Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now 

 

 

Peter Paul Markin comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity Forever and others like Deportee, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land  while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists (later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.”  Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act, nor did I  have anything that happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.

I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.

Now it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. (Although I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.)                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen). Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll). Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaselly Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover, Mayor Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And Markin would surely endorse this sentiment. Enough.

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days

Click below to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

Markin comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.

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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.

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Markin comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International).

While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, merely smitten by late Victorian fox hunts with the upper crust. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series specifically the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.

History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.

Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.

As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history. 

 

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2015 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Three 

 

From The American Left History Blog Archives –May Day 1971

 

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

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Frank Jackman, after scrounging around for some food to sate his hunger and after finding some, the “movement” food de jure, brown rice and beans, at a make-shift kitchen set up to feed the hungry like him he ambled back to the comfort of that still blazing campfire. As he sat down on one of the anonymous scattered friendly blankets (this time not an Army blanket) he noticed across the fire from him a young man, younger than he, wearing an obvious real GI-issued Army jacket (not Army-Navy store gear then popular about the street protestors). That brother had the look, the short hair, the haphazard mustache, the posture of someone who either was still in the service or who had like him also just gotten out. That fresh vision before him of what he himself looked like got Frank to thinking again about the last year of his “military service,” most of that time spent in the jug, in the Fort Devens stockade.

 

Frank, after having his conscientious objector application rejected by the military, had decided to pursue one avenue of appeal, to the federal courts. He was able through civilian counsel to get his case before a federal judge in Boston who had furthermore issued a restraining order on the military to not remove him from the jurisdiction of the court. That, however, Frank felt was a long and cumbersome course and not necessarily a successful route if the judge decided that the recent civilian decisions on CO status did not apply to the military. Frank was the first to admit that he had not been a vociferous and outspoken public opponent of the seemingly never-ending war but he had, as he would quip “gotten religion.” As part of his work with the Quakers and others down in Cambridge he had come to see that if the war was to be ended sooner rather than later then strategies based on massive, if ill-formed, public demonstrations or the pressuring of federal politicians was not going to get it done.

 

Frank knew, knew in his bones, from talks with guys who had been to ‘Nam, guy who knew how bad it was, guys who knew the score, and who also knew that lots of guys were disgruntled that to close down the war you had to get to the foot soldier, to the grunt. And so he determined that he would try to do that, or at least his small part. The Quakers he knew and other Cambridge radical also had the same idea that anti-war actions should be directed toward the military bases in order to try to reach the soldiers. A group of them had decided that one day, one weekday around the end of the base workday that they would make an anti-war protest in front of Fort Devens to drive home the issue. Frank was intrigued by the idea, saw a role for himself in the action, and suggested that he would join them, in uniform, on the appointed day.

 

After some discussion with his civilian supporters (who he was told later were secretly thrilled to have a uniformed soldier in their anti-war midst) and a period of thought about what his actions would entail (and whether he could do stockade time which would surely come out of his actions) he decided to cast his lot with the ant-warriors.  On a Wednesday afternoon in late October 1970 a small group of protestors (maybe fifty people) gathered for about an hour in the triangle in front of the entrance to the main gate of the fort. Among those in attendance was Frank Jackman in full private’s military uniform carrying a sign calling for the American government to “Bring The Troops Home.” That night upon returning to his barracks he was arrested and brought to the Provost Marshal’s Office for transport to the stockade for pre-trial confinement. And that was the start of Private Francis Alan Jackman’s war against the military.        

 

A lot of Frank’s thinking at the time was that he would further his efforts at getting that discharge from the Army by personally actively opposing the war from the inside. That is what was appealing to him about taking part in the civilian action in front of the fort. Call it a martyr’s complex or just show-boating he was determined to perform acts of personal resistance to show others the way out of the war. And the military was more than happy to comply giving him a mandatory six months sentence for his action under the rubric of disobeying lawful orders at his Special Court-Martial.

 

Frank had assumed that such a sentence would be the end of it. Either the federal judge would rule in his favor or the Army seeing an obvious malcontent would discharge him in some administrative way. So Frank was surprised when neither happened. He did his six months (minus good time) and then was released back to a replacement detachment without any word from Boston. He was in a bind, a political bind by his lights. He could not knuckle under to the military and return to serve good military time doing some job (meaning serving non-stockade time) yet he was hesitant to do another stretch in the stockade. The issue weighed on him until he came up with another idea- a surefire stockade-inducing action.      

