***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin –The Scorched Earth

  

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 although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars drinking cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

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

Oh sure I have a million stories to tell about my experiences now that I have retired after forty years working as an operative (peeper, shamus, gumshoe, private dick or whatever your dig at name for us)     with the International Operations Organization. Stories about murder and mayhem, deceit and deviousness, strange mental states and cold-bloodedness. Yes I have seen it all the worst side of mankind (male and female okay, and sometimes the women were the worst capable of things no guy would even think of doing no matter how much he hated whoever he hated), the backbiting, the scratching eyes out to beat someone out of something, the heat of passion and not in the bedroom where it belongs turning to dust. Not a pretty sight and not for the faint-hearted which is why I lasted for forty years, forty years of slugging it out to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world, and some days just for the pay. Right now my mind in on one of the last cases, the Bradford case, not because it was the worst, far from it, but because it didn’t make sense, didn’t make sense that a couple of well-off young women would go over the deep end for no real reason. Let me tell you about it    

It all started when John Bradford, the biggest banker in San Francisco (yes he was some distant descendant of somebody on the Mayflower crew although that doesn’t, I don’t think, explain what happened, not by any reasonable accounting) came to the agency looking for help when his two daughters, Anne and Prudence, went missing after not checking in for about a week. We had done a previous case with Mr. Bradford over an employee embezzlement scheme and so he came back to us on that recommendation.

You might well ask why if he was worried about his missing daughters, maybe having been kidnapped or worst, he didn’t go to the police, the FBI or something like your average guy would do. That is where the rich, and in his case the very rich, are different. They are worried about image, maybe about what would that Mayflower forbear think, or the country club set so they want things, including messy things and maybe especially messy things hushed up. They can also afford to pay for extra service, extra service that hard pressed police forces could not or would not provide. Besides in this case the two young women had something of a history of walking on the wild side and so hush it was just in case they were involved in some freefall caper. And so it landed on the agency’s lap and the boss assigned me to the case since he believed from what Bradford told him (not all of which he told me since Bradford worked on a need to know basis) that it would involve no heavy lifting, meaning no shooting or fists, something easy as I eased into retirement.     

Here is the way it went down, I started with the servants at the Bradford estate to see if they knew anything. Nothing, except some information about the pair having packed several suitcase before they left. None of them saw that as unusual since they had done that before even on short trips. Then I went the rounds of friends, relatives and acquaintances but no dice, no dice mainly because their friends were apparently working under some national security directive about giving information to a cop, public or private. A breakthrough did come when I went to the Knickknack Club, a place, a watering hole for the young, rich, and infamous where they hung out.

That tipster, who shall remain anonymous just in case the forces of evil that were unleashed decide to do something further about it, told me that I should check with a guy named Johnny Firestone because they had often been seen in his company. At first that name did not ring a bell but checking back with our agency files I found out that the name should have been ringing many bells. Johnny or rather his father and then he was knee-deep in the drug trafficking business in the Bay Area which meant some big time operations. It also seemed that Sonny Boy had branched out into high-end pornography. High-end meaning that the models were rich, wicked, perverted or whatever else made them get their kicks. 

So I followed that trail over to a converted warehouse in Haywood where Sonny Boy did his shoots. What would happen, and what did happen with Anne and Prudence, was that Johnny would get them high, high as kites, for a while and then suggest that modeling scam. 

In this case both young women were eager to get their kicks that way. Before it was all over though some shots were fired, some fists flew and a very large sum of Bradford money changed hands in order to get all the negatives and all the prints bought and burned. Last I heard the girls were married to some stockbrokers who are clueless about what their brides are capable of. Good luck, good luck reigning that pair in.  

 

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broué-Walter Held  
... I have mentioned before the importance of cadre to any revolutionary movement and the critical importance for propaganda groups and circles. The essentially stillborn fate of the Fourth International in the late 1930s and through World War II cane be directly traced to the decimation of its cadre in that period, and to call a thing by its right name its military defeat at the hands of Nazis and Stalinist alike. Walter Held's fate is a prime example of that proposition. 
    

 

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
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Pierre Broué-Walter Held

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

This short biographical sketch of Walter Held is translated from the French by Ted Crawford from a piece entitled Quelques Prôches Collaborateurs de Trotsky by Pierre Broué in the Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No.1, January 1979, and is published here with the author’s permission for the first time in English. 

