Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011
Stop Operating Engineers Local 701 Scabbing!
ILWU Battles Union Busters
Longview, WA
JULY 29—The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Longview, Washington, is locked in battle with a union-busting international consortium intent on breaching the ILWU’s hold on loading and unloading ships on the West Coast. EGT Development—a joint venture between St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Itochu Corporation (an import-export conglomerate based in Japan) and the South Korean shipping company Pan Ocean STX—is in the process of opening a new, $200 million export grain terminal in Longview, the first such facility built in the U.S. in over two decades. It wants to keep out the ILWU, which works grain terminals in the Pacific Northwest.
The 200-man ILWU Longview Local 21 has stepped up to the fight. On July 11, about 100 longshoremen and their supporters tore down a chain-link fence and occupied EGT grounds, demanding that the company honor its lease with the Port of Longview, which stipulates that it must hire Local 21 members. Some 90 protesters were arrested and later charged with trespassing. But that didn’t keep 600 more from around the region from blocking the railroad tracks in the dead of night on July 13-14 to stop a 107-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train carrying grain to the plant, now in its testing phase. The train was diverted to Vancouver, Washington, and BNSF suspended train service to the Longview terminal.
On July 22, a militant ILWU picket forced EGT itself to temporarily suspend operations. A major show of force by cops, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers three days later allowed the company to reopen the facility, with police escorting in 15-20 scabs. Seven unionists were arrested on the picket line, including one on felony charges. The cops have since forced the ILWU to limit the number of pickets at the EGT gate to 16, moving all other protesters to a site over a half mile away from the terminal. With some 100 ILWU members and supporters facing charges, Cowlitz County authorities are continuing their investigation and may charge others. Labor must demand: Drop the charges against the Longview unionists! Victory to the ILWU!
The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, wrote to the Cowlitz County prosecutor protesting the arrests. The PDC noted in a letter of solidarity to Local 21: “Your fight has rightly won the support of trade unions throughout the region and of ILWU locals up and down the West Coast. The police attacks on your protests are a threat to unionized workers on the docks and throughout the U.S.” In addition to longshoremen from across the region, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Pulp and Paper Workers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other construction unions have participated in ILWU actions in Longview, which is located on the Columbia River. In early June, over 1,200 rallied in front of EGT Development’s headquarters in Portland, some 50 miles upriver from Longview.
The overwhelming support indicates the high stakes at play. Grain export is big business in the Pacific Northwest. More than 47 percent of U.S. wheat exports use the Columbia-Snake River gateway. With demand for grain expected to skyrocket in Asia, grain export terminals in most ports in the region are expanding. All these facilities operate with ILWU labor under the Northwest Grainhandler’s Agreement. If the ILWU loses in Longview, the defeat would establish a non-union beachhead for the profit-hungry international conglomerates.
“This is much bigger than Longview,” said Tacoma-based ILWU Local 23 president Scott Mason (Labor Notes, July 21). “It’s about organized labor and not having a Wisconsin.” In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters flooded the streets of the state capital earlier this year to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But the union misleaders diverted this militancy into boosting the fortunes of the Democratic Party through a campaign to recall Republican officeholders.
It’s about time that the ILWU exercises its power, which lies in its ability to shut down the ports and interrupt the flow of cargo up and down the coast. But so far, the ILWU International has shown no sign of mobilizing coastwide in defense of its embattled Longview local, even as the union’s future is posed. To win this showdown, Local 21 must continue to look to their allies in the labor movement and not bank on the “good graces” of the port bosses, the Democratic Party politicians, who represent the class enemy, or the courts, which routinely issue anti-strike injunctions. Solidarity from the rail workers in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLE) could be crucial to stopping the shipment of scab grain.
Backstabbing Treachery of IUOE Local 701
Despicably, International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701 is openly crossing the ILWU’s picket lines. This scabbing began after EGT Development announced on July 17 that it had signed a five-year deal with General Construction Company from Federal Way, Washington, to operate its Longview facility. IUOE Local 701, whose members work for General Construction, agreed to take 25 to 35 of the plant’s projected 50 jobs. The local had already been excluded from the Longview/Kelso Building & Construction Trades Council for refusing to sign a “letter of solidarity” committing them to abide by union jurisdictional lines and honor picket lines. Its scabbing at the grain terminal has been condemned by the Executive Board of the Oregon state AFL-CIO.
EGT Development is retailing the lie that Local 701’s scabbing is a union jurisdictional dispute. But the conglomerate has run a union-busting operation in Longview since they broke ground on the facility in 2009. The company hired a Minnesota-based general contractor that in turn hired subcontractors employing largely non-union labor. In January, gearing up to open the new terminal in time for the fall harvest, EGT Development sued the Port of Longview, arguing that they were not bound by the Port’s agreement with the ILWU. EGT lawyers boast that they will save $1 million in operating costs by refusing to hire ILWU members.
EGT was in negotiations with the ILWU until talks broke down earlier this year over the issue of overtime pay for 12-hour shifts. The ILWU’s longshore contract with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) limits work to ten hours, with overtime paid after eight. The union’s dispatch system, intended to share available work equitably, allows workers to vary their jobs day-to-day. This is a real safety issue, as monotonous and dangerous work on bulk and break-bulk cargo is the bread and butter of the small ILWU locals in the region. The ILWU must stand firm: No substandard contracts! The work at Longview must be covered by the standard Grainhandler’s Agreement!
In using another union as a tool for its union-busting, EGT is following a playbook already tested by East Coast shipping bosses. In 1993, the labor-hating Holt family hired Teamsters to replace the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at the Holts’ Gloucester City terminal on the Delaware River near Philadelphia. After the AFL-CIO ruled that the Teamsters had no jurisdiction, the Gloucester local morphed into an out-and-out company union. Last year, Del Monte Co., notorious for union-busting worldwide, tore up its contract with the ILA (despite the union’s offer of massive concessions) and moved its operation to the Gloucester terminal under the jurisdiction of the company’s “Independent Dock Workers Local 1.”
In response, last September ILA members shut down docks in Philly and the New York/New Jersey area in a two-day protest. The New York Shipping Association then slapped the ILA with a lawsuit demanding over $5 million in “damages” for the port shutdown (see “ILA Under Attack Over Strike to Save Jobs,” WV No. 971, 7 January). Likewise in Charleston, South Carolina, Ports America and the SSA stevedoring firm are suing ILA Local 1422 after longshoremen walked off the job in May to protest the use of non-union labor on the docks. The ILWU’s Local 10 in the Bay Area and its president Richard Mead are facing a similar lawsuit from the PMA, which is demanding compensation for losses incurred when Local 10 members overwhelmingly stayed away from work on April 4 to support Wisconsin workers. This was the only labor action on that supposed “national day of action” (see “All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10!” WV No. 979, 29 April). The ILWU’s Dispatcher has yet to even mention the suit against Local 10.
EGT Development’s federal court suit against the Port of Longview won’t be heard until next year. But in the meantime, the Port has asked a judge to order EGT to honor its lease and hire Local 21 labor. The ILWU has made itself a party to the suit on the side of the Port. Workers should be under no illusion that the courts are on labor’s side. The judicial system is an integral part of the repressive apparatus of a state that exists only to defend the interests of the ruling class—the tiny minority that owns industry and lives off the toil of working people. Just as the cops have arrested Longview ILWUers seeking to defend their livelihoods, so too will the courts enforce capitalist “law and order” against labor. It is through victory on the picket line that the ILWU will prevail.
The Poison of Protectionism
Obscuring the irreconcilable class divide between labor and its exploiters and their state is at the heart of the trade-union bureaucrats’ class-collaborationist policies. To this end, they portray Longview as one united “community,” up against gigantic multinational corporations that give away “local” jobs to people from elsewhere while the small port town struggles with an unemployment rate of 12-14 percent.
Protesters at ILWU actions have carried signs reading, “Employ Local Workers for Local Jobs.” But the operating engineers who are scabbing on Local 21 are local workers, and unionized ones at that! In announcing its scab deal, EGT boasted: “We’re willing to hire union labor, and we got what we think is a good agreement with General Construction. Local, family-wage jobs is a really good news story.”
The port bosses already try to play one longshore local against another in the competition for work. This is the road to ruin for the multiracial ILWU, whose solidarity hinges on its coastwide membership. “Local workers for local jobs” is but an echo of the protectionist poison of “American jobs for American workers” with which the labor misleaders undermine class struggle, preaching the lie that workers in the U.S. have common interests with American-based corporations and the U.S. imperialist state that defends capitalist interests.
But anyone who follows the red-white-and-blue jingoists at the top of the AFL-CIO into thinking they will get a better deal from an “American” or “local” company should take a hard look at Wal-Mart, General Motors or…General Construction. Corporations, be they U.S.-based entities or international conglomerates, are in business only to make a profit for their shareholders from the sweat and blood of those they employ. The true allies of workers here are not the “local” bosses, but fellow workers across the continent and around the world.
The poison of protectionism pits U.S. workers against their class brothers and sisters around the world, thereby helping to fuel the anti-immigrant bigotry that has been a key factor in undermining union power. The longshore unions on both coasts have become isolated bastions of organized labor amid a sea of unorganized and largely immigrant port truckers as well as non-union intermodal yard workers and inland warehouse workers. The situation cries out for a massive campaign to organize these unorganized workers into solid industrial unions, including a national union of all port workers. To wage such a struggle, the unions must champion the rights of all foreign-born workers employed in the ports. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
A new leadership of the labor movement, imbued with the program of working-class independence from the bourgeois state, can only be forged in the crucible of such class struggle. That leadership will be the militant advocate of a workers party that fights for a workers government, built in intransigent opposition to all the parties of the capitalist class. It will arm workers with the understanding that their historic interests lie in freeing humanity from the anarchy and misery of an economic system based on production for profit instead of human need.
Monday, August 22, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Hunger Strike In California Prison Hell (Pelican Bay)- From Attica To Pelican Bay Never Forget!
Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011
Hunger Strike in California Prison Hell
JULY 29—For three weeks, inmates locked in the solitary concrete isolation chambers of the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s notorious Pelican Bay “supermax” prison starved themselves simply in order to be accorded some vestige of humanity from their jailers. At its height, the hunger strike, which began on July 1, was joined by 6,600 inmates at 13 other prisons in the state. The prisoners’ demands—for an end to group punishment and enforced “snitching”; for access to educational and other programs; to be allowed human contact, weekly phone calls, access to sunlight and nutritional food—were strikingly minimal. This fact is itself testament to the dehumanizing torture of solitary confinement.
As Pennsylvania death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal put it in a solidarity statement, “These men are killing themselves potentially for fresh air and sunlight.” SHU prisoners are locked in windowless concrete cells for 22 and a half hours a day under the incessant glare of fluorescent lights and behind solid metal doors that do not even allow eye contact with fellow inmates. The only “reprieve” is a possible 90 minutes a day in a 26-by-10-foot recreation yard surrounded by 20-foot-high walls. As an op-ed piece in the New York Times (17 July) titled “Barbarous Confinement” noted: “Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations…. Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ the reasoning goes.”
To be branded a “gang member”—a tag that can be applied at whim—is a one-way ticket to the SHU, where many prisoners have languished for years and some for decades. One way out, besides death, is “debriefing”—snitching out other prisoners as gang members, itself a possible death sentence for not only the prisoner but his family as well. As the hunger strike spread, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) railed that the willingness of thousands of prisoners to starve themselves was further evidence of “the power, influence and reach of prison gangs”!
The strike at Pelican Bay ended on July 21 with the CDCR agreeing to allow SHU prisoners to have wall calendars and woolen caps to wear in freezing cells during the winter, as well as promising some educational programs and a review of the “debriefing” procedures.
The super maximum jails like Pelican Bay, begun in the 1980s, were designed, in the words of one journalist, for “psychological emasculation, to crush the spirit, strip a man of the last vestige of defiance and force him to conform to the most punitive system the courts will allow” (London Sunday Times, 23 May 1993). High-tech sensory deprivation chambers like the SHU throw into stark relief the nature of the bourgeois state as an apparatus of organized violence to preserve the rule and profits of racist American capitalism.
The prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society, a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. Elementary humanity demands that the SHU and all other solitary confinement chambers be abolished. But it will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to destroy the capitalists’ prison system and sweep away all the barbaric institutions of the bourgeois state.
From Attica to Pelican Bay
The Pelican Bay hunger strike took place on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the murder of San Quentin prisoner and Black Panther Party spokesman George Jackson, who was gunned down by prison guards who alleged that he was “trying to escape.” The murder of Jackson was the spark that ignited the multiracial rebellion of inmates at Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971. Declaring: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such,” the Attica prisoners demanded decent medical care, a minimum wage for prison work, rehabilitation and education programs and an end to censorship of reading material.
In their struggle against the conditions in America’s prisons, Jackson and the Attica inmates reflected the mass social struggles that were taking place outside the prison walls, from the “black power” movement to the protests against the Vietnam War. One of Jackson’s comrades was Hugo Pinell, who became a leader of the prisoners’ rights struggle in the late 1960s while incarcerated in California. The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have long fought for freedom for Pinell, a Pelican Bay SHU prisoner who took part in the hunger strike. Pinell has been locked in solitary for some 40 years but remains unbroken and unbowed.
George Jackson was killed and the Attica revolt crushed with particular vengeance because the capitalist rulers feared that the prisoners had come to understand their repression in political terms. When New York governor Nelson Rockefeller moved in for the kill at Attica, he declared that the “revolutionary tactics of militants” were a “serious threat to the ability of free government to preserve order.” Four days after the revolt began, the state unleashed a 1,000-strong assault team. Twenty-nine inmates were killed. After the slaughter, hundreds of naked, overwhelmingly black prisoners were lined up in the yard like slaves at an auction in the Confederate South. Here was a searing image of the reality of black oppression in the U.S. Built on the foundation of black chattel slavery, the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society endures as a fundamental prop for preserving capitalist rule in the United States.
Forty years after Attica, America’s prisons are overflowing with black and Latino youth, the majority of them rounded up under the “anti-crime” crusade and especially the “war on drugs.” Republican president Richard Nixon launched a “war on crime” that was centrally aimed at the repression of black militants and the inner-city poor following the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s. This campaign was augmented as deindustrialization began to hit a wide swath of the country in the late 1970s. Largely due to the “war on drugs,” by the mid 1990s the prison population had grown by a million—one place behind bars for every job lost on the assembly lines.
The lives of inner-city blacks, who once supplied a “reserve army of labor” to fill jobs during times of economic expansion, were written off as expendable, no longer worth providing even the minimal subsistence needed to raise the next generation of wage slaves. Virtually every social program benefiting the ghetto and barrio poor was slashed. Having created the conditions in which black and Latino youth had little or no way out of desperate poverty, the rulers branded them as criminal “outlaws.”
The “war on drugs” went into high gear under Republican president Ronald Reagan, with the avid support of black Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who joined in the ideological crusade against ghetto youth as drug-pushing predators. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, the majority of whom were convicted on non-violent drug charges. The Spartacist League calls to decriminalize drugs. We oppose all laws against “crimes without victims”—from drug use and gambling to prostitution and pornography—which at bottom are designed to regiment the population in this viciously racist, bigoted, class-divided society.
As we wrote 16 years ago in “Lockdown U.S.A.” (WV No. 618, 10 March 1995): “The bourgeoisie’s vicious drive to imprison and execute ever-increasing numbers of ghetto youth reflects a sinister impulse to genocide against a layer of the black population.” The election of America’s first black president has not changed this cruel calculus of torture and death. While one in four black children have lost their fathers to prison by age 14, Barack Obama lectures young black men for having insufficient “family values.”