 

Each Monday morning there is in probably every military post a general formation to see who is where they are supposed to be (not AWOL) which he later found out was called the morning report. That general formation took place at a large central field where all the base’s units gathered to take account of their personnel. Frank decided that he would  make a big person anti-war statement on that occasion by wearing  civilian clothes and carrying a large sign calling for “Immediate U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam” One Monday morning in the summer of 1970 Private Jackman walked out onto the parade field carrying that sign. He was immediately tackled by a couple of lifer-sergeants and transported once again to the Provost Marshal’s Office and from there to pre-trial stockade confinement. Once again he was giving a Special Court-Martial for, what else, disobeying lawful orders, and sentenced to serve another six month sentence. It was during the latter part of that sentence that word came from Boston (through his lawyer) that the federal judge had granted his writ of habeas corpus. He was released from confinement a few days later on February 18, 1971

 

Frank once again became drowsy as the fire started to flicker and he nodded off still thinking about that year’s worth of time in the stockade and the chances of him having to do more time with the impeding street action set for early May Day morning in order to break down the war effort…          

A View From The Left-For the Materialist Conception of History-Marxism and the Fight Against Native Oppression in Canada
 

Workers Vanguard No. 1066	17 April 2015

For the Materialist Conception of History

Marxism and the Fight Against Native Oppression in Canada

We reprint below a presentation by comrade Nevin Morrison at a Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste Central Committee plenum and national educational gathering in July 2014. It was first published in edited form in Spartacist Canada No. 184 (Spring 2015).

In their introduction to the presentation, our Canadian comrades observed:

“The federal government recently fêted the bicentennial of the birth of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. Macdonald once boasted of keeping the Native population on the Prairies on the ‘verge of actual starvation’: as his government deliberately withheld food from the aboriginal peoples, thousands died. In 1885, he suppressed the Northwest Rebellion and hanged its Métis [people of mixed Native-European descent] leader Louis Riel. It is entirely fitting that today’s rulers of capitalist Canada, who continue to preside over the brutal oppression of Native people, would honour such a man.”

*   *   *

We have frequently exposed in the pages of Spartacist Canada the misery and brutality that are daily life for Native peoples. Our article “Canada: Racist Hell for Native Peoples” (SC No. 176, Spring 2013) [reprinted in WV No. 1021, 5 April 2013], for example, dealt with the Idle No More protests that began about two years ago with a hunger strike by chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat band in northern Ontario. These countrywide protests publicized the squalid poverty on reserves that lack even basic housing, clean water and sanitation. In the cities, Natives are ghettoized, disproportionately unemployed, subject to police violence and almost as likely to be imprisoned as to finish high school.

It’s not complicated to figure out how to improve conditions. There is a burning need for jobs, housing, education and infrastructure. An end to racist policies and redress for past mistreatment shouldn’t be controversial either (though they often are). But the capitalist class for whose benefit this society is organized cannot and will never provide these necessities.

To understand why, to address the roots of Native oppression and develop a program to defeat it, requires a Marxist worldview: historical materialism. At its core is the proposition that production of the means to support human life—food, clothing and shelter—and the exchange of things produced are the basis of all social systems. It is the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who don’t—the class struggle—that is the motor force of history.

For example, feudalism, based on the ownership of land and the exploitation of serfs, was replaced by capitalism, based on the ownership of manufactures and the exploitation of wage labour. A tiny minority, the bourgeoisie, owns the factories, mines and other industries, while the working class—the proletariat—owns essentially nothing and has to sell its ability to work to the capitalists in order to survive.

It is the historic task of today’s exploited class to sweep away the capitalist system and forge an egalitarian socialist society where production is based on human needs, and not on profit. The liberation of the working class is thus also necessarily the liberation of all of the oppressed. Only such a truly human society can guarantee Native rights and finally redress centuries of abuse and degradation at the hands of a truly venal ruling class.

Our political tendency has always emphasized the need to combat the special oppression of Natives, blacks, women and others. Such oppression is intimately connected with the “normal” capitalist exploitation of the workers and must be fought by means of the class struggle. The revolutionary party must, in the words of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, act as a “tribune of the people,” educating and mobilizing workers against the racism and other backwardness instilled by their capitalist rulers which can only divide and weaken them.

Most of our opponents on the left these days reject historical materialism, just as they reject the perspective of working-class revolution and instead push variants of Native cultural nationalism and “ecosocialism.” An example of this trend is found in a short book by David Bedford and Danielle Irving entitled The Tragedy of Progress: Marxism, Modernity and the Aboriginal Question (2001), which criticizes various leftist organizations (including ours) for not having “embraced more enthusiastically the Aboriginal struggle.” The source of this supposed lack of enthusiasm is, they claim, a reading of Marxism as a “variant of modernity” that flows from “the enlightenment idea of unceasing progress through the application of an instrumental rationality.” They attack “those on the left who equate worker emancipation and technological progress,” and assert that such a perspective cannot address the “desire by many Aboriginal leaders to preserve a traditional material culture.”

