From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- A Marxist Anaysis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910

Markin comment on this article:

I often wondered, back in the old days of the late 1960s when I was first studying the question, why the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 never took on the same degree of revolutionary social change that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia during, roughly, that same period. This two-part series goes a long way to explaining that question, especially on the land question, peasant organization, guerilla warfare as a strategy, the relationship of the Mexican bourgeoisie to the budding imperial power to the North and, as always, for those who try to work through Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution as applied to belatedly developed capitalist societies like Mexico how that theory applies in this case. Additionally for those who only know these days from some cinematic version of the Pancho Villa story, that done by the stool pigeon Elia Kazan on Emiliano Zapata, Viva Zapata, or even John Reed’s writings from down south of the border in the early 1910s this article takes some of the dust, the popular frontist dust at least, out of the eyes. That said, forward to the socialist revolution in Mexico as part of a socialist federation of Central American states.
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Workers Vanguard No. 973
4 February 2011

A Marxist Anaysis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910

Part One

The following is a slightly edited translation of an article that first appeared in Espartaco No. 12 (Spring-Summer 1999), publication of our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México. In 1999 Mexico’s ruling bourgeois party was the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, whose seven-decade reign would be broken the following year with the election of Vicente Fox of the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN), since succeeded by the PAN’s Felipe Calderón.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a long and bloody process that lasted almost a decade, during which more than two million people—almost 10 percent of the population—lost their lives. The gigantic peasant insurrection against the dictator Porfirio Díaz and its bloody suppression by the bourgeois reaction of Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón are events that had a profound impact on the country and have delineated the features of the Mexican bourgeois regime to the present day. For decades, the Mexican bourgeoisie has benefited from using the symbolism of the Revolution of 1910 to legitimize its capitalist order of exploitation and oppression, promoting a pervasive nationalism that continues to be the main ideological basis for the political subordination of the working masses in the city and the countryside.

The 1988 split in the ranks of the governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI), which later led to the formation of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD) of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, reinforced the old nationalist symbols that had been successfully used for more than 70 years by the decaying PRI to derail and repress class struggle. Subordinated to this nationalism, the reformist left, which feeds illusions in the bourgeois PRD, tries to convince the workers that only “Yankee imperialism” or the current PRI president are their enemies, and not the entire Mexican bourgeoisie as a class. Thus, the bourgeoisie, the PRD and their pseudo-leftist followers try to prevent the workers, youth and poor peasants from struggling against capitalist exploitation, and the working class from turning toward a common internationalist struggle together with the powerful working classes of other countries, especially in North America.

The nationalism encouraged by the bourgeoisie, which seeks to tie the exploited to their exploiters, intoxicates the masses with the lie that there is a “progressive and patriotic” sector of businessmen, politicians and the armed forces that can unite with the exploited and save the country from bankruptcy. The nationalist left, within and outside of the PRD, also helps to encourage class collaboration through the illusion that it is possible to solve burning democratic and social questions within the framework of capitalism. Nevertheless, this confidence in “progressive” sectors of the bourgeoisie and in the possibility of pressuring and reforming the capitalist state is a fatal illusion and a dead end for the working class and the oppressed in the struggle for their emancipation from capitalism.

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 had a tremendous impact in the semicolonial countries of the so-called Third World, which have become even more subordinated to the imperialists and their bloodsucking financial institutions. In growing competition with its rivals in Europe and Japan, North American imperialism continues through its NAFTA pillage to transform all Latin America into its backyard and its supplier of raw materials and semi-slave labor for its manufacturing plants. The generalized discontent over the effects of NAFTA has been shown in increasing social turbulence in Mexico, weakening the control of the PRI and helping to feed the growth of new bourgeois oppositions like the PAN and the PRD.

The hegemony of bourgeois nationalism in the organizations of the workers movement, in the corporatist unions as well as the “independent” ones, is the main reason why there has been no authentic proletarian challenge to the capitalist order. Thus, while most of the unions are still captives under the iron control of the PRI bureaucracy and its enforcers, the leadership of the “independent” and dissident union movement (from the UNT [National Union of Workers] and STUNAM [National University workers] to the SME [electrical workers] and the CNTE [teachers]) feeds illusions in the bourgeois politicians of the PRD or even in “democratic” sectors of the PRI. Nor is it uncommon for meetings of these unions and student marches to end with the singing of the national anthem, which is the anthem of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, the 1994 EZLN Zapatista rebellion, which arose in protest against the annihilation of indigenous villages by the imperialist rape of NAFTA, also reinforced the old nationalist ideology. The petty-bourgeois leadership of the EZLN, subordinate to the PRD, asks [then PRI president] Ernesto Zedillo to “lead by obeying” and demands that the national anthem be sung and the flag honored at all the unions and assemblies they visit. This is the same flag that is carried by the Mexican Army that murders indigenous people and that was saluted by [former PRI president] Díaz Ordaz after he ordered the massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco [in Mexico City] in 1968!

In intransigent opposition to bourgeois nationalism and its pseudo-left apologists, which block the development of conscious, decisive class struggle by the working class, the Grupo Espartaquista de México seeks to bring the program of communism to the vanguard of the workers and youth who want to struggle against the exploitation and oppression of capital. The GEM is dedicated to forging an internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead the proletariat to power. We struggle together with our comrades of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste of Canada, seeking to mobilize the powerful, multiracial North American proletariat against the imperialists and the Mexican bourgeoisie and in defense of all immigrants and the oppressed. As part of the International Communist League, we struggle to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

The Permanent Revolution

With its nationalist, paternalistic ideology, the Mexican bourgeoisie justifies the social backwardness, rural poverty and illiteracy of millions of workers and peasants, blaming the victims themselves for the ravages of their exploitation. To redirect the dissatisfaction of the masses, the bourgeoisie also incites rotten xenophobic hatred, anti-Semitism, anti-indigenous racism, machismo and homophobia, relying on the willing help of the church. For their part, the bourgeoisie’s arrogant North American imperialist masters portray Mexicans as a weak and lethargic people, using all types of disgusting racist stereotypes, unleashing the terror of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and border vigilantes as well as the racist death penalty. Against all this garbage, the communist program explains that the backwardness and grinding poverty in the semicolonial world are not the result of some “cultural” cause but instead come from powerful historical factors in the development of capitalism.

We communists base our struggle for workers revolution on the program of permanent revolution developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In Trotsky’s perspective, because of the combined and uneven development of the world economy, the bourgeoisies in backward countries are strongly linked to imperialist interests, thus preventing them from carrying out the fundamental tasks of bourgeois revolution—democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation. In the face of peasant rebellion and a combative working class, each and every one of these goals would directly threaten the political and economic control of the capitalist class. The democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution, then, can be resolved only by an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry. Marxism maintains that there can only be one dominant class in each state. Because the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class, as the Communist Manifesto declares, this alliance must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasants.

Trotsky was unequivocal that the peasantry cannot play an independent political role. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make “despotic incursions into the rights of bourgeois property.” Thus the revolution passes directly to socialist tasks, without stopping at any arbitrary “stages,” or, as Lenin put it, without the existence of a “Chinese Wall” between the bourgeois and proletarian phases. The advent of a genuinely socialist society (that is, without classes) can only be achieved on an international scale, requiring the overthrow of capitalism in at least several advanced countries.

That is why we communists base ourselves on the central role of the proletariat and fight for the working class to arise as the leader of the oppressed masses in the cities and the countryside in order to overthrow the bourgeois order. But for the working class to be able to free itself from the exploitation of capital, it is necessary for it to sweep away the ideology of the bourgeoisie and draw its own lessons from the historical event that exploded in Mexico at the dawn of the 20th century. Without a materialist understanding of its own history, the working class, and with it all those oppressed under capitalism, would be condemned to suffer new bloody defeats at the hands of the bourgeoisie. The fundamental task of the Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard, as we intervene to change history, is to take this understanding and the revolutionary program to the working class, fighting to raise its consciousness to the level required by its historic tasks.

The Absolutist Spanish State and the Colonization of America

There was a time when the bourgeoisie played a revolutionary role against the old feudal order and the obscurantism of the Middle Ages. The classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions that broke out in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries had concrete results: the liberation of the peasantry, national independence and unification, the elimination of feudal constraints on markets and industry, etc. Marxism came to this generalization after analyzing the results of several bourgeois revolutions, such as the English Revolution of Cromwell in the mid 17th century, and especially the Great French Revolution of 1789, which is the archetype of the classic bourgeois revolution.

Marxism also pointed out that after this radical period the bourgeoisie stopped being revolutionary. The reactionary course of the bourgeoisie was clearly shown in the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and especially in France, where the bourgeoisie bared its counterrevolutionary teeth when it brutally smashed the proletariat. After that, one sees the European bourgeoisie repudiating its original political ideals, ceding power to the forces of reaction—all because of its fear of the working class.

Spain and Portugal are a special case, because they lagged behind the bourgeois development experienced in several other European countries during those centuries. Spain was the first great unified, absolutist monarchical state to arise in Europe after the Reconquest in 1492, marked by the taking of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The victory over the Arabs consolidated the power of the Spanish monarchy as well as the Catholic church, which played a central logistical role in the struggle against the Moors. The Spanish church was the pillar of the Inquisition, which was a reaction against modernization and the Protestant Reformation of Calvin and Luther. Torquemada’s Inquisition also proceeded with brutal terror against the Jews. (This is one of the origins of the anti-Semitism that is deeply rooted in Latin America and in the nationalist and centrist left of today.)

The monarchy unified the church and the army under its banner, and, with the conquest of the Americas, the Inquisition and colonization went hand in hand. Thus, the Spanish state experienced a brief flowering from 1500 to 1550, above all because of the vast plunder wrenched from the American colonies. But this plunder failed to strengthen commercial capital, which was now ascendant in the rest of Europe. The Spanish mercantile class used it for the consumption of luxury goods, and the Spanish monarchy used it to purchase aristocratic titles and vast landed estates. A popular saying from that time captures something of this social reality: “Grandfather, a merchant; father, a nobleman; son, a beggar.” The Spanish monarchy did everything in its power to keep the nascent Spanish bourgeoisie and feudal lords weak and in debt to the throne. Everything passed through the monarchy, which tried to interfere with and control all aspects of economic, political and cultural life.

For the Spanish Crown, the new colonies in the Americas did not represent commercial or settlement expansion but rather tribute-paying protectorates, new sources of royal income that were not much different from the various Spanish provinces. After the brief flowering it experienced through consolidating as a national state, Spain began a downward spiral toward stagnation and decadence. In a short time, the main function of the monarchical state became that of a simple mediator, extracting tribute from the colonies to purchase articles produced in other locations by the manufacturing capital of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. The Spanish conquerors in the Americas soon became collecting agencies for the throne in Madrid, replacing the ancient Mexicas as collectors of tribute. But this extraction of tribute did not last long, owing to a catastrophic decline of the indigenous population in Mexico, which fell from some 16 million to about a million—in only two generations!

The annihilation of the indigenous population, the result of the brutal exploitation of the encomienda [peonage] system, famine and disease, was accompanied by a great influx of Spanish immigrants. With the impossibility of continuing to extract more tribute, other sources of exploitation appeared. Slowly, the development of a more diversified economy was achieved, one centered on mining, the textile industry and agriculture (dyes, sugar, and coffee, etc.) for the domestic market and for commercial export.