This is a common refrain of the black petty bourgeoisie. A thin layer of blacks benefited from the affirmative action and “war on poverty” programs instituted in response to the civil rights struggles and to quell the ghetto revolts. Today, much of the black middle class reviles the inner-city poor as “bringing down the race.” As Commander-in-Chief, Obama is the overseer of the plantation of racist American capitalism, which subjects tens of thousands of black, Latino and other U.S. citizens locked up in solitary to the kind of horrors perpetrated in the name of the “war on terror” against prisoners in Guantánamo.
Cruel but Not Unusual
With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the prison population of the entire planet. Over 7.3 million men, women and children are now in jail or prison or on parole or probation. And California leads the nation in the number of people behind bars. The state’s prison population exploded from 25,000 in 1980 to 168,000 in 2009. In the same period, 23 new prisons were built. But this has not been enough to warehouse those put on the state’s conveyor belt to mass incarceration.
California prisons are packed to almost 200 percent capacity in conditions so depraved that a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that they violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” It is notable that the ruling came from a Court that has itself worked assiduously to shred prisoners’ rights, as well as those of the population as a whole. But at bottom the ruling represents little more than an application of some cosmetics to the barbarism of the U.S. “justice” system.
Going back nearly three decades, a series of lower court orders have directed California prison authorities to relieve overcrowding, provide medical care and stop abuse by prison guards. In 2005, a California federal court found it to be an “uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” Such “deficiencies” include denial of medical care as well as the risk to life and limb that comes with being confined with hundreds of others, triple-bunked in gyms and cafeterias, for 24 hours a day in conditions described as a “giant game of survivor.” Mentally ill prisoners are locked up in “telephone-booth sized cages without toilets.” One prisoner a week kills himself, a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national average. Even the former head of the prisons in Texas, the execution capital of the U.S., described California’s prisons as “appalling” and “inhumane,” adding that “in more than 35 years of prison work experience I have never seen anything like it.”
Such conditions are the product of literally thousands of laws enacted by Democratic and Republican governors alike, over the past 30 years. In his first round in the governor’s office, when he was known as Governor Moonbeam by those who saw him as the voice of “la-la land” liberalism, Jerry Brown, a Democrat, knocked down any possibility for early release. Most rehabilitation programs were eliminated, and the length of mandatory prison terms was increased. The supercharged “tough on crime” climate laid the basis for the passage of Proposition 184 in 1994. The harshest “three strikes” law in the country, it mandates 25 years to life for any third offense by those with two prior serious convictions. Among those behind bars for life under this law are people convicted on their “third strike” of stealing $2 socks or $20 work gloves.
Anti-gang injunctions make it a crime if the cops find you anywhere in public in the company of an alleged gang member. Once you’re railroaded to prison, the brand of “gang affiliation” can land you in the torture chambers of solitary confinement. Even after serving their time, prisoners remain ensnared by laws that bar ex-felons from public housing, food stamps and many other benefits. California has 210 laws and regulations preventing felons from getting jobs or licenses—even to be a barber, an interior designer or a guide-dog trainer. Criminal background checks are mandatory on most employment applications. Seventy-seven percent of those released from prison in California end up back behind bars—the highest recidivism rate in the nation.
In 2009, Lovelle Mixon, a young black man raised on the destitute streets of the East Oakland ghetto who was out on parole, blew away four cops with an assault rifle in two separate confrontations after he was pulled over by the police. An article in the San Francisco Bay View (24 March 2009) remarked at the time: “Lovelle Mixon was America’s worst nightmare: the Black man with nothing to lose.” As an ex-felon on the streets, he had no prospects. When confronted by the cops, his only future was to be sent back to jail, so he went to his death in a hail of police gunfire instead. More than 500 people came out for Mixon’s funeral, their rage and defiance of the occupying army of police on their streets captured in a text message reading: “Us: 4—Them: 1.”
To preserve their power and profits against those they exploit and oppress, the capitalist rulers erect ever more monstrous institutions of coercion, suppression and death, vastly expanding police powers on the streets of the U.S. while their military marauds over the planet. The medieval tortures of the rack and the screw have been replaced by the high-tech barbarism of solitary confinement, the death row gurneys of state-sanctioned murder or the more “normal” conditions of being packed in overcrowded prisons like animals in abattoirs. Unspeakably cruel, these conditions are not, however, unusual in racist America. On the contrary, such barbarism is the product of a system that has long outlived any measure of progress.
The “Worst of the Worst”: California Prison Guards
Among the biggest beneficiaries of the “war on crime” have been the sadistic jailers themselves. In the past 30 years, the size of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has grown from 5,600 to 33,000, their pay more than tripling during the same period from $21,000 to $73,000 a year. One of the most powerful political forces in the state, the CCPOA has poured millions of dollars into speeding up the assembly line to prison. Promoting a series of reactionary initiatives—from the 1972 reinstatement of California’s death penalty to the 1994 “three strikes” law—this “union” has been a moving force behind the defeat of any attempt to alleviate prison conditions. The hellish prison conditions are their bread and butter. One guard enthused: “With ‘Three Strikes’ and the overcrowding we’re going to experience with that, we’re going to need to build at least three prisons a year for the next five years. Each one of those institutions will take approximately 1,000 employees.”
If there is any criminal gang in California’s prisons, the guards are it, genuinely the “worst of the worst” violent predators. According to testimony in a class-action suit brought by 3,600 Pelican Bay prisoners in the mid 1990s, California prison guards shot and killed more than 30 inmates between 1989 and 1994. Eight Corcoran State Prison guards were indicted for staging “blood sport” fights between inmates in the Secure Housing Unit. In 2010, an investigation by a Sacramento Bee journalist exposed the vicious racism and brutality of guards in the “Behavior Modification Unit” in the High Desert Prison, describing how one black prisoner was shackled, pepper-sprayed and then “paraded naked through the cell block in a way that that prisoner and others who witnessed the event regarded as a kind of image of modern slavery.”
A throwback to the plantation overseers in the Confederate slavocracy, the guards are well-compensated for “doing their job.” While savaging social programs for the poor, sick and aged in the name of balancing the state’s budget, Jerry Brown increased the CCPOA’s vacation and other benefits earlier this year. This was more than a simple payoff for the $2 million the prison guards provided for Brown’s election campaign. The misleaders of the public workers unions shelled out millions for the Democrats, but that didn’t spare their members’ jobs, pensions and other benefits from the budget-cutting ax. The political power of the bonapartist thugs who run and police the prisons is fed by the racist rulers’ endless “anti-crime” campaigns. Having secured ever more fabulous wealth through grinding the working class and poor, the capitalist class is well aware that it is creating a massive sea of discontent at the bottom of this society, and it spares no expense in increasing the powers of state repression—from the cops to the prisons.
Yet the armed thugs of the capitalist rulers are welcomed into the labor movement by the sellout misleaders of the trade unions. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the service the union bureaucrats provide as the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. In defense of the profits and competitiveness of U.S. imperialism, they allowed the industrial unions to be ravaged. Now they are lying down in the face of an all-out war against public workers unions, offering to share in the “sacrifice” while channeling the anger of their ranks into renewed support for the Democratic Party. To maintain their dues base, they organize the strikebreaking cops and the sadistic jailers whose purpose is the violent suppression of the working class, the ghetto and barrio poor and all those perceived as potential “enemies of the state.” Cops and prison guards out of the unions!
Fight for a Socialist America!
While they have written off a whole generation of black youth as criminal outlaws, the rulers remain fearful that prisoners might develop some social and political consciousness. Being caught with a book by George Jackson is enough to be branded a gang member and sent to solitary. In 2005, black death row prisoner Tookie Williams was denied clemency by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In sending Williams to his death, Schwarzenegger particularly singled out Williams’ dedication of his 1998 book Life in Prison to, among others, George Jackson as “a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems.”
It was the violence and brutality of the prisons, combined with the social upheavals of the time, that propelled George Jackson and others to see their oppression as a product of the capitalist system. Even so, as prisoners, divorced from any role in capitalist production, they had no social power. The struggles of that time were subject to both bloody repression and co-optation by the ruling class. Today, the Pelican Bay hunger strike is a desperate product of that legacy and of the subsequent dearth of class and other social struggle against the capitalist rulers, who are loyally served by the trade-union bureaucracy. The destitution and mass joblessness in the inner cities have likewise increasingly robbed a whole layer of the black population of any social power, reducing many ghetto youth to a reactive glorification of lumpenism as a reflection of their own desperate struggle to survive by whatever means necessary.
The multiracial working class is the only force in capitalist society with both the social power and historic interest to eradicate a system rooted in its exploitation. The black workers who remain a militant backbone of the unions provide a critical human bridge for linking the power of the working class to the anger of the inner cities. To unleash this power, it is necessary to wage a political struggle to break the chains forged by the trade-union bureaucracy which have shackled labor to its exploiters.
As we wrote in “Massacre at Attica,” the front-page article of the first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971):
“We support the most militant struggle against the state. We only seek to give that struggle the strategic perspectives that will lead to the workers conquering political power….
“The heroic Attica martyrs and George Jackson will long be remembered for their courageous stand against overwhelming odds. It is not the crimes (real or alleged) for which the prisoners were jailed, but the stand they took—rising far above capitalist-imposed ignorance, poverty, brutality and frame-up—for justice and against oppression, that the world’s working people will remember.”
The purpose of the Spartacist League is to build the multiracial revolutionary party that will lead the workers in the fight to shatter the capitalist state and all its instruments of incarceration, torture and death. When the workers internationally take political power and put the wealth now appropriated by the tiny class of exploiters to serving the needs of humanity, they will lay the material basis for achieving an egalitarian communist society, doing away with any need for a state apparatus of repression.
5 August 2011
Hunger Strike in California Prison Hell
JULY 29—For three weeks, inmates locked in the solitary concrete isolation chambers of the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s notorious Pelican Bay “supermax” prison starved themselves simply in order to be accorded some vestige of humanity from their jailers. At its height, the hunger strike, which began on July 1, was joined by 6,600 inmates at 13 other prisons in the state. The prisoners’ demands—for an end to group punishment and enforced “snitching”; for access to educational and other programs; to be allowed human contact, weekly phone calls, access to sunlight and nutritional food—were strikingly minimal. This fact is itself testament to the dehumanizing torture of solitary confinement.
As Pennsylvania death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal put it in a solidarity statement, “These men are killing themselves potentially for fresh air and sunlight.” SHU prisoners are locked in windowless concrete cells for 22 and a half hours a day under the incessant glare of fluorescent lights and behind solid metal doors that do not even allow eye contact with fellow inmates. The only “reprieve” is a possible 90 minutes a day in a 26-by-10-foot recreation yard surrounded by 20-foot-high walls. As an op-ed piece in the New York Times (17 July) titled “Barbarous Confinement” noted: “Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations…. Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ the reasoning goes.”
To be branded a “gang member”—a tag that can be applied at whim—is a one-way ticket to the SHU, where many prisoners have languished for years and some for decades. One way out, besides death, is “debriefing”—snitching out other prisoners as gang members, itself a possible death sentence for not only the prisoner but his family as well. As the hunger strike spread, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) railed that the willingness of thousands of prisoners to starve themselves was further evidence of “the power, influence and reach of prison gangs”!
The strike at Pelican Bay ended on July 21 with the CDCR agreeing to allow SHU prisoners to have wall calendars and woolen caps to wear in freezing cells during the winter, as well as promising some educational programs and a review of the “debriefing” procedures.
The super maximum jails like Pelican Bay, begun in the 1980s, were designed, in the words of one journalist, for “psychological emasculation, to crush the spirit, strip a man of the last vestige of defiance and force him to conform to the most punitive system the courts will allow” (London Sunday Times, 23 May 1993). High-tech sensory deprivation chambers like the SHU throw into stark relief the nature of the bourgeois state as an apparatus of organized violence to preserve the rule and profits of racist American capitalism.
The prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society, a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. Elementary humanity demands that the SHU and all other solitary confinement chambers be abolished. But it will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to destroy the capitalists’ prison system and sweep away all the barbaric institutions of the bourgeois state.
From Attica to Pelican Bay
The Pelican Bay hunger strike took place on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the murder of San Quentin prisoner and Black Panther Party spokesman George Jackson, who was gunned down by prison guards who alleged that he was “trying to escape.” The murder of Jackson was the spark that ignited the multiracial rebellion of inmates at Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971. Declaring: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such,” the Attica prisoners demanded decent medical care, a minimum wage for prison work, rehabilitation and education programs and an end to censorship of reading material.
In their struggle against the conditions in America’s prisons, Jackson and the Attica inmates reflected the mass social struggles that were taking place outside the prison walls, from the “black power” movement to the protests against the Vietnam War. One of Jackson’s comrades was Hugo Pinell, who became a leader of the prisoners’ rights struggle in the late 1960s while incarcerated in California. The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have long fought for freedom for Pinell, a Pelican Bay SHU prisoner who took part in the hunger strike. Pinell has been locked in solitary for some 40 years but remains unbroken and unbowed.
George Jackson was killed and the Attica revolt crushed with particular vengeance because the capitalist rulers feared that the prisoners had come to understand their repression in political terms. When New York governor Nelson Rockefeller moved in for the kill at Attica, he declared that the “revolutionary tactics of militants” were a “serious threat to the ability of free government to preserve order.” Four days after the revolt began, the state unleashed a 1,000-strong assault team. Twenty-nine inmates were killed. After the slaughter, hundreds of naked, overwhelmingly black prisoners were lined up in the yard like slaves at an auction in the Confederate South. Here was a searing image of the reality of black oppression in the U.S. Built on the foundation of black chattel slavery, the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society endures as a fundamental prop for preserving capitalist rule in the United States.
Forty years after Attica, America’s prisons are overflowing with black and Latino youth, the majority of them rounded up under the “anti-crime” crusade and especially the “war on drugs.” Republican president Richard Nixon launched a “war on crime” that was centrally aimed at the repression of black militants and the inner-city poor following the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s. This campaign was augmented as deindustrialization began to hit a wide swath of the country in the late 1970s. Largely due to the “war on drugs,” by the mid 1990s the prison population had grown by a million—one place behind bars for every job lost on the assembly lines.
The lives of inner-city blacks, who once supplied a “reserve army of labor” to fill jobs during times of economic expansion, were written off as expendable, no longer worth providing even the minimal subsistence needed to raise the next generation of wage slaves. Virtually every social program benefiting the ghetto and barrio poor was slashed. Having created the conditions in which black and Latino youth had little or no way out of desperate poverty, the rulers branded them as criminal “outlaws.”
The “war on drugs” went into high gear under Republican president Ronald Reagan, with the avid support of black Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who joined in the ideological crusade against ghetto youth as drug-pushing predators. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, the majority of whom were convicted on non-violent drug charges. The Spartacist League calls to decriminalize drugs. We oppose all laws against “crimes without victims”—from drug use and gambling to prostitution and pornography—which at bottom are designed to regiment the population in this viciously racist, bigoted, class-divided society.
As we wrote 16 years ago in “Lockdown U.S.A.” (WV No. 618, 10 March 1995): “The bourgeoisie’s vicious drive to imprison and execute ever-increasing numbers of ghetto youth reflects a sinister impulse to genocide against a layer of the black population.” The election of America’s first black president has not changed this cruel calculus of torture and death. While one in four black children have lost their fathers to prison by age 14, Barack Obama lectures young black men for having insufficient “family values.”