Heinz Epe was born in 1910 at Remscheid; his father had a small painting business and right-wing views. As a young man he was noticeable for his quick intelligence and undeniable charm together with perhaps a certain excessive self-confidence. A law student at Cologne, Berlin and Vienna he was active first in the young Communists and then the KPD, from which he was expelled in October 1932 as a 'Trotskyist'. He started but never finished his doctorate in sociology. In January 1933 he was coopted into the leadership of the German Section. The activity of his group in Remscheid had attracted the notice of the Nazis, and he was one of the first to get out of Germany as soon as they came to power to escape being rounded up immediately. He was in Prague in the middle of May 1933. We have not been able to obtain confirmation in the German archives that as a result of this activity he was condemned to death in his absence by a Hitlerian court, since they are often incomplete on this sort of topic. [1]

Married to a young Czech activist of Otto Friedmann’s group, he took an original position in the German section in 1933: he called for a ‘new party’ in Germany at that time – like Trotsky but against the leadership of the German Opposition – and for a new International – three months before anyone else. It was perhaps under his influence that this position was defended by the Cologne delegate against the majority led by Eugene Bauer at the clandestine national conference in Leipzig on 12 March 1933. In any case he defended this position against Bauer in a debate in one of the first numbers of Unser Wort and he signed the article with the initials ‘HE’. He was the first editor of this publication, standing in for Otto Schussler who was coming from Prinkipo to do it, and this responsibility led him to correspond directly with Trotsky.

When the decision was taken to transfer Unser Wort to Paris, Heinz Epe – who started to call himself Walter Held, his mother’s maiden name – arrived in Paris in the second half of September. He did not stay there. Henricus Sneevliet, whose party, the RSP, was about to join the international organisation, wanted a person on whom he could rely sent to work alongside him in Amsterdam. He pushed hard to have Jean van Heijenoort whose Flemish origins made him think that the latter would adapt to his language and country. But it was eventually Held who, without any ties in Paris, was chosen to do the liaison. He was certainly one of the last visitors to Saint Palais and discussed his German and Czech experiences and his tasks in the Netherlands with Trotsky. He settled in Amsterdam at the beginning of October.

As soon as he arrived he was hurled into a debate around the question of fusion of Sneevliet’s RSP with the OSP, led by Peter Schmidt and Jaques de Kadt, both parties being signatories in August of the appeal of the Four for a new International. Held took part in the unity negotiations. He reported regularly to Trotsky, and this correspondence has recently been made available in the Sneevliet archives at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, while at the same time he wrote mostly on German matters to Bauer, who represented the International Secretariat. It seems that Sneevliet told Trotsky that he both welcomed and had a high opinion of him. But to Held’s great sorrow he was not able to find in this ‘puritan and petit bourgeois’ country a man who would make a marriage of convenience with Maria Reese to naturalise this ex-KPD Reichstag deputy who had become a supporter of the Fourth International. [2]

At this juncture the initiative of the youth organisation of the OSP in calling for a world conference of Socialist and Communist revolutionary youth organisations gave him an important role in the construction of the International, for he was given the responsibility of representing the LCI and its youth sections in the preparatory work. LD attached the greatest importance to this task in building the Fourth International itself. Held was present at the youth hostel in Laren when it was raided by the Dutch police just as the conference was starting in February 1934. Since his papers were in order, he was able with his companion Willy Brandt, who was furnished with Norwegian documents, to avoid the late of four German comrades, illegal refugees, whom the democratic Netherlands government was to hand over to Hitler.

Interrupted at Laren, the conference took place at Brussels – officially at Lille – and ended by electing an International Bureau of three members, of whom Held was one, together with Willy Brandt and Kurt Forsland of the ‘Independent’ Swedish Young Communists. The International Secretariat hoped for a lot from this because the centre would be at Stockholm and it looked unfavourably on the idea that Held would stay in Brussels with possibilities for him of starting work around the party and youth of Karl Kilbom. Trotsky was unhappy that Held had in his words "capitulated" to Brandt; he scolded him without restraint and warned him against holding far too optimistic Swedish perspectives. [3] In fact Held could not get to Sweden and had to satisfy himself with setting up in Oslo in June 1934. There he would be in close contact with Willy Brandt who, in spite of his youth, played an important role in the SAP in exile and had close relations with the Norwegian Labour Party which was about to become the government.