Thus, during the colonial period that lasted three centuries (1519 to 1821), we cannot speak of a capitalist Mexico in the Marxist sense of the term (contrary to the assertions of some pseudo-Marxist authors like André Gunder Frank and Nahuel Moreno, for whom the conquest and colonization of America was fully capitalist). What was implanted in the New World was a mixture of tributary, parasitic despotism with decadent feudal elements and an embryonic mercantile capitalism. All this was woven together and organized by the Spanish Crown in the world market of mercantilist capitalism. (This mixture of several elements is not exclusive to colonial Mexico.)

Colonial domination by a backward Spain stifled Mexico and Latin America at a decisive stage of capitalist development. That was why Mexico could not reproduce the pattern of booming commercial and industrial capitalist development that appeared in the most advanced areas of Europe, something that was also achieved by the English colonists in North America, for example. The fact that some elements of mercantile capitalism can be perceived in the Spanish colonies in that era does not mean that those societies were already organized on the basis of capital. For Karl Marx, capitalism was essentially a mode of production, not a network of overseas commerce (something that had already existed since the time of the Phoenicians).

The War of Independence of 1810

By the end of the 17th century, Mexico was nevertheless the richest of the Spanish colonies, responsible for more than 60 percent of the precious metals sent to Spain from the Americas, especially silver. Over time, the Mexican political economy developed beyond mining, unlike in the rest of Latin America. For example, during the colonial period the income of the wealthy criollo [Creole: Mexican-born of Spanish descent] landowning hacendados was several times greater than that of their alter egos in Peru. By the middle of the 17th century, Mexico City rivaled Spanish cities in size and wealth. The name given to colonial Mexico, “New Spain,” was not an accident.

As Mexico’s economy developed, creole landowners and artisans and the middle and lower hierarchies of the church and the army clashed against the Spanish viceregal power that mediated and blocked their access to international commerce and political power. Many hacendados complained about a law that prohibited indigenous Mexicans from putting themselves more than five pesos in debt. This regulation blocked the transformation of indigenous Mexicans into debt peons—i.e., semi-slave laborers who would toil on large agricultural estates where production was completely for export. This type of Spanish protectionism was consciously maintained as a counterweight to the development of a creole bourgeoisie in Mexico. The Creoles began to demand the right to export agricultural goods as well as free importation of manufactured products and other prerogatives.

This contradiction was the material basis for the War of Independence that broke out in September 1810. This first Mexican revolution (1810-1821) was an attempt to resolve the conflicts between the nascent creole bourgeoisie and the stifling government of the parasitic Spanish monarchy. In his Historia del Capitalismo en Mexico (History of Capitalism in Mexico), historian Enrique Semo points out:

“The despotic-tributary system did not cease to exist by itself. A revolution was needed to help it exit the historical stage, and this is a fact forgotten by those who argue that the revolution for independence contributed little or nothing to the development of the Mexican nation. The rule of the Crown and its viceregal bureaucracy constituted not only a system of external dependence but also an internal form of rule. The task of the turbulent years of 1810-1821 was to destroy it, and this was, to a large extent, achieved. The Spanish official who controlled down to the last detail a society divided into conflicting corporations, who intervened between the owners of the means of production and the laborers, who extracted riches from the colony to enjoy them in the metropolis, who opposed any local enterprise that went against his own or the Crown’s interests had to go, and with him went all vestiges of the encomienda, the repartimiento [system of forced labor], the tribute, and so on. His place was taken by the hacendado, the main beneficiary of the revolution for independence, the natural representative of large private property and local particularism who—in conflict with the church—had to make his interests prevail over those of other social classes.

“The revolution of 1810-1821 did not mark the victory of bourgeois trends over feudal modes, but rather the removal of all vestiges of tributary despotism with its bureaucratic centralism, and the victory of large semifeudal landed property with its parochially oriented caciquismo [cacique means local boss].”

As in all the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the push to declare independence in Mexico was accelerated by the fear on the part of the creole propertied classes and the church of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808. At the same time, news of the French Revolution arrived in Mexico very early. Its language may be found in the struggle for independence, although strangely refracted. The priest Miguel Hidalgo, who initiated the insurrection, roused the indigenous masses with his famous Cry of Dolores, with slogans such as: Long live Religion! Long live our most holy mother of Guadalupe! Down with the usurping government! Long live America! Hidalgo was an educated man and very familiar with the writings of the French Revolution. His letters include phrases like “the sacred fire that inflames us,” “sons of the fatherland,” and “days of glory,” all from the Marseillaise.

But separation from Spain did not come until 1821, when Agustín de Iturbide, who was assigned to smash the rebellion, went over to the side of independence, among other reasons because of his appetite to anoint himself as emperor of Mexico. His slogan was “Independence, unity and religion!” By “unity” he meant unity with the Spanish monarchy—temporarily overthrown by the episodic revolution of 1820 in Spain, which tried to institute the radical democratic constitution of 1812 that called, among other things, for the separation of church and state. By “religion,” he meant defense of the privileges of the Catholic church, the largest landowner and also the largest moneylender in Mexico. Thus, independence from Spain ultimately had a distinctive smell of counterrevolution.

War with the United States, 1846-48

The next 40 years of Mexican history were full of revolt and internal struggle. There were constant clashes between the regional liberal elites, tending to appropriate indigenous lands (which were often controlled directly or indirectly by the church), and a weak conservative center based on the church, the army and the state administration. Between 1821 and 1861, there were 56 presidents in Mexico! It was during this time that Mexico suffered the first intervention by the United States, ordered by President James K. Polk in 1846—an event that presaged the current U.S. colonialist domination and rape of Mexico.

From a demographic point of view, at the beginning of the 19th century Mexico and the U.S. were almost the same—each had about six million inhabitants. (The population of Mexico was actually a bit larger.) But the characteristics of the economic systems in both countries were very different. The political economy of the United States was a transplant of the developed commercial capitalist system in Britain, whereas that of Mexico, as we have seen, issued out of Spain’s backwardness and tributary despotism. U.S. capitalism was very dynamic, exactly the opposite of the Mexican economy. Thus, the northern border of Mexico was strongly attracted to the economic orbit of the U.S. More than 90 percent of the region’s commerce was with that country.

Political pressures on Mexico had already been seen with the settlement of U.S. colonists in the province of Texas. The war of pillage that was waged against Mexico also had much to do with the conflict between the North and the South in the U.S. over the issue of slavery. The Southern plantation slaveowning class, which dominated the weak federal government, feared that the territories acquired from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase would tip the balance of power, and the South would be in a subordinate position. Thus they looked to the north of Mexico for new slave territories. Under the pretext of “independence” for Texas, the U.S. intervened to seize half of Mexico’s territory from one of its many governments, that of Santa Anna. The U.S. Civil War’s prominent Union general Ulysses S. Grant fought in the war against Mexico as a lieutenant. At the end of his life he wrote his memoirs, wherein he wrote of the Mexican war:

“Generally the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”

The War of the Reform and the Porfiriato

The war with the U.S., and the constant interference of the European powers, sharpened the conflicts that had dragged on since Independence. In this context, the War of the Reform (1858-61) broke out, undertaken by President Benito Juárez in the name of radical bourgeois ideology and influenced by the principles of the French Revolution. This second Mexican revolution differed from its predecessor because it had more of the features of a movement of the dominant and semi-dominant classes fighting against one another, without the plebeian mobilization that took place during Independence. Juárez established the separation of church and state, forced the sale of the church’s great landed estates and also abolished many of the collective properties of the indigenous peoples. Juarism established secular education and some social services. The Reform aimed for the bourgeoisie to be able to acquire property on a capitalist basis. From the Vatican, Pope Pius IX angrily railed against Juárez and declared “null and void” the laws of the Mexican government, excommunicating Juárez himself.

Under the pretext of the Mexican debt and with the cry of “Religion and Privileges!”, France and Britain intervened militarily in Mexico in 1863, seeking to impose the monarchy of Maximilian of Habsburg. This new rapacious intervention was possible because of the proximity of the U.S. Civil War. France and Britain would not have intervened in Mexico if the U.S. had not been in the middle of a civil war. The North, which had already recognized the Juárez government, preferred to remain “neutral” for fear that France and Britain might recognize the Confederate slave power in the South. Juárez declared war against the invaders, and although at one point he was pushed into the north of Mexico, he finally won the war in 1867. Maximilian was captured and executed.

Juárez became a national hero. His conservative opponents, including the church, were discredited in the eyes of the masses because of their collaboration with the invaders. Nevertheless, in spite of the prestige Juárez gained, the climate of instability not only continued but was aggravated by the war’s bloodletting and a boycott by reactionary forces. Thus, in 1876, General Porfirio Díaz, at the head of a liberal alliance, abruptly took power, installing a military dictatorship that would last more than 30 years. The coup was planned in close collaboration with U.S. interests. Díaz’s peculiar motto was “Little politics and much administration.” And to restore “order” in turbulent Mexico, Díaz threw out the Jacobin ideology of Juárez and achieved an understanding with the church, instituting the so-called “peace of the tomb”: immediate military repression of any peasant or popular rebellion, jail and exile—including the massive exile of entire populations such as the indigenous Yaqui and Mayo of Sonora—to the death camps in Yucatán or Valle Nacional in Oaxaca.

The new Porfirian cabinet tried to shape a Mexican bourgeoisie that might enrich itself by riding on the coattails of the imperialists. To guarantee that the imperialist corporations and the weak Mexican bourgeoisie would benefit from the exploitation of natural resources, the Díaz regime promoted the construction of a vast system of railroads. Díaz tried to do a balancing act between the United States, Britain, France and Germany, setting them against each other in distributing investment concessions. The result was that toward the end of his rule, more than one-fourth of Mexican land was the property of foreigners, as well as 90 percent of industrial capital.

It was the age of the ascendancy of modern imperialism, and the imperialist powers were deeply involved in the Mexican economy. U.S. capitalists were particularly concentrated in mining, railroads and the great cattle haciendas in the north. Yucatán was basically a satellite plantation of the International Harvester Company. The British were involved in the petroleum industry in particular, while the Germans tried to dominate the banking system. For their part, the French had large investments in textiles and amassed large amounts of Mexican government debt in the form of bonds. But with the world financial crisis at the beginning of the 20th century, marked by a precipitous fall in the prices of raw materials, the Mexican economy, sustained by the export of those materials, suffered a tremendous blow, and the Díaz dictatorship became extremely isolated and discredited.

Madero “Unleashes the Tiger”

In 1910 Mexico was an overwhelmingly agrarian country, characterized by a marked particularism and regional parochialism, where the majority of peasants had no land. This development was a direct consequence of imperialist investments and the rapid expansion of the railroads during the Porfiriato, which, by opening up the interior of the country, unleashed an explosion of land speculation and growth of agricultural production for export.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began as a classic Mexican uprising by five northern governors. Representing the bourgeoisie in that region, which was most closely linked to the U.S. economy, they felt threatened by the decrepit central government of Díaz. With his extensive network of favoritism and cronyism, the dictator had become an obstacle for the bourgeoisie and the object of popular hatred. At the end of Díaz’s long reign, the country was shaken by a profound financial crisis, worsened by corruption, gigantic government debt and a fiscal policy that was intolerable for the population. In the years immediately preceding the revolution, a wave of combative strikes (Cananea, Río Blanco, etc.) and peasant restlessness swept the country.

