Wednesday, December 18, 2013

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin –The Big Knock-Out

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

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

Every wise guy, every sporting guy, every crippled corner newsie, hell, everybody over the age of twelve, no more, knows, knows to a certainty that boxing, you know guys (and these days gals) beating each other down for the amusement of the blood-lusted crowds is fixed. Is fixed six ways to Sunday even before the first bell is sounded. It is worst now than in the old days when you at least knew that when a champ was crowned he was the one and only champ not like now the World Boxing this, Federated Boxing that, and United Boxing the other thing handing out gaudy belts like they were going out of style. But just so nobody gets all nostalgic about the good old days, gets misty-eyed that only one champ meant only one skinning on the bet line, only one fix, let’s look at our trusty brother tough-edged, hard guy private eye Michael Philip Marlin as he tried to unravel murder and mayhem on the canvas. And while Marlowe had seen it all, had figured out a few things in his time he almost for a minute believed with this kid, this well-built, scrappy kid that was being groomed for a championship fight was on the up and up. That momentary slip almost cost him his life so listen up.

Marlin thought that he really should have passed on the job, should have just walked away and maybe seen if that graveyard shift as the house peeper at the old Taft Hotel was still available. Yes, he was short of dough, short of office rent money, short of room rent but lining himself up with Jacky Craig, the, ah, boxing promoter, and man of many operations, mostly illegal, gave him pause. But damn that rent had to be paid and so in the year of our lord 1940 one more gumshoe took a walk on the wild side and he showed up at Craig’s gym to find out what was expected of him. See what Jackie wanted to see him about.

Of course a wise guy, if he wants to stay a wise guy, or at least alive covers himself with layers of protection so Markin was prepared when he was frisked by Frankie Lip, a cheapjack gunsel who had been with Craig for years, before entering his majesty’s office. The nature of Craig’s offer though was pretty straight up, pretty straight up on the face of it, a job for a tough- guy private eye and not for some brainless muscle only good for taking shots to protect the boss. What Jackie wanted was for Marlin to investigate who had been threatening Earl Avery, the best fighter in his stable and a boxer everybody said was slated to take a run for the light heavy-weight championship, when he was ready. Not only had somebody, some punk, Jackie called him been threatening the Earl but also Jean, the girlfriend that Jackie had provided to keep Earl amused, and to keep an eye on him in the sex, drugs, booze department.  No booze, no dope and one girl, this Jean who had Earl under her thumb about two minutes after he saw her.       

This Jean was a looker, the kind of woman Marlin favored, the kind he would take straight aim at if she wasn’t attached to the Earl, or to Jackie. Hell, taking a second look he thought if things worked out right he might take that run anyway, especially once he got close enough to get a small whiff of that sandalwood perfume she was wearing, wearing just enough to make a guy, a red-blooded guy, jump.  Moreover Jean’s story, when Marlin got around to hearing it, included some tough times, some down times. She had come West like a million other frails as she tried to make a go as a singer, along with another  woman doing duos and had finally caught on when Jackie heard them, mainly her over at the Club Lola near the Santa Monica Pier. Jackie signed them to perform at his club-casino, The Lighthouse, up in Malibu. But enough of Jean, enough for now because  Marlin was on the case to find out what the hell was going on in that murky world of boxing, big time money boxing out on the angel streets of his city, Los Angeles.

What happened was simplicity itself a guy like Jackie Craig doesn’t take chances, tries to control his environment and so it was the case here too. That is why a certain Sammy Sams (believe it or not his real given name so why change it), a punk, was found floating out with the tide, a classic Jackie job and Marlin was ripping mad once he found out that he had been simple-simon doped up by Jackie. And Jackie tried to control all his arena, his boxing business, tried to control the new boxing commissioner, Steve Earle, a former state senator and power in the state capital, who had come in declaring the he was going to “clean the sport up.” So Jackie tried by might and main to buy him off, buy him off good. And Brother Earle turned out to be looking for the main chance, and that had Jackie’s signature all over it too. That was what Marlin was up against and after a few fists flying, a few off-hand shootings at The Lighthouse, and a few off-hand tosses under the sheets with Jean he closed down Jackie’s operation, closed down Earle’s operation and felt he had done some good work. Even if he got no dough to pay that office rent coming due at the end of the week.                    

