upon his old enemies. I place no trust whatsoever in this gossip. From his youth Stalin was a revolutionist. All the facts about his life bear witness to this. To reconstruct his biography ex post facto means to ape the present reactionary bureaucracy."
Again, when the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky had brought in the verdict: Not Guilty, and a press conference was called, Trotsky was asked: "Do not pessimistic conclusions in regards to socialism flow from the Moscow Trials and the verdict of the Commission?" Trotsky replied:
"No. I do not see any basis for pessimism. It is necessary to take history as it is. Humanity moves forward as did some pilgrims: two steps ahead, one step back. During the time of the backward movement, all seems lost to skeptics and pessimists. But this is an error of historical vision. Nothing is lost. Humanity has developed from the ape to the Comintern. It will advance from the Comintern to actual socialism. The judgment of the Commission demonstrates once more that the correct idea is stronger than the most powerful police force. In this conviction lies the unshakable basis of revolutionary optimism."
Unfortunately, optimism, no more than subjectivism, is at the root of political attitudes. It is theory -- the philosophical premise for it -- which is decisive. Because his theory -- that Russia still remained a workers' state, "though degenerate," and must be "defended" when World War II broke soon after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was concluded -- appeared to me to be at variance with both the reality of state capitalism in Russia and its total perversion of the Humanism of Marxism as a theory of liberation, I broke with Trotsky. My break from Trotsky's politics in no way changed my attitude toward him as one of the greatest revolutionists of our age, one who, with Lenin, led the great October Revolution. He remains "the man of October."
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