Francisco I. Madero, the most representative figure in this stage of the revolution against Díaz, came from one of the richest families in the country, one which wanted to compete with companies from the United States. But Madero’s timid campaign to bar the president from running for re-election soon opened the door to a series of peasant revolts that swept like wildfire through the country, as unrest could no longer be contained by the dictator. Díaz soon capitulated to Madero and the northern revolutionary wave, which was powerfully reinforced by massive popular protests in Mexico City. In the elections that followed the fall of Díaz, Madero emerged victorious and anointed himself president. Like a good bourgeois politician, Madero left the military apparatus of the old regime intact, and the essence of his program was a colorless liberalism. Certainly, Madero had no intention of altering social relations in the countryside, nor did he grant any concessions whatever to the working class.

When Díaz left Veracruz to go into exile, he was heard to say in reference to Madero: “I hope he can tame the tiger he let out of the cage.” The tiger he was referring to was the immense peasant uprising. The intra-bourgeois conflict between Madero and Díaz had indeed opened the tiger’s cage. The agrarian question—the land hunger of millions of peasants—was revealed as the most burning and explosive question of the revolution. Madero’s unfulfilled promises quickly provoked conflicts with the forces of Emiliano Zapata, who controlled the state of Morelos. Meanwhile, various strikes broke out in industry.

By the end of 1912, the Madero regime, in power for a little more than a year, was already in deep crisis, trapped between popular discontent and reactionary forces, both domestic and imperialist, that were determined to re-establish “order.” In February 1913, in a coup plotted from the U.S. Embassy, Madero was overthrown and shot by General Victoriano Huerta. Huerta’s coup unleashed popular anger and energized the peasant forces of Francisco Villa in the north and the guerrillas of Emiliano Zapata in the south. Partly because of Huerta’s connections to Britain, the Americans later began to support the Constitutionalist forces of Venustiano Carranza and Villa, which had taken up arms against the new dictatorship.

The Taking of Mexico City and Bourgeois Reaction

With the fall of the Huerta dictatorship in July 1914, the victorious anti-Huerta forces immediately fell apart. The more conservative bourgeois wing of Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón, representing the northern bourgeois elites and the radical petty bourgeoisie, was more adept than Villa. In a military race, Obregón’s forces occupied Mexico City on 15 August 1914, although not for long. With the definitive split between Villa and Zapata on one side and Carranza and Obregón on the other, after the Convention of Aguascalientes in November 1914, a new and acute phase of the Mexican Revolution began.

Lacking sufficient supplies to hold on to Mexico City, the Carrancistas withdrew to Veracruz. The victorious peasant armies of Zapata and Villa took the capital in December 1914. Veracruz had been occupied by the U.S. since 21 April 1913. In an agreement Carranza made with the occupiers, he obtained a large reserve of arms and provisions as the U.S. forces evacuated the city. It is significant that when the U.S. took Veracruz for the first time, Carranza made an impassioned nationalist speech and criticized them harshly for the occupation (although it was designed to benefit him), while Villa remained silent, not wanting the enmity of the U.S., which supplied him with arms.

In this regard, it is interesting to analyze the occupation of the capital by Villa’s and Zapata’s peasant armies, as well as their withdrawal. The regional, petty-bourgeois peasant perspective of Villa and Zapata meant that these radical leaders did not know what to do when, upon taking the capital, they had state power within reach. This is despite the fact that they had arms and the overwhelming sympathy of the population, which welcomed them with great jubilation (including many workers who months later would be joining Carranza’s “red battalions” to put down the rebellion). The limited demands for more democracy and land distribution in the villages, like the Plan of Ayala, were insufficient as a national political program and a means for Villa and Zapata to hold on to power in the urban centers. It was a movement based on the peasantry, and as such, was limited by that ideology.

Along the same lines, it is notable that during this conflict, which lasted almost a decade, none of the warring factions created a political formation—a party—with any consistency. The Mexican Revolution was led mainly by spontaneously arising peasant leaders or by regional military leaders. Trotsky explained the political inability of the Russian peasantry, as a class, to lead a revolution, a characteristic that can be extended to the Mexican peasantry:

“The peasantry is dispersed over the surface of an enormous country whose key junctions are the cities. The peasantry itself is incapable of even formulating its own interests inasmuch as in each district these appear differently. The economic link between the provinces is created by the market and the railways, but both the market and the railways are in the hands of the cities. In seeking to tear itself away from the restrictions of the village and to generalize its own interests, the peasantry inescapably falls into political dependence upon the city. Finally, the peasantry is heterogeneous in its social relations as well: the kulak [rich peasant] stratum naturally seeks to swing it to an alliance with the urban bourgeoisie while the nether strata of the village pull to the side of the urban workers. Under these conditions the peasantry as such is completely incapable of conquering power.”

— “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution,” 1939

An anecdotal but illustrative example of this inability of the peasantry to assume power in its own name happened during a meeting of the Villa-Zapata Convention in Mexico City. A large group of poor women was demonstrating against famine in front of this assembly, and the only answer the Convention could come up with was to pass the hat to collect a bit of money for them! In other words, Villa and Zapata did not have, nor could they have on their own, the program to use these latent forces for a victorious revolutionary—that is to say, proletarian and socialist—solution. When Villa and Zapata occupied the capital, they certainly did not touch the church, which was a bastion of the most reactionary elements of the ruling class in Mexico and an enemy of the poor peasantry. The upper ranks of the Catholic hierarchy in the capital certainly were a different animal from those humble village priests who were won to Zapatismo. This was one more nail in the coffin of the peasant rebellion.

The bourgeois wing of Carranza, conscious of the political weakness of the peasant armies, was able to reorganize and pursued the forces of the Zapatista Convention until finally defeating them. Obregón effectively avoided the capital in order to confront Villa, who had the principal mobile forces of the Convention, in decisive battles in the north and in El Bajío [lowlands of central Mexico]. By the end of 1915, Villa’s powerful División del Norte had been dismantled. On 10 April 1919, Zapata was ambushed and slaughtered.

In July 1923, bourgeois reaction caught up to Villa, who had retired to private life and become a well-to-do hacendado in Chihuahua. He was still a symbol for the peasantry. When he supported the local bourgeois Adolfo de la Huerta against Obregón’s group, Villa was massacred and his body decapitated. (It was a very different story on the other side of the world, when in October 1917 the gigantic Russian “peasant bear,” hungry for land and justice, found a revolutionary leadership in a young and resolute working class and the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky.)
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011

A Marxist Analysis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910

Part Two

This part concludes this article, translated from Espartaco No. 12 (Spring-Summer 1999), published by the Grupo Espartaquista de México. Part One appeared in WV No. 973 (4 February).

When the Mexican Revolution broke out, the proletariat consisted of some 600,000 workers but was very dispersed and atomized throughout the country, particularly in the mines, on the railroads, in the textile industry and various artisanal trades. The list of organizations affiliated with the Casa del Obrero Mundial [House of the World Worker], founded only in September 1912, shows the still-rudimentary composition of the proletariat. Besides electricians and streetcar drivers, the majority of the list consisted of guilds such as bakers, drivers, tailors, leather workers, bricklayers, shoemakers, carpenters, etc. There was also some urban industry, such as textiles, but not nearly as modern or concentrated as in western Russia. Also, because of the limited migration of European workers, socialist thought was not as widespread here as in Chile and Argentina in the Southern Cone of the hemisphere.

Consequently, anarchism (imported from Spain) flourished and gained authority in the young working class. The anarchism of the Flores Magón brothers had emerged as a radical-liberal tendency in the ranks of the bourgeois opposition to Porfirio Díaz. During the Porfirian dictatorship, anarchist publications such as El Hijo del Ahuizote [Son of the Scourge], Revolución and Regeneración helped to organize sectors of society unhappy with the regime. From 1906 to the 1910 uprising led by Francisco Madero, the anarchists focused their strategy on the formation of guerrilla cells in the north. They even established a utopian anarchist “Socialist Republic of Baja California” in 1911, which was immediately crushed after an agreement between Díaz and Madero was reached. Díaz’s constant repression of Ricardo Flores Magón’s group, which eventually had to hide in the U.S., pushed the group to the left, and it began to build workers’ cells. During the Revolution, anarchist groups founded the Casa del Obrero Mundial.

Flores Magón and his Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) certainly presented the most radical program during the Revolution, even calling for the abolition of private property and for no support for the bourgeoisie. But its ideas and proclamations were extremely contradictory. In spite of its influence on the incipient unions, Magonist anarchism did not represent the historic interests of the working class; it had more to do with a type of petty-bourgeois “utopian socialism” that reflected the desperation of the artisans and the middle classes ruined under the Porfiriato.

The acid test of the Mexican Revolution showed the total bankruptcy of anarchism and its inability to draw an independent class line. Some anarchists in the Casa del Obrero (such as Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama) went over to the ranks of Zapatismo. But the majority of the anarchist leaders, such as Antonio I. Villarreal, who went from the ranks of the PLM to being governor of [the northern state of] Nuevo León and a mouthpiece for the bourgeois forces of Venustiano Carranza, reached agreement with Carranza and engaged in demagoguery to convince a sector of the working class to participate in Carranza’s infamous “red battalions” [armed forces arrayed against peasant insurgents].

The traitorous collaboration of the Casa del Obrero anarchists, who exchanged their “direct action” discourse for the demagogic “class struggle” offered by Carranza in his 1913 Plan de Guadalupe, guaranteed “social peace” in the capital for Alvaro Obregón while he pursued Pancho Villa. In the end, the Casa del Obrero leadership accepted without complaint Obregón’s order to dissolve their organization when it was no longer useful to him. Most of these anarchists would later have careers as union bureaucrats in the new Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM, Mexican Regional Workers Confederation), subservient to the bourgeois regime.

Here it is interesting to refer to the position of the centrist Internationalist Group (IG), a handful of deserters from Trotskyism who were expelled from our organization in 1996. The IG attempts a retrospective embellishment of the anti-revolutionary role of anarchism which, inciting the backward consciousness of the working class, mobilized it to actively support the suppression of the revolution under the Carranza’s orders. The IG writes:

“The anarchists withdrew into passive opposition to all sides. General Obregón, meanwhile, wooed the Casa del Obrero on behalf of the mistrusted landowner-general Carranza.... When Obregón appealed for the formation of Red Battalions of workers to fight Villa, the union bureaucrats finally agreed (despite continued opposition in the ranks).”

—The Internationalist, April-May 1997

In the IG’s centrist laundry room, the anarchist bureaucrats of the Casa del Obrero seem like confused, passive victims of Obregón’s intrigues. The IG uses the same lying description of “paralyzed” victims that [IG leader Jan] Norden used to clean up the image of the Stalinists of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), who in 1990 led the counterrevolution and presented the East German workers state as a gift to imperialism.

As we have written, anarchism showed its complete bankruptcy during the Mexican Revolution. With their petty-bourgeois perspective, the pages of Regeneración and Magón’s correspondence were filled with bitter recriminations against the working class for being responsible for its destiny. Magón wrote to Gus Teltsch in 1921: “Man is a very stupid animal...as long as he has a crust of stale bread to put in his mouth, he thinks he lives in the best world, and everything is going well.” Years earlier, Magón even celebrated with strange justifications the imperialist slaughter of the First World War:

“Millions of men dead? Even better! The people are such imbeciles that they need these terrible blows, these formidable shocks, to wake up. Let us not give in to whining and sentimentality in the face of this spectacle of desolation and ruin. Let us accept with fortitude this result of human stupidity, and to those who wish to hear us, let us say: Brothers, here is the result of your obstinate refusal to heed our good counsel…. Long live the war! Let the horrible spectacle of death, the desolation, the hunger, the ruin, shock the peoples who are lethargic with the narcotic of flags, fatherlands and religions!”