Oh yeah, about Jean, about that perfume driving Marlin crazy every time he came with a mile of her. The Earl Avery thing was strictly as a favor to Jackie, a favor to get her act on his stage and before long Marlin and she were roughing up some sheets. Here is the funny thing though this Jean had her own ax to grind, grind against Steve Earle. Her previous performance companion, Ada, had committed suicide after they were forced, after striking out in a few mean street gin mills doing opening act duos for third-rate has-beens out in the heartland, to turn a few tricks out on the mean streets to keep body and soul together and Ada was too ashamed to face that fact. The funny part although obviously not funny is that this Ada was allegedly Steve Earle’s daughter and so Jean had drifted to L.A. to squeeze Earle for some dough, for retribution dough.

Naturally any girl, any guy for that matter, down on her uppers was entitled to take a chance at getting out from under with guys who had dough. But this Earle character proved quite reluctant even when she put the proposition to the boss, Jackie. But before she could properly squeeze the main chance Jackie as was his way tried to insure that his boy Earl had a one- hundred percent chance, no one-hundred and ten percent chance of winning that championship so the fix was in, in big time. Jackie bought Earle (who actually needed dough and so it made sense that Jean’s pitch fell on deaf ears) into the tent. Avery in three.  Marlin took that probability off the agenda though when he confronted Jackie with his evidence. Those aforementioned fists and guns flailed away. Needless to say the boxing world was short one promoter. In the fallout Earle tumbled under Jackie’s weight after Marlin pulled the hammer down on his operation Jean and so lost her chance for serious dough. But ever the trouper all Jean said when her current partner said that The Lighthouse was closed was “I guess we have to hit the road again.” Nice. Nice too that Marlin told her to keep in touch, and keep wearing that sandalwood next time they met.           
***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

…yeah, always getting a guy with the big talk, a flash wad (what did they used to call it, oh yeah, a Missouri bankroll, a twenty up front and singletons in back-yeah-“show me”), some fancy latest cut suit (on credit with some downtown tailor now dunning for payment, or else), although a small room-war shortages he said, just temporary he said that time she rolled over on the bed and wound up flat on her face. Oh brother, she should have fled then but she was well let’s call it underdressed at the time.

She could have put up with the no dough, maybe given him the dough to get that jerk tailor off his back, he sure looked good in it all pressed up, and would not have complained of that fall on the floor (he was well, well, let’s put it this way he knew how make a girl happy in bed) if he only would not live in that two- cent dream world of his about his ship coming in. Not a ship like other guys, like her husband who shipped out just after she ran into Mr. Big Talk at Jimmy’s when she was feeling blue and needed a quick drink. Some sunken treasure Spanish doubloons ship, some pipe dream ship.         

Yeah, she always drew the talkers (the takers and the fakers too)- that hubby Europe-bound no better than him (and well not as good in bed as him if you want to know) or she might have stayed home at night and remained true-blue. Always drew the little walkers with that little walk, a guy who promised the moon, the stars, all of god’s heavens, if you would just give it up. Yeah, give it up for a cold floor face down in some cheap rooming-just temporary of course. Saying maybe you could walk the streets to raise, what did he call it, capital, yes, capital. Then glad-handing back to your door looking for two dollars to pay the taxi fare, smelling, smelling lots of smells, smells of low-rent whisky meaning he is busted (in the chips nothing but high-shelf bonded blends), smelling of some Bull Durham roll-your-own meaning real broke (and meaning once again his nasty pitch to raise capital, raise it off of her back), smelling of reefer meaning long gone broke (wouldn’t score any for her though when she was blue and needed a lift- said it would make her a tramp, yeah, like he hadn’t already), and smelling of some other woman’s sweat and faded sandalwood perfume. Yeah, yeah get the hell out here you two-timing so and so…         

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Two false oppositions (Socialist League-Britain) 

...the question of smaller revolutionary left-wing groups entering into larger working class formations like the British Labor Party is a tricky matter and had bedeviled many smaller organizations. In a time of left-wing drift entry in those reformist formations to take advantage of being able to speak to the serious militants make lots of sense. The classic example in the United States was the 1930s entry (not without opposition from those who were happy with the propaganda group spirit) of the Socialist Workers Party into the Socialist Party. While the experience was not long the SWP drew out the best militants from that organization and essentially crushed that party as a pole of attraction for serious labor militants. A huge organization like the Labor Party with lots of authority in the working class however is more problematic, especially in the "dog days" and the pressure to go easy on the tops as demonstrated by this sketch below is strong.      
 



Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover”the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible. 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the

********

Two false oppositions

The following article, dealing with winding up of the Socialist League, appeared in the 10 August 1937 edition of L’Internationale, the monthly magazine of the Union Communiste in France. As the original English text has been lost, we have retranslated it from the French.

The main document published before the fifth annual Conference of the Socialist League was the resolution of the National Council recommending the dissolution of the League. This resolution protests against the “action of the Executive Committee of the Labour Party which no longer recognises the affiliation of the Socialist League and considers adherence to the Labour Party to be incompatible with that of the League”. Conference was requested, in the sacred name of unity (with the EC of the Labour Party) to dissolve the organisation. The National Council of the League, however, would still be free, to express “the confident hope” that the following annual, Conference of the Labour Party would reverse the decision of its EC. If this was so, then, and only then, would the Socialist League become “reconstructed as a propaganda organisation inside the labour movement”, the term Labour Movement is used as, a synonym, for the Labour Party. An amendment deleting this part of the resolution, which shows clearly that the National Council of the League had no intention of reforming the organisation without the express permission of the Executive of the Labour Party, was, put. down in the course of the Conference and accepted by the National Council. But, however modified, the resolution still left. the rebirth of the, League to the discretion, of the National Council, which had already, decided to leave this task to the Labour Party Conference, which meant, in effect, the EC of the Labour Party.
The participation of the Socialist League in the Unity Campaign with the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party, which provoked the break with the League and the violent expulsion of its members from the Labour Party was motivated by two principal reasons; an overestimation on the part of the leaders of the League, Sir Stafford Cripps & Company, of their influence over the rank and file of the Labour Party and their underestimation of the power of the tops of the Labour Party whom the actions of the League had inconvenienced and who were ready to fight for their existence.
This false opposition, a majority of it petit bourgeois, decided to commit suicide in order not to inconvenience the tops of the Labour Party.