While in exile Held does not seem to have had much activity centred on Germany, though nominally he was in the leadership of the IKD. He was a determined opponent of ‘entrism’ in the SFIO – he is said to have compared Trotsky to Plekhanov and even Kautsky – but he finally came round. He supported the SL Johre/Oskar Fischer (Josef Weber and Otto Schüssler) group though he was never really a whole-hearted supporter. [4] He occupied himself with the Norwegian workers’ movement and had political contacts with Olav Scheflo, Helge Krog, Kjell Ottelson and Haakon Meyer which were valuable for Trotsky and which in a certain sense laid the foundations for the Norwegian section that first saw the light in 1937. It was under his influence that the Youth Bureau came out in favour of the International, which obliged Brandt to vote at the February conference of the LAG for the Sneevliet-Schmidt resolution in favour of the Fourth International.

This was the period when the SAP definitely turned its back on such an orientation and no doubt Brandt was not the most backward in pushing it this way. The LCI denounced what Trotsky termed his ‘treason’ for, when representing the Youth Bureau, Brandt had voted for the Fourth, but as a member of the SAP spoke against it. LD wanted Held to make an energetic intervention to break up the anti-Trotskyist bloc which was forming. The SAP moved first, and the only result of this attack was the expulsion of Held from the bureau on 18 August 1935.

At this date LD was already installed at Hönnefoss. Held made great efforts to get a residence permit for him from the new Labour government. He had welcomed LD’s arrival at the quayside in Oslo on 18 June and had accompanied him to Hönnefoss, the home of the Knudsens, where he would live, and made frequent and long visits there to see him. The presence of the young Held couple, (he had just married a young Norwegian, Synnoeve Rosendahl), was very precious to the Old Man in that terrible period. In December 1936 Trotsky asked Trygve Lie for permission for Held to accompany him to Mexico [5]; the government’s refusal prevented this.

It seems that during the next period Held spent his efforts in turning the Norwegian Youth Section towards the Fourth International. The veteran militant Jeanette Olsen was the standard-bearer in this effort. But he was still an influential member of the IKD and the only German to work at the same time both for Unser Weg, the organ of the Johre-Fischer tendency and den Eisen Weg, which was edited by the International Secretariat. He wrote regularly for the New International with theoretical, historical and reporting articles of excellent quality. [6] He played an important role in the inquiry into the Moscow trials and particularly in his search for witnesses in Denmark for the events that had taken place in Copenhagen in 1932.

Trotsky at this time wished to see Held where his abilities would be fully utilised by appointing him to the International Secretariat. The phoney letter sent by Rudolf Klement after his kidnapping referred to projects about Held’s future activity. In 1938 LD suggested that he should come to Paris to the International Secretariat as a step on the road to the United States, where the IS would move after the start of the war in Europe. [7] We do not know why this never happened and why Held was still in Norway in September 1939.

Daniel Guerin, who was a delegate of the PSOP, met him with the veteran Czechoslovak Alois Neurath, the latter also a refugee. He recalled later his memories of these ‘two militants of exceptional quality’, ‘the cream of the Fourth International’, mentioning Held in particular as ‘a real frilly-shirted revolutionary, of a most refined and subtle culture’. [8] But at this time the general conditions in which information circulated make it unclear exactly what happened. It seems that in the quarrel which broke out in the US SWP following the Hitler-Stalin pact and the debate on the nature of the USSR, Held took the side of the minority led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham. It seems on the other hand that he denounced the split in the party and in the International: both factions were to claim him after his death.