—Regeneración No. 201 (undated)

Even earlier, the anarchist PLM went so far as to define a chauvinist, anti-immigrant, protectionist vision in its program. Regarding Chinese workers, the 1906 PLM Program stated: “Generally willing to work for the lowest pay, submissive, with paltry aspirations, the Chinese is a great obstacle to the prosperity of other workers. His competition is disastrous and we must avoid it in Mexico.”

It was Villa and the northern governors who took anti-Chinese chauvinism to its ultimate consequences. One can see this brutal aspect of the Villista troops in Friedrich Katz’s well-documented biography Pancho Villa, in which the historian exposes the visceral hostility of the Villistas toward Chinese immigrants, whom they plundered and murdered in the cities Villa’s forces occupied. The anti-Chinese chauvinist poison went hand in hand with the moth-eaten anti-Semitism propagated in Mexico since the Inquisition. It is no accident that today’s “Chinatown” in Mexico City occupies only half a block of Dolores Street.

The lack of an authentic revolutionary internationalist leadership during the Mexican Revolution would be felt again when the working class began to radicalize against Carranza, as demonstrated by an electricians general strike in Mexico City in 1916. One can understand the limited anarcho-liberal vision of Magón and many of its unresolvable contradictions, which led him to sordid extremes like the anti-Chinese chauvinism of his party. But it is pathetic that today reformist groups like the Partido Obrero Socialista (POS, Socialist Workers Party), heirs of the political chameleon Nahuel Moreno, and the Liga de Unidad Socialista (LUS, League of Socialist Unity), heirs of the pseudo-Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, which along with others promote nationalism, venerate Flores Magón and refer to him uncritically as a “fighter for the liberation of the proletariat” (El Socialista-Umbral No. 238, 1 May 1998).

The Petty-Bourgeois Vision of the Nationalist Left

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 is a clear example of one of those revolutions in which the proletariat, still socially weak, was incapable of acting as an independent contender for power and carrying out its revolutionary tasks. Generalizing from the experience of the Chinese proletariat’s bloody defeat, thanks to Stalin’s betrayal, in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927 at the hands of the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang of Chiang Kai-shek, Leon Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution (1930):

“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch, the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.”

Later, he continued:

“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its conclusion.”

As subsequent history would show, what Trotsky wrote is completely applicable to the Mexican Revolution, whose results were partial and “directed entirely against the working masses.” This can be seen from the beginning in the Zapatista demand that “the land belong to the tiller”—a demand for which hundreds of thousands of peasants rose in rebellion and died. The land was completely stolen by the victorious bourgeois faction: almost all the land seized in the revolution was returned to the landowners or appropriated by elements of the new military caste. (Such a return of lands to the owners of the landed estates did not occur, for example, in France under Napoleon after the Great French Revolution, nor even under the restorationist monarchists that succeeded him.)

Besides the key agrarian question that the Mexican Revolution failed to resolve, there is the issue of imperialism and national liberation, which could not be resolved under bourgeois leadership, or under peasant leadership for that matter. The United States was able to increase its control over the Mexican economy, and the shackles of imperialism continued to tighten on the country, giving rise to the present situation.

With the bloody triumph of Carranza and Obregón’s bourgeois wing, ferocious repression was unleashed in the cities. Not surprisingly, many workers and anarchist leaders of the “red battalions” who returned from fighting the peasant armies were shot as soon as they began to demand that Carranza’s promises be kept. The old death penalty, which had been decreed in 1862, was restored along with other brutal punishments to be applied against the workers movement. A common practice of this new regime was to first send the army against strike picket lines and then, after carrying out repression, to concede a few of the workers’ demands...over their leaders’ corpses. This type of political practice, directed entirely against the working class, as Trotsky wrote, was crystallized in the famous Carrancista Constitution of 1917, which gives the bourgeois state the role of inspector and supreme arbiter in the life of the unions.

To achieve its consolidation, the bourgeois regime of Carranza’s successor Obregón, which had support among the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals, began to use nationalism and an opportunistic anticlericalism as ideological battering rams in order to justify its continuing repression of workers struggles and regional uprisings of land-hungry peasants. In 1938, the nationalist regime of General Lázaro Cárdenas decreed the expropriation of the petroleum industry and carried out some land distribution, mainly as an escape valve for the pressure of peasant unrest that had been set loose by the church in the reactionary clerical Cristero movement. Cárdenas also used the land distribution as a way to deactivate workers struggles, offering pieces of land so that dissatisfied workers could become small peasant landowners.

With these measures and because of his occasional friction with imperialism, Lázaro Cárdenas gained popularity with the masses and gave a strong boost to nationalism. The Cárdenas regime was able to subordinate the most important workers unions to the PRM (predecessor of the PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party). This was thanks to the treason of the Stalinist Mexican Communist Party (PCM, founded in 1919), which, following the traitorous, class-collaborationist line of Stalin’s popular front, used its influence in the unions to support [the reformist] Lombardo Toledano and [quintessential pro-government bureaucrat] Fidel Velázquez. Thereafter, the leadership of these unions fell into the hands of the corporatist “charro” bureaucracy—labor lieutenants of capital and the bourgeois state in the workers movement. While opening schools and initiating some public works projects, Lázaro Cárdenas reinforced the army and also founded the hated anti-riot squad known as the “granaderos,” the fundamental instrument of the bourgeoisie for breaking strikes and beating students.

The reformist left failed to resist the increasing popularity of the caudillo Cárdenas and capitulated to the nationalism that was in vogue. This had its most well-known intellectual expression in the works of José Revueltas, a dissident member of the Stalinist PCM, and, later, those of the onetime pseudo-Trotskyist Adolfo Gilly. Influenced by the Stalinist schema of “revolution in stages” and “socialism in one country” and adding his own special philosophical gibberish, Revueltas extolled the terrible backwardness in the Mexican countryside in order to paint the economy during the Porfiriato as merely “semi-feudal.” He then characterized the Revolution of 1910 as a successful bourgeois-democratic “anti-feudal” revolution, which is false.

In the imperialist epoch of capital, as we have noted, it is impossible for the national bourgeoisie to carry a democratic revolution to victory and solve such burning issues as the agrarian question. The millions of landless peasants, including indigenous people, throughout the country are the strongest possible refutation of the Stalinoid vision of Revueltas, who embellished the meager achievements of the Mexican Revolution.

Inspired by the Stalinist concept, Revueltas feverishly looked for a “progressive” sector of the bourgeoisie, which he claimed to have found in Carranza’s forces. In his 1962 essay “Un Proletariado Sin Cabeza” (“A Proletariat Without a Head”), in which he supposedly differentiates himself from the PCM, Revueltas writes a defense of Carranza:

“Thus, carrancismo is actually more radical, more ‘advanced’ than maderismo, because the bourgeois-democratic ideology must widen its field of criticism.... Not only does Carranza promise from the beginning to establish a new organic legal statute for the country, but he also announces the beginning of the social revolution.”

Revueltas’ anti-Marxist revisionism is accompanied by his position on the role of the working class:

“Even when the proletariat does not carry out a leadership function in a bourgeois-democratic revolution like that of 1910, on its own, solely by its presence, it provokes a series of historical and revolutionary consequences. There is an immanent force in the proletariat that on its own becomes evident and leads to results within history.

“This occurred with the proletariat in the Revolution of 1910. And if this bourgeois-democratic revolution has such an advanced and progressive character, it owes this more than anything else to the working class.”

—José Revueltas, “La Revolución Mexicana y el Proletariado” (“The Mexican Revolution and the Proletariat”), 1938

This “objectivist” vision of the weight and role of the working class is typical of the revisionist current of Michel Pablo, which developed in the ranks of the Fourth International in the 1950s. (Perhaps that was why, at the end of his life, Revueltas considered joining the Pabloite United Secretariat of the late Ernest Mandel.) Trotsky polemicized strongly against the false position that the proletariat could effect revolutionary changes “solely by its presence” or its combativity. Trotsky affirmed that the fundamental condition for the proletariat to intervene as a revolutionary force is that it has the consciousness of its historical tasks and a communist leadership. Revueltas was hostile to this Marxist-Leninist perspective.

The Stalinist position of seeking a nonexistent “progressive” sector of the bourgeoisie, and its vision of the proletariat as a mass whose weight is revolutionary in and of itself, was consistent with the type of party that Revueltas wanted to build: not a Leninist vanguard party but rather an amorphous party of “the whole class.” In fact, the core of Revueltas’ critique of the Stalinist PCM was to reproach it for not having succeeded in becoming a party of “the whole class,” that is, a mass party. It is no accident that the majority of members who, with Revueltas, broke with the PCM to found the so-called “Liga Espartaco” in 1960 ended up joining the PRI, attracted by its “mass influence” and nationalist rhetoric. This summary of Revueltas’ work merits a correction in reference to what we wrote in the first issue of Espartaco (Winter 1990-91), that “our tendency has taken up again the key point of Revueltas’ break with Stalinism.” In reality, Revueltas never transcended his Stalinist political framework.

Gilly and the Pseudo-Trotskyist Left

The book La Revolución Interrumpida (The Interrupted Revolution) by the former pseudo-Trotskyist Adolfo Gilly is the bible of the revisionist left. In a merely formal way, Gilly accepted a key tenet of permanent revolution—that the stage of classic bourgeois revolutions had ended a long time ago—only to write that in the Mexican Revolution the peasantry played the socialist role that the working class could not undertake. For Gilly, the Mexican Revolution was an “interrupted revolution” because the radical peasant leaders like Zapata and Villa were assassinated. Thus, while the revolution was “temporarily” interrupted, Gilly finds that the bourgeois government of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s took up socialist principles once again. This supports the bourgeois myth of the revolution that never ends and therefore justifies, from a supposedly Marxist viewpoint, subordination to Cardenismo and the current capitulation of the left to the PRD [the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution].

Taking his liquidationist logic to its ultimate consequences, Gilly became an official in the current [Mexico City] government of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The same fate awaited his old Mandelite party, the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT, Revolutionary Workers Party), which liquidated into the PRD and the Zapatista EZLN.

A current archetype of the reformist left’s capitulation to the influence of bourgeois nationalism, also inspired by Gilly’s “interrupted revolution,” is the Partido Obrero Socialista. For the Morenoite POS as well, the Mexican Revolution could have continued...including even to socialism, if Zapata and Villa had not been assassinated. The POS writes:

“While Madero and his followers planned to throw Díaz out of power to establish, mainly, a bourgeois-democratic system based on the principle of no re-election and effective suffrage, hundreds of revolutionaries worked clandestinely to overthrow the dictator and generate a social revolution, which in essence would have socialist objectives....

“Anarchists, Zapatistas and Villistas understood this desire perfectly well, and not always agreeing on how to achieve it, nevertheless fought in the same trench....

“With this unprecedented event, and because of the objectives that inspired the Zapatista and Villista armies, the Mexican Revolution seemed to be headed toward a socialist revolution, which would finally destroy the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and establish a workers and peasants government. Nevertheless, in spite of the social conquests expressed in the Constitution of 1917, because the working class did not lead the revolution and because there was no revolutionary party to lead it, the Mexican Revolution fell into the hands of the national bourgeoisie, and at that point another dictatorship began to take shape: the priato [decades-long rule of the PRI].”

