This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Sunday, December 15, 2013
You Can’t Go Home Again, Can You
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman, Hullsville Class Of
1964
No he, Peter Paul Markin, would not be going after
all, not going to the scheduled 50th Anniversary North Adamsville
Class of 1964 reunion to be held at the swanky Adams Hotel Deluxe over
Thanksgiving weekend.(Apparently that
holiday weekend a very usual occasion for such events across the country, a
time when old-time rooted families might still gather together in the old
hometowns or just to take advantage of the generally taken long weekend.) He
announced the news to me, to the candid world as he called it (or me) in his
usual odd-ball historical literary snarl, something that I have grown used to,
grown to deeply discount, to block out okay, so maybe I did not get the full
import of his screed, one night when we were cutting up torches at our favorite
watering hole.
That spot these days, the days since we have both
returned to the Boston area and have re-ignited our old time friendship, is
Jimmy’s Bar & Grille over in Centerville a few miles south of the
respective towns where we grew up, and about thirty miles from downtown Boston
if anybody is asking. We had been talking about the old days, the old high
school days when we had met, met down at a rock and roll dance at the Surf
Ballroom in my hometown of Hullsville. Met after pursuing the same girl, ah,
young woman who eventually gave both of us the air. But our friendship, close
or faraway as times changed, lingered on. Now in the great scheme of things,
the great mandala of life out in the real world such a decision as Markin made
(everybody always called him Markin and not that Peter Paul Markin thing that
only his mother and, I think, one prissy ex-wife called him, like he was some Mayflower swell rather than to the
“projects” born and so Markin) naturally would take a back seat to serious
matters like the fight against war and pestilence, the struggle to keep body
and soul together that preoccupies most minds most of the time, and being
mindfully thoughtful about the three great tragedies of human existence-hunger,
sex, and death.
Notwithstanding those heavy precedent- takers, no,
emphatically no, Markin would not be going back to his old hometown that
weekend to see the old gang. See the old gang collectively for probably the
last effective time that clan would be able to gather on a significant occasion
what with death, disability, forgetfulness and just plain fright at the idea of
a next time taking their toll. That the next significant milestone, the 75th
, assuming that the mania for oddball celebration years like 30th ,
45th , and 60th , or worst 38th ,48th
or 68th has no taken root they would all be at or approaching
ninety-three. A very scary thought, the thought of holding a reunion at some
assisted living site or nursing home. No thank you then either he can safely be
quoted as saying that night as well.
Strangely, and I quizzed him on the subject that
night, several years before, I can remember Markin telling me, thatunder the influence of some old town family
members passing he had returned to North Adamsville after many years absence.
As a result of roaming around the old neighborhoods, around the old memory
sites, or places that triggered memories he had exhibited a spurt of old town
patriotism, some old bleeding of school colors red and black, some old time
nostalgia for sacred youth places and quirky roots memories. More, a fervent
desire to put together some occasion, not necessarily a tradition-filled
full-blown official reunion like has been done since Horace Mann’s time, maybe
before, but a collective gathering of those in the area to mark the passing of
time, mark some memory mist youthful occasions and, frankly to gather some
information, insights, observations on what they had been through back in the
day, back in those hectic angst and alienation-filled school days.
Markin had told me at that time, and we had had
several good laughs about his answers, that he had actually answered (patiently
answered, believe me, unusual for him when it is not his own project),
extensively answered a series of questions posed through an Internet classmates
site by the chairwoman of the Class of 1964 45th Reunion Committee
(see what I mean by odd-ball year celebrations) to her fellow classmates about
a whole range of questions. [And no, he would not be going, did not go to, had
had no intention of going to that odd-ball year reunion unlike the 50th
that he was really aiming at with his answers.]You know the usual suspect
questions about work history, family history, any distinctions creditable to
old North, and the role played by the old school in keeping you off the
streets, off welfare and out of prison (sorry). He waved those questions off
out of hand in maybe a sentence, no more. After all three divorces, a checkered
work history, and half a dysfunctional family not speaking to you, and maybe
wishing you were in jail can be summarily written off with few words.