But the curtain was coming down on the drama: after the occupation of Norway by German troops in 1940, Held could not stand the temporary political inactivity to which he was reduced by his refugee status in Sweden. Friendly relations with an American diplomat made him think of an audacious plan: furnished with a proper passport and all the necessary visas he attempted at the beginning of 1941 to cross the Soviet Union by train to the Soviet Far East and there to embark by ship for the United States with his companion and their son Ivar Roland. [9]

The enterprise was doomed in advance: the GPU were ignorant neither of his identity nor his activity, and he was, like Klement and like Wolf, a man to strike down. Asked by the police to get off the train at Saratov to be interrogated, he disappeared. Some Polish Bundists seem to have seen him some weeks later in prison in Moscow, where they were also detained. It is certain that he was executed as a ‘Trotskyist’ like so many others; in his case Stalin also carried out the sentence pronounced by Hitler. Walter Held was not yet thirty-one years old.

Pierre Broué

Notes

1. learning what information is contained in the dossiers of the Gestapo preserved in the FDR. However Dr. Zieghan of the Hauptstaatsarchiv at Dusseldorf has promised to tell us of any information of the registrar concerning births, marriages and deaths that he has extracted for us from the dossiers of the Gestapo on Heinz Epe and others.

2. Correspondence between Walter Held and Erwin Ackerknecht (Bauer) in December 1933 and January 1934, Sneevliet Papers. International Institute of Social History. When we saw this dossier it had the erroneous note that this correspondence was between Held and Erwin Wolf. (The confusion is explained by the similar first names.) [After this, Reese rapidly moved over to the Nazis – editors]

3. Letter to Trotsky from Held, 29 March 1934, Glotzer Papers, New York, published in the Oeuvres November 1933-April 1934, pp.298-302.

4. See on this subject the abundant correspondence between Held and Wolf in the Wolf dossier, Vereeken papers.

5. Trotsky wrote about this in Quatrieme International in February-March 1937 at the end of a piece about his leaving Norway.

6. Held was also the author of the document, The Evolution of the Comintern that was adopted at the First International Conference for the Fourth International in July 1936. It appears in Documents of the Fourth International – the formative years (1933-1940), New York 1973 pp.l13-l31. See also Walter Held’s thesis on the evolution of the Comintern, Writings of Leon Trotsky Supplement (l934-l940), New York 1979, pp.685-686. [editors’ note]

7. Letter from Trotsky to Cannon and Shachtman, 20 April 1938, Cannon Papers. [More on European Problems, Writings of Leon Trotsky l937-l938, New York 1976, p.322 – editors]

8. Daniel Guerin, Front Populaire, Revolution Manque, Paris, Maspero 1970, p.255.

9. A certain number of precious details have been given to us by Wolfgang Alles who has just submitted a thesis to the University of Mannheim entitled Zur Politik und Geschichte der Deutschen Trotzkisten ab 1930.

 

First Night Against the Wars! When: Tuesday, December 31, 2013, 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm Where: steps of the Boston Public Library • Boylston & Dartmouth Sts. • Copley T • Boston starting at Noonish till sixish 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 at 857-272-6743. Daniel.Kontoff@yahoo.com   United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today. info@justicewithpeace.org 617-383-4857

***Like A Rolling Stone-The Hunter Thompson Papers

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, introduction by Jann Wenner, Hunter S. Thompson, 2013

Sometimes it is just nice to be able to grab an author’s work, especially an author whose stock and trade was essentially working as a free- lance journalist, in one place. That is the idea behind this collection of all of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s (Doctor Gonzo’s) work for Rolling Stone magazine which launched him to some fame in the counter-cultural world in the early 1970s and later. Although the bulk of the work was done in that 1970s period occasional articles pop up almost until his death. An added feature is that Jann Wenner, the editor/owner of the magazine and Hunter’s ally/nemesis, introduces the book and each individual piece to give a little back-ground history of what did (or did not) happen with each article.

Hunter Thompson first became widely known as a crackerjack journalist when he “rode” and wrote about Oakland’s Hell’s Angels and set a new path for a proper way to write journalistic articles. No more so-called objective on the one hand, on the other stuff but considered reportage with the writer in the middle of the drama. Not everybody liked it (or likes it) but it got the attention of whole generation of kids (the now fading, greying generation of ’68) excited about more than drugs, sex and rock and roll (although that too).

