URGENT: Calls Again Needed to Save Mumia's Life! Stop the attempted murder of Mumia through medical neglect! Keep the pressure on!
HEAR Mumia’s 26 April message thanking the movement!		Please call these numbers and any other numbers you have for the Prison and the Governor. (Dialling code from UK for the USA is 001.  Pennsylvania is five hours behind London.) John Wetzel Secretary, Department of Corrections ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov 717-728-4109 717-728-4178 Fax 1920 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg PA 17050 John Kerestes Superintendent SCI Mahanoy 570-773-2158 x8102 570-783-2008 Fax 301 Morea  Road, Frackville PA 17932 Tom Wolf PA Governor 717-787-2500 governor@PA.gov 508 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg PA 17120 Susan McNaughton Public Information Office PA DOC Press secretary: 717-728-4025 smcnaughton@pa.gov
Mumia's Condition Grave Take Action NOW!
On Friday, April 24, Mumia Abu-Jamal was visited by his wife, Wadiya Jamal, who reported that his condition has worsened. She saw him again on April 25 and he appeared even more gravely ill.  Everyone is asked to call the prison and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately. Please continue to call on throughout this week. Mumia was released from the prison infirmary three days ago even though he was in no condition to be in general population. His request to be seen by independent medical specialists was denied by the PA Department of Corrections. Yet he is in need of 24-hour care and supervision. He is too weak and in this state he may not be able ask for help.
Please call the numbers listed.  Along with Mumia's name his prison number is AM 8335.  Call local news sources in your area that would report on this crisis. Share this email with your contact lists. Get out the information via any social media you use especially Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #MumiaMustLive. Demand that prison officials call Mumia’s wife and his lawyer Bret Grote to discuss his condition. Demand that Mumia Abu-Jamal see a competent doctor of his choice immediately, that he be taken to the hospital for emergency care and not be left to go into a diabetic coma.
It is clear that Pennsylvania prison officials are intent on carrying out their plans to murder Mumia through medical neglect. This situation is urgent.  Every call matters.  Every action matters.  Call your friends, your neighbours. We must speak out now before it’s too late. For more information: Free Mumia, Move organization, Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, International Action Center and Mumia’s Facebook.
Circulated  by: Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike & Payday men’s network

 

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.

They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course. 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….           

Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind  

Sure guys, black guys, on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi or some such number, had plenty to have the blues about, especially how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and  their doings). Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the rest. Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have the blues back then (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, via hip-hop nations) and add to Mister’s miseries, woman trouble, trouble with Sheriff Law, and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own. Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s  Sunday service to have their sins from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the devil’s music by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister laws by singing the blues and making them go away.          

That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from record companies like RCA, the radio company. They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money  (and maybe a few white hipsters if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, race records, that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains too). But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend, some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.   

And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s. Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, would write stuff for her, big sax and trombone players would back here up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dogs tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on, the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all. From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.

Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman all pain, pathos and indignity as he good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the like of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.                

A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog

 A link below to link to the Steve Lendman Blog

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Over the years that I have been presenting political material in this space I have had occasion to re-post items from some sites which I find interesting, interesting for a host of political reasons, although I am not necessarily in agreement with what has been published. Two such sites have stood out, The Rag Blog, which I like to re-post items from because it has articles by many of my fellow Generation of ’68 residual radicals and ex-radicals who still care to put pen to paper and the blog cited here, the Steve Lendman Blog.  The reason for re-postings from this latter site is slightly different since the site represents a modern day left- liberal political slant. That is the element, the pool if you will, that we radicals have to draw from, have to move left, if we are to grow. So it is important to have the pulse of what issues motivate that milieu and I believe that this blog is a lightning rod for those political tendencies. 

I would also add that the blog is a fountain of rational, reasonable and unrepentant anti-Zionism which became apparent once again this summer of 2014 when defense of the Palestinian people in Gaza was the pressing political issue and we were being stonewalled and lied to by the bourgeois media in service of American and Israeli interests. This blog was like a breath of fresh air.

A Jackman disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

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 various blogs and other networking media. 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 on. 

An additional Jackman comment (Fall 2014):

The left-liberal/radical arena in American politics has been on a steep decline since I was a whole-hearted denizen of that milieu in my youth somewhere slightly to the left of Robert Kennedy back in 1968 say but still emerged in trying put band-aids on the capitalist system. That is the place where Steve Lendman with his helpful well informed blog finds himself. It is not an enviable place to be for anyone to have a solid critique of bourgeois politics, hard American imperial politics in the 21st century and have no ready source in that milieu to take on the issues and make a difference  (and as an important adjunct to that American critique a solid critique of the American government acting as front-man for every nefarious move the Israeli government makes toward increasing the oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank). 

