Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America (algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Works of Karl Marx 1873
Political Indifferentism-1873
Written: 1873;
Translated: from the French by Bignami;
Source: The Plebs, Vol. XIV, London 1922;
First Published: 1874 in the Italian, Almanacco Repubblicano per l'anno 1874;
“The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!
“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles.
“Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated.
“If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement.
“In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements. These movements can never produce anything more than short-term results. As truly religious men they should scorn daily needs and cry out with voices full of faith: "May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but let the eternal principles remain immaculate! As pious Christians they must believe the words of their pastor, despise the good things of this world and think only of going to Paradise. In place of Paradise read the social liquidation which is going to take place one day in some or other corner of the globe, no one knows how, or through whom, and the mystification is identical in all respects.
“In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law and offer itself up uncomplaining as cannon-fodder.
“In the practical life of every day, workers must be the most obedient servants of the state; but in their hearts they must protest energetically against its very existence, and give proof of their profound theoretical contempt for it by acquiring and reading literary treatises on its abolition; they must further scrupulously refrain from putting up any resistance to the capitalist regime apart from declamations on the society of the future, when this hated regime will have ceased to exist!'
It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.
Now let us see whether they are still able to be brought back to the good old traditions, to modesty, good faith and eternal principles.
The first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future and were led thus to condemn all the attempts such as strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by the workers to improve their lot. But while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of socialism, just as chemists cannot repudiate their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid falling back into their mistakes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable.
Later, however, in 1839, when the political and economic struggle of the working class in England had taken on a fairly marked character, Bray, one of Owen's disciples and one of the many who long before Proudhon hit upon the idea of mutualism, published a book entitled Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy.
In his chapter on the inefficacy of all the remedies aimed for by the present struggle, he makes a savage critique of all the activities, political or economic, of the English working class, condemns the political movement, strikes, the limitation of the working day, the restriction of the work of women and children in factories, since all this -- or so he claims -- instead of taking us out of the present state of society, keeps us there and does nothing but render the antagonisms more intense.
This brings us to the oracle of these doctors of social science, M. Proudhon. While the master had the courage to declare himself energetically opposed to all economic activities (combinations, strikes, etc.) which contradicted his redemptive theories of mutualism, at the same time through his writings and personal participation, he encouraged the working-class movement, and his disciples do not dare to declare themselves openly against it. As early as 1847, when the master's great work, The System of Economic Contradictions, had just appeared, I refuted his sophisms against the working-class movement. [2] None the less in 1864, after the loi Ollivier, which granted the French workers, in a very restrictive fashion, a certain right of combination, Proudhon returned to the charge in a book, The Political Capacities of the Working Classes, published a few days after his death.
The master's strictures were so much to the taste of the bourgeoisie that The Times, on the occasion of the great tailors' strike in London in 1866, did Proudhon the honour of translating him and of condemning the strikes with the master's very words. Here are some selections.
The miners of Rive-de-Gier went on strike; the soldiers were called in to bring them back to reason. Proudhon cries, 'The authority which had the miners of Rive-de-Gier shot acted disgracefully. But it was acting like Brutus of old caught between his paternal love and his consular duty: it was necessary to sacrifice his sons to save the Republic. Brutus did not hesitate, and posterity dare not condemn him.' [3] In all the memory of the proletariat there is no record of a bourgeois who has hesitated to sacrifice his workers to save his interests. What Brutuses the bourgeois must then be!
'Well, no: there is no right of combination, just as there is no right to defraud or steal or to commit incest or adultery.' [4] There is however all too clearly a right to stupidity.
What then are the eternal principles, in whose name the master fulminates his mystic anathema?
First eternal principle: 'Wage rates determine the price of commodities.'
Even those who have no knowledge of political economy and who are unaware that the great bourgeois economist Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, has refuted this long-standing error once and for all, are however aware of the remarkable fact that British industry can sell its products at a price far lower than that of any other nation, although wages are relatively higher in England than in any other European country.
Second eternal principle: 'The law which authorizes combinations is highly anti-juridical, anti-economic and contrary to any society and order.' [5] In a word 'contrary to the economic right of free competition'.
If the master had been a little less chauvinistic, he might have asked himself how it happened that forty years ago a law, thus contrary to the economic rights of free competition, was promulgated in England; and that as industry develops, and alongside it free competition, this law -- so contrary to any society and order - imposes itself as a necessity even to bourgeois states themselves. He might perhaps have discovered that this right (with capital R) exists only in the Economic Manuals written by the Brothers Ignoramus of bourgeois political economy, in which manuals are contained such pearls as this: 'Property is the fruit of labour' ('of the labour', they neglect to add, 'of others').