—El Socialista No. 182, November 1993

These last references to the lack of a revolutionary party and the working class are merely demagogic, serving as the POS’s red loincloth to cover its true nationalist and reformist program for the class struggle. It is sufficient to see what they wrote the previous year in referring to the capture of Mexico City by Zapata and Villa in December 1914:

“Without knowing it, the Mexican peasants were placing themselves at that moment in the vanguard of the world revolution. It is a fact that has been preserved in the historical memory of the masses, an event that we must always remember, since it demonstrates the possibility that an organized and decisive people can put the bourgeoisie and the government in check and take power in this country.”

—El Socialista No. 166, November 1992

Like Gilly, the POS considers that the peasantry was—even without knowing it—the vanguard of the world revolution, and that the Magonista anarchists, along with Zapata and Villa, could have been the equivalent of a revolutionary party of the working class in the struggle for socialism...if they had just had a little more time. Nothing could be further from the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution!

The POS view of the Mexican Revolution is in accordance with its current reformist program and the patriotic language that fills the pages of El Socialista. If the peasantry was, according to the POS, “the vanguard of the world revolution” in 1914, it is logical that these reformists called for a vote for the EZLN in 1994. And if for the POS the anarchists, Zapatistas and Villistas were the vanguard of the world revolution, today they welcome without embarrassment any class-collaborationist front that emerges in this country—from its joint campaign with the PRD to “struggle” against NAFTA (El Socialista No. 182, November 1993) to its political support for the EZLN, the CND [pro-EZLN National Democratic Convention], El Barzón [a middle-class movement of bank debtors], etc., and its current petition campaign begging the Senate and the House of Representatives not to privatize the electric industry. The illusion of the POS that the bourgeois state can be reformed is shown in its call for the “democratic restructuring of judicial power” (“Draft Program of the Socialist Coalition, POS-LUS,” 1998) and in its treasonous calls on the bourgeois state to intervene into the unions. In 1997, for example, the POS called for “imprisonment without bail for union leaders who sell sweetheart contracts to businesses” (El Socialista No. 225, February 1997). The conscious workers movement should sweep away these types of fake “socialist” parties.

The LTS and IG: Centrist Confusionism

The centrists of the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS, League of Workers for Socialism), a 1988 split from the POS, differ from their parent party only because they want the end of the PRI to come through the advent of a “[revolutionary constituent] Assembly that develops out of the overthrow of the hated PRI regime” and struggles against imperialism (Estrategia Obrera No. 7, September-October 1998). But in Mexico the semi-bonapartist bourgeois regime adopted a thin cover of bourgeois democracy which, although unstable, allowed the PRI to govern for decades with the politics of “the carrot and the stick.” The PRD has shored up illusions in this discredited bourgeois parliamentarism, and today it governs Mexico City, several municipal governments around the country and the states of Baja California and Zacatecas. Calling here for a constituent assembly—a new parliamentary body—only serves to sow more illusions in the bourgeois PRD.

The fact that the LTS fetishizes bourgeois democracy is clearly seen in its assertion, in the same issue of its newspaper, that it would be a “Provisional Workers and Peasants Government” that would convene this assembly. As Trotsky noted in the Transitional Program:

“This formula, ‘workers’ and farmers’ government,’ first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the October Revolution. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat.”

But for the LTS, the purpose of the dictatorship of the proletariat would be to convene...a bourgeois parliamentary body! Trotsky never proposed the constituent assembly as a possible organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is an invention of the fake Trotskyists, who distort the Bolshevik call for a workers and peasants government, converting it into a call for a government to reform the bourgeois state.

The centrists—revolutionary in word, reformist in deed—frequently borrow small pieces of the genuine Marxist program to hide their real appetites. Thus, the LTS writes: “The main tasks of the Revolution of 1910 that were left unfinished, such as giving land to the peasants, national independence to break the yoke of imperialism and elementary democratic demands, can only be fully and effectively accomplished under a government of the victorious working class” (Estrategia Obrera No. 2, December 1996). However, this is nothing more than a fig leaf to hide the LTS’s illusions in the bourgeoisie. Trying to polemicize against Gilly and his old party, the LTS winds up kissing his hand:

“The PRT, far from raising a consistent Trotskyist strategy to fight for the program of the second Mexican Revolution, to conclude the anti-capitalist revolution begun in 1910 (interrupted by the triumph of the Carranza wing over the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, imposing the reactionary Constitution of 1917 on the masses), ends up joining the Cárdenas government.”

—Estrategia Internacional No. 10, November-December 1998 (emphasis ours)

In the end, the LTS accepts Gilly’s revisionist schema by which the Mexican Revolution, “anti-capitalist” in its inner dynamic, was “interrupted” by the fact that Villa and Zapata were murdered.

The Internationalist Group is not very different from the LTS. The IG’s rejection of the perspective of permanent revolution is evident in the way it obscures the differences between the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the working class—the only class with the social power and consistent historic interest to lead the fight against the rule of capital. In spite of its Trotskyist pretensions, every time the IG tries to paraphrase or put into practice the perspective of permanent revolution, it jumbles together workers with other oppressed sectors. The IG takes this centrist confusionism onto the historical plane. Trying to distinguish itself from Gilly on the Mexican Revolution, the IG finally bows to him:

“In its successive incarnations (PNR-PRM-PRI), this regime has presented itself as the ‘party of the Mexican Revolution.’ This is an enormous historical falsification. In truth it is the party of the firing squad against the revolution, the party of the northern ranchers who assassinated the radical peasant and plebeian leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, and put an end to the revolution before it could become a full-fledged social revolution.”

—The Internationalist, April-May 1997

Here we see how the IG, like the LTS, leaves the door open to the implication that if Zapata and Villa had not been murdered, the Mexican Revolution could have continued and eventually become a “fully developed social revolution.” The IG consciously uses this vague, classless phrase only to distinguish itself slightly from its pseudo-Trotskyist cousins.

But like good centrists, the IG tries to cover its tracks with apparently orthodox formulations. In the same article, it writes: “The Mexican Revolution was frustrated, above all, because of the absence of a proletarian vanguard with a program for workers revolution, the only way to complete the agrarian revolution and liberate the country from the yoke of imperialism.” In spite of the IG’s demagogic references to Trotskyism, its mystification of the peasant leaders and its defense of the anarchist bureaucrats of the Casa del Obrero Mundial are not isolated errors. With its frenetic passion to dilute the proletariat in an amorphous mass of “discontented sectors,” the IG’s rejection of permanent revolution becomes even clearer in its attempt to discover a nonexistent popular front around the PRD of Cárdenas in order to capitulate to this bourgeois formation.

As we explained in Espartaco No. 10 (Autumn-Winter 1997), a popular front is a bourgeois formation that ties the reformist organizations of the working class to the bourgeois parties. In Mexico, however, the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie has been particularly open, with the union movement directly tied to the bourgeoisie through bourgeois nationalism and its corporatist shackles. The dominance of this nationalism explains why mass reformist workers parties did not develop here and the pseudo-socialist left never overcame its marginalization in the workers movement.

In its insistence that a popular front exists in Mexico, which it uses as a lying argument that the Spartacists “abandoned” the struggle against the PRD, the IG presents as conclusive proof a paragraph from an article in La Jornada (2 May 1997), which reports:

“The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) yesterday released its final list of candidates for the House of Representatives to fill the seats assigned to the party based on the proportion of votes for the entire country. It consists of leaders of university unions, the SNTE and the FAT; also peasant organizations such as CIOAC, UNTA and CODUC; ex-CNC members; the UCD; leaders and activists from El Barzón and popular urban organizations.... In the leading places, more than 50 percent are not PRD members.”

And the IG fervently concludes: “Yes, there is a popular front in Mexico!” This jumble that the IG makes of the proletariat and the peasantry with organizations of renters and bank debtors recalls the old Stalinist concept of a “bloc of four classes.” As Trotsky himself explained in his devastating “Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International” (printed in The Third International After Lenin), following the defeat guided by the Comintern in China in 1925-27:

“Those organizations which in capitalist countries label themselves peasant parties are in reality one of the varieties of bourgeois parties. Every peasant who has not adopted the proletarian position, abandoning his proprietor psychology, will inevitably follow the bourgeoisie when it comes to fundamental political issues.... The celebrated idea of ‘workers’ and peasants’ parties’ seems to have been specially created to camouflage bourgeois parties which are compelled to seek support from the peasantry but who are also ready to absorb workers into their ranks.”

Or, as Lenin once expressed it, urging the proletariat to organize separately from the peasantry:

“We stand by the peasant movement to the end; but we have to remember that it is the movement of another class, not the one which can and will bring about the socialist revolution.”

—“Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers’ Party” (1906)

Against the efforts of the fake socialists and centrists who embellish bourgeois democracy and the current level of consciousness of the working class, we communists struggle for the political independence of the proletariat to advance the cause of socialism. This will happen in Mexico by building a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party to sweep away the deep nationalism in the workers organizations that poisons and divides their struggles and to break the chains of the bourgeois state’s corporatist control of the unions—a legacy of Cardenismo.

An essential part of this struggle is winning the sectors oppressed under capitalism to the program of workers revolution. The struggle for the liberation of women is especially important in a society like Mexico, where the oppression and enslavement of women are strongly rooted and are buttressed by nationalism and the church. With a large percentage of the proletariat made up of women, especially but not exclusively in the northern part of the country in the maquiladoras, the proletarian revolution cannot triumph unless the working class wins the confidence of women workers, by acting as a tribune of the people.

The task we face is, as Trotsky noted, “a succession of social revolutions, transferring power to the hands of the most resolute class, which afterwards applies this power for the abolition of all classes” [“The Revolution in Spain,” January 1931]. The revolutionary-internationalist task Trotsky refers to is still before us today, and it is from the point of view of permanent revolution that we must evaluate the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Only then will the working class be able to take the correct path toward victory. Forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party! For new October Revolutions!

All out In Solidarity With Wisconsin's (and other states' soon to be under fire) Public Workers Unions'- Mass State House Rally- Saturday February 26, 2011

Wisconsin Solidarity
Sunday, February 20, 2011
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50-State Mobilization to Save the American Dream
Saturday February 26, 2011
12-1 PM
In front of the Massachusetts State House
24 Beacon St.
Boston, MA 02108

Calling all students, teachers, union members, workers, patriots, public servants, unemployed folks, progressives, and people of conscience:




In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich, and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response and vital human services. The right to organize is on the chopping block. The American Dream is slipping out of reach for more and more Americans, and we have to fight back.

We call for emergency rallies in front of every statehouse this Saturday at noon to stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin. Demand an end to the attacks on workers' rights and public services across the country. Demand investment, to create decent jobs for the millions of people who desperately want to work. And demand that the rich and powerful pay their fair share.

We are all Wisconsin.
We are all Americans.

Endorsing organizations include: Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, AFL-CIO, SEIU, PCCC, Color of Change, CREDO Action, Democracy for America, Campaign for Community Change, National People's Action, TrueMajority, US Action, Progressive Majority, Courage Campaign, and Van Jones

The Latest From The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions' Struggle-Wis. troopers sent to find Democrats, no one home- Hands Off The Democratic Legislators!