This is a common refrain of the black petty bourgeoisie. A thin layer of blacks benefited from the affirmative action and “war on poverty” programs instituted in response to the civil rights struggles and to quell the ghetto revolts. Today, much of the black middle class reviles the inner-city poor as “bringing down the race.” As Commander-in-Chief, Obama is the overseer of the plantation of racist American capitalism, which subjects tens of thousands of black, Latino and other U.S. citizens locked up in solitary to the kind of horrors perpetrated in the name of the “war on terror” against prisoners in Guantánamo.
Cruel but Not Unusual
With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the prison population of the entire planet. Over 7.3 million men, women and children are now in jail or prison or on parole or probation. And California leads the nation in the number of people behind bars. The state’s prison population exploded from 25,000 in 1980 to 168,000 in 2009. In the same period, 23 new prisons were built. But this has not been enough to warehouse those put on the state’s conveyor belt to mass incarceration.
California prisons are packed to almost 200 percent capacity in conditions so depraved that a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that they violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” It is notable that the ruling came from a Court that has itself worked assiduously to shred prisoners’ rights, as well as those of the population as a whole. But at bottom the ruling represents little more than an application of some cosmetics to the barbarism of the U.S. “justice” system.
Going back nearly three decades, a series of lower court orders have directed California prison authorities to relieve overcrowding, provide medical care and stop abuse by prison guards. In 2005, a California federal court found it to be an “uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” Such “deficiencies” include denial of medical care as well as the risk to life and limb that comes with being confined with hundreds of others, triple-bunked in gyms and cafeterias, for 24 hours a day in conditions described as a “giant game of survivor.” Mentally ill prisoners are locked up in “telephone-booth sized cages without toilets.” One prisoner a week kills himself, a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national average. Even the former head of the prisons in Texas, the execution capital of the U.S., described California’s prisons as “appalling” and “inhumane,” adding that “in more than 35 years of prison work experience I have never seen anything like it.”
Such conditions are the product of literally thousands of laws enacted by Democratic and Republican governors alike, over the past 30 years. In his first round in the governor’s office, when he was known as Governor Moonbeam by those who saw him as the voice of “la-la land” liberalism, Jerry Brown, a Democrat, knocked down any possibility for early release. Most rehabilitation programs were eliminated, and the length of mandatory prison terms was increased. The supercharged “tough on crime” climate laid the basis for the passage of Proposition 184 in 1994. The harshest “three strikes” law in the country, it mandates 25 years to life for any third offense by those with two prior serious convictions. Among those behind bars for life under this law are people convicted on their “third strike” of stealing $2 socks or $20 work gloves.
Anti-gang injunctions make it a crime if the cops find you anywhere in public in the company of an alleged gang member. Once you’re railroaded to prison, the brand of “gang affiliation” can land you in the torture chambers of solitary confinement. Even after serving their time, prisoners remain ensnared by laws that bar ex-felons from public housing, food stamps and many other benefits. California has 210 laws and regulations preventing felons from getting jobs or licenses—even to be a barber, an interior designer or a guide-dog trainer. Criminal background checks are mandatory on most employment applications. Seventy-seven percent of those released from prison in California end up back behind bars—the highest recidivism rate in the nation.
In 2009, Lovelle Mixon, a young black man raised on the destitute streets of the East Oakland ghetto who was out on parole, blew away four cops with an assault rifle in two separate confrontations after he was pulled over by the police. An article in the San Francisco Bay View (24 March 2009) remarked at the time: “Lovelle Mixon was America’s worst nightmare: the Black man with nothing to lose.” As an ex-felon on the streets, he had no prospects. When confronted by the cops, his only future was to be sent back to jail, so he went to his death in a hail of police gunfire instead. More than 500 people came out for Mixon’s funeral, their rage and defiance of the occupying army of police on their streets captured in a text message reading: “Us: 4—Them: 1.”
To preserve their power and profits against those they exploit and oppress, the capitalist rulers erect ever more monstrous institutions of coercion, suppression and death, vastly expanding police powers on the streets of the U.S. while their military marauds over the planet. The medieval tortures of the rack and the screw have been replaced by the high-tech barbarism of solitary confinement, the death row gurneys of state-sanctioned murder or the more “normal” conditions of being packed in overcrowded prisons like animals in abattoirs. Unspeakably cruel, these conditions are not, however, unusual in racist America. On the contrary, such barbarism is the product of a system that has long outlived any measure of progress.
The “Worst of the Worst”: California Prison Guards
Among the biggest beneficiaries of the “war on crime” have been the sadistic jailers themselves. In the past 30 years, the size of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has grown from 5,600 to 33,000, their pay more than tripling during the same period from $21,000 to $73,000 a year. One of the most powerful political forces in the state, the CCPOA has poured millions of dollars into speeding up the assembly line to prison. Promoting a series of reactionary initiatives—from the 1972 reinstatement of California’s death penalty to the 1994 “three strikes” law—this “union” has been a moving force behind the defeat of any attempt to alleviate prison conditions. The hellish prison conditions are their bread and butter. One guard enthused: “With ‘Three Strikes’ and the overcrowding we’re going to experience with that, we’re going to need to build at least three prisons a year for the next five years. Each one of those institutions will take approximately 1,000 employees.”
If there is any criminal gang in California’s prisons, the guards are it, genuinely the “worst of the worst” violent predators. According to testimony in a class-action suit brought by 3,600 Pelican Bay prisoners in the mid 1990s, California prison guards shot and killed more than 30 inmates between 1989 and 1994. Eight Corcoran State Prison guards were indicted for staging “blood sport” fights between inmates in the Secure Housing Unit. In 2010, an investigation by a Sacramento Bee journalist exposed the vicious racism and brutality of guards in the “Behavior Modification Unit” in the High Desert Prison, describing how one black prisoner was shackled, pepper-sprayed and then “paraded naked through the cell block in a way that that prisoner and others who witnessed the event regarded as a kind of image of modern slavery.”
A throwback to the plantation overseers in the Confederate slavocracy, the guards are well-compensated for “doing their job.” While savaging social programs for the poor, sick and aged in the name of balancing the state’s budget, Jerry Brown increased the CCPOA’s vacation and other benefits earlier this year. This was more than a simple payoff for the $2 million the prison guards provided for Brown’s election campaign. The misleaders of the public workers unions shelled out millions for the Democrats, but that didn’t spare their members’ jobs, pensions and other benefits from the budget-cutting ax. The political power of the bonapartist thugs who run and police the prisons is fed by the racist rulers’ endless “anti-crime” campaigns. Having secured ever more fabulous wealth through grinding the working class and poor, the capitalist class is well aware that it is creating a massive sea of discontent at the bottom of this society, and it spares no expense in increasing the powers of state repression—from the cops to the prisons.
Yet the armed thugs of the capitalist rulers are welcomed into the labor movement by the sellout misleaders of the trade unions. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the service the union bureaucrats provide as the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. In defense of the profits and competitiveness of U.S. imperialism, they allowed the industrial unions to be ravaged. Now they are lying down in the face of an all-out war against public workers unions, offering to share in the “sacrifice” while channeling the anger of their ranks into renewed support for the Democratic Party. To maintain their dues base, they organize the strikebreaking cops and the sadistic jailers whose purpose is the violent suppression of the working class, the ghetto and barrio poor and all those perceived as potential “enemies of the state.” Cops and prison guards out of the unions!
Fight for a Socialist America!
While they have written off a whole generation of black youth as criminal outlaws, the rulers remain fearful that prisoners might develop some social and political consciousness. Being caught with a book by George Jackson is enough to be branded a gang member and sent to solitary. In 2005, black death row prisoner Tookie Williams was denied clemency by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In sending Williams to his death, Schwarzenegger particularly singled out Williams’ dedication of his 1998 book Life in Prison to, among others, George Jackson as “a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems.”
It was the violence and brutality of the prisons, combined with the social upheavals of the time, that propelled George Jackson and others to see their oppression as a product of the capitalist system. Even so, as prisoners, divorced from any role in capitalist production, they had no social power. The struggles of that time were subject to both bloody repression and co-optation by the ruling class. Today, the Pelican Bay hunger strike is a desperate product of that legacy and of the subsequent dearth of class and other social struggle against the capitalist rulers, who are loyally served by the trade-union bureaucracy. The destitution and mass joblessness in the inner cities have likewise increasingly robbed a whole layer of the black population of any social power, reducing many ghetto youth to a reactive glorification of lumpenism as a reflection of their own desperate struggle to survive by whatever means necessary.
The multiracial working class is the only force in capitalist society with both the social power and historic interest to eradicate a system rooted in its exploitation. The black workers who remain a militant backbone of the unions provide a critical human bridge for linking the power of the working class to the anger of the inner cities. To unleash this power, it is necessary to wage a political struggle to break the chains forged by the trade-union bureaucracy which have shackled labor to its exploiters.
As we wrote in “Massacre at Attica,” the front-page article of the first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971):
“We support the most militant struggle against the state. We only seek to give that struggle the strategic perspectives that will lead to the workers conquering political power….
“The heroic Attica martyrs and George Jackson will long be remembered for their courageous stand against overwhelming odds. It is not the crimes (real or alleged) for which the prisoners were jailed, but the stand they took—rising far above capitalist-imposed ignorance, poverty, brutality and frame-up—for justice and against oppression, that the world’s working people will remember.”
The purpose of the Spartacist League is to build the multiracial revolutionary party that will lead the workers in the fight to shatter the capitalist state and all its instruments of incarceration, torture and death. When the workers internationally take political power and put the wealth now appropriated by the tiny class of exploiters to serving the needs of humanity, they will lay the material basis for achieving an egalitarian communist society, doing away with any need for a state apparatus of repression.
An Old Geezer Jogging, Kind Of, At The North Adamsville"Dust Bowl" (A.K.A. The Cavanaugh Track)-For Bill Bailey, North Adamsville Class Of 1964
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hicham el Guerouj, the Moroccan Knight, setting the one mile run world record in 2008.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I have written a number of entries in this space about the old days at North, North Adamsville High School in the early 1960s, for those unfamiliar with that hallowed ground, and the like. This little beauty follows in that same tradition, although with this twist- the "old geezer" described in the headline to this entry has requested anonymity for reasons that will become obvious once the tale he has asked me to tell unfolds. I think, however, that the average, above-average, classmates that old North produced can all figure this one out. Right?
For those of us who went to North Adamsville Junior High School and can remember that far back this year (2010) marks the 50th anniversary of our graduation from that unhallowed school. For the old geezer, a man know personally to me from the old days and man given to the faux-heroic feat, the odd-ball, off-hand symbolic gesture, and a disturbingly steadfast adherence to the drumbeat of history this called for some action. Now the old geezer and I go back to the times when we were corner boys together along with Frankie Riley, yes, Frankie Riley the now successful lawyer that you keep reading about in the newspapers of late (that is if anybody still reads such things in the “new age”) along with several other guys at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs.” (For those unfamiliar with that term don’t worry about such a localism it does not affect the story here). So when I speak of odd-ball behavior I know of where I speak.
As if merely a nodding commemoration of the 50th anniversary graduation “event” were not enough since this year also marked the 50th anniversary of the old geezer’s first seriously taking up running (indoor and outdoor track, cross country) as a sport, under the guidance of old time North Adamsville Junior High, Coach Bob Lewis, a gesture was required. As a historic “gesture” he decided to an attempt to run one mile around the old "Dust Bowl" track that served (and still serves) as an “athletic field” for the North high school and middle school (a.k.a. junior high school) community since Hector was a pup. And if not that long, then since beyond local memory.
Now this Herculean effort was to be done in spite of the fact that the old geezer had done no more, at most, than run for the bus for the past quarter of a century, or more. And just missed that bus on more occasions that warrants attention here. Note also that the distance selected for this “heroic” effort was the well-known classic one mile that he sought to run. Not for him that old "lame" 600 yards around the front driveway circle at North that everyone had to do as part of the old-time yearly President's Physical Fitness Test. Kids’ stuff. No, he went back to the mist of time and to feats like those of the first sub-four minute miler, Roger Bannister. (For those unfamiliar with that name it too is not germane to this story, although you can Google the name or look it up in Wikipedia if you have a little time on your hands.
For those not familiar with the location the old "Dust Bowl" is the field the next street over from the North Adamsville Middle School. It served as our junior high school field for some other sports as well. It also was the place where the legendary 1964 football team, led by "Bullwinkle", "Woj", Jim Fallon, Charlie McDonald, Tom Kiley, Walt Simmons, Don McNally, Lee Munson and a host of others practiced being mean under Coach Lion in order to beat beleaguered cross town arch-rival Adamsville High School that year. Now I know that some readers here "know" that location.
Furthermore, it was also the training ground and meet location for the high school spring track team where the silky-strided Bill Bailey held forth in distance running, Ritchie McDonald and others in the middle distances, Brooks Atkins in the sprints, Carl Lindberg and Ralph Moore in the hurdles, Al Bartley in the pole vault and a host of others who ran around in their skimpy black shorts, including the old geezer. The old geezer, moreover, was then distinguished by being a consummate well-below average runner. He had the “slows” as every other teammate told him at every possible opportunity. He was not sure on this one, nor am I, but, perhaps, the football cheerleaders led by the spunky Josie Weinfeld, the sprightly Roxanne Gower, and the plucky Linda Plane also practiced there. In short, if you were not familiar with the locale and grew up in the old town there then you now stand accused of being willfully out of touch with old North Adamsville reality.
I should also mention that this name "Dust Bowl" is not mere hyperbole on my part. In summer and fall, at least, there was more dust that the EPA would find tolerable these days. Moreover, as the old geezer told me the field 'owed' him. So revenge was also a motive here, as well. Apparently he still has cinders in his left knee from when he fell while running on the track 50 years ago. Ouch! He asked me to ask around to see if others had similar "war stories", although none came worthy of notice-mere band-aid wounds. Moreover, and this is symbolic in its own way, the track is not the normal quarter-mile one that you only had to go around four times to the mile(for the non-Math whizzes out there) but five laps to the mile. That may explain many things about our subsequent lives, right?
Okay, now to the big event. In the interest of accuracy this "event", according to the old geezer's information, occurred at about 9:00 AM on February 6, 2010. Now why he was not in Florida or at least in some warm house instead of being out on the "track" will go a long way to explaining the "inner demons" that plague then this sixty-three year-old man's psyche. Moreover, he continued on with his quest despite having to wait upon dogs, and their owners, who seemingly felt such an hour was ripe for a canine national convention at the old bowl. But, we digress.
The old geezer started off okay with the usual burst of adrenaline one gets when the big day finally comes carrying him along for a while, he then settled into a 'pace' and all went well until he started breathing heavily, got light-headed and began feeling cramps in his thigh, and that was only on the first lap. It went down hill from there. He insisted I give the gory details of each lap but thank god for the Delete button. Intrepid soul that he is he” dogged" it out. He informed me that his time for the mile has been declared a matter of national security and therefore not available to the public, although he did allude to an unfavorable comparison with the time it takes to get to the moon and back. Nevertheless the gesture is in the books, a member of the class of 1964 has been vindicated, and life can return to normal. Oh, the old geezer did mention this. For those of you with grandchildren under the age of five he is ready to take on all comers. Okay.