Of course  I had the luxury, if one could call it that, which a look at Mr. Lendman's bio information indicates that he did not have, was the pivotal experience in the late 1960s of being inducted, kicking and screaming but inducted, into the American army in its losing fight against the heroic Vietnamese resistance. That signal event disabused me, although it took a while to get "religion." on the question of the idea of depending on bourgeois society to reform itself. On specific issues like the fight against the death penalty, the fight for the $15 minimum wage, immigration reform and the like I have worked with that left-liberal/ radical milieu, and gladly, but as for continuing to believe against all evidence that the damn thing can be reformed that is where we part company. Still Brother Lendman keep up the good work and I hope you find a political home worthy of your important work.                  

In Honor Of May Day 2015-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day Organizing 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

 

 

All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

 

 

All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!

 

Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012

 

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?

 

Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.

But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

 

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

 

No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

 

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

 

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

 

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

 

I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:

 

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!

 

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

 

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

 

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

 

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

 

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

 

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

 

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

 

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.

 

*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

 

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.

 

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

 

All out on May Day 2012.

From The Marxist Archives- In Defense Of The Early American Communist Experience-Upholding the Revolutionary Legacy-The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919–1929

Workers Vanguard No. 1067	1 May 2015

Upholding the Revolutionary Legacy

The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919–1929

A Review

 

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The Communist International and
U.S. Communism, 1919–1929
by Jacob A. Zumoff
443 pp.
Paperback: Haymarket Books, 2015, $28.00
Hardcover: Brill, 2014, $167.00

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The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929 examines the founding, development and degeneration of the Communist Party (CP) in the United States in the broader framework of the struggle for international proletarian revolution. Available in both paperback and hardcover, this fully indexed book, with extensive footnotes and references, will be of enduring value as a reference work for avowed socialists as well as scholars of communism. It is also a fun and interesting read and belongs in the toolkits of everyone seeking a coherent revolutionary program and lessons on building an organization capable of leading the working class in revolutionary struggle to sweep away capitalist imperialism.

 

The 1917 October Revolution in Russia, led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, inspired millions worldwide by demonstrating for the first time that the working class could establish itself as the ruling class. The Bolshevik Revolution, occurring amid the imperialist slaughter of World War I, took the question of workers revolution out of the realm of Marxist theory and gave it flesh and blood. The Revolution was made in Russia but not for Russia alone; it was waged as the opening shot in the world socialist revolution.

 

The role of the Bolsheviks in leading the proletarian conquest of power gave great impetus to Lenin’s fight for a communist Third International, which he had first called for in 1914. He had pronounced the social-democratic Second International dead after all its leading national sections supported the war aims of their “own” ruling class at the beginning of WWI. The Third (Communist) International, known as the Comintern, was founded in Moscow in 1919. The establishment of the Comintern was only the beginning of the fight to build revolutionary workers parties around the world. Forging new, Leninist vanguard parties internationally required a series of political fights to break the revolutionary elements completely from social-democratic program and practice.

 

How this struggle played out in the U.S. is thoroughly described in Zumoff’s book, which focuses on the relationship between the American CP and the Comintern. The Communist movement in the U.S. was founded in 1919, a year that saw massive class struggles across the country and revolutionary struggles in Central Europe. The ranks of the American Socialist Party (SP) swelled and its pro-Bolshevik left wing grew. It was from splits from the SP’s left wing that not one, but two Communist parties, both pledging allegiance to the Comintern, were formed in August/September 1919.

Just months after their formation, the two U.S. Communist groups were faced with massive government repression, dubbed the “Palmer Raids” after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, which also targeted Socialists, anarchists and trade-union militants. Over 6,000 Communists were arrested in the first week of January 1920 and hundreds of foreign-born Communists were deported. In response to this repression, both groups went underground and many members of both CPs decided, invoking principle, to remain there.

 

The crucial and controversial thrust of Zumoff’s account is his well-documented presentation of the positive role that the Comintern initially played in forging a Communist Party in the U.S. Zumoff analyzes in detail how interventions by the Comintern during Lenin and Trotsky’s era, working with elements of the CP leadership, helped the nascent Communist Party grapple with American society. A key intervention of the Comintern was to support the unification of the two American parties and the establishment of a legal party, rejecting the ultraleft undergroundism. This struggle led to the establishment of the (legal) Workers Party in December 1921 and the definitive rejection of the fetish of undergroundism after debate at the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in 1922.