Cripps & Company were taking good care to express their devotion to “unity” (which means an opportunist bloc on chauvinist lines with other parties along with left phrases and slogans), and they promised to continue to work for the Unity Campaign. Having proved that they were ready to submit to the Executive of the Labour Party, this task limited them to passing on unity resolutions to Labour Party Conferences. In reality Cripps & Company intended to keep in existence a left tendency without really leading it to fight the right wing of the Labour bureaucracy and the Stalinists had their aims made easier of organising the leftward-moving masses around a reactionary programme under cover of “left” and democratic slogans.
There was a Trotskyist opposition at the Conference consisting of two groups:
  1. The Marxist League – of nearly 30 members – publishing a monthly organ, The Red Flag. Their representative was Reg Groves, a member of the National Council of the Socialist League.
  2. The Militant Group – of about 40 members – publishing a duplicated organ for sale inside the Labour Party – The Militant – For Revolutionary Socialism appearing monthly. Their representative at the conference was D.D. Harber.
These groups have “tactical” differences with Trotsky but they have never explained publicly in what they consist. There were also “tactical” differences between the two groups. Even though they did not met in the fractional meetings before the Conference the Harber Group supported the resolution put down by a member of the Marxist League.
In this resolution the Trotskyists demanded that the Socialist League continued its existence inside the Labour Party and renounce the Unity campaign. They made no attack against the dissolution of the Socialist League, a dissolution exposing the false nature of the opposition of Cripps & Company.
The Trotskyists did not consider it to be opportune to speak in the presence of militants of the Labour Party about its break with the Socialist League and the dissolution of the latter by Cripps’s adherents nor to denounce the reactionary nature of the Labour Party and expose the pretensions of Cripps to pass himself off as a revolutionary opposition, but judged it preferable instead to consider the affair as the unfortunate consequence of the wrong tactic, which could be rectified by doing what the Executive of the Labour Party demanded of them.
The perspective of a break with the Labour party and the formation of a new Communist party was not presented. Moreover, in their resolution the Trotskyists asked conference to decide “to reconstitute the Socialist League as a revolutionary organisation within the Labour Party”, renewing and spreading the illusion that it is possible for a revolutionary organisation to exist inside the Labour Party. With this opportunist position, which in reality comes round to support for reformism, the Trotskyists in Great Britain are on a level with their colleagues in the United States and elsewhere.
The resolution of the Trotskyists gained 10 votes with 51 against. The dissolution of the organisation was unanimously accepted.
R. Groves informed the Conference that he would continue to work inside the Labour Party and invited those in agreement to meet together after the Conference. After the Conference the Harber and Groves groups met.
Capitulation is something never admitted, whether it be Zinoviev and Kamenev before Stalin, German Social Democracy before Hitler, or simply the sacrifice of the Socialist League to the cause of “unity”.
The reply of the Labour Executive to the obliging dissolution of the Socialist League was a further strengthening of the dictatorship of reformism inside the party.
Twenty four hours after the Conference the Daily Herald, the organ of the labour bureaucracy, warned those who intended to continue to support the organisation and work of the League that fresh measures would be taken against them.
Three weeks after the dissolution of the League the secretary of the Scottish Labour Party sent a circular to all sections asking their delegates to sign an undertaking a) to take no part in the Unity Campaign, b) to accept no proposal for unity in action, c) to accept nothing of like character, and d) to refuse to put itself to any trouble in favour of unity in action (New Leader, 4 June 1937).
“We must struggle for each piece of independence”, Trotsky said before becoming demoralised by the fascist victories and leading the sections of the International Communist League towards the right and into centrist and reformist parties.
But it is not impossible that Trotskyists in Great Britain, following the example of those in France, are going to form an independent organisation (The Marxist Group, which publishes an organ Fight: For the Fourth International, under the leadership of C.L.R. James, a group which includes the greater part of the Trotskyists in the Independent Labour Party, has already preceded them). But unless they recognise their entry into the Socialist League (and the ILP) as an evolution to the right, an abandonment of the Leninist position of the necessity for the independence of the revolutionary organisation caused by demoralisation following the defeats of the proletariat, a demoralisation principally due to a disproportion of petit bourgeois elements in the organisation, and unless they recognise this in all clarity, courageously orientate themselves in complete independence in the first instance towards the proletariat at the point of production, in the factories, the mines, the naval dockyards, and the trade unions, and only in the second instance towards the political parties, they will become no more than a centrist group making a display of “leftist” slogans without mass roots, without real influence.
POSTSCRIPT:
Since the drafting of the above report the leaders of the Socialist League have decided not to establish a common platform with the Stalinist party and the ILP, confirming our forecast as to their ultimate capitulation before the bureaucracy of the Labour Party. Significantly, neither the ILP nor the Stalinists have taxed them with this capitulation. The Stalinists greeted it with pleasure, and the ILP simply regretted the “tactic” of the Socialist League.
We conclude from the press that the Trotskyists have formed a “Left Socialist Federation” within the Labour Party, to spread the idea of a United Front opposed to the Popular Front on the basis of rejecting imperialist alliances and the activity of the League of policy of active class conquest of power and of socialism.
Yet again it is necessary to analyse this point to reveal the pathetic positions of these people. The need for a United Front springs from the weakness and divisions of the working class. For the revolutionary party it is a compromise, intending to prove to the workers an identification with their interests, and at the same time to demonstrate in action against the exploiting class the true nature of other parties.
Without a revolutionary party, exposing the agents of the bourgeoisie, and those who indirectly support them, there is no United Front; there can only be a bloc of centrist and rightist parties, whose principal object will be to camouflage these parties and help them to mislead the working class, which is what realising the Popular Front means in everyday language.
In not openly establishing this, and in asserting that the United Front is possible without a revolutionary party, the Trotskyists themselves, after their fashion, are supporters of the Popular Front.
Such is the swamp in which are enmeshed those who think that the question of the independence of the revolutionary organisation in the struggle for the revolutionary party reduces itself to a simple “tactical” question.
Ernest Rogers
Leninist League
Glasgow
June 1937
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.

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.


Tuesday, December 17, 2013


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

 
…and memories of sitting after school in Doc’s Drugstore (the one across from the school not the one up in Adamsville Center-that’s for old people who need medicine or something). Sitting at the soda fountain counter (or better, always better, in the “saved” booths, saved for the couples) dreamily throwing nickels into that jukebox, sipping on a Cherry Coca-Cola, watching an odd couple or two, boys and girls, dancing, no that is too staid a word, jitter-bugging to some bop-bop Benny Goodman swing tune as if the world depended on each and every move. This day she sitting, single, at the counter talking to Doris, single, about, well you know about boys, boys the topic of the day from sixteen- year old teenage girl teenage time eternity, and just then the subject of frets. Great Depression table hungers and World War II rationing or not frets about who liked  who in the social pecking order of the school, who was holding hands with who, and most importantly who was “cheating” on who while Johnnie was in CCC camp or Jimmie was in some wasteland sullen boot camp. The life-blood of teen life like the man said, music humming in the background.