Postscript- If you can believe this the old geezer refuses to permit me to post the “news” of his “heroic” one mile effort if I do not include a blow-by-blow description of his five lap (remember the “Dust Bowl” is five laps to the mile in case you might have forgotten). I thought that giving a short summary of his first lap was more than adequate but no we need to know every hurried breathe, every turned toe, every near collapse. The reader should feel no compulsion to wade through this but don’t forget the Delete button is readily at hand. In any case the following is strictly the old geezer’s take on the matter.
Old Geezer comment:
That February day was cold but not much colder than in the old days when we went down to Clintondale and their winter outdoor track in January that really froze you. The trick was to take off your sweat suit, jump on the oval banked-wooden track as quickly as possible and hit the starting line just as the starter yelled to run. And then do the same thing in reverse after the race. Funny the old Dust Bowl with the exception of them taking out the wooden bleachers where the seven (hey, maybe it was six if you didn’t count the girl scorer, the cute girl scorer, Roseanne something, I think) track and field fans gathered in the old days the place looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since about 1964. Same old rutted, brambly, asphalty, hard-scrabble surface that you dare not trip and fall on. I know because I still carry some “cinder” from the old days in my left knee. But enough. To the run itself.
Of course I started out slow, slow as hell, slower than a couple of the dogs that were rummaging around along with their “guardians.” As I picked up steam I was going pretty good until I started breathing real heavy, started to get the inevitable sweating, and my legs started getting light and wobbly. That was almost at the end of the first lap with four more to go. I almost stopped but I am not built that way, slow or fast, mainly slow I almost always finished a race except when I came up injured a couple of times. The second lap was tough as I started to put my head down to push myself along just like in the old days. Painful step after step.
The third lap got a little better as I got in stride and was pretty uneventful except for a random dog who decide he (or she) wanted to be my “rabbit” ( a rabbit in track is someone who sets the pace, a fast pace, for others and then either falls back or drops out). The fourth lap though almost did me in. I stumbled and almost fell on a clod of dirt that must have been dug up before the winter set in. I managed to right myself but I felt kind of dizzy after that for a while. Hey, four laps are done now and I am at the “gun” lap (fifth for those legions who don’t know track “lingo”). No way am I not going to finish now. And while it seemed like an eternity I did finish with a “sprint” the last ten yards or so. After about twenty minutes recuperation while my pulse slowed down, my blood pressure stabilized and about thirteen other medical conditions passed the crisis point I left the dust bowl feeling I had even up the score on that damn place.
Markin comment:
That "fifteen minutes of fame" thing is pretty attenuated here but for those who actually read this last section there you have it. Enough.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I have written a number of entries in this space about the old days at North, North Adamsville High School in the early 1960s, for those unfamiliar with that hallowed ground, and the like. This little beauty follows in that same tradition, although with this twist- the "old geezer" described in the headline to this entry has requested anonymity for reasons that will become obvious once the tale he has asked me to tell unfolds. I think, however, that the average, above-average, classmates that old North produced can all figure this one out. Right?
For those of us who went to North Adamsville Junior High School and can remember that far back this year (2010) marks the 50th anniversary of our graduation from that unhallowed school. For the old geezer, a man know personally to me from the old days and man given to the faux-heroic feat, the odd-ball, off-hand symbolic gesture, and a disturbingly steadfast adherence to the drumbeat of history this called for some action. Now the old geezer and I go back to the times when we were corner boys together along with Frankie Riley, yes, Frankie Riley the now successful lawyer that you keep reading about in the newspapers of late (that is if anybody still reads such things in the “new age”) along with several other guys at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs.” (For those unfamiliar with that term don’t worry about such a localism it does not affect the story here). So when I speak of odd-ball behavior I know of where I speak.
As if merely a nodding commemoration of the 50th anniversary graduation “event” were not enough since this year also marked the 50th anniversary of the old geezer’s first seriously taking up running (indoor and outdoor track, cross country) as a sport, under the guidance of old time North Adamsville Junior High, Coach Bob Lewis, a gesture was required. As a historic “gesture” he decided to an attempt to run one mile around the old "Dust Bowl" track that served (and still serves) as an “athletic field” for the North high school and middle school (a.k.a. junior high school) community since Hector was a pup. And if not that long, then since beyond local memory.
Now this Herculean effort was to be done in spite of the fact that the old geezer had done no more, at most, than run for the bus for the past quarter of a century, or more. And just missed that bus on more occasions that warrants attention here. Note also that the distance selected for this “heroic” effort was the well-known classic one mile that he sought to run. Not for him that old "lame" 600 yards around the front driveway circle at North that everyone had to do as part of the old-time yearly President's Physical Fitness Test. Kids’ stuff. No, he went back to the mist of time and to feats like those of the first sub-four minute miler, Roger Bannister. (For those unfamiliar with that name it too is not germane to this story, although you can Google the name or look it up in Wikipedia if you have a little time on your hands.
For those not familiar with the location the old "Dust Bowl" is the field the next street over from the North Adamsville Middle School. It served as our junior high school field for some other sports as well. It also was the place where the legendary 1964 football team, led by "Bullwinkle", "Woj", Jim Fallon, Charlie McDonald, Tom Kiley, Walt Simmons, Don McNally, Lee Munson and a host of others practiced being mean under Coach Lion in order to beat beleaguered cross town arch-rival Adamsville High School that year. Now I know that some readers here "know" that location.
Furthermore, it was also the training ground and meet location for the high school spring track team where the silky-strided Bill Bailey held forth in distance running, Ritchie McDonald and others in the middle distances, Brooks Atkins in the sprints, Carl Lindberg and Ralph Moore in the hurdles, Al Bartley in the pole vault and a host of others who ran around in their skimpy black shorts, including the old geezer. The old geezer, moreover, was then distinguished by being a consummate well-below average runner. He had the “slows” as every other teammate told him at every possible opportunity. He was not sure on this one, nor am I, but, perhaps, the football cheerleaders led by the spunky Josie Weinfeld, the sprightly Roxanne Gower, and the plucky Linda Plane also practiced there. In short, if you were not familiar with the locale and grew up in the old town there then you now stand accused of being willfully out of touch with old North Adamsville reality.
I should also mention that this name "Dust Bowl" is not mere hyperbole on my part. In summer and fall, at least, there was more dust that the EPA would find tolerable these days. Moreover, as the old geezer told me the field 'owed' him. So revenge was also a motive here, as well. Apparently he still has cinders in his left knee from when he fell while running on the track 50 years ago. Ouch! He asked me to ask around to see if others had similar "war stories", although none came worthy of notice-mere band-aid wounds. Moreover, and this is symbolic in its own way, the track is not the normal quarter-mile one that you only had to go around four times to the mile(for the non-Math whizzes out there) but five laps to the mile. That may explain many things about our subsequent lives, right?
Okay, now to the big event. In the interest of accuracy this "event", according to the old geezer's information, occurred at about 9:00 AM on February 6, 2010. Now why he was not in Florida or at least in some warm house instead of being out on the "track" will go a long way to explaining the "inner demons" that plague then this sixty-three year-old man's psyche. Moreover, he continued on with his quest despite having to wait upon dogs, and their owners, who seemingly felt such an hour was ripe for a canine national convention at the old bowl. But, we digress.
The old geezer started off okay with the usual burst of adrenaline one gets when the big day finally comes carrying him along for a while, he then settled into a 'pace' and all went well until he started breathing heavily, got light-headed and began feeling cramps in his thigh, and that was only on the first lap. It went down hill from there. He insisted I give the gory details of each lap but thank god for the Delete button. Intrepid soul that he is he” dogged" it out. He informed me that his time for the mile has been declared a matter of national security and therefore not available to the public, although he did allude to an unfavorable comparison with the time it takes to get to the moon and back. Nevertheless the gesture is in the books, a member of the class of 1964 has been vindicated, and life can return to normal. Oh, the old geezer did mention this. For those of you with grandchildren under the age of five he is ready to take on all comers. Okay.
Postscript- If you can believe this the old geezer refuses to permit me to post the “news” of his “heroic” one mile effort if I do not include a blow-by-blow description of his five lap (remember the “Dust Bowl” is five laps to the mile in case you might have forgotten). I thought that giving a short summary of his first lap was more than adequate but no we need to know every hurried breathe, every turned toe, every near collapse. The reader should feel no compulsion to wade through this but don’t forget the Delete button is readily at hand. In any case the following is strictly the old geezer’s take on the matter.
Old Geezer comment:
That February day was cold but not much colder than in the old days when we went down to Clintondale and their winter outdoor track in January that really froze you. The trick was to take off your sweat suit, jump on the oval banked-wooden track as quickly as possible and hit the starting line just as the starter yelled to run. And then do the same thing in reverse after the race. Funny the old Dust Bowl with the exception of them taking out the wooden bleachers where the seven (hey, maybe it was six if you didn’t count the girl scorer, the cute girl scorer, Roseanne something, I think) track and field fans gathered in the old days the place looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since about 1964. Same old rutted, brambly, asphalty, hard-scrabble surface that you dare not trip and fall on. I know because I still carry some “cinder” from the old days in my left knee. But enough. To the run itself.
Of course I started out slow, slow as hell, slower than a couple of the dogs that were rummaging around along with their “guardians.” As I picked up steam I was going pretty good until I started breathing real heavy, started to get the inevitable sweating, and my legs started getting light and wobbly. That was almost at the end of the first lap with four more to go. I almost stopped but I am not built that way, slow or fast, mainly slow I almost always finished a race except when I came up injured a couple of times. The second lap was tough as I started to put my head down to push myself along just like in the old days. Painful step after step.
The third lap got a little better as I got in stride and was pretty uneventful except for a random dog who decide he (or she) wanted to be my “rabbit” ( a rabbit in track is someone who sets the pace, a fast pace, for others and then either falls back or drops out). The fourth lap though almost did me in. I stumbled and almost fell on a clod of dirt that must have been dug up before the winter set in. I managed to right myself but I felt kind of dizzy after that for a while. Hey, four laps are done now and I am at the “gun” lap (fifth for those legions who don’t know track “lingo”). No way am I not going to finish now. And while it seemed like an eternity I did finish with a “sprint” the last ten yards or so. After about twenty minutes recuperation while my pulse slowed down, my blood pressure stabilized and about thirteen other medical conditions passed the crisis point I left the dust bowl feeling I had even up the score on that damn place.
Markin comment:
That "fifteen minutes of fame" thing is pretty attenuated here but for those who actually read this last section there you have it. Enough.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
The Latest From The "Partisan Defense Committee" Website- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners
Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1950s Beach Blanket Saga.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.
DVD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Late 50s, various artist, Time-Life Records, 1997
Markin comment:
No question that my corner boy comrades from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out and me from the day high school got out for the summer drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? No. Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? No. Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day. No. Well, maybe a little. But come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. We were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls (young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’s liberation time) sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike., to see.
And they were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood. And said show-offs included, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working at the old A&P Supermarket), his faithful scribe, Peter Paul Markin, and other including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that gets a hearing today. If it all sounds kind of familiar, even to the younger set, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is.
*********
“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. As the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving You came over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love, one of those no one in particulars, Peter Paul Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, “Jimmy Jukes,” does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.” Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… “But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, no thing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ You’re So Fine came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy his way, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, Johnny poured out his sad saga.
Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his Everyday, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not. Not until this very day when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked her if she liked Elvis’ That’s When The Heartache Begins. She answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) that it was “dreamy.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing. And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So the to the strains of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together we will move along.
Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of really about that), and don’t forget foxy, Katy Larkin had a “crush” on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That more than somewhat entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. So on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters One In a Million for the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.” And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all woman imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take no for an answer.” Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, voice commands. So Johnny is now re-evaluating his attitude toward beach sand and maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny grew quite a bit that summer and now Katy Larkin is not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decides she wants to go.
DVD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Late 50s, various artist, Time-Life Records, 1997
Markin comment:
No question that my corner boy comrades from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out and me from the day high school got out for the summer drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? No. Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? No. Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day. No. Well, maybe a little. But come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. We were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls (young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’s liberation time) sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike., to see.
And they were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood. And said show-offs included, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working at the old A&P Supermarket), his faithful scribe, Peter Paul Markin, and other including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that gets a hearing today. If it all sounds kind of familiar, even to the younger set, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is.
*********
“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. As the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving You came over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love, one of those no one in particulars, Peter Paul Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, “Jimmy Jukes,” does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.” Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… “But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, no thing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ You’re So Fine came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy his way, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, Johnny poured out his sad saga.
Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his Everyday, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not. Not until this very day when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked her if she liked Elvis’ That’s When The Heartache Begins. She answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) that it was “dreamy.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing. And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So the to the strains of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together we will move along.
Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of really about that), and don’t forget foxy, Katy Larkin had a “crush” on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That more than somewhat entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. So on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters One In a Million for the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.” And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all woman imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take no for an answer.” Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, voice commands. So Johnny is now re-evaluating his attitude toward beach sand and maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny grew quite a bit that summer and now Katy Larkin is not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decides she wants to go.
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Birth of the Communist Party
Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Birth of the Communist Party
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*********
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
[First Letter]
Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.91-92.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 2, 1954
Dear Sir:
I received your letter stating that you are working on a history of the American communist movement. I am interested in your project and am willing to give you all the help I can.
Your task will not be easy, for you will be traveling in an undiscovered country where most of the visible road signs are painted upside down and point in the wrong directions. All the reports that I have come across, both from the renegades and from the official apologists, are slanted and falsified. The objective historian will have to keep up a double guard in searching for the truth among all the conflicting reports.
The Stalinists are not only the most systematic and dedicated liars that history has yet produced; they have also won the flattering complement of imitation from the professional anti-Stalinists. The history of American communism is one subject on which different liars, for different reasons in each case, have had a field day.
However, most of the essential facts are matters Of record. The trouble begins with the interpretation; and I doubt very much whether an historian, even with the best will in the world, could render a true report and make the facts understandable without a correct explanation of what happened and why.
As you already know, I have touched on the pioneer days of American communism, in my book, The History of American Trotskyism. During the past year I have made other references to this period in connection with the current discussion in our movement. The party resolution on American Stalinism and Our Attitude Toward It, which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fourth International, was written by me.
I speak there also of the early period of the Communist Party, and have made other references in other articles and letters published in the course of our discussion. All this material can be made available to you. I intend to return to the subject again at greater length later on, for I am of the definite opinion that an understanding of the pioneer days of American communism is essential to the education of the new generation of American revolutionists.
My writings on the early history of American communism are mainly designed to illustrate my basic thesis, which as far as I know, has not been expounded by anyone else. This thesis can be briefly stated as follows:
The Communist Party originally was a revolutionary organization. All the original leaders of the early Communist Party, who later split into three permanent factions within the party, began as American revolutionists with a perspective of revolution in this country. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been in the movement in the first place and wouldn’t have split with the reformist socialists to organize the Communist Party.
Even if it is maintained that some of these leaders were careerists – a contention their later evolution tends to support – it still remains to be explained why they sought careers in the communist movement and not in the business or professional worlds, or in bourgeois politics, or in the trade union officialdom. Opportunities in these fields were open to at least some of them, and were deliberately cast aside at the time.
In my opinion, the course of the leaders of American communism in its pioneer days, a course which entailed deprivations, hazards and penalties, can be explained only by the assumption that they were revolutionists to begin with; and that even the careerists among them believed in the future of the workers’ revolution in America and wished to ally themselves with this future.