 

Zumoff devotes two early chapters to the CP’s work in the labor movement. The CP oriented toward the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), reflecting the Comintern’s orientation to left-wing syndicalists internationally. While the CP was unable to recruit large numbers from the IWW, the few syndicalists who were won to Communism were crucially important. They enriched the American party with their experience of militant class struggle. The Comintern also pushed the CP to carry out work in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) despite its pro-capitalist leadership because it encompassed the majority of unionized workers.

Today, we are in a deeply reactionary period shaped by the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The general level of political consciousness has been thrown so far back that even those claiming to be socialists have for the most part abandoned any notion of a revolutionary transformation of society. In the 1920s, unlike today, there was a layer of a few tens of thousands of subjectively revolutionary workers and youth who looked to the living example of the Bolshevik Revolution. However, they needed to learn the program of Bolshevism. In the early years, the Comintern was a teacher and guide for the young American CP. The fights for political clarity that Zumoff describes are instructive, and many of the political issues which the CP had to learn to address still exist: racist oppression; divisions between U.S.-born and immigrant workers; broad attacks on the labor movement; illusions in left-talking capitalist third parties.

A Marxist Exploration of History

 

Zumoff’s forthrightly Marxist exploration of early American Communism is a breath of fresh air. It has received reviews from diverse points on the political spectrum, creating a welcome forum for debate. In its final issue, the New World Finn noted Zumoff’s recognition of the importance of the Finnish-American foreign language federation, the largest voting bloc in the early American CP. The Communist Party USA published a quite positive review on its website (peoplesworld.org, 26 January). The review’s author did not however address Zumoff’s analysis of the destructive Stalinist degeneration of the Comintern and the CP, of which today’s reformist Communist Party is the product.

Despite the generally favorable tone of his review, Dan La Botz of the social-democratic Solidarity group disagrees with the entire point of the book, complaining that Zumoff “fails to address the central question, the Soviet domination of the Communist International, including its domination of the American Communists in the 1920s” (newpol.org, February 27). The notion there was ever any positive intervention from Moscow sticks in the craw of anti-communist social democrats like La Botz, who view Stalinism as having flowed inevitably from Leninism.

In his introduction, Zumoff writes, “The study of American Communism is at once the study of Communists and previous studies of American Communism.” His book thus acknowledges and supplements Theodore Draper’s excellent two volumes, The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960). Other key works acknowledged by Zumoff that should be required reading for all interested in the early history of American Communism include the letters to Draper from James P. Cannon, a founding member of the Communist and Trotskyist movements in the United States, published as The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962); Bryan Palmer’s biography, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (2007); and the documentary volume of Cannon’s writings, James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism—Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 (1992), published by the Prometheus Research Library (PRL). Zumoff also cites useful articles by Michael Goldfield, the author of Color of Politics (1997), on the CP and black oppression.

 

The most crucial source materials used by Zumoff were in the Comintern’s own archives in Moscow, which had been closed to historians until 1992. He also delved into other primary source materials that were not previously available, such as memoirs and FBI files. Zumoff additionally mined the archives of the PRL, of which he is an associate. The PRL is a working Marxist research library and the archives of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee. It is Zumoff’s sympathy for the aims of the early CP that guides his use of previously neglected sources and his fresh interpretation of others, lending his work a richer color and texture than that of previous scholars.

 

Draper (a former writer for the CP’s Daily Worker who became a liberal anti-Communist) argued that the American CP was dominated by Moscow and that this relationship prevented the party from becoming a viable American revolutionary organization. As he claimed in an exchange with his critics in the New York Review of Books, “the Soviets exercised their hegemony and the Americans experienced it” (15 August 1985).

 

New Left historians, propelled by the mass radicalization and social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, approached history “from the bottom up” and asserted against Draper that Moscow was not so significant and that the CP had sprouted from native soil. The New Left historians concentrated on the CP’s more successful work in the mass black and union struggles of the 1930s (see, e.g., Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression [1983]). By focusing narrowly on the 1930s, these historians obscure the fact that the CP’s work in that decade was built upon foundations laid, with the involvement of the Comintern, in the 1920s.