What he did respond to were more thoughtful
questions about dreams and ambitions (Jesus, right up Markin’s wheelhouse),
disappointments, thoughts on mortality, and most importantly, questions
directly related to the old days like what did you think of certain school clubs,
sport teams, school dances (particularly the annual Fall Frolics and the Spring
Follies), and several other school- specific events that I have forgotten about
and I did not think important before I decided to write this screed, He went
wild, went crazy, stopped the presses, he said. He wrote sketch after sketch,
some long some short, about the school dances, his wall-flower status before he
got his courage up, his girl shy courage, at some last dance trigger moment.
About his lackluster running career, and the stellar performances of his
running mate, Bill Brady, and their mutual jock-inspired devotion to the
football team neither could ever come close to making. About his befuddlement
over the segregated, boy-girl segregated, bowling teams, the vagaries of the
mythical Tri-Hi-Yi, the inanity of white socks and white shorts for gym garb,
the sex question, circa 1960 and the role that Adamsville Beach played in
resolving that question. Endlessly as well about corner boy life in about
twelve varieties, the place of rock and roll in the teenage universe then.
Fluff but answered.
Here is the beauty of his answers though, the beauty
of Markin really. He answered, or he told me he answered everything put before
him by that relentless chairwoman, even making stuff up if he did not remember,
or could have cared less about something back then, like Glee Club or the Chess
Club. Here was the best one, and I can attest to this one because I was
actually present with him that night down at the Surf Ballroom at one of those
frequent rock and roll dances we both attended. He felt compelled to write
about the senior year Thanksgiving Football Rally in 1963 held the night before
the game against the hated cross-town rival blue and white Adamsville High
since he really did bleed Red Raider black and red around the football team. He
wrote this long screed that several people thought was an excellent description
of the event, that it had brought back some nice memories especially from
someone who remembered so many details. Of course as you now know this was made
out of whole cloth since he was not within twenty miles of the event. That’s
Markin
Some answers though were actually thoughtful,
another aspect of Markin as well, his beauty if you will. He movingly, if
briefly, wrote about the John F.Kennedy
assassination that cast a dark shadow over that senior year, over the fresh
breeze brought down that Camelot represented and that I had also felt bereaved
by down in my hometown. About missing out on the Great Books Club because they
were, uh, nerds, about the odd-ball class photographs, before and after, about
some teachers, English teachers I think, that he sent delayed kudos too, about
his love of the sea (me too). About like I said before, dreams and ambitions.
The best one, at least the one I remember him showing me at the time was simply
entitled, A Walk Down Dream Street,
which dealt with Billy Brady and his habit, penniless, no car, no girl, sitting
on the granite steps of the high school on warm, sultry nights talking about
their dreams for the future, their jail-break from the unhappy homes they came
from, about how they were going to do this and that to make their marks in the
world. Small dream stuff as he recalled, but dreams, nicely written, with the
virtue (if it can be called that) that he, they, actually did do that talking
as Billy confirmed when I met him for the first time a few years ago.
So you can see that Markin was clearly at peace with
himself and ready to go to that reunion based on that box full of memories.
Moreover, Markin had put together his own survey at that time looking for more
in-depth information although that project kind of died on the vine due to
apathy, poor response from classmates, and his own need to push on to a more
pressing project at the time. Last year in another spurt of old town devotion
he pulled that survey together with much better results since he really worked
hard to contact, through the beauty of the Internet, as many classmates as
possible working off of the 1964 Magnet
yearbook. Then one night in December, as we sat down at Jimmy’s, a local watering hole we frequent of late, he laid out to
me the reasons why he was not going, could not possibly go, what did he say, oh
yeah, he empathically could not go. Later I got to thinking about his long
trail of reasons and came to agree with his conclusions. My recollections of
that night’s conversation, maybe not quite the way he put the matter but close,
followed under our common sign that, unfortunately, you cannot go home
again.
Friday, Nov
15, 2013
Boston Veterans For Peace Again Forced to March Behind the
Official Pro-War Veterans Day Parade
About one
hundred members of Smedley Butler Brigade Veterans For Peace and their
supporters, marched on Veterans Day. As in years past, VFP
is forced to march well behind the official pro-war Veterans Day parade,
separated at the end by Boston police on motorcycles. The pro-war parade
organizers reject the VFP because they are anti-war. Additional photos of Boston
Parade Back to
Top
Thanks to VFP Chapters Who Participated in VFP's National call
to "Ring Eleven Bells for Peace"
Clarification:
This story was updated to include a quotation that was substituted for one that appeared in the original version online. The quotation, attributed to a law enforcement official, was replaced with another from the same interview because the original quotation created the erroneous impression that the official was saying Julian Assange would not be arrested if he came to the United States. The official said Assange would not be arrested on U.S. charges. He did not address any possible extradition request from another country.