It is needless to add that the rank and file of the party, who had no personal interests to serve, were animated by revolutionary convictions. By that I mean, they were believers in the perspective of revolution in this country, for I do not know any other kind of revolutionists.
The American Communist Party did not begin with Stalinism. The Stalinization of the party was rather the end result of a process of degeneration which began during the long boom of the Twenties. The protracted prosperity of that period, which came to be taken for permanence by the great mass of American people of all classes, did not fail to affect the Communist Party itself. It softened up the leading cadres of that party, and undermined their original confidence in the perspectives of a revolution in this country. This prepared them, eventually, for an easy acceptance of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country.”
For those who accepted this theory, Russia, as the “one country” of the victorious revolution, became a substitute for the American revolution. Thereafter, the Communist Party in this country adopted as its primary a task the “defense of the Soviet Union” by pressure methods of one kind or another on American foreign policy, without any perspective of a revolution of their own. All the subsequent twists and turns of Communist policy in the United States, which appears so irrational to others, had this central motivation – the subordination of the struggle for a revolution in the United States to the “defense” of a revolution in another country.
That explains the frenzied radicalism of the party in the first years of the economic crisis of the Thirties, when American foreign policy was hostile to the Soviet diplomacy; the reconciliation with Roosevelt after he recognized the Soviet Union and oriented toward a diplomatic rapprochement with the Kremlin; the split with Roosevelt during the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the later fervent reconciliation and the unrestrained jingoism of the American Stalinists when Washington allied itself with the Kremlin in the war.
The present policy of the Communist Party, its subordination of the class struggle to a pacifistic “peace” campaign, and its decision to ally itself at all costs with the Democratic Party, has the same consistent motivation as all the previous turns of policy.
The degeneration of the Communist Party began when it abandoned the perspective of revolution in this country, and converted itself into a pressure group and cheering squad for the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia – which it mistakenly took to be the custodian of a revolution “in another country.”
I shouldn’t neglect to add the final point of my thesis: The degeneration of the Communist Party is not to be explained by the summary conclusion that the leaders were a pack of scoundrels to begin with; although a considerable percentage of them – those who became Stalinists as well as those who became renegades – turned out eventually to be scoundrels of championship caliber; but by the circumstance that they fell victim to a fake theory and a false perspective.
What happened to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.
I firmly believe that American revolutionists should indeed sympathize with revolutions in other lands, and try to help them in every way they can. But the best way to do that is to build a party with a confident perspective of a revolution in this country.
Without that perspective, a Communist or Socialist party belies its name. It ceases to be a help and becomes a hindrance to the revolutionary workers’ cause in its own country. And its sympathy for other revolutions isn’t worth much either.
That, in my opinion, is the true and correct explanation of the Rise and Fall of the American Communist Party.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
*********
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
[First Letter]
Source: Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.91-92.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 2, 1954
Dear Sir:
I received your letter stating that you are working on a history of the American communist movement. I am interested in your project and am willing to give you all the help I can.
Your task will not be easy, for you will be traveling in an undiscovered country where most of the visible road signs are painted upside down and point in the wrong directions. All the reports that I have come across, both from the renegades and from the official apologists, are slanted and falsified. The objective historian will have to keep up a double guard in searching for the truth among all the conflicting reports.
The Stalinists are not only the most systematic and dedicated liars that history has yet produced; they have also won the flattering complement of imitation from the professional anti-Stalinists. The history of American communism is one subject on which different liars, for different reasons in each case, have had a field day.
However, most of the essential facts are matters Of record. The trouble begins with the interpretation; and I doubt very much whether an historian, even with the best will in the world, could render a true report and make the facts understandable without a correct explanation of what happened and why.
As you already know, I have touched on the pioneer days of American communism, in my book, The History of American Trotskyism. During the past year I have made other references to this period in connection with the current discussion in our movement. The party resolution on American Stalinism and Our Attitude Toward It, which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fourth International, was written by me.
I speak there also of the early period of the Communist Party, and have made other references in other articles and letters published in the course of our discussion. All this material can be made available to you. I intend to return to the subject again at greater length later on, for I am of the definite opinion that an understanding of the pioneer days of American communism is essential to the education of the new generation of American revolutionists.
My writings on the early history of American communism are mainly designed to illustrate my basic thesis, which as far as I know, has not been expounded by anyone else. This thesis can be briefly stated as follows:
The Communist Party originally was a revolutionary organization. All the original leaders of the early Communist Party, who later split into three permanent factions within the party, began as American revolutionists with a perspective of revolution in this country. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been in the movement in the first place and wouldn’t have split with the reformist socialists to organize the Communist Party.
Even if it is maintained that some of these leaders were careerists – a contention their later evolution tends to support – it still remains to be explained why they sought careers in the communist movement and not in the business or professional worlds, or in bourgeois politics, or in the trade union officialdom. Opportunities in these fields were open to at least some of them, and were deliberately cast aside at the time.
In my opinion, the course of the leaders of American communism in its pioneer days, a course which entailed deprivations, hazards and penalties, can be explained only by the assumption that they were revolutionists to begin with; and that even the careerists among them believed in the future of the workers’ revolution in America and wished to ally themselves with this future.
It is needless to add that the rank and file of the party, who had no personal interests to serve, were animated by revolutionary convictions. By that I mean, they were believers in the perspective of revolution in this country, for I do not know any other kind of revolutionists.
The American Communist Party did not begin with Stalinism. The Stalinization of the party was rather the end result of a process of degeneration which began during the long boom of the Twenties. The protracted prosperity of that period, which came to be taken for permanence by the great mass of American people of all classes, did not fail to affect the Communist Party itself. It softened up the leading cadres of that party, and undermined their original confidence in the perspectives of a revolution in this country. This prepared them, eventually, for an easy acceptance of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country.”
For those who accepted this theory, Russia, as the “one country” of the victorious revolution, became a substitute for the American revolution. Thereafter, the Communist Party in this country adopted as its primary a task the “defense of the Soviet Union” by pressure methods of one kind or another on American foreign policy, without any perspective of a revolution of their own. All the subsequent twists and turns of Communist policy in the United States, which appears so irrational to others, had this central motivation – the subordination of the struggle for a revolution in the United States to the “defense” of a revolution in another country.
That explains the frenzied radicalism of the party in the first years of the economic crisis of the Thirties, when American foreign policy was hostile to the Soviet diplomacy; the reconciliation with Roosevelt after he recognized the Soviet Union and oriented toward a diplomatic rapprochement with the Kremlin; the split with Roosevelt during the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the later fervent reconciliation and the unrestrained jingoism of the American Stalinists when Washington allied itself with the Kremlin in the war.
The present policy of the Communist Party, its subordination of the class struggle to a pacifistic “peace” campaign, and its decision to ally itself at all costs with the Democratic Party, has the same consistent motivation as all the previous turns of policy.
The degeneration of the Communist Party began when it abandoned the perspective of revolution in this country, and converted itself into a pressure group and cheering squad for the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia – which it mistakenly took to be the custodian of a revolution “in another country.”
I shouldn’t neglect to add the final point of my thesis: The degeneration of the Communist Party is not to be explained by the summary conclusion that the leaders were a pack of scoundrels to begin with; although a considerable percentage of them – those who became Stalinists as well as those who became renegades – turned out eventually to be scoundrels of championship caliber; but by the circumstance that they fell victim to a fake theory and a false perspective.
What happened to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.
I firmly believe that American revolutionists should indeed sympathize with revolutions in other lands, and try to help them in every way they can. But the best way to do that is to build a party with a confident perspective of a revolution in this country.
Without that perspective, a Communist or Socialist party belies its name. It ceases to be a help and becomes a hindrance to the revolutionary workers’ cause in its own country. And its sympathy for other revolutions isn’t worth much either.
That, in my opinion, is the true and correct explanation of the Rise and Fall of the American Communist Party.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.
Markin comment:
Free Bradley Manning! Free all class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Free Bradley Manning! Free all class-war prisoners!
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
From The "Free Jaan Laaman" Blog- "Jaan's Running Down the Walls 2011 Shoutout" - Free Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio 7
Click on the headline to link to the Ohio 7's Free Jaan Laaman blog for the latest.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
Friday, August 19, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Leon Sedov-Son, Fighter, Friend By Leon Trotsky
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment on this article:
As is well-known in revolutionary circles many times the children of famous Reds tend to be either apolitcal, non-political, or anti-political. Those like Karl Liebknecht (son of Wilhelm, leader of the early German Social-Democratic Party), and here Leon Sevov, Leon Trotsky's older son, have big shoes to fill. As the Leon Trotsky memorial for his fallen son points out-Leon Sedov did just fine, just fine, indeed.
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LEON SEDOV
Son, Friend, Fighter
By Leon Trotsky
As I write these lines, with Leon Sedov’s mother by my side, telegrams of condolence keep coming from different countries. And for us each telegram evokes the same appalling question: “Can it really be that our friends in France, Holland, England, the United States, Canada, South Africa and here in Mexico accept it as definitely established that Sedov is no more?” Each telegram is a new token of his death, but we are unable to believe it as yet. And this, not only because he was our son, truthful, devoted, loving, but above all because he had, as no one else on earth, become part of our life, entwined in all its roots, our co-thinker, our co-worker, our guard, our counsellor, our friend.
Of that older generation whose ranks we joined at the end of the last century on the road to revolution, all, without exception, have been swept from the scene. That which Tsarist hard-labour prisons and harsh exiles, the hardships of emigration, the civil war and disease had failed to accomplish has in recent years been achieved by Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution. Following the destruction of the older generation, the best section of the next, that is, the generation which awakened in 1917 and which received its training in the twenty-four armies of the revolutionary front, was likewise destroyed. Also crushed underfoot and completely obliterated was the best part of the youth, Leon’s contemporaries. He himself survived only by a miracle, owing to the fact that he accompanied us into exile and then to Turkey. During the years of our last emigration we made many new friends, some of whom have entered intimately into our lives, becoming, as it were, members of our family. But we met all of them for the first time in these last few years when we had already neared old age. Leon was the only one who knew us when we were young; he became part of our lives from the very first moment of his self-awakening. While young in years, he still seemed our contemporary. Together with us, he went through our second emigration: Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Amherst [concentration camp in Canada], and finally Petrograd.
While but a child – he was going on twelve – he had, in his own way, consciously made the transition from the February revolution to that of October. His boyhood passed under high pressure. He added a year to his age so that he might more quickly join the Komsomol [Communist youth], seething at that time with all the passion of awakened youth. The young bakers, among whom he carried on propaganda, would award him a fresh loaf of white bread which he happily brought home under his arm, protruding from the torn sleeve of his jacket. Those were fiery and cold, great and hungry years. Of his own volition Leon left the Kremlin for a proletarian student dormitory, in order not to be any different from the others. He. would not ride with us in an automobile, refusing to make use of this privilege of the bureaucrats. But he did participate ardently in all Red Saturdays and other “labour mobilizations”, cleaning snow from the Moscow streets, “liquidating” illiteracy, unloading bread and firewood from freight cars, and later, as a polytechnic student, repairing locomotives. If he did not get to the war front, it was only because even adding two or as much as three years to his age could not have helped him; for he was not yet fifteen when the civil war ended. However, he did accompany me several times to the front, absorbing its stark impressions, and firmly understanding why this bloody struggle was being waged.
The latest press reports speak of Leon Sedov’s life in Paris under “the most modest conditions” – much more modest, let me add, than those of a skilled worker. Even in Moscow, during those years when his father and mother held high posts, he lived not better but worse than for the past few years in Paris. Was this perhaps the rule among the youth of the bureaucracy? By no means. Even then he was an exception. In this child, growing to boyhood and adolescence, a sense of duty and achievement awakened early. In 1923 Leon threw himself headlong into the work of the Opposition. It would be entirely wrong to see in this nothing more than parental influence. After all, when he left a comfortable apartment in the Kremlin for his hungry, cold and dingy dormitory, he did so against our will, even though we did not resist this move on his part. His political orientation was determined by the same instinct which impelled him to choose crowded street cars rather than Kremlin limousines. The platform of the Opposition simply gave political expression to traits inherent in his nature. Leon broke uncompromisingly with those of his student friends who were violently torn from “Trotskyism” by their bureaucratic fathers and found a way to his baker friends. Thus, at seventeen he began the life of a fully conscious revolutionist. He quickly grasped the art of conspiratorial work, illegal meetings, and the secret issuing and distribution of Opposition documents. The Komsomol rapidly developed its own cadres of Opposition leaders.
Leon had exceptional mathematical ability. He never tired of assisting many worker-students who had not gone through grammar school. He engaged in this work with all his energy; encouraging, leading, chiding the lazy ones – the youthful teacher saw in this work a service to his class. His own studies in the Superior Technical Academy progressed very favourably. But they took up only a part of his working day. Most of his time, strength, and spirit were devoted to the cause of the revolution.
In the winter of 1927, when the police massacre of the Opposition began, Leon had passed his twenty-second year. By that time a child was born to him and he would proudly bring his son to the Kremlin to show him to us. Without a moment’s hesitation, however, Leon decided to tear himself away from his school and his young family in order to share our fate in Central Asia. En this he acted not only as a son bat above all as a co-thinker. It was essential, whatever the cost, to guarantee our connection with Moscow. His work in Alma Ata, during that year, was truly peerless. We called him our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Police and Minister of Communications. And in fulfilling all these functions he had to rely on an illegal apparatus. Commissioned by the Moscow Opposition centre, comrade X, very devoted and reliable, acquired a carriage and three horses and worked as an independent coachman between Alma Ata and the city of Frunze (Pishpek), at that time the terminus of the railroad. It was his task to convey the secret Moscow mail to us every two weeks and to carry our letters and manuscripts back to Frunze, where a Moscow messenger awaited him. Sometimes special couriers also arrived from Moscow. To meet with them was no simple matter. We were lodged in a house surrounded on all sides by the institutions of the GPU and the quarters of its agents. Outside connections were handled entirely by Leon. He would leave the house late on a rainy night or when the snow fell heavily, or, evading the vigilance of the spies, he would hide himself during the day in the library to meet the courier in a public bath or among the thick weeds on the outskirts of the town, or in the oriental market place where the Kirghiz crowded with their horses, donkeys and their wares. Each time he returned excited and happy, with a conquering gleam in his eyes and the precious booty under his clothing. And so for a year’s time he eluded all enemies. What is more, he maintained the most “correct”, almost “friendly”, relations with these enemies who were “comrades” of yesterday, displaying uncommon tact and restraint, carefully guarding us from outside disturbances.
The ideological life of the Opposition seethed like a cauldron at the time. It was the year of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International. The Moscow packets arrived with scores of letters, articles, theses, from comrades known and unknown. During the first few months, before the sharp change in the conduct of the GPU, we even received a great many letters by the official mail services from different places of exile. It was necessary to sift this diversified material carefully. And it was in this work that I had the occasion to realize, not without surprise, how this little boy had imperceptibly grown up, how well he could judge people – he knew a great many more Oppositionists than I did – how reliable was his revolutionary instinct, which enabled him, without any hesitation, to distinguish the genuine from the false, the substance from the veneer. The eyes of his mother, who knew our son best, glowed with pride during our conversations.
Between April and October we received approximately 1,000 political letters and documents and about 700 telegrams. In this same period we sent out 550 telegrams and not fewer than 800 political letters, including a number of substantial works, such as the Criticism of the Draft Programme of the Comintern, and others. Without my son I could not have accomplished even one half of the work.