Talking to Doris too about what to do about them, boys, you know about how far to go, or to go at all, or how to hold off some sidewalk Lothario while pining away for that certain guy who was making his eyes sore looking her way (at least that is what he told his boys in the locker room) but was too shy to speak a word to her. And, and, too, hold the presses, whether she should go to the North Adamsville Annual Autumn Frolic with Jimmie from across the street. Jimmy with the smooth moves on the dance floor, and off. Or wait until that shy boy gets up his courage or goes blind looking.  

She figures she can hold Jimmy off on the dance floor part but she has two left- feet and only Doris knows that sad fact and is sworn to eternal secrecy. That is why she is holding out a little for shy boy knowing (knowing through that “intelligence” grapevine only the young can figure out the code to) that he too has two left-feet (or two right she forgot which). Then Jimmy comes in, comes gliding in as if on cue to the last beat and asks her, yes her, to dance….and she does not too badly, not too badly at that. He asks again on that upcoming dance. Okay, yeah was her faux sullen reply. Now she wondered as he headed out the door about her resolve on that off floor stuff…                            

 

 

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









Workers Vanguard No. 1035
29 November 2013
 
Obamacare Puts Squeeze on Working People
For Socialized Medicine—Quality Health Care for All!
 
News coverage of the botched rollout of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) initially focused on the government’s virtually unusable Web site. But the headlines soon shifted to a bigger story: insurance companies canceling millions of families’ policies. So far, some 4.8 million people who do not get coverage through their employers have received cancellation notices because their plans do not conform to the ACA. Many are being forced to accept policies that impose much higher premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs for inferior coverage.
Obama repeatedly promised: “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan.” In fact, the administration knew from the start that this was false. Though it was practically unreported in the press, the administration estimated as far back as June 2010 that up to two-thirds of privately purchased insurance policies would get canceled when the ACA was introduced. On November 7, Obama apologized to those losing their coverage despite “assurances they got from me.” He insisted that the problem would impact only “about 5 percent of the population who are in what’s called the individual market.”
That new promise by the president is just as false as the previous one. A major component of Obamacare is the drive to scale back employer-paid health plans, which provide health insurance for 156 million people—more than half of the population. By the administration’s own estimate, as many as 80 percent of small-employer plans and 64 percent of large-employer plans could be canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act (Federal Register, 17 June 2010).
When working people got a measure of decent health coverage through employer-paid plans, it was the fruit of hard class struggle by this country’s industrial unions. The years-long attack on those plans is reflected in the increasing medical costs that workers are obliged to pay. Since the financial crisis began six years ago, average family premiums have grown by over 25 percent. The efforts to water down employer-funded health plans are of a piece with the drive initiated under the Ronald Reagan presidency to replace defined-benefit pension plans with 401(k) accounts, to which the bosses make only minimal contributions.
In our previous article on Obamacare (“U.S. Rulers Intensify War on Workers, Poor,” WV No. 1031, 4 October), we laid out several ways that the ACA further undermines company health plans. One key provision is the tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans, which actually comprise up to three-quarters of all employer-paid plans. An economist who helped draft the ACA called the tax “one of the most significant provisions” of the law (New York Times, 27 May). Companies—as well as local and state government agencies—are putting unions under intense pressure to accept whittled-down health benefits before the tax goes into effect in 2018.
The Obama administration has trumpeted the fact that, with the expansion of Medicaid, millions of currently uninsured poor people will have access to health insurance under the ACA. As is traditional in racist capitalist America, even that improvement is being denied to many black people and others on the bottom. Since the Supreme Court gave the green light, a total of 26 states—including every state of the former Confederacy except Arkansas—have rejected the expansion of Medicaid, which was supposed to help finance the extension of coverage to the poorest layers of society. Those states are home to more than two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers nationwide who lack insurance. A Mississippi doctor pointed to the legacy of segregation: “If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It’s a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit” (New York Times, 2 October).
The low-cost insurance plans obtainable under the ACA require such high out-of-pocket payments in the form of copayments and deductibles that many of those covered will still not be able to afford doctor’s examinations or medical tests. In reality, these so-called “bronze” plans offer little more than catastrophic care insurance: If you run up major hospital bills, you will be much less likely to lose everything in bankruptcy than is now the case. In opposing the ACA from the outset, we noted that “Obama invokes the plight of the uninsured, with promises of a level of care not much above a pledge to pick up the dead bodies” (“For Socialized Medicine!” WV No. 943, 25 September 2009). With the population mandated to purchase coverage, the insurance companies expect to collect an additional annual bonanza of $60 billion.