Markin comment:

The story below tells the tale in the headline. Last week when the Wisconsin struggle first broke out I mentioned that we might need to send workers' defense guards to the Wisconsin borders to insure that the legislators are not "kidnapped" back into the state. I might not be so far off on that one after all. As I also said in that post we are living in strange time indeed when I am worrying, in the year 2011, about the safety and fate of Democratic legislators. So be it. Victory to the Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!

******
Wis. troopers sent to find Democrats, no one home
By TODD RICHMOND and SCOTT BAUER, AP
3 hours ago

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MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin state troopers were dispatched Thursday to try to find at least one of the 14 Senate Democrats who have been on the run for eight days to delay a vote on Republican Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to strip collective bargaining rights from nearly all public employees.

Meanwhile, the state Assembly appeared close to voting on the union rights bill after two days of filibustering the measure with a blizzard of amendments. Democrats reached an early morning deal after 43 hours of debate to limit the number of remaining amendments and time spent on each.

Troopers went to multiple homes Thursday morning hoping to find at least one of the 14 Democrats, some of whom were rumored to have made short trips home to pick up clothes and other necessities before again fleeing the state. But they came up empty handed, Senate Sergeant at Arms Ted Blazel said.

"Every night we hear about some that are coming back home," said Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who hoped sending the move to send the troopers would pressure Democrats to return.

But Democratic Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who was in the Chicago area, said all 14 senators remained outside of Wisconsin and would not return until Walker was willing to compromise.

"It's not so much the Democrats holding things up, it's really a matter of Gov. Walker holding things up," Erpenbach said.

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie issued a statement praising the Assembly for nearing a vote and renewing his call for Senate Democrats to come back.

Thousands of people have protested the bill for nine straight days, with hundreds spending the night on the Capitol's hard marble floor as the debate was broadcast on monitors in the rotunda. Many still were sleeping when the deal to only debate 38 more amendments, for no more than 10 minutes each, was announced shortly after 6 a.m. The timing of the agreement means the vote could come as soon as noon Thursday.

"We will strongly make our points, but understand you are limiting the voice of the public as you do this," said Democratic state Rep. Mark Pocan of Madison. "You can't dictate democracy. You are limiting the people's voice with this agreement this morning."

Democrats, who are in the minority, don't have the votes to stop the bill once the vote occurs.

Passage of the bill in the Assembly would be a major victory for Republicans and Walker, but the measure still must clear the Senate. Democrats there left town last week rather than vote on the bill, which has stymied efforts there to take it up.

The battle over labor rights has been heating up across the country, as new Republican majorities tackle budget woes in several states. The GOP efforts have sparked huge protests from unions and their supporters and led Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana to flee their states to block measures.

Republicans in Ohio offered a small concession Wednesday, saying they would support allowing unionized state workers to collectively bargain on wages — but not for benefits, sick time, vacation or other conditions. Wisconsin's proposal also would allow most public workers to collectively bargain only for wages.

In Ohio, Republican Senate President Tom Niehaus denied protests have dented the GOP's resolve, saying lawmakers decided to make the change after listening to hours of testimony. He said he still believes the bill's core purpose — reining in spending by allowing governments more flexibility in dealing with their workers — is intact.

Senate Democratic Leader Capri Cafaro called the changes "window dressing." She said the entire bill should be scrapped.

"We can't grow Ohio's economy by destroying jobs and attacking the middle class," Cafaro said. "Public employees in Ohio didn't cause our budget problems and they shouldn't be blamed for something that's not their fault."

Wisconsin Democrats have echoed Cafaro for days, but Walker has refused to waver.

Walker reiterated Wednesday that public workers must make concessions to avoid thousands of government layoffs as the state grapples with a $137 million shortfall in its current budget and a projected $3.6 billion hole in the next two-year budget.

The marathon session in the Assembly was grand political theater, with exhausted lawmakers limping around the chamber, rubbing their eyes and yawning as Wednesday night dragged on.

Around midnight, Rep. Dean Kaufert, R-Neenah, accused Democrats of putting on a show for the protesters. Democrats leapt up and started shouting.

"I'm sorry if democracy is a little inconvenient and you had to stay up two nights in a row," Pocan said. "Is this inconvenient? Hell, yeah! It's inconvenient. But we're going to be heard!"

The Ohio and Wisconsin bills both would strip public workers at all levels of their right to collectively bargain benefits, sick time, vacations and other work conditions. Wisconsin's measure exempts local police, firefighters and the State Patrol and still lets workers collectively bargain their wages as long as they are below inflation. It also would require public workers to pay more toward their pensions and health insurance. Ohio's bill, until Wednesday, would have barred negotiations on wages.

Ohio's measure sits in a Senate committee. No vote has been scheduled on the plan, but thousands of protesters have gathered at the Statehouse to demonstrate, just as in Wisconsin.

In Indiana, Democrats successfully killed a Republican bill that would have prohibited union membership from being a condition of employment by leaving the state on Tuesday. They remained in Illinois in hopes of derailing other parts of Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels' agenda, including restrictions on teacher collective bargaining.

And in Oklahoma, a Republican-controlled state House committee on Wednesday narrowly approved legislation to repeal collective bargaining rights for municipal workers in that state's 13 largest cities.

___

Associated Press writers Ryan J. Foley in Madison and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

The Assembly deal was announced shortly after 6 a.m. while the troopers were sent after the Democrats at 7 a.m.

*Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Jody Reynolds “Endless Sleep”- Billie’s, Billie From "The Projects", View

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Jody Reynolds performing the classic Endless Sleep.

Markin comment:

This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billie, William James Bradley, the mad hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” neighborhood. Ya, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days, every kid, including best friend Markin, me, lived to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that we would recognize as our own. This song, Endless Sleep, came out at a time when I my family was beginning to start the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, I had begun to move away from Billie’s orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe. I was in my 24/7 reading at the local public library branch phase in lieu of being Billie’s accomplice on various, well, let’s call them capers just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Still Billie, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billie I’m still pulling for you. Got it.

JODY REYNOLDS
"Endless Sleep"
(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)
The night was black, rain fallin' down
Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around
Traced her footsteps down to the shore
‘fraid she's gone forever more
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“I took your baby from you away.
I heard a voice cryin' in the deep
“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.


Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?
Why did I leave her alone tonight?
That's why her footsteps ran into the sea
That's why my baby has gone from me.
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“I took your baby from you away.
I heard a voice cryin' in the deep
“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.


Ran in the water, heart full of fear
There in the breakers I saw her near
Reached for my darlin', held her to me
Stole her away from the angry sea
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“You took your baby from me away.
My heart cried out “she's mine to keep
I saved my baby from an endless sleep.


[Fade]
Endless sleep, endless sleep
*****
Billie back again, William James Bradley, if you didn’t know. Markin’s pal, Peter Paul Markin’s pal, from over the Adamsville Elementary School and the pope of rock lyrics down here in “the projects.” The Adamsville projects, if you don’t know. Markin, who I hadn’t seen for a while since he told me his family is going to move out of the projects and who has developed this big thing for the local library and books lately, came by the other day to breathe in the fresh air of my rock universe-adorned bedroom when we got to talking about this latest record, Endless Sleep, by Jody Reynolds. All the parents around here, at least the parents that care anyway, or those who have heard the lyrics screaming from their kid’s plug-in blaring radio (that’s why they invented transistor radios-so parents wouldn’t, or couldn’t, catch on to what we are listening to- smarten up is what I say to those kids still on plug-in mode, for christ’s sake) about the not so subtle suicide theme. Ya, like that is what every kid is going to do when the going gets a little tough in the love department. Take a jump in the ocean, and call one and all to join them. Come on, will ya. It's only a song. Besides what is really good about this one is that great back beat on the guitar and Jody Reynold’s cool clothes and sideburns. I wish to high heaven I had both.

But see the pope of rock lyrics, me, can’t just leave this song like that. I have to decode it for the teeny-boppers around here or they will be clueless, including big time book guy Markin. And that is really what is going to make the difference between us here. We had a battle royal over this one. See, Markin always wants to give big play to the “social” meaning of the song, whatever that is, you know where the thing sticks in society, at least teeny-bopper society. Ya, and Markin is also the “sensitive” guy, usually. Like pulling for the girl to get her guy back, or at least go back to her old boyfriend for some back-up love, in Eddie My Love. Or has a kind thing to say about the dumb cluck of a bimbo who went back to the railroad track-stuck car to get some cheapjack class ring in Teen Angel (although he agreed, agreed fully, that the dame was a dumb cluck on other grounds).

Here though I am the sensitive guy, if you can believe that. Here’s why. It seems that Markin has some kind of exception to the “social” rule when it comes to the ocean, to the sea, christ, probably to some scum pond for all I know as the scene for suicide attempts. Apparently he is in the throes of some King Neptune frenzy and took umbrage (his word, not mind I don’t go to the library much) at the idea that someone would desecrate the sea that way, our homeland the sea the way he put it. Like old Neptune hasn’t brought seventy-three types of hell on us with his hurricane tidal waves, his overflowing the seawalls, his flooding everything within three miles of the coast, or when he just throws his flotsam and jetsam (my words, from school, I like them) on the projects beaches whenever he gets fed up. So I have to defend this frail’s action, and gladly.

You know it really is unbelievable once you start to think about it how many of these songs don’t have people in them with names, real names, nicknames, anything to tag on them. Here it’s the same old thing. Markin would just blithely go on and makes up names but I’ll just give you the “skinny” without the Markin literary touches, okay. Rather than calling the girl every name in the book for disturbing the fishes or the plankton like Markin I am trying to see what happened here to drive her to such a rash action. Obviously they, the unnamed boy and girl, had an argument, alright a big argument if that satisfies you. What could it have been about? Markin, wise guy Markin, wants to make it some little thing like a missed date, or the guy didn't call or something. Maybe it was, but I think the poor girl was heartbroken about something bigger. Maybe boyfriend didn’t want to “go steady” or maybe he wasn’t ready to be her ever lovin’ one and only. Let me put it this way it was big, not Markin’s b.s. stuff.

Okay she went over the edge, no question, running down to the sea and jumping in. On a rainy night to boot. Hey she had it bad, whatever it was. But see old Neptune, Markin’s friend, maybe father for all I know, is taunting said boyfriend, saying he is taking his baby away. Well, frankly, and old wimpy Markin dismissed this out of hand, those are fighting words in the projects, and not just the projects either. And the girl, given the cold and what that does to you when you have been in too long is forced to taunt her lover boy, trying to bring him down too. This is the part I like though, although Markin would probably take umbrage (again), the boy friend is ready to reclaim his honey, come hell or high water. Ya, he’s taking his baby, and taking her no questions asked, back from that nasty relentless sea. Chalk one up for our side. Yes, Billie, William James Bradley, is happy, pleased, delighted and any other words you can find in the library that this story has a happy ending. Markin be damned.

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-James W. Ford- American Communist Party Vice-Presidential Candidate (1932, 1936, 1940)

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for James W. Ford.

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February, and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

A Cold “Civil War” Is Brewing In The Land - In Solidarity With The Wisconsin Public Workers’ Unions Struggle- Reflections On Boston’s Labor Support Rally

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia entry for the rally held at the Massachusetts State House in Boston in support of the Wisconsin Public Workers’ Unions’ struggle to save collective bargaining on Tuesday February 22, 2011,

Markin comment:

Sometimes a rally, like many other events, is just a rally. For example, after a while the various anti-war rallies, their speakers, and their purposes (lately Iraq, Afghanistan, or both) have tended to be pro forma events, necessary but very much on a well-trodden subject that we leftist militants are not gaining ground on among the masses that we are trying to influence. On Tuesday February 22, 2011, at a rally held in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in support of the beleaguered and battling Wisconsin public workers unions, however, there was a refreshing and positive change.