Bedford and Irving try to strip Marxism of its materialist underpinnings and working-class centrality and twist it into a utopian worldview that can encompass Native “traditionalism.” This requires idealizing Native customs and cultures as somehow standing outside and apart from productive developments and immune to change. Having done this, they conclude that workers revolution cannot address the issues facing Native people.

“Human societies which exist without individual property ownership and without industrialization experience no alienation,” wrote Bedford in a 1994 article in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, asking rhetorically: “What do we say to those people who have yet to experience the alienation for which socialism is the answer...?” By this logic, the Marxist program for the emancipation of the proletariat is inapplicable to indigenous peoples today because 500 years ago their cultures and pre-colonial development did not include alienated labour!

Naturally we have something to say about this caricature of Marxism. More broadly, Bedford’s polemic provides an opportunity to explore just what has changed in the last 500 years or so—the historical and anthropological roots of Native oppression and our Marxist program to address it. Of course the diversity of the pre-colonial cultures of North America cannot be captured in one presentation and I won’t try to do so, but I will discuss some specific examples in what is now the Canadian state. I will not talk at much length about some current issues impacting Natives—resource development and land claims, for example—which are dealt with in the pages of SC.

Bedford and Irving write of the “silence of the left” on Native oppression, asserting: “For parties on the left, the fate of Aboriginal peoples and the fate of a traditional culture confronted by a capitalist economy is of little interest.” Even a cursory look at our press gives the lie to this ridiculous assertion. Our very first issue, published in October 1975, includes an article headlined “Defend the B.C. Native Militants!” What Bedford really objects to is our Marxist worldview. This is captured succinctly in a passage he quotes from our press that sharply denounces those whose concern for “traditional culture” is a mask for liberal anti-communism:

“The options for Native people are often presented as a choice between ‘traditional culture’ and racist capitalist society. But this is a false choice, not least because the vibrant pre-European culture is irreparably lost. The real choice is between the perpetuation of the crimes of the past—centuries of racist genocide and wholesale destruction of the Natives’ way of life—or the creation of a future in a society not based on brutal exploitation and all-sided racism.

“...[W]e reject the idealization of ‘traditional culture’ as liberal racism and a patronizing glorification of backwardness.”

— “Torture of Native Women in Canada,” Women and Revolution No. 42, Spring/Summer 1993

Morgan, Marx and Engels

Native oppression is a product of capitalist society that can only be finally defeated with its overthrow. It is rooted in history: in the rise of the Canadian state from its colonial origins and the consequent undermining and destruction of the indigenous societies and economies. Our Programmatic Theses, published in 1998, concisely summarized this process:

“Canadian capitalism was founded on the destruction of the pre-existing aboriginal societies, beginning under French and, later, English colonialism. The possibility of independent development of Indian nations was foreclosed by the expropriation of these peoples through fraud and military conquest, combined with the devastating impact of disease following European contact.”

One cannot understand the development of indigenous peoples by an idealized study of their culture and values. It is essential to understand what they did to survive and adapt their environments to their needs—the material basis for culture—as well as the material forces that were at play in the displacement of these societies.

Historical materialism holds that a superstructure of ideas, politics and culture and so on fundamentally derives from the ways in which humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence. This method was applied independently by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan to sketch the history and anthropology of the Iroquois people. Morgan’s 1877 book Ancient Society was the basis for Karl Marx’s ethnological notebooks, and these in turn were elaborated by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels wrote in his introduction that Morgan “rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago.”

Morgan was influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to view human societies in the process of their development. He described the different technologies, i.e., tools and practices, associated with different levels of development. Morgan used the anthropological categories of savagery, barbarism and civilization to describe stages of social development. Given the pejorative use today of the terms “savagery” and “barbarism,” I should note that his writings contain no hint of any ethnocentric prejudice. To the contrary, he viewed social progress always from the point of view of the fundamental unity of our species.

In examining the different forms of social development, Morgan (like Marx, Engels and ourselves) placed value on the technologies associated with progressively higher forms of production. He wrote that humans “worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge.” The acquisition of agriculture, metal tools, domesticated animals, language and writing allowed human societies to live better with less labour, to settle in centres with larger populations, to grow stronger with a stable supply of protein. These advances in our mastery of nature made social and cultural developments possible.

Morgan’s survey of ancient societies began with the successive developments in technology that increased the means of subsistence. He then traced the impact of these developments on forms of social organization, systems of family and the establishment of political organizations based on territory and private property.

Marx and Engels used the phrase “primitive communism” to describe aboriginal societies which had relative equality between men and women and did not have private property, classes or a coercive state. The ability to produce more than the bare necessities, mainly through agriculture, would lead to a social division of labour and hierarchy as the surplus production came to be divided. Those who appropriated a greater share would eventually require the means to defend this property against the less privileged and to pass it down to their children. Private property, classes, the state and the monogamous family therefore emerged. This is also the origin of women’s oppression, what Engels called “the world historic defeat of the female sex.”