Here you have articles ranging from Thompson’s 1970s Freak Power alternative political campaigns in the Rockies, the tense happenings in the East Los Angeles barrios, the skewering (there is no other word for it) of one Richard M. Nixon, one time President of the United States and common thief, a solid tribute to the old war-horse and ally Oscar Acosta (the Brown Buffalo), the Pulitzer Palm Beach divorce case and a quick swing through the hardships of the polo set to name a few. All done with factual accuracy and blazing wit (and occasional head full of dope, booze, cigarette smoke, and who knows what else).      

Many of these articles (although in some cases here heavily-edited) have appeared in previous volumes by Thompson, notably The Great Shark Hunt, but it is nice to have them all in one place to once again ponder over and get a few private chuckles from. Yeah, buy the ticket, take the ride, Thanks Hunter, wherever you are.  

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.

(please forward widely) As UNAC prepares for a new year of struggle for peace, we ask that you help us with a generous donation to support our work   DONATE     The need for an active anti-war coalition in the US was made clear from the events of the past year.  Many antiwar groups exist throughout the country that are doing very important work but when we can coordinate our efforts throughout this country, and along with activists in other countries, we magnify our strength.   Such was the case with the important 10-city tour we organized with the Afghan Women’s Mission for the former Afghan legislator and human rights activist, Malalai Joya.  The tour, which coincided with the 12th anniversary of the Afghan invasion, attracted large audiences throughout the country.  Joya explained that no one can liberate the Afghan people except for the Afghan people themselves.  She said the continued US occupation of her country was the cause of much of the misery of Afghan women and Afghan people as a whole.  We raised tens of thousands of dollars to support her work in Afghanistan and her ongoing mission to tell the truth about the US occupation.   UNAC also played an important role in organizing anti-drone actions in dozens of cities throughout the country during last April’s days of action against drones.  Three UNAC leaders also traveled to Pakistan at the end of last year with the Code Pink anti-drone delegation to that country.  We were joined by thousands of Pakistanis as we pushed our way to the border of Waziristan where the US drones are taking their terrible toll and came back to speak to audiences throughout the country and Canada.  We also attended the anti-drone conference organized by Code Pink last month to prepare ourselves for the continuing fight against drone warfare and mass surveillance.   As the war in Syria continued to heat up and mercenary forces, armed by the US and its allies continued to pour into country and when the Obama administration declared that it would strike Syria, we called for emergency demonstrations demanding “No U.S. War on Syria.”  These took place in close to 100 cities and were larger than we had seen for a long time.  Polls showed the people were overwhelmingly against any US attack.  The British Parliament voted against supporting a strike and the US congress was poised to do the same.  Obama was compelled to back down, at least for the moment.   UNAC sponsored or was involved in many more activities throughout the year.  We held educational conference calls on the little known militarization and aggressive actions in the Philippines, North Korea and Africa.  We continued our support for persecuted Muslim communities, communities of color and immigrants who were under attack.  This we saw as the domestic side of the phony “war on terror.”   We also continued to support the civil and democratic rights of, Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani political prisoner in the US and we called for compassionate release from prison for UNAC’s own coordinating committee member attorney Lynne Stewart.  We spoke at and organized forums and meetings in support of Chelsea Manning, against NSA spying and growing attacks on civil liberties such as the recent attack on Palestinian-American leader Rasmea Odeh and the FBI attacks on the 24 antiwar and solidarity activists who had their homes raided and were served with federal subpoenas.  Many of these 24 are leaders and supporters of UNAC.   We are faced with a dangerous year ahead.  The US is building up forces in Asia and has conducted provocative military maneuvers directed at China and North Korea.  The sectarian violence that the US helped create in many countries like Iraq, is increasing.  War rages in many parts of Africa where the US has sent 3,500 troops to 35 nations to foster its neo-colonial agenda. The plight of the Palestinians continues to worsen.  UNAC’s demand to “End all U.S. Aid to Israel” and to support the Palestinian call for BDS has found traction in the broader antiwar and social justice movements.   The US still maintains troops in some 120 countries and US Special Forces and drones kill without regard to borders.   NATO is planning its next summit in Britain and many groups including international groups that UNAC collaborates with like the No to War, No to NATO coalition are planning actions similar to the ones we initiated and helped organize, such as the rally of 15,000 activists, when the NATO summit was held in Chicago in May, 2012.  We will want to participate in these anti-NATO actions in Britain and perhaps build solidarity actions in the US.    UNAC is now scheduling its third national antiwar/social justice conference in 2014 with a focus on linking the deepening environmental crisis and global warming with the ongoing US wars over fossil fuels and the growing repression and austerity measures at home.   To consistently raise the alarm and take action against the criminal acts of our imperialist government and to continue to build a strong and expanding coalition, we need your support.  Please send a generous donation to UNAC, PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the button above to make an on-line donation.  Checks should be made out to UNAC.   Peace, Joe Lombardo and Marilyn Levin UNAC co-coordinators     click here to donate to UNAC Click here for the Facebook UNAC group. To add yourself to the UNAC listserv, please send an email to: UNAC-subscribe@lists.riseup.net   --