On that day, on short notice, several hundred spirited union workers, public and private, and their supporters rallied on behalf of their brothers and sisters in Wisconsin. Of course, the now obligatory anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-anti Tea Party movement sent a small force to suck up some bourgeois media attention (and got it out of all proportion to their numbers under some quaint theory of even-handed impartiality). I do not know, or remember, the names of every union that was represented but it was a cross-section of the labor movement in the Boston area, and the representatives were serious in their commitment and understanding that the class struggle, hell, the class war has just heated up several degrees even if they would not have been able to articulate it that way. Clearly understood though was that the lines were now drawn by this vanguard militant segment of the local labor movement.

Needless to say, lacking serious class-struggle traditions in this generation (and part of the last) there were many workers, young and old, in the crowd who had illusions in the good offices of the government, especially in the good offices of the Democratic Party occupants of that government. That was reflected in the speakers’ list chock full of Democratic Party office-holders, from Congressmen to locals, who had even the most attenuated relationship to the local labor movement, including no friend of labor Governor Deval Patrick fresh from a recent electoral win in heavily liberal Massachusetts. These illusions will, of necessity, begin to shake themselves out a bit as the class struggle gets even hotter but for today there is a militant base on which to draw around the struggle to preserve our unions, preserve the heart of a union, the collective-bargaining process (and, needless to say as well, the right to strike).

To give dramatic symbolism to the day’s efforts and to underline what is at stake, as well as highlight that cold “civil war” warning in the headline to today’s entry let me finish with this little observation seen in front of the State House. The Tea Party contingent set up their small operation, unknowingly I am sure, across Beacon Street in front of the now-famous Saint-Gaudens sculpture depicting the black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment (led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw)that did great service to the Union cause down in the South during the American Civil War, and who had the privilege of entering defeated and captured Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 to the words of “John Brown’s Body.” In order to counteract the effect of the heckling by the Tea Party advocates some young, stalwart craft union workers got up behind that cohort and used the sculpture as a standing ground to do their pro-union sloganeering work. While they also may not have known what the frieze represented as we head to the observance of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War that scene should give one pause for reflection.

*On The 8th Anniversary of The Iraq War (Really 20th) A March 19th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website.

Markin comment:

In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)

I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
********
December 1, 2010

A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”

Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”

That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.

On The Theory Of “The Most Oppressed Are The Most Revolutionary”- A Short Note

Markin comment:

As Bob Mandel pointed out in the article posted today, February 23, 2011, Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement: A Trade-Union Militant Speaks On The New Left, youth vanguardism was rampant in the New Left as the student movement began to swing dramatically leftward. I was fully in tune with that sentiment, at least for a while. What I was not tuned into, and as he also mentioned, was the other strong current coming out of the New Left, especially from those elements reacting to those of us who were starting, gropingly, to reach out to the working class was the notion that the “most oppressed were the most revolutionary.”

And the reason for my skepticism was not some esoteric theory but pure fact. I came from a segment of that milieu as it came to be in post World War II America- the working poor, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled day workers, and those drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, as my school days friend Frankie used to say, who fed off their misery. In short, the lumpen proletariat. These segments need a revolution; desperately need a revolution but their life circumstances almost preclude political action unless some bigger turmoils are occurring in society. A lot of the New Left glorification stemmed, frankly, from ignorance of the ways of life down at the very edges of society. And "Third-World-ist" book romance with Franz Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth and a movie like Battle Of Algiers. I have written previously on the latter and will do a review in the future on Fanon’s work.

No question down at the edges of society that the substance of Hobbes’ observation of life being “short, nasty and brutish,” holds true, as a matter of pure survival if nothing else. The “war” of all against all takes concrete form there either by fear of the takers, or fear of the consequences of not being a taker. Either way the bonds of social solidarity are indeed very tenuous. I will give a very concrete example from my own life so that we can dispense with any prettification of this theory. I, in my very early teens, hung around with a bunch of guys, guys a few years older, from “the projects” where I lived who were into “jack-rolling.” For those not in the know about this activity it is very simple. Take one dark alley, or other isolated place, stand in the shadows or some other out of the way place with a Billy club–like stick (or other blunt instrument) and wait on some likely (usually an old or otherwise helpless person) and when your “target” comes by either threaten or actually use that club to subdue the victim, taking their money or whatever valuables with you. Nice, right? I was, given my youth, the look-out, or set-up guy. I didn’t do it for long, the lure of the library made more sense at some point. As for those other guys, some went to jail for other more serious offenses, some were killed down in Mexico in a drug deal that went wrong, and at least one died in a police shoot out. Needless to say no Bolsheviks came out of that crew. And this, my friends, from other stories that I have heard later, was not all that different when you changed the faces to black or brown.

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement (Vietnam War): A Militant Trade-Union Leader Speaks On The New Left (1980)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
Markin comment on this article

This article is place here mainly to give a flavor of the times (early 1970s) when every self-respecting extra-parliamentary leftist was struggling to find the road to the working class. There were plenty of groups, committees, leagues, tendencies and what not to the left of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party (both dismissed almost out of hand as too tame for revolutionary hearts based on practical experience in running up against them in the process of trying to break with the Democrats and other so-called progressives as a preclude to bringing THEIR, the Democrats, house down). The speaker’s general comments, and specific insights, could have been written by me, or any number of leftist militants, back then as we struggled to break out of the youth vanguard milieu and learn a couple of things about revolutionary politics

As Bob Mandel pointed out in this article, youth vanguardism was rampant in the New Left as the student movement began to swing dramatically leftward. I was fully in tune with that sentiment, at least for a while. What I was not tuned into, and as he also mentioned here, was the other strong current coming out of the New Left, especially from those elements reacting to those of us who were starting, gropingly, to reach out to the working class was the notion that the “most oppressed were the most revolutionary.” And the reason was not some esoteric theory but pure fact.

I came from a segment of that milieu as it was left behind in post World War II America- the working poor, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled day workers, and those drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, as my school days friend Frankie used to say, who fed off their misery. In short, the lumpen proletariat parasites. These segments need a revolution; desperately need a revolution but their life circumstances almost preclude political action unless some bigger turmoils are occurring in society. A lot of the New Left glorification stemmed, frankly, from ignorance of the ways of life down at the very edges of society. And "Third-World-ist" book romance with Franz Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth and a movie like Battle Of Algiers. I have written previously on the latter and will do a review in the future on Fanon’s work.
********
From Young Spartacus, May 1980, Lessons Of The Anti-War Movement (Vietnam War): A Militant Trade-Union Leader Speaks On The New Left.

We print below an edited text of the talk given by Bob Mandel at a Spartacus Youth League forum entitled "No to the Draft! Down with Carter's Anti-Soviet War Drive!" held March 7 at Stanford University.

Mandel was an early civil rights organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later became a prominent Bay Area anti-Vietnam War activist. In 1967 he helped organize "Stop the Draft Week," a successful—if short-lived—street action to shut down the Army Induction Center in Oakland, California. For his leading role in this action, Mandel was tried (and acquitted) along with six others in the "Oakland 7" conspiracy trial.

Shortly thereafter Mandel became an active member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). He is currently a member of the General Executive Board of ILWU Local 6 in the Bay Area and a leader of the Militant Caucus, a class-struggle opposition within the union. Last month Mandel was convenor of the April 19 Committee Against Nazis, which organized a 1,200-strong mobilization of labor and minorities in San Francisco to stop the Nazis from celebrating Hitler's birthday.

Many leaders of the student struggles of the 60s and early 70s passed through the Democratic Party on their way out of politics. Others adopted China as the "socialist fatherland," and are today abject apologists for the anti-Soviet U.S.-China alliance and enemies of world revolution. The tragedy of the New Left is that so many who at one time despised the racist imperialism of the United States failed to find the revolutionary program to guide the oppressed in overthrowing that system.

Mandel's remarks are a guide for today's young militants who wish to
avoid the mistakes of the New Left, which led to an accommodation to U.S. imperialism. To find the road to revolution, one must examine the Trotskyist program. It is only the Spartacist League and its youth section,
the Spartacus Youth League, which fights to implement that program.

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In one very major sense, the new anti-draft movement is different from the New Left. I remember, when in 1965 Johnson rigged the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify bombing North Vietnam, that 3,000 people marched through the streets of San Francisco and ran an NLF (National Liberation Front) flag up on the Federal Building flagpole. Almost from the beginning the New Left had a very clear side.

Now the New Left came out of a series of experiences domestically. There had been the civil rights sit-ins beginning in 1960 in Greensboro, and an educational process had gone on. People initially started off involved in these struggles believing that reform could be effected within the context of capitalism. And the first Kennedy administration consciously played into that illusion. In fact, Kennedy gave money to the SNCC civil rights workers to do voter registration to bolster the illusion that if you vote Democratic things will improve in the U.S. And initially SNCC believed that. But in 1964 an organization called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had been organized by the left wing of the student civil rights movement, came to the Democratic Party convention and was simply rudely swept off the floor, and all the old white racists were seated in toto. People's eyes began to open.

It took the New Left a hell of a long time to draw the conclusion that the Democrats were bankrupt, and most of the New Left didn't. That's why the left today in the U.S. is very small. So I want to go through some of the mistakes that the New Left made and some of the New Left's history.

New Left Rejects History

The central mistake is that it rejected history, and it said that the old politics, the politics of the American CP (Communist Party), the question of what the Soviet Union is, what China is and what Cuba is, were irrelevant. It just closed the book, decided to start all over again, and it kept feeling its way along. So you start with militant non-violence with SNCC and the MFDP, then black power.

What "Stop the Draft Week" in 1967 represented in the largely white student
milieu was a conscious break from non-violence. We split with Joan Baez and David Harris. The first day of "Stop the Draft Week" they sat in at the induction center and made their moral protest; there were about 150 people. The second to fifth days of "Stop the Draft Week" 3,000 and then 10,000 students and some young workers and blacks from the city of Oakland fought the cops. We were going to show working-class kids in this country that they didn't have to burn their draft cards and set themselves up or go to jail, but that somebody was actually going to fight to stop the draft. Now, it was illusory. What can 3,000 or 10,000 students do? They can riot, but they sure as hell can't bring down state power. They couldn't even bring down state power in one city. But what it represented was a significant empirical lurch to the left: enough of this sitting down and saying, "Drag me off and put me in jail and then I can't do anything anymore."

At the same time that "Stop the Draft Week" was going on, Huey Newton was shot and the Panthers became nationally known. 1968 brought the Chicago demonstrations around the Democratic Party convention and the new element there was that black and white GIs at Fort Hood and Fort Carson rebelled and refused to go on riot duty in Chicago. Cops beating students wasn't so new, but that rebellion was new.

New Left and the Democratic Party

The anti-draft movement became consciously anti-imperialist in that period and started talking not about bad U.S. policy, but that there was some¬thing endemic in the capitalist system which had led to the Vietnam War. One of the real hallmarks of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in those days— when students in Berkeley were talking about anti-imperialism and the nature of the capitalist system—was telling people to link up with Vance Hartke, link up with the liberals in the Democratic Party, that it can be cleaned up and American capitalism can be reformed. They were trying to construct what is called a popular front, an alliance between leftist and working-class forces and capitalist forces.