Early Aboriginal Societies

Before European settlement, the population of what is now Canada numbered perhaps two million, concentrated in regions where sedentary life was possible: Iroquois farmers in southern Ontario and fishermen on the Northwest coast. The continent then was fully populated. As historian Olive Dickason writes in Canada’s First Nations (2009): “The lands that appeared ‘vacant’ to the new arrivals were either hunting areas or else had been recently depopulated because of introduced epidemics.”

The tribal mode of life was based on what Marx called production for use. This appropriation of nature for the maintenance and reproduction of the community did not provide for the personal accumulation of capital through the private ownership and hired labour that drove the capitalist economies. The concept of private property in land was a foreign one. Where an economic surplus was produced, as in the rich fishing economies of the Northwest, goods were frequently redistributed in potlatch ceremonies to increase the prestige of a tribe and its leaders and perhaps to attract free labour.

Starting roughly 10,000 years ago in Central and South America, agriculture had slowly spread into the less hospitable climate of North America over several millennia. Morgan notes that grain cultivation allowed a more settled village existence, as in the Iroquois region, tending to supplant fish and game and making possible for the first time an abundance of food. Agriculture made permanent settlement both possible and necessary in such regions.

Morgan identified two plans of government: the ancient social organization based on kinship links; and the modern, political organization based on territory and property. “The plan of government of the American aborigines,” he wrote, “commenced with the gens [a group of families] and ended with the confederacy, the latter being the highest point to which their governmental institutions attained.” A confederacy was an alliance of tribes whose members spoke dialects of the same language. The social organization was essentially democratic. The tribes of the Iroquois confederacy were linked through common descent through the female line. In the Iroquois matriarchate, property remained within the clan, so mother-daughter ties were more important than spousal ties. Morgan noted that there was no political society, citizenship or state in this kinship-based society.

Like Morgan, who was adopted as an honorary member of the Seneca tribe after helping them retain land that had been taken by fraud, Marx admired the egalitarianism of many primitive societies based on pre-class communal property forms. At the same time, he would denounce as foolish utopianism all schemes of somehow returning to a romanticized traditional culture based on scarcity. He emphasized that the development of means of production was the engine of history, which allowed us to overcome scarcity but was also the basis for class divisions and the alienation of labour from its products. Given the uneven development of capitalism, it was inevitable that many pre-capitalist societies would be the victims of the ruthless expansion of the profit system.

Disease, Death and Devastation

The settlement of North America by Europeans is sometimes depicted as a simple slaughter and military conquest. This did occur in some areas but it is also an overgeneralization. One example is the Beothuk who encountered Europeans in Newfoundland. Early on, Basque fishermen who came to the island could leave gear and boats undisturbed in Beothuk areas over the winters. But no common interests developed between them and the indigenous population. As the fishermen began to interfere with the Beothuk seasonal hunting rounds by using their shore sites, the latter in turn began raiding European gear. When permanent European settlement began, conflicts escalated into bloody slaughter: the French and English attacked the Beothuk, driving them away from the coast and into the barren interior, where they faced isolation and starvation and were hunted down. After 300 years none were left.

By far the biggest killers of the aboriginal population were the diseases carried by European settlers that quickly spread to the furthest reaches of the continent. Natives did not share the acquired immunity of the Europeans and the vast majority of the population was decimated in epidemics that recurred for centuries.

Alongside bloody massacres and the plague of epidemic disease, when interests coincided there could be cohabitation. Fur traders, especially from France, lived interdependently with Native trappers, intermarrying and fighting alongside them against rival traders. As the fur trade dwindled over time, relationships changed. Fishermen contesting the best spots and farmers lusting after aboriginal land were more likely to be hostile. These eventually came to carry more economic weight and to vastly outnumber the Native population.

Colonial Rivalries

The French, English and Dutch established rival trading posts, seeking the allegiance of Native trappers in competition for furs. The result was a rapid depletion of fur-bearing animals and bloody competition among Native tribes for furs and trade routes. Peoples who left behind hunter-gatherer or agricultural modes that were incompatible with the fur trading economies would become dependent on Europeans, relying on the trading posts to fill many of their needs. Proximity to European trading posts and missionaries exacerbated the effects of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and the use of alcohol and indebtedness to manipulate Natives.

The Huron and Iroquois are a case study in the divisions created by the fur trade. As the French established themselves in Quebec in 1608, they secured an alliance with the Huron, fighting beside them against their Iroquois rivals. The French plugged into the Huron trade network and flotillas of canoes carrying thousands of furs came down the Ottawa River to Quebec annually for decades.