So intimate a collaboration did not, however, mean that no disputes or occasionally even very sharp clashes arose between us. Neither at that time, nor later in emigration and this must be said candidly – were my relations with Leon by any means of an even and placid character. To his categorical judgements, which were often disrespectful to some of the “old men” of the Opposition, I not only counterposed equally categoric corrections and reservations, but I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time. And inasmuch as the closest to me of all the youth was my son, he usually had the hardest time of all. To a superficial eye it might even have seemed that our relationship was permeated with severity and aloofness. But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than bonds of blood – a solidarity of views and appraisals, of sympathies and antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common. And this mutual attachment blazed up from time to time so warmly as to reward us three-hundred-fold for the petty friction in daily work.
Thus four thousand kilometres from Moscow, two hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest railway, we spent a difficult and never-to-be-forgotten year which remains in our memory under the sign of Leon, or rather Levik or Levusyatka as we called him.
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In January 1929, the Political Bureau decided to deport me “beyond the borders of the USSR” – to Turkey, as it turned out. Members of the family were granted the right to accompany me. Again, without any hesitation Leon decided to accompany us into exile, tearing himself forever from his wife and child who he dearly loved.
A new chapter, with its first pages almost blank, opened in our life. Connections, acquaintances, and friendships had to be built anew. And once again our son became all things for us: our go-between in relations with the outside world, our guard, collaborator and secretary as in Alma Ata, but on an incomparably broader scale. Foreign languages, with which he had been more familiar in his childhood than he was with Russian, had been almost completely forgotten in the tumult of the revolutionary years. It became necessary to learn them all over again. Our joint literary work began. My archives and library were wholly in Leon’s hands. He had a thorough knowledge of the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, was very well acquainted with my books and manuscripts, with the history of the party and the revolution, and the history of the Thermidorian falsification. In the chaos of the Alma Ata public library he had already studied the files of Pravda for the Soviet years and gathered the necessary quotations and references with unfailing resourcefulness. Lacking this precious material and without Leon’s subsequent researches in archives and libraries, first in Turkey, later in Berlin and finally in Paris, not one of my works during the past ten years would have been possible. This applies especially to The History of the Russian Revolution. Vast in point of quantity, his collaboration was by no means of a “technical” nature. His independent selection of facts, quotations, characterizations, frequently determined both the method of my presentation as well as the conclusions. The Revolution Betrayed contains not a few pages which I wrote on the basis of several lines from my son’s letters and the quotations which he sent from Soviet newspapers inaccessible to me. He supplied me with even more material for the biography of Lenin. Such collaboration was made possible only because our ideological solidarity had penetrated our very flesh and blood. My son’s name should rightfully be placed next to mine on almost all my books written since 1928.
In Moscow, Leon had lacked a year and a half to complete his engineering course. His mother and I insisted that while abroad he return to his abandoned science. In Prinkipo a new group of young co-workers from different countries had meanwhile been successfully formed, in intimate collaboration with my son. Leon consented to leave only because of the weighty argument that in Germany he would be able to render invaluable services to the International Left Opposition. Resuming his scientific studies in Berlin (he had to start from the beginning), Leon simultaneously threw himself headlong into revolutionary activity In the International Secretariat he soon became the representative of the Russian section. His letters for that period to his mother and myself show how quickly he has acclimatized himself to the political atmosphere of Germany and Western Europe, how well he judged people and gauged the differences and countless conflicts of that early period of our movement. His revolutionary instinct, already enriched by serious experience, enabled him in almost all cases to find the right road independently. How many times were we gladdened when, upon opening a letter just arrived, we discovered in it the very ideas and conclusions which I had just recommended to his attention. And how deeply and quietly happy he was over such coincidences of our ideas! The collection of Leon’s letters will undoubtedly constitute one of the most valuable sources for the study of the inner pre-history of the Fourth International.
But the Russian question continued to occupy the centre of his attention. While still in Prinkipo he became the actual editor of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition from its inception (the middle of 1928), and took complete charge of this work upon his arrival in Berlin (the beginning of 1931), where the Bulletin was immediately transferred from Paris. The last letter we received from Leon written on February 4, 1938, twelve days before his death, begins with the following words: “I am sending you page-proofs of the Bulletin for the next ship will not leave for some time, while the Bulletin will come off the press only tomorrow morning.” The appearance of each issue was a minor event in his life, a minor event which demanded great exertions; making up the issue, polishing the raw material, writing articles, meticulous proof-reading, prompt correspondence with friends and collaborators, and, not the least, gathering funds. But how proud he was over each “successful” number!
During the first years of emigration he engaged in a vast correspondence with Oppositionists in the USSR. But by 1932 the GPU destroyed virtually all our connections. It became necessary to seek fresh information through devious channels. Leon was always on the lookout, avidly searching for connecting threads with Russia, hunting up returning tourists, Soviet students assigned abroad, or sympathetic functionaries in the foreign representations. To avoid compromising his informant, he chased for hours through the streets of Berlin and later of Paris to evade the GPU spies who trailed him. In all these years there was not a single instance of any one suffering as a consequence of indiscretion, carelessness or imprudence on his part.
In the files of the GPU he was referred to by the nickname “synok” or “Little Son”. According to the late Ignace Reiss, in the Lubyanka they said on more than one occasion: “The Little Son does his work cleverly. The Old Man wouldn’t find it so easy without him.” This was the actual truth. Without him it would not have been easy. Without him it will be hard. It was just for this reason that agents of the GPU, worming their way even into the organizations of the Opposition, surrounded Leon with a thick web of surveillance, intrigues and plots. In the Moscow trials his name invariably figured next to mine. Moscow was seeking for an opportunity to get rid of him at all costs!
After Hitler assumed power, the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition was immediately banned. Leon remained in Germany for several weeks, carrying on illegal work, hiding from the Gestapo in different apartments. His mother and I sounded the alarm, insisting on his immediate departure from Germany. In the spring of 1933 Leon finally decided to leave the country which he had learned to know and to love, and moved to Paris where the Bulletin followed him. Here Leon again resumed his studies. He had to pass an examination for the French intermediate school and then for the third time to begin with the first term in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the Sorbonne. In Paris he lived under very difficult conditions, in constant want, occupying himself with scientific studies at the University at odd moments; but thanks to his exceptional ability he completed his studies, i.e., obtained his diploma.
His main efforts in Paris, even to a greater extent than in Berlin, were devoted to the revolution and to literary collaboration with me. During recent years Leon himself began to write more systematically for the press of the Fourth International. Isolated indications, especially the notes on his reminiscences for my autobiography, made me suspect while still in Prinkipo that he had literary gifts. But he was loaded down with all sorts of other work, and inasmuch as we held our ideas and subject matter in common, he left the literary work to me. As I recall, in Turkey he wrote only one major article: Stalin and the Red Army – or How History is Written, under the pseudonym of N. Markin, a sailor-revolutionist to whom in his childhood he was bound by a friendship deepened by profound admiration. This article was included in my book The Stalin School of Falsification. Subsequently his articles began to appear more and more frequently in the pages of the Bulletin and in other publications of the Fourth International, written each time under the pressure of necessity. Leon wrote only when he had something to say and when he knew that no one else could say it better. During the period of our life in Norway I received requests from various places for an analysis of the Stakhanovist movement which to some extent caught our organizations by surprise. When it became clear that my prolonged illness would prevent me from fulfilling this task, Leon sent me a draft of an article by him on Stakhanovism, with a very modest accompanying letter. The work appeared to me excellent both in its serious and thorough analysis as well as in the terseness and clarity of its presentation. I remember how pleased Leon was by my warm praise! This article was published in several languages and immediately provided a correct point of view upon this “socialist” piecework under the whip of the bureaucracy. Scores of subsequent articles have not added anything essential to this analysis.
Leon’s chief literary work was his book, The Red Book on the Moscow Trial, devoted to the trial of the Sixteen (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, et al.). It was published in French, Russian and German. At that time my wife and I were captives in Norway, bound hand and foot, targets of the most monstrous slander. There are certain forms of paralysis, in which people see, hear and understand everything but are unable to move a finger to ward off mortal danger. It was to such political paralysis that the Norwegian “Socialist” government subjected us. What a priceless gift to us, under these conditions, was Leon’s book, the first crushing reply to the Kremlin falsifiers. The first few pages, I recall, seemed to me pale. That was because they only restated a political appraisal, which had already been made, of the general condition of the USSR. But from the moment the author undertook an independent analysis of the trial. I became completely engrossed. Each succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last. “Good boy, Levusyatka!” my wife and I said. “We have a defender!” How his eyes must have glowed with pleasure as he read our warm praise! Several newspapers, in particular the central organ of the Danish Social Democracy, said with assurance that I apparently had, despite the strict conditions of internment, found the means of participating in the work which appeared under Sedov’s name. “One feels the pen of Trotsky ...” All this is – fiction. In the book there is not a line of my own. Many comrades who were inclined to regard Sedov merely as “Trotsky’s son” -just as Karl Liebknecht was long regarded only as the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht – were able to convince themselves, if only from this little book, that he was not only an independent but an outstanding figure.
Leon wrote as he did everything else, that is, conscientiously, studying, reflecting, checking. The vanity of authorship was alien to him. Agitational declamation had no lures for him. At the same time every line he wrote glows with a living flame, whose source was his unfeigned revolutionary temperament.
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This temperament was formed and hardened by events of personal and family life indissolubly linked to the great political events of our epoch. In 1905, his mother sat in a Petersburg jail expecting a child. A gust of liberalism set her free in the autumn. In February of the next year, the boy was born. By that time I was already confined in prison. I was able to see my son for the first time only thirteen months later, when I escaped from Siberia. His earliest impressions bore the breath of the first Russian revolution whose defeat drove us into Austria. The war, which drove us into Switzerland, hammered into the consciousness of the eight-year-old boy. The next big lesson for him was my deportation from France. On board ship he conversed, in sign language, about the revolution with a Catalan stoker. The revolution signified for him all possible boons, above all a return to Russia. En route from America, near Halifax, the eleven-year-old Levik struck a British officer with his fist. He knew whom to hit; not the sailors who carried me off the ship, but the officer who issued the orders. In Canada, during my incarceration in the concentration camp, Leon learned how to conceal letters not read by the police and how to place them unobserved in the mail box. In Petrograd he found himself immediately plunged into the atmosphere of Bolshevik-baiting. In the bourgeois school where he happened to be enrolled at the beginning, sons of liberals and Social Revolutionaries beat him up because he was Trotsky’s son. Once he came to the Wood-Workers’ Trade Union, where his mother worked, with his hand all bloody. He had had a political discussion in school with Kerensky’s son. In the streets he joined all the Bolshevik demonstrations, took refuge behind gates from the armed forces of the then People’s Front (the coalition of Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks). After the July Days, grown pale and thin, he came to visit me in the jail of Kerensky-Tseretelli. In the home of a colonel they knew, at the dinner table, Leon and Sergei threw themselves, knives in hand, at an officer who had declared that the Bolsheviks were agents of the Kaiser. They made approximately the same reply to the engineer Serebrovsky, now a member of the Stalinist Central Committee, when he tried to assure them that Lenin was – a Germany spy. Levik learned early to grind his young teeth when reading slanders in the newspapers. He passed the October Days in the company of the sailor Markin who, in leisure moments, instructed him in the cellar in the art of shooting.
Thus a future fighter took shape. For him, the revolution was not an abstraction. Oh, no! It seeped into his very pores. Hence derived his serious attitude toward revolutionary duty beginning with the Red Saturdays, and tutoring of the backward ones. That is why he later joined so ardently in the struggle against the bureaucracy. In the autumn of 1927 Leon made an “Oppositional” tour to the Urals in the company of Mrachkovsky and Beloborodov. On their return, both of them spoke with genuine enthusiasm about Leon’s conduct during the sharp and hopeless struggle, his intransigent speeches at the meetings of the youth, his physical fearlessness in the face of the hooligan detachments of the bureaucracy, his moral courage which enabled him to face defeat with his young head held high. When he returned from the Urals, having matured in those six weeks, I was already expelled from the party. It was necessary to prepare for exile. Be was not given to imprudence, nor did he make a show of courage. He was wise, cautious, and calculating. But he knew that danger constitutes an element in revolution as well as war. Whenever the need arose, and it frequently did, he knew how to face danger. His life in France, where the GPU has friends on every floor of the govern mental edifice, was an almost unbroken chain of dangers. Professional killers dogged his steps. They lived in apartments next to his. They stole his letters and archives and listened in on his phone conversations. When, after an illness, he spent two weeks on the shores of the Mediterranean – his only vacation for a period of years – the agents of the GPU took quarters in the same pension. When he arranged to go to Mulhausen for a conference with a Swiss lawyer in connection with a legal action against the slanders of the Stalinist press, a whole gang of GPU agents was waiting for him at the station. They were the same who later murdered Ignace Reiss. Leon escaped certain death only because he fell ill on the eve of his departure, suffered from a high fever and could not leave Paris. All these facts have been established by the judicial authorities of France and Switzerland. And how many secrets still remain unrevealed? His closest friends wrote us three months ago that he was subject to a danger too direct in Paris and insisted on his going to Mexico. Leon replied: The danger is undeniable, but Paris today is too important a battle post; to leave it now would be a crime. Nothing remained except to bow to this argument.
When in the autumn of last year a number of foreign Soviet agents began to break with the Kremlin and the GPU, Leon naturally was to be found in the centre of these events. Certain friends protested against his consorting with “untested” new allies: there might possibly be a provocation. Leon replied that there was undoubtedly an element of risk but that it was impossible to develop this important movement if we stood aside. This time as well we had to accept Leon as nature and the political situation made him. As a genuine revolutionist he placed value on life only to the extent that it served the struggle of the proletariat for liberation.
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On February 16, the Mexican evening papers carried a brief dispatch on the death of Leon Sedov following a surgical operation. Absorbed in urgent work I did not see these papers. Diego Rivera on his own initiative checked this dispatch by radio and came to me with the terrible news. An hour later I told Natalia of the death of our son – in the same month of February in which 32 years ago she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives.
We had expected many things, almost anything, but not this. For only recently Leon had written us concerning his intention to secure a job as a worker in a factory. At the same time he expressed the hope of writing the history of the Russian Opposition for a scientific institute. He was full of plans. Only two days prior to the news of his death we received a letter from him dated February 4, brimming with courage and vitality. Here it is before me. “We are making preparations,” he wrote, “for the trial in Switzerland where the situation is very favourable both as regards so-called ‘public opinion’ and the authorities.” And he went on to list a number of favourable facts and symptoms. “En somme nous marquons des points.” [Well, we are scoring points] The letter breathes with assurance concerning the future. Whence then this malignant disease, and lightning death? In twelve days? For us, the question is shrouded in deep mystery. Will it ever be cleared up? The first and natural supposition is that he was poisoned. It presented no serious difficulty for the agents of Stalin to gain access to Leon, his clothing, his food. Are judicial experts, even if untrammelled by “diplomatic” considerations capable of arriving at a definitive conclusion on this point? In connection with war chemistry the art of poisoning has nowadays attained an extraordinary development. To be sure the secrets of this art are inaccessible to common mortals. But the poisoners of the GPU have access to everything. It is entirely feasible to conceive of a poison which cannot be detected after death, even with the most careful analysis. And who will guarantee such care?