Access to health care should be an elementary right for everyone, not just those who can pay for the highly advanced care that can be found in the U.S. The allocation of skilled personnel, medical facilities, equipment and medicines entails a cost to society. That cost should be borne not by individuals out of pocket but by the government. At the point of delivery of health care, the service should be free of charge. The U.S. government throws plenty of money—collected through taxes—at its police, prisons, army and other repressive state institutions to protect capitalist profits and rule. But it will take fierce class struggle for workers to win even a modicum of the quality health care everyone needs. This requires fighting the class-collaborationist outlook of the trade-union bureaucrats, who have acceded to countless givebacks in the service of capitalist profitability. The labor traitors went all out to help ensure passage of the ACA, whatever their current misgivings about the “reform.”
Under the capitalist system, fully satisfying basic human necessities—including good education, decent housing and stable, well-paid jobs—inevitably runs up against the drive by corporations to generate profits. For the capitalist bosses of the U.S. insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies, health care is essentially a commodity trade in human lives. These parasites should be expropriated, a task that points straight to the need to overturn the capitalist order through socialist revolution. To achieve this goal requires forging a workers party that champions the cause of all the exploited and oppressed.
Socialism and Health Care
That the U.S. is the only major industrialized country in the world without a national health care program is, in large part, testimony to how successfully America’s rulers have wielded anti-black racism and anti-immigrant nativism to divide and weaken the working class and its struggles. Those divisions have been a major roadblock to the development of elementary class consciousness—that is, the understanding that the multiracial proletariat has distinct class interests that require political expression in its own party. In Europe, the rise of mass workers parties beginning in the late 19th century went side by side with the introduction of national health care.
Europe’s first compulsory social health insurance program was introduced in Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. A major concern of the “Iron Chancellor” and his advisers was to avoid any repeat in Germany of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the French workers briefly seized power during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1883, shortly after passing the Anti-Socialism Laws to squash the German Social Democratic Party, Bismarck introduced the Health Insurance Act. Bismarck declared that government policy “cannot be expressed simply by the repression of Social Democratic excesses, but that this must be accompanied by the positive enhancement of the workers” (Vicente Navarro, “Why Some Countries Have National Health Insurance, Others Have National Health Services, and the U.S. Has Neither,” Social Science and Medicine, 1989).
Insurance plans soon spread to Austria (1888), Hungary (1891), Luxembourg (1901), Norway (1909) and Serbia (1910) after social-democratic parties had been established in most of those countries. In Russia, where the tsarist regime had survived workers revolution in 1905, state insurance was introduced in 1912 during a period of explosive strike battles and spreading influence of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The outbreak of World War I split the workers movement between the social-democratic parties that supported the war effort of their own capitalist ruling classes and revolutionary elements and organizations, prominently including the Bolsheviks, that opposed all sides in this interimperialist conflict.
In October 1917, the Bolsheviks led the working class in seizing state power. As reported in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), one of the Soviet government’s early decrees, issued months before the expropriation of capitalist industry, declared:
“The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, relying upon the support of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, announces to the working-class of Russia and to the town and village poor, that it will immediately prepare laws on Social Insurance based on the formulas proposed by the Labour organisations:
“1. Insurance for all wage-workers without exception, as well as for all urban and rural poor.
“2. Insurance to cover all categories of loss of working capacity, such as illness, infirmities, old age, childbirth, widowhood, orphanage, and unemployment.
“3. All the costs of insurance to be charged to employers.
“4. Compensation of at least full wages in all loss of working capacity and unemployment.
“5. Complete workers’ self-government of all Insurance institutions.”
The subsequent development of a collectivized, planned economy assured access to health care for all. This gain remained despite the degeneration of the October Revolution under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Workers in the Soviet Union had guaranteed health care, housing and jobs up until the workers state was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The value of the collectivized economy can be seen today in the Cuban deformed workers state, where despite an imperialist embargo and limited resources, health care outshines in many respects what is generally available in the U.S.