The Iroquois in turn opened up trade with the Dutch and English but soon exhausted their own beaver supplies. By the 1640s, with guns from the Dutch, the Iroquois Five Nations attacked Huron control of the rivers, routing them and annihilating their villages. The Huron scattered, starved, or were captured and adopted into Iroquois tribes. By 1700 the Five Nations expanded to become the dominant force in the Northeast, controlling trade routes from the English colonies into the interior.

By the mid 17th century, New France was being colonized as an agricultural colony organized on feudal principles. In England, meanwhile, the rising bourgeoisie began to multiply its fleet of ships and pursue an aggressive colonial policy. As the two powers went to war in Europe, they and their Native allies also fought in North America, combining trade competition with military objectives. As Marxist historian Stanley Ryerson observed, “The forces that impelled New England forward were those that brought on and carried through the English bourgeois revolution. The roadblocks in the way of New France were such as the Cromwellian revolution cleared away” (The Founding of Canada: Beginnings to 1815 [1960]).

With the British victory in the Seven Years War [known in the U.S. as the French and Indian War], the 1763 Treaty of Paris transferred to the British Crown one of the largest territories covered by any treaty before or since. Native peoples naturally disputed the transfer of land they had never ceded, taking the position that it was not they but the French who had been defeated, so their lands were not at stake. On top of this, the vacuum left by the French spurred settlers to take land through “sharp dealing” or outright theft.

At the same time, decreased leverage for Natives to bargain between the feuding powers was reflected in the rising prices demanded by British traders. Seething discontent erupted in a Native uprising which took several British forts in the Old Northwest in 1763, killing hundreds of settlers. British commander-in-chief Jeffrey Amherst’s infamous reaction was to propose the distribution of smallpox-laden blankets. The rising was unsuccessful, failing to receive help from France as hoped, and tribes were played off against each other in negotiations which allowed the British to resume control of their forts in exchange for an empty promise that Native hunting grounds would remain undisturbed.

The American Revolution

The American war of independence began in 1775, a result of the growth of a colonial bourgeoisie which asserted itself in an historically progressive struggle against the imperial centre. The Americans gained the assistance of France and Spain to defeat their British rivals. The 1783 Peace of Paris ceded the Ohio Valley to the newly fledged United States, and settlers and governments continued to press for and confiscate aboriginal lands. Attempted Native uprisings defeated Americans in two battles, but were ultimately put down as Britain refused assistance. Yet more aboriginal land was ceded.

Britain’s attempts to reverse the verdict of the American Revolution culminated in the War of 1812. The so-called United Empire Loyalists—wealthy counterrevolutionaries who took Britain’s side—flowed north to what is now Canada. These reactionaries were no friends of Native peoples, but for several reasons the British side posed fewer direct threats to tribes struggling to resist colonial expansion. Settlements were smaller, and agriculture and industry slower to develop in Canada than to the south. Moreover, the continued preoccupation with trade actually required a degree of Native participation. Thus there was less immediate pressure to expropriate land.

Britain’s military efforts rested heavily on aboriginal support. In particular they cultivated Tecumseh, a Shawnee-Creek leader who had sought to mobilize an inter-tribal movement to insist that no single tribe could cede land without the consent of others. Thousands of Natives of several tribes fought beside just 800 British soldiers in 1813 at Moraviantown, where Tecumseh died in battle while his British counterpart General Proctor turned tail and ran. Their support was rewarded with betrayal once again as the British dropped the demand for a neutral territory for Natives, leaving them no further ahead for their military efforts.

Dispossession of Land: Fraud and Conquest

The core of the conflict between tribal societies and the expansion of capitalism in the New World lay in the clash of productive systems of vastly different levels of development. The continued independent evolution of the Indian tribes, whose technology could not possibly compete with that of the colonizers, was a possibility bloodily cancelled by history. The development of capitalism first in England and later the colonies required what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital,” a brutal process which drove people off the land they had lived on and worked since time immemorial.

Britain used the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to codify its mercantile interests in the territory acquired with the defeat of the French. This document recognized some kind of aboriginal title—not out of any supposed generosity toward the aboriginal peoples, but as a way of securing peace so the fur trade would remain profitable. But this all changed with the triumph of industrial capitalism over the mercantile system in the decades following the American Revolution.

As trade turned to more intensive settlement, communal aboriginal hunting and gathering grounds became an obstacle to exploitation of the continent’s natural resources through agriculture, lumbering and mining. The colonial state moved to “extinguish” the Native title and squeeze them into paltry reserves. Over several decades, treaties took land covering most of Canada’s habitable area in return for trivial annuities and hunting and fishing rights that have since been eroded. As Stanley Ryerson wrote, “The fact of the matter is that the Indians were dispossessed of their lands by a colossal operation of fraud, misrepresentation and legalized theft.”