Or did they kill him without resorting to the aid of chemistry? This young and profoundly sensitive and tender being had had far too much to bear. The long years of the campaign of lies against his father and the best of the older comrades, whom Leon from his childhood had become accustomed to revere and love, had already deeply shaken his moral organism. The long series of capitulations by members of the Opposition dealt him blows that were no less heavy. Then followed in Berlin the suicide of Zina, my older daughter, whom Stalin had perfidiously, out of the sheerest vindictiveness, torn from her children, her family, her own milieu. Leon found himself with his older sister’s corpse and her six-year old boy on his hands. He decided to try to reach his younger brother Sergei in Moscow by phone. Either because the GPU was momentarily disconcerted by Zina’s suicide or because it hoped to listen in to some secrets, a phone connection, contrary to all expectations, was made, and Leon was able to transmit the tragic news to Moscow by his own voice. Such was the last conversation between our two boys, doomed brothers, over the still-warm body of their sister. Leon’s letters to us in Prinkipo were terse, meagre and restrained when they described his ordeal. He spared us far too much. But in every line one could feel an unbearable moral strain.
Material difficulties and privations Leon bore lightly, jokingly, like a true proletarian: but of course they too left their mark. Infinitely more harrowing were the effects of subsequent moral tortures. The Moscow Trial of the Sixteen, the monstrous nature of the accusations, the nightmarish testimony of the defendants, among them Smirnov and Mrachkovsky, whom Leon so intimately knew and loved; the unexpected internment of his father and mother in Norway, the period of four months without any news; the theft of the archives, the mysterious removal of my wife and myself to Mexico; the second Moscow Trial with its even more delirious accusations and confessions, the disappearance of his brother Sergei, accused of “poisoning workers”; the shooting of countless people who had either been close friends or remained friends to the end; the persecutions and the attempts of the GPU in France, the murder of Reiss in Switzerland, the lies, the baseness, the perfidy, the frameups – no, “Stalinism” was for Leon not an abstract political concept but an endless series of moral blows and spiritual wounds. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him. The day of his death they marked on the Thermidorian calendar as a major celebration.
Before they killed him they did everything in their power to slander and blacken our son in the eyes of contemporaries and of posterity. Cain Djugashvili and his henchmen tried to depict Leon as an agent of Fascism, a secret partisan of capitalist restoration in the USSR, the organizer of railway wrecks and murders of workers. The efforts of the scoundrels are in vain. Tons of Thermidorian filth rebound from his young figure, leaving not a stain on him. Leon was a thoroughly clean, honest, pure human being. He could before any working-class gathering tell the story of his life – alas, so brief – day by day, as I have briefly told it here. He had nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. Moral nobility was the basic warp of his character. He unwaveringly served the cause of the oppressed, because he remained true to himself. From the hands of nature and history he emerged a man of heroic mould. The great awe-inspiring events which hover over us will need such people. Had Leon lived to participate in these events he would have shown his true stature. But he did not live. Our Leon, boy, son, heroic fighter, is no more!
His mother – who was closer to him than any other person in the world – and I are living through these terrible hours recalling his image, feature by feature, unable to believe that he is no more and weeping because it is impossible not to believe. How can we accustom ourselves to the idea that upon this earth there no longer exists the warm, human entity bound to us by such indissoluble threads of common memories, mutual understanding, and tender attachment. No one knew us and no one knows us, our strong and our weak sides, so well as he did. He was part of both of us, our young part. By hundreds of channels our thoughts and feelings daily reached out to him in Paris. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.
Goodbye, Leon, goodbye dear and incomparable friend. Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary. We lived in firm conviction that long after we were gone you would be the continuer of our common cause. But we were not able to protect you. Goodbye, Leon! We bequeath your irreproachable memory to the younger generation of the workers of the world. You will rightly live in the hearts of all those who work, suffer and struggle for a better world. “Revolutionary youth of all countries! Accept from us the memory of our Leon, adopt him as your son – he is worthy of it – and let him henceforth participate invisibly in your battles, since destiny has denied him the happiness of participating in your final victory.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment on this article:
As is well-known in revolutionary circles many times the children of famous Reds tend to be either apolitcal, non-political, or anti-political. Those like Karl Liebknecht (son of Wilhelm, leader of the early German Social-Democratic Party), and here Leon Sevov, Leon Trotsky's older son, have big shoes to fill. As the Leon Trotsky memorial for his fallen son points out-Leon Sedov did just fine, just fine, indeed.
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LEON SEDOV
Son, Friend, Fighter
By Leon Trotsky
As I write these lines, with Leon Sedov’s mother by my side, telegrams of condolence keep coming from different countries. And for us each telegram evokes the same appalling question: “Can it really be that our friends in France, Holland, England, the United States, Canada, South Africa and here in Mexico accept it as definitely established that Sedov is no more?” Each telegram is a new token of his death, but we are unable to believe it as yet. And this, not only because he was our son, truthful, devoted, loving, but above all because he had, as no one else on earth, become part of our life, entwined in all its roots, our co-thinker, our co-worker, our guard, our counsellor, our friend.
Of that older generation whose ranks we joined at the end of the last century on the road to revolution, all, without exception, have been swept from the scene. That which Tsarist hard-labour prisons and harsh exiles, the hardships of emigration, the civil war and disease had failed to accomplish has in recent years been achieved by Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution. Following the destruction of the older generation, the best section of the next, that is, the generation which awakened in 1917 and which received its training in the twenty-four armies of the revolutionary front, was likewise destroyed. Also crushed underfoot and completely obliterated was the best part of the youth, Leon’s contemporaries. He himself survived only by a miracle, owing to the fact that he accompanied us into exile and then to Turkey. During the years of our last emigration we made many new friends, some of whom have entered intimately into our lives, becoming, as it were, members of our family. But we met all of them for the first time in these last few years when we had already neared old age. Leon was the only one who knew us when we were young; he became part of our lives from the very first moment of his self-awakening. While young in years, he still seemed our contemporary. Together with us, he went through our second emigration: Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Amherst [concentration camp in Canada], and finally Petrograd.
While but a child – he was going on twelve – he had, in his own way, consciously made the transition from the February revolution to that of October. His boyhood passed under high pressure. He added a year to his age so that he might more quickly join the Komsomol [Communist youth], seething at that time with all the passion of awakened youth. The young bakers, among whom he carried on propaganda, would award him a fresh loaf of white bread which he happily brought home under his arm, protruding from the torn sleeve of his jacket. Those were fiery and cold, great and hungry years. Of his own volition Leon left the Kremlin for a proletarian student dormitory, in order not to be any different from the others. He. would not ride with us in an automobile, refusing to make use of this privilege of the bureaucrats. But he did participate ardently in all Red Saturdays and other “labour mobilizations”, cleaning snow from the Moscow streets, “liquidating” illiteracy, unloading bread and firewood from freight cars, and later, as a polytechnic student, repairing locomotives. If he did not get to the war front, it was only because even adding two or as much as three years to his age could not have helped him; for he was not yet fifteen when the civil war ended. However, he did accompany me several times to the front, absorbing its stark impressions, and firmly understanding why this bloody struggle was being waged.
The latest press reports speak of Leon Sedov’s life in Paris under “the most modest conditions” – much more modest, let me add, than those of a skilled worker. Even in Moscow, during those years when his father and mother held high posts, he lived not better but worse than for the past few years in Paris. Was this perhaps the rule among the youth of the bureaucracy? By no means. Even then he was an exception. In this child, growing to boyhood and adolescence, a sense of duty and achievement awakened early. In 1923 Leon threw himself headlong into the work of the Opposition. It would be entirely wrong to see in this nothing more than parental influence. After all, when he left a comfortable apartment in the Kremlin for his hungry, cold and dingy dormitory, he did so against our will, even though we did not resist this move on his part. His political orientation was determined by the same instinct which impelled him to choose crowded street cars rather than Kremlin limousines. The platform of the Opposition simply gave political expression to traits inherent in his nature. Leon broke uncompromisingly with those of his student friends who were violently torn from “Trotskyism” by their bureaucratic fathers and found a way to his baker friends. Thus, at seventeen he began the life of a fully conscious revolutionist. He quickly grasped the art of conspiratorial work, illegal meetings, and the secret issuing and distribution of Opposition documents. The Komsomol rapidly developed its own cadres of Opposition leaders.
Leon had exceptional mathematical ability. He never tired of assisting many worker-students who had not gone through grammar school. He engaged in this work with all his energy; encouraging, leading, chiding the lazy ones – the youthful teacher saw in this work a service to his class. His own studies in the Superior Technical Academy progressed very favourably. But they took up only a part of his working day. Most of his time, strength, and spirit were devoted to the cause of the revolution.
In the winter of 1927, when the police massacre of the Opposition began, Leon had passed his twenty-second year. By that time a child was born to him and he would proudly bring his son to the Kremlin to show him to us. Without a moment’s hesitation, however, Leon decided to tear himself away from his school and his young family in order to share our fate in Central Asia. En this he acted not only as a son bat above all as a co-thinker. It was essential, whatever the cost, to guarantee our connection with Moscow. His work in Alma Ata, during that year, was truly peerless. We called him our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Police and Minister of Communications. And in fulfilling all these functions he had to rely on an illegal apparatus. Commissioned by the Moscow Opposition centre, comrade X, very devoted and reliable, acquired a carriage and three horses and worked as an independent coachman between Alma Ata and the city of Frunze (Pishpek), at that time the terminus of the railroad. It was his task to convey the secret Moscow mail to us every two weeks and to carry our letters and manuscripts back to Frunze, where a Moscow messenger awaited him. Sometimes special couriers also arrived from Moscow. To meet with them was no simple matter. We were lodged in a house surrounded on all sides by the institutions of the GPU and the quarters of its agents. Outside connections were handled entirely by Leon. He would leave the house late on a rainy night or when the snow fell heavily, or, evading the vigilance of the spies, he would hide himself during the day in the library to meet the courier in a public bath or among the thick weeds on the outskirts of the town, or in the oriental market place where the Kirghiz crowded with their horses, donkeys and their wares. Each time he returned excited and happy, with a conquering gleam in his eyes and the precious booty under his clothing. And so for a year’s time he eluded all enemies. What is more, he maintained the most “correct”, almost “friendly”, relations with these enemies who were “comrades” of yesterday, displaying uncommon tact and restraint, carefully guarding us from outside disturbances.
The ideological life of the Opposition seethed like a cauldron at the time. It was the year of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International. The Moscow packets arrived with scores of letters, articles, theses, from comrades known and unknown. During the first few months, before the sharp change in the conduct of the GPU, we even received a great many letters by the official mail services from different places of exile. It was necessary to sift this diversified material carefully. And it was in this work that I had the occasion to realize, not without surprise, how this little boy had imperceptibly grown up, how well he could judge people – he knew a great many more Oppositionists than I did – how reliable was his revolutionary instinct, which enabled him, without any hesitation, to distinguish the genuine from the false, the substance from the veneer. The eyes of his mother, who knew our son best, glowed with pride during our conversations.
Between April and October we received approximately 1,000 political letters and documents and about 700 telegrams. In this same period we sent out 550 telegrams and not fewer than 800 political letters, including a number of substantial works, such as the Criticism of the Draft Programme of the Comintern, and others. Without my son I could not have accomplished even one half of the work.
So intimate a collaboration did not, however, mean that no disputes or occasionally even very sharp clashes arose between us. Neither at that time, nor later in emigration and this must be said candidly – were my relations with Leon by any means of an even and placid character. To his categorical judgements, which were often disrespectful to some of the “old men” of the Opposition, I not only counterposed equally categoric corrections and reservations, but I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time. And inasmuch as the closest to me of all the youth was my son, he usually had the hardest time of all. To a superficial eye it might even have seemed that our relationship was permeated with severity and aloofness. But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than bonds of blood – a solidarity of views and appraisals, of sympathies and antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common. And this mutual attachment blazed up from time to time so warmly as to reward us three-hundred-fold for the petty friction in daily work.
Thus four thousand kilometres from Moscow, two hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest railway, we spent a difficult and never-to-be-forgotten year which remains in our memory under the sign of Leon, or rather Levik or Levusyatka as we called him.
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In January 1929, the Political Bureau decided to deport me “beyond the borders of the USSR” – to Turkey, as it turned out. Members of the family were granted the right to accompany me. Again, without any hesitation Leon decided to accompany us into exile, tearing himself forever from his wife and child who he dearly loved.
A new chapter, with its first pages almost blank, opened in our life. Connections, acquaintances, and friendships had to be built anew. And once again our son became all things for us: our go-between in relations with the outside world, our guard, collaborator and secretary as in Alma Ata, but on an incomparably broader scale. Foreign languages, with which he had been more familiar in his childhood than he was with Russian, had been almost completely forgotten in the tumult of the revolutionary years. It became necessary to learn them all over again. Our joint literary work began. My archives and library were wholly in Leon’s hands. He had a thorough knowledge of the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, was very well acquainted with my books and manuscripts, with the history of the party and the revolution, and the history of the Thermidorian falsification. In the chaos of the Alma Ata public library he had already studied the files of Pravda for the Soviet years and gathered the necessary quotations and references with unfailing resourcefulness. Lacking this precious material and without Leon’s subsequent researches in archives and libraries, first in Turkey, later in Berlin and finally in Paris, not one of my works during the past ten years would have been possible. This applies especially to The History of the Russian Revolution. Vast in point of quantity, his collaboration was by no means of a “technical” nature. His independent selection of facts, quotations, characterizations, frequently determined both the method of my presentation as well as the conclusions. The Revolution Betrayed contains not a few pages which I wrote on the basis of several lines from my son’s letters and the quotations which he sent from Soviet newspapers inaccessible to me. He supplied me with even more material for the biography of Lenin. Such collaboration was made possible only because our ideological solidarity had penetrated our very flesh and blood. My son’s name should rightfully be placed next to mine on almost all my books written since 1928.
In Moscow, Leon had lacked a year and a half to complete his engineering course. His mother and I insisted that while abroad he return to his abandoned science. In Prinkipo a new group of young co-workers from different countries had meanwhile been successfully formed, in intimate collaboration with my son. Leon consented to leave only because of the weighty argument that in Germany he would be able to render invaluable services to the International Left Opposition. Resuming his scientific studies in Berlin (he had to start from the beginning), Leon simultaneously threw himself headlong into revolutionary activity In the International Secretariat he soon became the representative of the Russian section. His letters for that period to his mother and myself show how quickly he has acclimatized himself to the political atmosphere of Germany and Western Europe, how well he judged people and gauged the differences and countless conflicts of that early period of our movement. His revolutionary instinct, already enriched by serious experience, enabled him in almost all cases to find the right road independently. How many times were we gladdened when, upon opening a letter just arrived, we discovered in it the very ideas and conclusions which I had just recommended to his attention. And how deeply and quietly happy he was over such coincidences of our ideas! The collection of Leon’s letters will undoubtedly constitute one of the most valuable sources for the study of the inner pre-history of the Fourth International.
But the Russian question continued to occupy the centre of his attention. While still in Prinkipo he became the actual editor of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition from its inception (the middle of 1928), and took complete charge of this work upon his arrival in Berlin (the beginning of 1931), where the Bulletin was immediately transferred from Paris. The last letter we received from Leon written on February 4, 1938, twelve days before his death, begins with the following words: “I am sending you page-proofs of the Bulletin for the next ship will not leave for some time, while the Bulletin will come off the press only tomorrow morning.” The appearance of each issue was a minor event in his life, a minor event which demanded great exertions; making up the issue, polishing the raw material, writing articles, meticulous proof-reading, prompt correspondence with friends and collaborators, and, not the least, gathering funds. But how proud he was over each “successful” number!