Assange not under sealed indictment, U.S. officials say
Federal prosecutors have not filed a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, despite persistent rumors that a nearly three-year-old grand jury investigation of him and his organization had secretly led to charges, according to senior law enforcement sources.
“Nothing has occurred so far,” said one law enforcement official with knowledge of the case. “But it’s subject to change. I can’t predict what’s going to happen. The investigation is ongoing.”
Video
The Post's Sari Horwitz reported that federal prosecutors haven't filed a sealed indictment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. But, she explains, that doesn't mean the path forward for him is clear.
The Justice Department, at least for now, appears to be drawing a distinction between those who were government employees or contractors and were required by law to protect classified information and those who received and published the material.
The Justice Department has unsealed an indictment charging former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden under the Espionage Act. Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and then Russia, leaked tens of thousands of documents about U.S. surveillance programs that have led to reports in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, among other publications around the world.
“Snowden was a person who swore an oath, an employee of the National Security Agency,” said a second senior U.S. official, drawing a line between Snowden’s legal obligations and responsibility and someone like Assange.
Federal officials said the grand jury investigation has not been closed, and a spokesman for WikiLeaks said the organization drew no comfort from the fact that there was no sealed indictment.
“We will treat this news with skepticism short of an open, official, formal confirmation that the U.S. government is not going to prosecute WikiLeaks,” said Kristinn Hrafnsson, the spokesman. “It is quite obvious that you can shake up an indictment in a very short period of time.”
Hrafnsson added, “Unfortunately, the U.S. government has a track record of being deceptive and of choosing its words carefully on this issue and other issues as well.”
Assange, who published documents from one of the largest leaks of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents, has been living in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since June 2012, when he was granted political asylum.
The Australian national sought asylum after he lost a series of court battles in Britain to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over allegations of sexual assault. There is still a warrant in Sweden for his arrest. A small office at the Ecuadoran Embassy, which is under constant watch by British police, has been converted into his private living area.
Assange and his associates have maintained that he was unwilling to travel to Sweden because he feared that he would ultimately be extradited to the United States to face possible charges under the Espionage Act.
“My focus of attention is on the U.S. case — the continuing grand jury investigation,” Assange told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper last month. “That is what I have received full political asylum in relation to. I assume the Swedish case will disappear of its own accord in due course.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the case.
In 2010, WikiLeaks received an enormous cache of classified U.S. documents from Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst serving in Iraq. The documents included military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables, assessments of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility and video of a U.S. helicopter firing on a group of people, including a Reuters cameraman, in Baghdad. The anti-secrecy group worked with the New York Times, the Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel to publish the material.
Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 and sentenced by a military judge to 35 years in prison this August after he was convicted of violating the Espionage Act, among several counts.
After Manning was convicted, Zachary Terwilliger, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, said a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks was ongoing. But he would not comment on whether there was a sealed indictment or whether Assange had been charged.
During Manning’s court- martial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist” who encouraged Manning to turn over classified material. They also argued that WikiLeaks cannot be considered a media organization that was acting in the public interest.
Michael Ratner, an attorney for Assange, and civil liberties groups said at the time that it was increasingly likely that the United States would prosecute Assange as a co-conspirator.
“Either there [are] charges already, which I think is very possible, or they now have this and they can say they have one part of the conspiracy,” Ratner told The Post in July.
Julie Tate contributed to this report.
BOSTON FIRST NIGHT AGAINST THE WARS 2013-2014 EDUCATIONAL
Come
celebrate the close of 2013 with First Night Against All Wars!
Join
a growing coalition of people dedicated to ending all forms of oppression
!
Meeting first at 565 Boylston St. Community church of Boston and then walking on over to our set up location on the steps of the Boston Public Library (corner of Boylston & Dartmouth starting at Noon till six after the parade).
We'll have free hot chocolate and snacks for passersby who stop to pick up your literature. We're also going to have a bright sticker that has broad appeal and that everyone opposed to these wars can wear.