Nationalized health systems introduced in capitalist West Europe following World War II were themselves a response to the appeal the Soviet Union held for militant workers. The USSR, and by extension the mass Communist parties in capitalist Europe, gained enormous authority for having borne the brunt of the fighting to defeat the Nazi armies. As a wave of working-class militancy swept the continent, the capitalist rulers were willing to surrender a portion of their profits and grant social benefits in order to contain the powerful workers movements and prevent them from going further in a revolutionary direction.
In Britain, the Labour Party government under Clement Attlee instituted the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. Even at its best, the NHS did not provide adequate care for the needs of the population. But the legal obligation for the state to provide universal health care, free to everyone at the point of delivery, was one of the most significant gains ever won by working people from British capitalism. Attempts by the British bourgeoisie to roll back that gain by privatizing health care repeatedly ran up against massive popular opposition. It was the Labour government of Tony Blair, using plans hatched in the 1980s under Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, that succeeded in introducing the first significant measures opening the NHS to the penetration of private capital and the generation of corporate profits. That set the stage for the substantial shift of medical care toward the private sector under current Conservative prime minister David Cameron (see “Britain: Nationalized Health Care Under Attack,” WV No. 1023, 3 May).
Class, Race and American Medicine
In the U.S., the campaign in the early 20th century for government-organized health insurance was spearheaded by the bourgeois Progressives. The high point of the Progressive Era was the presidential election of 1912, when the Progressives bolted from the Republican Party and nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt supported government health insurance on the basis that no country could lord it over other nations if its people were in poor health, i.e., the rank and file of the armed forces had to be in shape to project U.S. military might around the world.
Nevertheless, the campaign for state insurance was defeated by an alliance of capitalists seeking to lower wages and benefits, insurance companies reaping cash from insecurity and fear, pharmaceutical companies hungering for profits and doctors in the American Medical Association (AMA) defending their incomes and social status. Lacking their own class party, workers were led by the likes of American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, who denounced compulsory health insurance. This stalwart of U.S. capitalism (who also opposed legislation for the eight-hour day, the minimum wage and unemployment insurance) hypocritically intoned that government-paid health care would stand in the way of the workers struggling “for their own emancipation through their own efforts”!
In the 1930s, the issue of state-sponsored health insurance arose again in response to the working-class upsurge that led to the creation of the mass, integrated industrial unions of the CIO. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to head off class struggle and the deepening leftist political radicalization by proposing a New Deal of palliative reforms. The racist Dixiecrats, who controlled the Democratic Party in the South and had a stranglehold in Congress, imposed a veto on any government intrusion in the health care system because they feared that it could ultimately threaten Jim Crow segregation of Southern hospitals and other health care services. The Dixiecrats did not block FDR’s social security program, though they insisted that the mostly black agricultural and domestic workforce be excluded from its benefits. However, national health insurance did not survive the final draft of the 1935 Social Security Act.
The sharp class battles in the 1930s created an opening to form an independent workers party in the U.S. But that potential was stymied by the Communist Party and social democrats who used their influence in the CIO unions to help channel the workers’ upsurge into support for FDR’s Democratic Party. The working class has paid for this class-collaborationist alliance ever since.
Following World War II, a massive strike wave broke out. When the United Mine Workers (UMW) walked off the job in 1946 demanding employer-funded health care benefits, Democratic president Harry Truman seized the mines and ordered striking miners back to work. They refused. The nationwide strike ended when Truman agreed to endorse the miners’ demand for lifetime health benefits. In 1947, Congress passed the slave-labor Taft-Hartley law, which specifically forbade company-funded welfare plans directly controlled by the unions. When the miners struck again in 1950 in defiance of government threats, they won an unprecedented cradle-to-grave union-controlled health plan. Miners paid a big price for their victory: UMW head John L. Lewis made a deal with the coal bosses not to protest the loss of thousands of jobs to mechanization. Nevertheless, the miners opened the way for the United Auto Workers and other unions to win health benefits, helping lay the basis for the employer-funded health plans that today are under attack.
While the bourgeoisie’s ongoing class battle with the miners was playing out, Truman’s platform for the 1948 presidential election included a proposal for national health insurance. Truman’s electoral promises soon foundered in the sweeping tide of anti-Communist witchhunting, as the AMA mounted what was at the time the most expensive lobbying effort in American history to stop this “creeping socialism.” Congressional Republicans denounced “socialized medicine” as a communist-inspired assault on personal freedoms, sounding a theme that has been taken up by today’s Tea Party yahoos as they fulminate against Obamacare.
Wall Street Bullish on Obamacare