The much later settlement of British Columbia provides an example of capitalist so-called primitive accumulation at its rawest. In B.C. there had been as dense a pre-industrial, non-agrarian population as anywhere: perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 inhabitants, with sophisticated, wealthy, hierarchical societies, a rich economy focused on the salmon harvest and thriving trade networks. An underclass of slaves comprised up to a third of the population. Contact with Europeans brought disease which resulted in a radical depopulation of 90 to 95 percent, a blow from which the Natives did not recover. Indeed, B.C.’s aboriginal population continued to drop until it reached a low of about 20,000 in 1929.

The early colonial economy in B.C. had revolved around the maritime fur trade which did not bring extensive settlement, and Natives remained a majority through the 1880s. Europeans really began to establish themselves in the mid 19th century as the British formed a proprietary Hudson’s Bay Company colony and gold was discovered on the Fraser and Thompson rivers.

With the Douglas Treaties of the 1850s, the aboriginal people on the southern part of Vancouver Island were compelled to give up their land “entirely and forever” in exchange for some blankets and a pledge that they could continue to use certain areas. Things only got worse when Joseph Trutch became land commissioner in the 1860s. Trutch was a vile racist who declared that “The Indians really have no right to the lands they claim, nor are they of any actual value or utility to them.” Seeing B.C.’s future in large land grants to settlers to develop agriculture, he reduced Native reserves to ten acres or less per family—in contrast to 160 acres for settlers—and made it impossible for Natives to acquire land by pre-emption as settlers did (i.e., by fencing and putting labour into it).

In his book Landing Native Fisheries (2008), historian Douglas Harris documents how the government imposed tiny, often barren reserves on the basis that Natives were fishing peoples who didn’t need extensive land, while simultaneously devastating the Native fisheries by opening up the industry to all comers. He writes: “The reserve and the food fishery served the same purpose. Their intent and effect were to set aside fragments of traditional territories and fisheries for Native peoples, opening the remainder to immigrants.” Dispossession of land together with enforced isolation from the productive forces of capitalist society formed a general pattern of racist abuse, denying Natives both the old world of the tribe, which was destroyed, and the new world of capitalist society, whose doors were closed to them.

We support any attempt by aboriginal peoples to claw back some of the land which has been stolen from them, and to obtain whatever financial compensation they can from the ruling class. But the courts, like the glacial treaty process, will never provide a solution to the Native oppression under capitalism. While sometimes running ahead of governments in recognizing specific claims, the courts are bound to uphold capitalist private property and Canada’s British colonial constitutional heritage. The deck is necessarily stacked against Natives.

A small historical example: in 1921 the British Privy Council ruled that aboriginal title pre-existed and continued throughout the British Empire unless explicitly extinguished. The Canadian response? The Indian Act was amended, making it illegal for Natives to raise money or retain a lawyer to advance land claims. This continued until 1951, two years after the abolition of Canadian appeals to the Privy Council. Elementary justice demands the end of the entire private property system under a workers government, which alone can guarantee a just and egalitarian future for the Native peoples.

Marginalization and Racist Oppression

The colonial administrations—and, following Confederation in 1867, the Canadian government—came to regard the aboriginal population as a disappearing people whose remnants were to be forcibly assimilated, refashioned as farmers and Christians. This racist “civilization” program would be run by missionaries and funded by sale of Native land. Native cultural practices were outlawed and languages and culture suppressed, most notoriously through the infamous residential school system run by churches and religious orders, which stole children from their families. The purpose of this system was captured in 1892 by Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the U.S.: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

At the same time, the remnants of the traditional aboriginal material cultures were destroyed. Today, even in the shrinking areas of production where Natives have a role based on their traditional means of subsistence—the salmon fishery and seal hunt, for example—their products are necessarily largely directed to the capitalist market.

Contrary to Professor Bedford—who judges himself competent to state that indigenous North Americans “are not proletarians, nor do they want to become proletarians” (Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 1994)—Native people have historically often sought integration into the workforce. In B.C., Native workers were an important component in longshore, lumbering, commercial fishing and the canning industry during the late 19th and early 20th century. Bryan Palmer’s new book on the Trotskyist-led 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, Revolutionary Teamsters, describes how Native workers joined one of the key strikes that built the American labour movement. A member of the Sioux Nation conducted target practice for the union defense guard, and some Indian militants joined the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. [See our review in WV Nos. 1052 and 1053, 19 September and 3 October 2014.]

Over the years, insofar as Native people have been able to find work, this has mostly been in the worst-paid, most insecure jobs. Today, urban Natives are largely either excluded from production altogether or relegated to the “reserve army of labour,” sacrificed to the structural unemployment that the capitalists need to attack wages and working conditions. They are also jailed in massive disproportion to their numbers. On the reserves, aboriginal people are treated as second-class citizens, with separate and unequal systems of education and health care. The integrated working class must stand at the head of all the oppressed: not only defending Native people against oppression and repression, but fighting for their integration into the workforce. We call for the unions to control hiring, with aggressive recruitment and training for those—Natives, women, immigrants—who have historically been discriminated against by the capitalist class.