We're organizing an educational action that reaches the 100,000s of people who will be in Boston to celebrate First Night. We want to welcome them. We want to celebrate.
But we also want everyone to be fully conscious of the many wars:
• Wall Street and Government's War on Us!
•The wars on women. •The wars on people of color and immigrants. •The wars on working people. •The wars in Africa and Middle East. •The war on the environment.
These are all connected!
Help make this happen!
To help with the planning and organizing, please call "Dan the Bagel Man", Daniel Kontoff, at 857-272-6743.
Daniel.Kontoff@yahoo.com
Our second planning meeting will be on Monday, December 16 at 6:30 PM at the Community Church 565 Boylston Street Copley Square
BOSTON FIRST NIGHT AGAINST THE WARS 2013-2014 EDUCATIONAL
Come celebrate
the close of 2013 with First Night Against All Wars! Join a growing
coalition of people dedicated to ending all forms of oppression !
Noon
until 6pm Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Facebook page First Night
Against All
Wars https://www.facebook.com/firstnightagainstallwars
Meeting first
at 565 Boylston St. Community church of Boston and then walking on over to our
set up location on the steps of the Boston Public Library (corner of Boylston
& Dartmouth starting at Noon till six after the parade).
We'll have
free hot chocolate and snacks for passersby who stop to pick up your literature.
We're also going to have a bright sticker that has broad appeal and that
everyone opposed to these wars can wear.
We're organizing an
educational action that reaches the 100,000s of people who will be in
Boston to celebrate First Night. We want to welcome them. We want to
celebrate.
But we also want everyone to be fully conscious of the many
wars:
• Wall Street and Government's War on Us! •The wars on
women. •The wars on people of color and immigrants. •The wars on working
people. •The wars in Africa and Middle East. •The war on the
environment.
These are all connected!
Help make this
happen!
To help with the planning and organizing, please call "Dan the
Bagel Man", Daniel Kontoff, at 857-272-6743.
Daniel.Kontoff@yahoo.com
Our second planning meeting will be on
Monday, December 16 at 6:30 PM at the Community Church 565 Boylston Street
Copley Square
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broue -In Honor Of Slain Trotskyist Leader Rudolf Klement
…Most social and political organizations, and
communist vanguard parties, national sections and international configurations
alike above all, depend on the education and preservation of cadre for continuity
and for preparation for the tasks at hand. For the revolutionary surge in the final
analysis. Occasional militancy in good times by individuals who then go off and
something else does not made revolutions in the modern era, successful ones
anyway. (Yes, I have resurrected the Bolshevik-Menshevik split here, and with
good reason.) That was why Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, hell even Kautsky and
Bernstein, stressed the role of cadre. And that is where the sliver of cadre
who adhered to the Fourth International, or rather the decimation of that sliver
of cadre, including the murders of Trotsky and the man honored here, Rudolf Clements,
in the late 1930s tells a lot of the story about the essential stillbirth of
that organization. A hard lesson to draw, but a necessary one.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series: This
is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover”
the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies
which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary,
Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their
programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and
just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual
pro-socialist proponents. Some,
maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for
struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist
monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of
making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts
either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably
Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to
make a revolution when it was possible. The Spanish
Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition,
most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's
(POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially
the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every
non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of
the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants
in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody
Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political
disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work,
work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will
do better when our time comes. Finally,
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical
public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have
mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for
the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by
the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in
which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary
politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the
early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that
struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the
fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So
read, learn, and try to figure out the worthwhile from the chaff. *****************
Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee
Workers Vanguard No. 1034
Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.
The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.
The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).
Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.
Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.
Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)
The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.
At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.
The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!
Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.
Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.
The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.
The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.
Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”
In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:
“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”
— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)
The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.
Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.
The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.
WRITE LYNNE!
Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!
Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.
Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
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Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.
Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthersin their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
The National office received reports of Armistice Day events in
Charlottesville NC, London UK, Indianapolis IN, Manchester NH, Daytona Beach FL,
St Paul MN, Roxboro NC, San Jose CA, Iowa City IA, Evansville IN, Chicago IL,
Milwaukee WI, Santa Monica CA, Boston MA, Traverse City MI, Cape Cod MA,
Portland OR, Hyannis MA, San Francisco CA and New York NY.