The neo-Confederates of the Tea Party are part of a long tradition of right-wing demagogues railing against “big government.” That is coded language for a call to ax social programs portrayed as a “redistribution” of income from hard-working folks to “undeserving” blacks and immigrants. Ironically, as the media increasingly reports on—and Republicans seize upon—examples of families overwhelmed by increased insurance costs, liberal backers of Obama’s health plan are putting forward their own version of the redistribution theme. For example, columnist John Harwood argued in the New York Times (23 November) that “the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law” because some must pay higher insurance costs so that coverage can be extended to those with pre-existing medical conditions and others who suffered discrimination at the hands of the insurance companies.
Some working people have bought in to that reasoning, which feeds on the populist notion that “we’re all in this together.” In our recent subscription drive, comrades encountered unionized black workers in the South who were willing to take a hit on their health care costs—to pay their “fair share”—if it meant that their impoverished relatives might see an improvement in their conditions. In those Southern Republican-controlled states, this sentiment is reinforced by a sense of racial solidarity with the president, particularly as the ACA comes under attack from overt racists. In reality, the fundamental problem in medical care is the obscenely rich owners of the insurance, pharmaceutical and other health care corporations who prey upon the working people and poor.
Almost 20 percent of the entire economic output of the U.S. goes to pay for health care, about twice the level of spending in most industrialized countries. Yet that enormous expenditure does not come close to resulting in a corresponding level of health and welfare of the population. A study by the Institute of Medicine in January compared the health of the U.S. population to that in other economically advanced countries. Americans fared worse in a broad range of categories, including infant mortality, heart disease, chronic lung disease, HIV/AIDS infection, obesity and diabetes. Not surprisingly, life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than in all other advanced industrial countries, and that gap continues to grow.
Like all businesses, for-profit health care companies exist to generate the maximum possible return on their owners’ investments. In that regard, those corporations have been spectacularly successful. They are raking in such fabulous profits that the S&P stock index for the health care sector is up 38 percent this year, more than for any other sector of the economy. Big investors are definitely bullish on Obamacare.
A valuable window into the parasitic dealings of this industry was provided by investigative journalist Steven Brill in a Time (20 February) cover story. Brill noted: “When medical care becomes a matter of life and death, the money demanded by the health care ecosystem reaches a wholly different order of magnitude, churning out reams of bills to people who can’t focus on them, let alone pay them.” He documented cases of hospitals charging patients two and a half times the purchase price of an implantable device, $77 for a box of gauze pads and $1,200 per hour for nursing services. As for the pharmaceutical industry, Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary movie Sicko showed a woman in Cuba paying a nickel for the same inhaler that in the U.S. cost $120.
Make no mistake: When the capitalist rulers speak of cutting health care costs, they are not referring to the elimination of such obscene examples of the heartless exploitation of working people’s suffering. In the interest of swelling profits, the bourgeoisie means to further slash the medical care that is provided to the working population. As the New York Times (27 May) put it, companies that are cutting health benefits “are right in line with the administration’s plan: To encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests.”
That same logic is fueling the drive to cap Medicaid spending by turning millions of recipients over to private “managed-care organizations.” Those outfits are typically paid a fixed sum for providing (grossly inadequate) care. Since 2000, the number of Medicaid enrollees covered by managed care has increased from 19 million to 30 million and now accounts for some 40 percent of beneficiaries.
Growing popular anger at the Wall Street and health insurance robber barons has helped fuel the rise of a number of liberal Democratic Party politicians, such as New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Playing the populist card, they reinforce the illusion that the system can be made to work for the little guy. Of course, when the Republican Party revels in union-bashing as well as racist, anti-woman, anti-immigrant reaction, it is easy for a Democrat to appear as the lesser evil. This is despite the fact that “illegal” immigrants and their families are excluded from the ACA, which also will not put a dollar toward abortion services. And that many poorer people who find themselves shelling out more for health care are seeing their food stamp benefits cut by bipartisan agreement.
Populist nostrums help obscure the fundamental class divide between the capitalists—the coterie of families who own the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. As such, the working class is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system. The interest of the capitalist class in the health of the population comes down to maintaining a workforce fit enough to be exploited and to fight in their imperialist wars. To put the immense wealth generated by the labor of working people at the service of human need will require the expropriation of the bourgeoisie through workers revolution and the establishment of a workers state as part of a socialist world.