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

 

 

…it wasn’t always about the struggle against some big societal hurts, against food hunger or that gnawing hunger, want hunger that eats away at a woman or man, it wasn’t always about what to do next to keep body and soul together, it wasn’t always about desperate heroic deeds ahead in places nobody had ever heard of , it wasn’t always about what to do, or not do, about fighting the night-takers of the world, it wasn’t always desperately waiting for news, waiting for the other shoe to drop about Johnny, Jimmy or Leroy.   A lot of that was for those older coming of age youth but for the younger ones, the ones left to put nickels and dimes in Doc’s Drugstore jukebox (or name your jukebox location), it looked a lot like stuff that had been going on ever since some guy, some old guy from what everybody head, invented teenage-hood several decades before. And so it was with him, him and his hidden desire, virginal desire, maybe, maybe not, such things were kept on the QT then, for her, and the way she disturbed his dreams, disturbed his night.

It all started like all such things started no need to detail every little point like the story hadn’t been told before, hadn’t been told since Adams and Eve, maybe before. He spied her all black hair and freshness, she gave a furtive glance his way, maybe in class at school, maybe at Doc’s when some dreamy song came on the jukebox, or maybe in the back row of church, the possibilities were endless. They talked and they did their mating dance. They went out together, boy-girl together, made out, maybe more, but like I said such things were closely held in those days. Reputations mattered and everybody knew everybody else so if an “accident” occurred the old gone to Aunt Ethel gag came into play.

Whatever happened at night they had their favorite song, favorite spot (down at the far end of Squaw Rock, okay, meaning no question they doing it since nobody went there to get swoony over the ocean), favorite everything that there could be a favorite for. Then the hammer came down. See, that first furtive glance that got him going she gave him was to get Billy mad, Billy who had split them up running after some Jane and who was now contrite, was back in her field of vision, and so he, well, to put it in cold hard teen talk, was yesterday’s news. Yes, yesterday’s news and wandering, constantly wandering down at Squaw Rock, wondering.

Yes, wondering like some fool, like some kid fool and he almost ready to go, after summer’s end if he could survive this hurt, to his senior year in high school and then off to join brothers and fathers in that great big shooting gallery oversea (his preference, like his older brothers, to go west, go west to get those Japs, those beasts, after Pearl). But now kid hurt, kid hurt wondering how his old corner- boy, corner boy, junior high school version and so harmless standing older guys-like against Mom and Pops’ Variety Store until Mom and Pop chased them away, or they had to do homework, Billy, could cut him that way, could come back and take her away with the snap of his fingers when he knew for a blessed fact that Billy was just playing with her, playing with her fragile heart.

And as it turned out that was exactly what Billy was doing, or that was the way that she started to understand his actions, his sneaking out with other women, again. Actions that were trumped though by the happenings in Europe and Asia as Billy’s number was called and he went, went not like a lot of other guys with an air of resignation but kicking and screaming about how he was more useful on the home front. So much hot air according to his friends and neighbors at the local draft board. Trumped too by him, by his wandering and wondering as she once again was seen at Doc’s alone, playing that old jukebox, spending her nickels and dimes, constantly playing That’s When Your Heartache Begins. He spied her, she gave him the now familiar furtive glance and so they started that old mating dance again.  Started until his number too was called and with an air of resignation he was off. She saw him off at the station when he was ready to go to the uncertain European front, saw him off with tears. The night before they had vowed that they would get married when he got back, got back in one piece, and she swore too that she would play their song, Til Then, on Doc’s old jukebox every day until he returned. How about that, my friends.