Zumoff explains that both interpretations of Communist history imbibe the bourgeois ideology that any Soviet influence had to be bad:

 

“Although there was no love lost between Draper and his critics, both accepted the same framework. The division between ‘American’ and ‘foreign’ in American Communism remained undisputed, with the Soviet/Comintern influence unquestionably negative....

 

“The present work rejects this concept of Americanisation as counterposed to Comintern guidance. Leninism, as understood by the early Comintern, did not represent a set of formulae or dogmas, but rather the understanding of the need for a political struggle not only against the bourgeoisie but also the social-democratic leadership that had shown its bankruptcy through parliamentarianism and support to the slaughter of World War I.”

 

Lenin and Trotsky realized that each country had its own history and conditions that required different revolutionary tactics. Recognizing that the founding cadres of the American CP were animated by the revolutionary internationalist vision of Lenin and Trotsky’s Comintern, Zumoff assesses Comintern interventions and the work of the American CP on the basis of the validity or otherwise of what the Communists fought for, how they fought for it and what they learned from the experiences.

 

The purpose and methods of the Comintern’s intervention in the American party changed as the Soviet workers state itself underwent a process of degeneration beginning in 1924. As Zumoff notes: “By the end of the decade, reflecting the political degeneration of the Russian Revolution under Stalin, the Comintern’s interventions were more negative.”

 

The Bolsheviks recognized that socialism, a society of material abundance based upon the highest level of productive technology and an international division of labor, required workers revolutions worldwide, especially in the advanced capitalist countries. The isolated workers state in backward Russia was plagued by economic scarcity and desperately needed proletarian rule to be extended to the West. With the defeat of revolutionary opportunities in Germany in 1918-19 and, critically, 1923, a conservative bureaucracy led by Stalin rose to political power beginning in 1924 amid a profound demoralization of the Soviet proletariat. The economic basis of the workers state (the collectivized property, the centrally planned economy and the monopoly of foreign trade) had not been overturned, but the proletariat was politically expropriated by a bureaucratic caste.

Promulgated by Stalin in late 1924, the dogma of “socialism in one country” became a justification for abandoning the revolutionary internationalist purpose of the October Revolution. Over the next several years, the Comintern (and its national sections) became subordinated to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, ceasing to be the party of world revolution. Leon Trotsky doggedly fought the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern, while continuing to defend the Soviet workers state.

 

The bulk of the American Communist Party, feeling the pressure of an expanding and powerful U.S. imperialism, readily followed in the degenerating Comintern’s wake. This was the “roaring twenties,” a period of fabulous accumulation of wealth for the bourgeoisie, a lull in class struggle and a rise of racist state and Ku Klux Klan terror against black people and immigrants. As Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper about these years: “The party became receptive to the ideas of Stalinism, which were saturated with conservatism, because the party cadres themselves were unconsciously yielding to their own conservative environment” (The First Ten Years of American Communism).

 

One important aspect of the Stalinist degeneration of the American party that Zumoff deals with is the division of the party into rival factions lacking any fundamental political basis. By 1925, the political differences around which the groupings had initially formed became displaced by struggles for party control, obscuring political clarity. As he notes, “Leading bodies often passed important political motions unanimously, yet factionalism hardened.”

 

A substantial section of one of these factions did acquire a revolutionary program. After becoming acquainted with some of Trotsky’s central criticisms of Stalinism at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, James P. Cannon was won to the program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition. The Trotskyists were fighting to return the Soviet regime and the Comintern to revolutionary internationalism. For this opposition to Stalinism, Cannon and a core of his factional supporters were expelled from the CP in 1928 and formed the nucleus of the first American Trotskyist organization.

 

The Russian Revolution and the Fight for Black Freedom

Fully four chapters of the book are devoted to the Comintern’s fight to force the American CP to address black oppression (then called the “Negro Question”), which now as then is integral to U.S. capitalism. The Bolsheviks had developed their party in intense opposition to the Great Russian chauvinism of the tsar’s empire and they understood that the struggles against national and other forms of special (i.e., non-class) oppression could be a powerful lever to advance socialist revolution. This was a new revolutionary idea that changed how American communists thought about their work in a country founded on black chattel slavery.

 

As Cannon wrote in “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement” (1959): “The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.” He went on to note:

 

“The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it.”

 

In describing this critical struggle, a frontal challenge to Jim Crow America, Zumoff highlights the stories of early black Communists, such as Caribbean immigrants Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud as well as Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a former anarchist from Texas. He narrates the story of the important recruitment of cadre from the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a Harlem-based organization of mainly Caribbean immigrants, including its founder, Cyril Valentine Briggs.