The Dead End of Native “Nationalism”

Bedford and Irving devote a section of their book to the cultural nationalism of Native activists Ward Churchill and Russell Means, who openly denounce Marxism because it is inseparable from “the rest of the European intellectual tradition” in basing itself on industry and production (Ward Churchill [ed.], Marxism and Native Americans [1999]).

Indigenous cultural nationalists like Churchill and Means came out of the radicalization of the 1960s and early ’70s. This saw the rise of a “new Indian” movement based on the view that the indigenous peoples of North America were nationalities that should pursue national independence. In Canada, parallel movements emerged in opposition to the Liberal government’s 1969 White Paper, which proposed to end any special status for Natives, convert reserves to private property which could be sold and gradually terminate existing treaties. This was rightly labelled cultural genocide by many Natives.

The Spartacus Youth League, our youth organization in the U.S. in the 1970s, wrote that:

“American Indian ‘nationalism’…represents an expression of the oppression and despair which Indians have experienced in urban centers [where they] have organized against particular manifestations of their special oppression beyond tribal lines into pan-Indian organizations. But Indian ‘nationalism’ has never succeeded in formulating a genuinely nationalist program and perspective for struggle, ultimately because the American Indian tribes were dismembered and destroyed by rising American capitalism before they could enter the historic process of national consolidation.”

— “Marxism and the American Indian Question,” Young Spartacus No. 31, April 1975

Today, despair over mass unemployment, racism and social isolation leads many Natives to seek solace in spiritualism and traditional communal values said to be shared by diverse aboriginal cultures, dreaming of a refuge where the virtues of idealized traditional life can be pursued. The stark fact is that none of this can do anything to end their oppression.

Lacking any perspective of a proletarian overturn of the capitalist order, various reformist left organizations have embraced or given cover to such cultural nationalism. For example, a 1970 pamphlet, “Red Power in Canada,” issued by the League for Socialist Action acknowledged that Natives lacked a common territory, language and economic life to serve as the basis for a nation. Yet it concluded: “Regardless of this, or that formal criterion, the key question is how the Indians see themselves—their collective consciousness. In this sense, the Indians are evolving, from a race to a nationality…to a nation” (republished by socialisthistory.ca, 2005).

The flag of “self-determination” can be waved around by all manner of liberals and reformists because they obscure its concrete content: the right to national independence. The cohering of nations is fundamentally a material not an idealist process, based not on nationalist ideology or feelings but on political and economic development. This was forcibly halted for Native peoples when their pre-capitalist economic forms were conquered by colonial capitalism.

I would note by way of contrast that the Québécois, descendants of the French settlers, are a fully fledged nation forcibly contained in the Canadian state with their own shared language and culture and a clear basis for an independent political economy. In contrast to his talk of self-determination for Natives, Bedford has nothing to say about this; indeed when he was briefly around our organization in Montreal in the late 1980s, he wanted nothing to do with our advocacy of Quebec’s right to self-determination.

Movements for Native “self-determination” encompass everything from armed protests to the official process of negotiating treaties and self-government agreements. The former, while often militant and courageous, can ultimately result only in deadly defeat at the hands of a capitalist state possessing far greater force of arms. The latter has produced few results, even as aboriginal peoples become indebted to the government for the costs of treaty negotiations. And any treaty arrangement between the rich, racist rulers and the impoverished aboriginal peoples can only be based on a wildly unequal balance of forces.

Indeed, we have warned against a conception of “self-government” that amounts to offloading the reserves or other settlements onto Native chiefs and bureaucrats so they can assume responsibility for the results of centuries of racist oppression and keep their people in line with their own cops and courts. Under capitalism, the result of such “self-government” will be the same old poverty and social degradation, under a camouflage of Native traditions. Nevertheless, we defend whatever measure of political autonomy Native peoples with a land base are able to attain, including the right to govern their land and control its resources.

Native Rights and “Ecosocialism”

I want to say a few words about environmentalism. Bedford has recently rebranded his arguments to take advantage of the popularity of “ecosocialism,” coauthoring with Thomas Cheney an article titled “Labor, Nature, and Spirituality: Human Ecology and a Left-First Nations Politics” (Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2013). They argue that aboriginal peoples do not seek to control nature; rather, their animism/spiritualism “engenders an attitude of respect and humility toward the ecology, rather than a will to dominate it.” If this were the case, Native people would be unlike every other group of humans that has ever existed.

It is interesting that Bedford and Cheney choose to develop their argument with reference to Northwest coastal peoples whose hierarchical societies traditionally captured slaves and traded them up and down the coast. One can imagine what kind of opinion those slaves might have had concerning their captors’ “will to dominate”!