1971 was the peak of the mass demonstrations. That was the year the 10,000 hippies and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members went to Washington to shut down the govern¬ment, and the government simply moved in and picked them all up and locked them up. They had no social power and the U.S. government, intent on maintaining its imperial empire, was not about to let 10,000 hippies of 10,000 people with Viet Cong flags disrupt its central government. You began to have splits from 1969 to 1971, splits all over the place in the left, as people groped for new solutions, because they kept coming up against their powerlessness.

So on the one extreme you had the Weathermen going underground and bombing the Capitol, and on the other extreme—and this is far and away the most significant, it was the death of the New Left—you had the McGovern campaign with literally tens of thousands of students who had been very active in the struggles against the war going back into the Democratic Party in the hope that the party that had sponsored the war in the first place would somehow clean up its act. And central in people going back into the Democratic Party was the SWP with their line that there weren't class questions posed in Vietnam: it was not the workers and peasants vs. the landlords and U.S. imperialism, it was simply a question of should American boys be killed. So under a socialist guise, it's the Tom Hayden line of today and it was the line of the various "doves" of those days: American boys shouldn't be killed; let's bring the troops home now. And the question that the New Left was groping toward was that imperialism isn't a policy. Imperialism is, as Lenin said a longtime ago, a phase of capitalist development—the international extension of markets, the dominance of finance capital. It's part of the growth of the capitalist system.

Destruction of the Black Panthers

Another key thing that happened was that as large parts of the antiwar movement went into the Democratic Party, the Black Panther Party was being annihilated and was also going back into the Democratic Party, having tried to substitute a heroic handful of black kids for mass working-class struggles. They went up against the police in city after city; they went up against the federal police and they were murdered systematically.

Now one of the key things in the defeat of the Panthers was that the left consciously hid its politics. The left had this theory that the most oppressed were the most revolutionary. Remember that the New Left had been inspired by the civil rights struggles in the South and by the Black Panthers. It looked around and saw that most important fights were being fought by blacks primarily so that there was a certain reflex reaction that blacks were by definition the most revolutionary.

A lot of the New Left simply did not know history. But there were parts of the left, like the CP and the SWP, that very much did know it. Unlike the Spartacist League (SL), they refused to criticize in a comradely way. They contributed to the defeat and destruction of the Panthers by not saying, "Look, we sympathize with what you are doing, but the power in the U .S. is in the factories, in those sections of the working class which are already in interracial unions and which already have some basic sense of solidarity of workers against bosses."

So, for instance, when 1 worked in General Motors in 1970, there was a Black Panther Party caucus in GM. They had about a dozen cadre and 200 to 300 active supporters. If, when the cops framed up Newton or Bobby Seale or murdered Bobby Button in Oakland, the Panther caucus (which had large
support among the white workers in the plant) had shut the plant down to demand cops out or to demand a political strike against the frame-up trials, that would have been power. That would have cost the American bourgeoisie millions of dollars and worried them about the fact that the working class in its organized forms was beginning to come into play.

New Left Turns to the Workers

You had at this same time whole sections of the left turning to the, but turning very empirically. The New Left was influenced by the 1968 general strike in France, which came within a hair's breadth of toppling the capitalist government. There was also a strike wave in the U.S. from 1969 to 1971. So, in 1970 the postal workers went out in an unprecedented strike, and the National Guard was brought in to break that strike. Essentially for the same reasons, Teamsters went out in the Midwest. For about a week and a half the news every night on TV would have scenes of National Guard convoys escorting scab trucks—the stuff that we all saw a little bit of during the miners strike in 1978—and there would be the Teamsters up in the hills shooting at the scab trucks.

One of the contingents of the National Guard that was used to try to break that Teamsters strike was the contingent that went over to Kent State in 1970 and massacred the students who were protesting the bombing of Cambodia. And there was a lesson there: that the students had no social power. Students can play an important role. Students carry ideas, students historically have been catalysts, students historically have played important roles in building revolutionary parties; but you shut a university down, so what? It is a symbolic act; it can have certain political impact. But if the National Guard had turned around and shot four or five or ten Teamsters in the Midwest, then the U.S. government faced the possibility of a nationwide strike of Teamsters in protest. And, there is the obvious link-up: the troops are shooting the Vietnamese in Vietnam, the troops are shooting blacks in the ghettos, and the troops are shooting striking workers. Well, what's going on here?

So there was an enormous opening for the left, and unfortunately, most of the left went into the labor movement in a very touchy-feely fashion. Maybe that's not doing it justice. Most of the left went in with the same prejudices that it carried. There's a connection here. In 1969 SDS split into two camps, and then one of those camps split a lot more.

One of those camps was Progressive Labor (PL)/SDS. The other was the Weathermen and all the Maoist groups which developed. The theory of the Weathermen was that the American working class, and centrally its white component, is a labor aristocracy which is hopelessly backward, hopelessly racist and which can never be won to revolutionary politics. Therefore: "forget about them, we're going to go underground, we'll be the Third World army in the cities and we'll blow up this and that and the other thing." Their lack of belief that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics was symmetrical with everybody who went into the Democratic Party, because going into the Democratic Party was essentially a statement that there is no other route for the working class in the U.S. except through the dominant capitalist parties.

PL/SDS said that the workers could be won to revolutionary politics, but PL had a lot of the same intellectual baggage. So it went into the labor movement thinking that workers were dumb, workers were bought off and that workers could not be educated. Therefore PL tended to jump back and forth. So that on the one hand, it had a very leftist impulse; on the other hand, it had a theory that you had to accommodate to existing consciousness. For instance, on the woman question, PL opposed free abortion on demand because male chauvinism is rather rampant in American society and PL simply accommodated to that backwardness.

Then there was another side to it. PL opposed both open admissions and free college education. When this was raised in a successful student strike at the City College of New York, PL opposed it because it decided that workers would be bought off if their kids could go to college. Now, what kind of crap is that? What lies there is the basic assumption that you better suffer a lot or you'll never be a revolutionary. It is the same old "the most oppressed are the most revolutionary." In fact, the most oppressed are very often the most backward.

The second half of the SDS split in 1969 was the Revolutionary YouthMovement, a bloc of the terrorist Weathermen and assorted Maoists which rapidly splintered into a myriad of competing groups. All the Maoist groupings went through the same thing. One has to examine, in any given instance like Afghanistan, what are the forces at work, which side should you be on- and draw essential conclusions. What was wrong with the New Left was that it had no program to run on. When people vote for us they know they are voting against the capitalist system and against the Democratic Party, for the workers running their own government.

Massachusetts is Wisconsin Public Employee Unions Country- Boston, Massachusetts State House Rally, Tuesday February 22, 2011,4:00-6:00PM –The Lines Are Draw-All Out In Support Of The Wisconsin Public Employee Unions-Hands Off All Our Public Employee Unions!

Click on the headline to link to an announcement of a labor-centered rally at the Massachusetts State House on Tuesday February 22, 2011 in support of the beleaguered Wisconsin State Public Employee Unions.

Markin comment:

Sometimes politics, our working class-oriented politics, is a no-brainer. This occasion is one of those times. The lines are drawn very visibly now with the yahoos of the Tea Party movement entering the fray. “Which side are you on?” is the question of the hour. All out in support of the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions!
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Repost from American Left History


Friday, February 18, 2011


Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators

Markin comment:

I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).

On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.

Playwright's Corner- Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American playwright Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_Jones

Markin comment:

This entry provides a little background information for the play (and movie) that helped, along with Othello, define Paul Robeson as the epitome of the strong black man, a man for every racist, and every Uncle Tom, to fear. Period.

*Films to While Away The Class Struggle by-“Old Man River Keeps Rolling Along”-The Work Of Paul Robeson

Click on the title to link to an American Left History blog entry of a book reviewing the life of Paul Robeson as background for this film review>

February Is Black History Month

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Portrait Of An Artist, Paul Robeson, The Criterion Collection, 2007

Paul Robeson’s name can be found in many places in this space for his extraordinary (untutored) vocal talents singing songs of freedom, of the struggle for human dignity and for artistic effect (Emperor Jones, etc.). The most famous, or from a leftist perspective, infamous use of that instrument was the Peekskill (New York) concert of 1949 where he, his fellow progressives, including Communist Party members and sympathizers, literally had to fight off the fascistic locals in the throes of the post-World War II Cold War “red scare” that dominated my childhood and many others from my generation of ’68.

But that skill hardly ends the list of talents that Paul Robeson used in his life: scholar, All-American football player (at one point denied that honor because of his politics0, folklorist, actor, and, most importantly, political activist round out the main features. This Criterion Collection series of four discs concentrates on his film career (and other short biographic and memory pieces) especially the early work where he had to play groveling, simple-minded blacks and did so against type (his ever present black and proud type). I will give a short summary below to show the range of his work, although his real role as Shakespeare’s Othello, done on the stage, is by all accounts, his definitive work, as is, to my mind Emperor Jones for his film work.

That said, Paul Robeson, and I were political opponents on the left. Whether he was a member or just a sympathizer of the Stalinized Communist Party (or to use a quaint work form the old Cold War days, fellow-traveler) he nevertheless, if one looks closely at his speeches and comments stayed very close to the American Communist Party "party line" of the times (whatever that was, or rather whatever Moscow called for), including the ritualistic denunciation of Trotskyites as counter-revolutionaries, etc. He, however, was an eloquent spokesman for blacks here in America and internationally, a speaker against the Cold War madness, and a fighter for national liberation and anti-colonial struggles a kindred spirit. Moreover, unlike others, including poet Langston Hughes and novelist Richard Wright no “turncoat” and held his ground despite its effect on his career, his ability to earn a living, and his ability to leave America. Thus, he, along with the anarchist Emma Goldman, is one of those contradictory political characters from the past that I have a “soft” spot for. Paul Robeson’s voice and presence, in any case, with this comprehensive retrospective (and others) will always be there. I wish, wish like hell, he could have been with us when the deal went down and communists had to choose between Stalinism and Trotskyism.
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Emperor Jones, a classic Robeson performance is the main feature of the first disc. It is almost painful to watch this brilliant Eugene O’Neill play brought to the screen in 1933 for its language (the ‘n’ word), it depiction of blacks, in the cities and the jungle as servile or loony, and merely the white man’s fodder and for its primitive cinematic effects. But Paul Robeson IS Emperor Jones. No amount of fool talk, bad dialogue, didactic scripting can take away the power of his performance, foolishly tempting the fates, and the white man, or not. This is a powerful black man, period. His singing, especially of Water Boy, of course, needs no comment from me.

The other part of this disc is a sequence short piece on his life and times, as well as the effect hat he had on then up-and-coming young black actors and singers like James Earl Jones and Ruby Dee. This is a good short biographic sketch, although I find it hard to believe that throughout the various comments the fact of his association with the American Communist Party is no mentioned by anyone or I did not hear it mentioned by the narrator once. Robeson is characterized as merely a black social activist. This is a disservice to his memory, and a form of historical distortion that I have found elsewhere (notably in a Howard Zinn tribute documentary done by Matt Damon).The American Communist Party, our left-wing political enemy or not, was part of the working class movement in this country, at some points an important part, and to deny that is to deny our left-wing history. No, this falsification by omission will not do.

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Paul Robeson

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Paul Robeson.

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February, and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.