 

At the end of WWI, coinciding with the Russian Revolution, there was a burgeoning of black militancy and racial pride in the Northern ghettos. The “Great Migration” of black people from the rural Jim Crow South to the industrial cities of the North intersected the return of black veterans who thought their military service entitled them to some measure of equality. Organizations like the ABB championed the struggles of blacks in the U.S. and the colonial world and espoused black self-defense against racist terror.

 

Black revolutionaries joined the CP because of the appeal of the Russian Revolution and the authority of the Bolsheviks. As Zumoff puts it:

 

“Indeed, the American Communists with their social-democratic colourblindness must not have appeared attractive; the Communist Party would have been unable to recruit the ABB on their own. Briggs and the ABB, like many throughout the colonial world, were attracted to the Communist International because of its anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, as well as Lenin’s emphasis on fighting special oppression. Briggs and the other ABB recruits did not want to join the American CP per se, but saw themselves as enlisting in the American branch of international Communism.”

In the 1920s, the vast majority of the trade unions organized by the AFL (with the significant exception of the United Mine Workers) were narrow craft unions and consciously racially exclusionist, essentially job trusts for skilled white workers. The “Wobblies” of the IWW had been an exception in their fight for industrial unions and their energetic organizing of black and white workers together. There were few black members of the Socialist Party, the most prominent of which was Hubert Harrison. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was anti-racist to his bones but the Socialist Party was a “broad church” that also encompassed stone-racist segregationists like Victor Berger. Even Debs said that socialists “have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.”

 

Recognition of the necessity for revolutionaries to combat the special oppression of black people was part of the Communists’ struggle to fully break with the reformist political baggage of social democracy. It took a fight by Lenin at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 to get the CP to begin to focus on the black question. Zumoff’s book brings to light correspondence between Lenin and the American Communist John Reed. Lenin insisted that Reed give a report to the Second Congress on the nature of black oppression, despite Reed’s protests that he would rather report on the American trade unions.

 

Over the next few years, black CP cadres, backed by the Comintern leadership, constantly prodded the American party to actively take up the fight for black freedom. Zumoff describes how McKay and Fort-Whiteman pushed this question at the Fourth and Fifth Comintern Congresses (in 1922 and 1924) respectively. Over the next period, there were several attempts by the CP to address black oppression, including the founding of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925. However, these attempts were not particularly successful.

 

At its Sixth Congress in 1928, against the opposition of the vast majority of black Communists, the Stalinized Comintern wrongly declared that the American black population was an oppressed nation with the right of self-determination (i.e., national independence) in the so-called Black Belt in the South. As Zumoff writes, this theory was incorrect because black people “were an integral part of American society, albeit forcibly segregated at the bottom. Black struggle since antebellum times had been focused on ending racial oppression and for full integration into American society, not separation. A separate black nation state seemed fantastical and contradicted Marxist theory.”

 

Despite the erroneous theoretical framework, the Comintern’s intervention at the Sixth Congress had a positive influence in that it forced the CP to redouble its work among black people. It also underscored that black oppression was a form of special oppression and impelled the CP to establish roots in the South. The theory as such had little effect on the Communists’ day-to-day work; they continued to fight for black equality—not separation. The CP in the 1930s carried out important and often dangerous work building integrated unions and organizing sharecroppers in the South. It also earned respect for leading the defense of black labor organizer and CPer Angelo Herndon in Georgia and of the Scottsboro Boys (nine black youth who faced legal lynching in Alabama on frame-up rape charges).

 

Revolutionary Continuity

 

An essential point that emerges from Zumoff’s detailed study is the importance of revolutionary continuity. As Cannon noted in History of American Trotskyism (1944):

 

“Out of the Communist Party in the United States came the nucleus of the [Trotskyist] Fourth International in this country. Therefore, we should say that the early period of the Communist movement in this country belongs to us; that we are tied to it by indissoluble bonds; that there is an uninterrupted continuity from the early days of the Communist movement, its brave struggles against persecution, its sacrifices, mistakes, faction fights and degeneration to the eventual resurgence of the movement under the banner of Trotskyism.”

 

Like Cannon, the SL/U.S. and our comrades in the ICL do not turn our backs on what was valuable from the early CP, rather we claim that history as our own. We fight to impart the lessons of our revolutionary forebears to new generations of socialist fighters. Learning and assimilating these lessons is essential to the struggle for a workers America, a step toward a global communist society.