Embracing a traditional lifestyle and culture is not a luxury available to most Natives, who face stark poverty on the reserves and a wall of racism and police brutality in the cities. In terms of the material culture existing before European settlement, which required large areas of land for hunting to support small populations, the continent was, as I noted, already pretty full. With vastly larger numbers today, a hunter-gatherer economy is far beyond fantasy. Intensive production and a social division of labour are essential not only to produce books, computers, motorized transportation and vaccines, but to adequately feed and house the population.

Environmentalists often see a superficial affinity between their reactionary “back to nature” utopias and the interests of Native peoples. Today, opposition to various pipeline proposals sees Natives and environmentalists conjuncturally on the same side, as the former seek to protect land claims while the latter oppose any oil development. But environmentalism often runs directly against Native interests. The success of “conservation” campaigns against logging, trapping and the seal hunt has reinforced the poverty of many, including Inuit and other aboriginal peoples who depended on these industries for their livelihood. Aboriginal rights to control their resources include the right to seek their development, a right which we defend.

As Marxists, we recognize that rational planning of the use of natural resources and the development of production requires the overturn of the irrational capitalist profit system. Production for use rather than the profit of a wealthy minority opens the possibility for society to plan the use of the earth’s resources for the benefit of all.

The best historical model for this is the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Under Marxist leadership, the insurgent working class and the new workers state championed the cause of all those oppressed in the former tsarist empire. The experience of the Soviet Union before its Stalinist degeneration gives a taste of what is possible for indigenous tribal peoples under working-class rule. Despite great material poverty, the workers state promoted broad autonomy, language and cultural rights, literacy programs and integration into the economy as well as leading positions in the party and state administrations.

Only the destruction of capitalism can set the conditions for voluntary integration on the basis of full equality for those Native people who desire it, and the fullest possible regional autonomy for those who prefer a different way of life. And where Native rights to land and resources would be affected by socially useful industrial developments, only a workers government will guarantee that any development proceeds on the basis of full consent and generous compensation.

Yes, Marxism Means Social Progress!

Bedford and Cheney argue that the left must “shed long-held dogmas about religion and alienated consciousness, allowing it to take seriously indigenous spirituality.” To the contrary, Marxists defend the scientific progress associated with the Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries, together with its conception of human freedom against all forms of mysticism, superstition, quackery and social reaction. The “liberty, equality and fraternity” of capitalism’s progressive epoch has long ceased to be the rallying cry for a bourgeois class firmly ensconced in power. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union two decades ago and the consequent retrogression of working-class consciousness worldwide provide fertile soil for all kinds of backward ideas. Bedford et al.’s idealist and reactionary promise of a return to a pre-modern economy and culture is one of them.

In idealizing societies of the past, Bedford has to distort them beyond any historical or anthropological understanding. Indeed, he takes aim at the Enlightenment itself, attributing the left’s supposed “silence” on the Native question to an analysis “grounded on an acceptance of the key concept associated with modernity—the fact and value of progress”:

“Modern cultures, the inheritors of the Enlightenment, see history as a development or progress from less advanced to more advanced forms. History is marked by continual improvements in science and technology.... This is especially visible as our capacity to produce and consume is directly linked to technological and scientific progress.”

“Acceptance of the Enlightenment project,” he concludes, “infuses the left’s political stands on the Aboriginal question, and it conditions their reading of Marx.”

Of course Marxism does value technological progress, and it is forward-looking, as (I would add) human societies have always been. Modern societies share a great deal with “traditional” ones, which also sought to better understand and master nature—and frequently other humans—in order to survive and thrive. Even spiritualism based on mythological beliefs was an early attempt to better understand the natural world in ways that could help to secure human survival.

Technological progress is necessary but not sufficient to human progress. Workers rule is needed to establish social equality—which today can be achieved only on the basis of material abundance—and lay the basis for the abolition of private property and the eventual withering away of the state. At the end of Ancient Society, Morgan paints a vista of the future which I find inspiring:

“The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past.... Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”

Morgan’s vision of a renaissance of “primitive communist” egalitarianism combined with modern technology could easily be dismissed as idealist utopianism. But what Marxism provides is an understanding that the working class, by virtue of its relation to the means of production, can be the necessary instrumentality to make this vision a material reality.

Native people cannot have a decent future under capitalism. Only the destruction of the rulers’ profit system and construction of a socialist society can redress centuries of crimes against the aboriginal peoples of this country. The fight against Native oppression provides a litmus test for those aspiring to lead the working class. A party that does not champion the defense of the most oppressed will never succeed in leading the workers to victory over their class enemies. We seek to build a Marxist vanguard party that champions the cause of all the oppressed in the struggle for socialist revolution. iew