During the first years of emigration he engaged in a vast correspondence with Oppositionists in the USSR. But by 1932 the GPU destroyed virtually all our connections. It became necessary to seek fresh information through devious channels. Leon was always on the lookout, avidly searching for connecting threads with Russia, hunting up returning tourists, Soviet students assigned abroad, or sympathetic functionaries in the foreign representations. To avoid compromising his informant, he chased for hours through the streets of Berlin and later of Paris to evade the GPU spies who trailed him. In all these years there was not a single instance of any one suffering as a consequence of indiscretion, carelessness or imprudence on his part.
In the files of the GPU he was referred to by the nickname “synok” or “Little Son”. According to the late Ignace Reiss, in the Lubyanka they said on more than one occasion: “The Little Son does his work cleverly. The Old Man wouldn’t find it so easy without him.” This was the actual truth. Without him it would not have been easy. Without him it will be hard. It was just for this reason that agents of the GPU, worming their way even into the organizations of the Opposition, surrounded Leon with a thick web of surveillance, intrigues and plots. In the Moscow trials his name invariably figured next to mine. Moscow was seeking for an opportunity to get rid of him at all costs!
After Hitler assumed power, the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition was immediately banned. Leon remained in Germany for several weeks, carrying on illegal work, hiding from the Gestapo in different apartments. His mother and I sounded the alarm, insisting on his immediate departure from Germany. In the spring of 1933 Leon finally decided to leave the country which he had learned to know and to love, and moved to Paris where the Bulletin followed him. Here Leon again resumed his studies. He had to pass an examination for the French intermediate school and then for the third time to begin with the first term in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the Sorbonne. In Paris he lived under very difficult conditions, in constant want, occupying himself with scientific studies at the University at odd moments; but thanks to his exceptional ability he completed his studies, i.e., obtained his diploma.
His main efforts in Paris, even to a greater extent than in Berlin, were devoted to the revolution and to literary collaboration with me. During recent years Leon himself began to write more systematically for the press of the Fourth International. Isolated indications, especially the notes on his reminiscences for my autobiography, made me suspect while still in Prinkipo that he had literary gifts. But he was loaded down with all sorts of other work, and inasmuch as we held our ideas and subject matter in common, he left the literary work to me. As I recall, in Turkey he wrote only one major article: Stalin and the Red Army – or How History is Written, under the pseudonym of N. Markin, a sailor-revolutionist to whom in his childhood he was bound by a friendship deepened by profound admiration. This article was included in my book The Stalin School of Falsification. Subsequently his articles began to appear more and more frequently in the pages of the Bulletin and in other publications of the Fourth International, written each time under the pressure of necessity. Leon wrote only when he had something to say and when he knew that no one else could say it better. During the period of our life in Norway I received requests from various places for an analysis of the Stakhanovist movement which to some extent caught our organizations by surprise. When it became clear that my prolonged illness would prevent me from fulfilling this task, Leon sent me a draft of an article by him on Stakhanovism, with a very modest accompanying letter. The work appeared to me excellent both in its serious and thorough analysis as well as in the terseness and clarity of its presentation. I remember how pleased Leon was by my warm praise! This article was published in several languages and immediately provided a correct point of view upon this “socialist” piecework under the whip of the bureaucracy. Scores of subsequent articles have not added anything essential to this analysis.
Leon’s chief literary work was his book, The Red Book on the Moscow Trial, devoted to the trial of the Sixteen (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, et al.). It was published in French, Russian and German. At that time my wife and I were captives in Norway, bound hand and foot, targets of the most monstrous slander. There are certain forms of paralysis, in which people see, hear and understand everything but are unable to move a finger to ward off mortal danger. It was to such political paralysis that the Norwegian “Socialist” government subjected us. What a priceless gift to us, under these conditions, was Leon’s book, the first crushing reply to the Kremlin falsifiers. The first few pages, I recall, seemed to me pale. That was because they only restated a political appraisal, which had already been made, of the general condition of the USSR. But from the moment the author undertook an independent analysis of the trial. I became completely engrossed. Each succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last. “Good boy, Levusyatka!” my wife and I said. “We have a defender!” How his eyes must have glowed with pleasure as he read our warm praise! Several newspapers, in particular the central organ of the Danish Social Democracy, said with assurance that I apparently had, despite the strict conditions of internment, found the means of participating in the work which appeared under Sedov’s name. “One feels the pen of Trotsky ...” All this is – fiction. In the book there is not a line of my own. Many comrades who were inclined to regard Sedov merely as “Trotsky’s son” -just as Karl Liebknecht was long regarded only as the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht – were able to convince themselves, if only from this little book, that he was not only an independent but an outstanding figure.
Leon wrote as he did everything else, that is, conscientiously, studying, reflecting, checking. The vanity of authorship was alien to him. Agitational declamation had no lures for him. At the same time every line he wrote glows with a living flame, whose source was his unfeigned revolutionary temperament.
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This temperament was formed and hardened by events of personal and family life indissolubly linked to the great political events of our epoch. In 1905, his mother sat in a Petersburg jail expecting a child. A gust of liberalism set her free in the autumn. In February of the next year, the boy was born. By that time I was already confined in prison. I was able to see my son for the first time only thirteen months later, when I escaped from Siberia. His earliest impressions bore the breath of the first Russian revolution whose defeat drove us into Austria. The war, which drove us into Switzerland, hammered into the consciousness of the eight-year-old boy. The next big lesson for him was my deportation from France. On board ship he conversed, in sign language, about the revolution with a Catalan stoker. The revolution signified for him all possible boons, above all a return to Russia. En route from America, near Halifax, the eleven-year-old Levik struck a British officer with his fist. He knew whom to hit; not the sailors who carried me off the ship, but the officer who issued the orders. In Canada, during my incarceration in the concentration camp, Leon learned how to conceal letters not read by the police and how to place them unobserved in the mail box. In Petrograd he found himself immediately plunged into the atmosphere of Bolshevik-baiting. In the bourgeois school where he happened to be enrolled at the beginning, sons of liberals and Social Revolutionaries beat him up because he was Trotsky’s son. Once he came to the Wood-Workers’ Trade Union, where his mother worked, with his hand all bloody. He had had a political discussion in school with Kerensky’s son. In the streets he joined all the Bolshevik demonstrations, took refuge behind gates from the armed forces of the then People’s Front (the coalition of Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks). After the July Days, grown pale and thin, he came to visit me in the jail of Kerensky-Tseretelli. In the home of a colonel they knew, at the dinner table, Leon and Sergei threw themselves, knives in hand, at an officer who had declared that the Bolsheviks were agents of the Kaiser. They made approximately the same reply to the engineer Serebrovsky, now a member of the Stalinist Central Committee, when he tried to assure them that Lenin was – a Germany spy. Levik learned early to grind his young teeth when reading slanders in the newspapers. He passed the October Days in the company of the sailor Markin who, in leisure moments, instructed him in the cellar in the art of shooting.
Thus a future fighter took shape. For him, the revolution was not an abstraction. Oh, no! It seeped into his very pores. Hence derived his serious attitude toward revolutionary duty beginning with the Red Saturdays, and tutoring of the backward ones. That is why he later joined so ardently in the struggle against the bureaucracy. In the autumn of 1927 Leon made an “Oppositional” tour to the Urals in the company of Mrachkovsky and Beloborodov. On their return, both of them spoke with genuine enthusiasm about Leon’s conduct during the sharp and hopeless struggle, his intransigent speeches at the meetings of the youth, his physical fearlessness in the face of the hooligan detachments of the bureaucracy, his moral courage which enabled him to face defeat with his young head held high. When he returned from the Urals, having matured in those six weeks, I was already expelled from the party. It was necessary to prepare for exile. Be was not given to imprudence, nor did he make a show of courage. He was wise, cautious, and calculating. But he knew that danger constitutes an element in revolution as well as war. Whenever the need arose, and it frequently did, he knew how to face danger. His life in France, where the GPU has friends on every floor of the govern mental edifice, was an almost unbroken chain of dangers. Professional killers dogged his steps. They lived in apartments next to his. They stole his letters and archives and listened in on his phone conversations. When, after an illness, he spent two weeks on the shores of the Mediterranean – his only vacation for a period of years – the agents of the GPU took quarters in the same pension. When he arranged to go to Mulhausen for a conference with a Swiss lawyer in connection with a legal action against the slanders of the Stalinist press, a whole gang of GPU agents was waiting for him at the station. They were the same who later murdered Ignace Reiss. Leon escaped certain death only because he fell ill on the eve of his departure, suffered from a high fever and could not leave Paris. All these facts have been established by the judicial authorities of France and Switzerland. And how many secrets still remain unrevealed? His closest friends wrote us three months ago that he was subject to a danger too direct in Paris and insisted on his going to Mexico. Leon replied: The danger is undeniable, but Paris today is too important a battle post; to leave it now would be a crime. Nothing remained except to bow to this argument.
When in the autumn of last year a number of foreign Soviet agents began to break with the Kremlin and the GPU, Leon naturally was to be found in the centre of these events. Certain friends protested against his consorting with “untested” new allies: there might possibly be a provocation. Leon replied that there was undoubtedly an element of risk but that it was impossible to develop this important movement if we stood aside. This time as well we had to accept Leon as nature and the political situation made him. As a genuine revolutionist he placed value on life only to the extent that it served the struggle of the proletariat for liberation.
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On February 16, the Mexican evening papers carried a brief dispatch on the death of Leon Sedov following a surgical operation. Absorbed in urgent work I did not see these papers. Diego Rivera on his own initiative checked this dispatch by radio and came to me with the terrible news. An hour later I told Natalia of the death of our son – in the same month of February in which 32 years ago she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives.
We had expected many things, almost anything, but not this. For only recently Leon had written us concerning his intention to secure a job as a worker in a factory. At the same time he expressed the hope of writing the history of the Russian Opposition for a scientific institute. He was full of plans. Only two days prior to the news of his death we received a letter from him dated February 4, brimming with courage and vitality. Here it is before me. “We are making preparations,” he wrote, “for the trial in Switzerland where the situation is very favourable both as regards so-called ‘public opinion’ and the authorities.” And he went on to list a number of favourable facts and symptoms. “En somme nous marquons des points.” [Well, we are scoring points] The letter breathes with assurance concerning the future. Whence then this malignant disease, and lightning death? In twelve days? For us, the question is shrouded in deep mystery. Will it ever be cleared up? The first and natural supposition is that he was poisoned. It presented no serious difficulty for the agents of Stalin to gain access to Leon, his clothing, his food. Are judicial experts, even if untrammelled by “diplomatic” considerations capable of arriving at a definitive conclusion on this point? In connection with war chemistry the art of poisoning has nowadays attained an extraordinary development. To be sure the secrets of this art are inaccessible to common mortals. But the poisoners of the GPU have access to everything. It is entirely feasible to conceive of a poison which cannot be detected after death, even with the most careful analysis. And who will guarantee such care?
Or did they kill him without resorting to the aid of chemistry? This young and profoundly sensitive and tender being had had far too much to bear. The long years of the campaign of lies against his father and the best of the older comrades, whom Leon from his childhood had become accustomed to revere and love, had already deeply shaken his moral organism. The long series of capitulations by members of the Opposition dealt him blows that were no less heavy. Then followed in Berlin the suicide of Zina, my older daughter, whom Stalin had perfidiously, out of the sheerest vindictiveness, torn from her children, her family, her own milieu. Leon found himself with his older sister’s corpse and her six-year old boy on his hands. He decided to try to reach his younger brother Sergei in Moscow by phone. Either because the GPU was momentarily disconcerted by Zina’s suicide or because it hoped to listen in to some secrets, a phone connection, contrary to all expectations, was made, and Leon was able to transmit the tragic news to Moscow by his own voice. Such was the last conversation between our two boys, doomed brothers, over the still-warm body of their sister. Leon’s letters to us in Prinkipo were terse, meagre and restrained when they described his ordeal. He spared us far too much. But in every line one could feel an unbearable moral strain.
Material difficulties and privations Leon bore lightly, jokingly, like a true proletarian: but of course they too left their mark. Infinitely more harrowing were the effects of subsequent moral tortures. The Moscow Trial of the Sixteen, the monstrous nature of the accusations, the nightmarish testimony of the defendants, among them Smirnov and Mrachkovsky, whom Leon so intimately knew and loved; the unexpected internment of his father and mother in Norway, the period of four months without any news; the theft of the archives, the mysterious removal of my wife and myself to Mexico; the second Moscow Trial with its even more delirious accusations and confessions, the disappearance of his brother Sergei, accused of “poisoning workers”; the shooting of countless people who had either been close friends or remained friends to the end; the persecutions and the attempts of the GPU in France, the murder of Reiss in Switzerland, the lies, the baseness, the perfidy, the frameups – no, “Stalinism” was for Leon not an abstract political concept but an endless series of moral blows and spiritual wounds. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him. The day of his death they marked on the Thermidorian calendar as a major celebration.
Before they killed him they did everything in their power to slander and blacken our son in the eyes of contemporaries and of posterity. Cain Djugashvili and his henchmen tried to depict Leon as an agent of Fascism, a secret partisan of capitalist restoration in the USSR, the organizer of railway wrecks and murders of workers. The efforts of the scoundrels are in vain. Tons of Thermidorian filth rebound from his young figure, leaving not a stain on him. Leon was a thoroughly clean, honest, pure human being. He could before any working-class gathering tell the story of his life – alas, so brief – day by day, as I have briefly told it here. He had nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. Moral nobility was the basic warp of his character. He unwaveringly served the cause of the oppressed, because he remained true to himself. From the hands of nature and history he emerged a man of heroic mould. The great awe-inspiring events which hover over us will need such people. Had Leon lived to participate in these events he would have shown his true stature. But he did not live. Our Leon, boy, son, heroic fighter, is no more!
His mother – who was closer to him than any other person in the world – and I are living through these terrible hours recalling his image, feature by feature, unable to believe that he is no more and weeping because it is impossible not to believe. How can we accustom ourselves to the idea that upon this earth there no longer exists the warm, human entity bound to us by such indissoluble threads of common memories, mutual understanding, and tender attachment. No one knew us and no one knows us, our strong and our weak sides, so well as he did. He was part of both of us, our young part. By hundreds of channels our thoughts and feelings daily reached out to him in Paris. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.
Goodbye, Leon, goodbye dear and incomparable friend. Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary. We lived in firm conviction that long after we were gone you would be the continuer of our common cause. But we were not able to protect you. Goodbye, Leon! We bequeath your irreproachable memory to the younger generation of the workers of the world. You will rightly live in the hearts of all those who work, suffer and struggle for a better world. “Revolutionary youth of all countries! Accept from us the memory of our Leon, adopt him as your son – he is worthy of it – and let him henceforth participate invisibly in your battles, since destiny has denied him the happiness of participating in your final victory.
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart Now And Her Co-Workers Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
class struggle defend, free lynne stewart, free all class-war prisoners, ZEALOUS ADVOCACY, an injury to one is an injury to all, PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE,
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
class struggle defend, free lynne stewart, free all class-war prisoners, ZEALOUS ADVOCACY, an injury to one is an injury to all, PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE,
The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-American Communist Party Leader William Z. Foster- An Appraisal of the Man and His Career((1954-58)
Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of American Communist Party Leader William Z. Foster- An Appraisal of the Man and His Career((1954-58)
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
Markin comment on this series:
Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.
Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.
As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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