Third eternal principle: 'Therefore, under the pretext of raising the working class from its condition of so-called social inferiority, it will be necessary to start by denouncing a whole class of citizens, the class of bosses, entrepreneurs, masters and bourgeois; it will be necessary to rouse workers' democracy to despise and to hate these unworthy members of the middle class; it will be necessary to prefer mercantile and industrial war to legal repression, and class antagonism to the state police.' [6]
The master, in order to prevent the working class from escaping from its so-called social inferiority, condemns the combinations that constitute the working class as a class antagonistic to the respectable category of masters, entrepreneurs and bourgeois, who for their part certainly prefer, as does Proudhon, the state police to class antagonism. To avoid any offence to this respectable class, the good M. Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to the coming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or competition, our 'only guarantee'. [7]
The master preached indifference in matters of economics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom or competition, our only guarantee. His disciples preach indifference in matters of politics -- so as to protect bourgeois freedom, their only guarantee. If the early Christians, who also preached political indifferentism, needed an emperor's arm to transform themselves from oppressed into oppressors, so the modern apostles of political indifferentism do not believe that their own eternal principles impose on them abstinence from worldly pleasures and the temporal privileges of bourgeois society. However we must recognize that they display a stoicism worthy of the early Christian martyrs in supporting those fourteen or sixteen working hours such as overburden the workers in the factories.
Footnotes
2. P. J. Proudhon, Système des contradictions economiques, ou philosophie de la misère (1846). This was the work that Marx replied to with his book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Return to Text
3. De la Capacité politique des class ouvrières, Paris, 1865, p. 413. To give Proudhon his due, he was not so much justifying the actions of the French authorities as exposing the 'contradictions' he saw as an inevitable evil of the present social order. Return to Text
4. ibid., p. 421. Return to Text
5. ibid., p. 424. Return to Text
6. ibid., p. 426. Return to Text
7. ibid., p. 422. Return to Text
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The "Projects" Boys... And Girls-For Denny And All The Other Adamsville Housing Authority Survivors From The Class Of 1964-With Tom Waits In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Jersey Girl
"Ain't Got No Time For The Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise"- The first line from Tom Waits classic working class love song, Jersey Girl. The best version of the song by Tom Waits is the one that you can link to on YouTube above.
***********
Peter Paul Markin, Adamsville Housing Authority Alumnus and North Adamsville, Class Of 1964, (although most AHA alumni graduated from cross-town rival, Adamsville High) comment:
Funny how some stories get their start. A few years back one of my old Adamsville South Elementary corner boys, Denny Romano, he of the squeaky burgeoning tenor in our impromptu 1950s back end of the school-yard summer nights doo wop group (and I of the squeaky bass, low, very low bass) “connected” with me again. He did so not through this site but through one of those looking for old high school graduate-based Internet sites that relentlessly track you down just as, in your dotage; you think you have finally gotten out from under that last remnant speck of fighting off the last forty years of your teen alienation and teen angst.
Denny asked me to speak of the old “corner boy” days down at “the projects,” the Adamsville Housing Authority low-rent housing where the desperately poor, temporarily so or not, were warehoused in our town in the post-World War II good night when some returning veteran fathers needed a helping hand to get them going back into civilian life. Corner boys, in case you were clueless (or too young to know of anything but mall rat-dom), were guys, mainly, who “hung out” together. Poor boy, no money, no other place to go, or with no transportation to get some place, hung out in front of a million mom and pop variety corner variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner bowling alleys, corner fast food joints, hell, even corner gas stations in some real small towns from what some guys have told me when I asked them. Here is the odd part though. Ya, we were corner boys even that young, although we had no corner, no official corner like a corner mom and pop variety store, or a pizza parlor like I did later at Doc’s Drugstore in middle school and then as the king hell king’s scribe to Frankie Riley in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor but just the back end of the elementary school, as long as we were quiet and nobody cried murder and mayhem to the cops. The following, in any case, a little revised, represents my “homage” to Denny and the gang from those by-gone days and even the girls that ninety-three point four percent of the time I was scared to death of/ fascinated by. Well, some things haven’t changed anyway.
*******
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, the Old Sailor’s Home, the Shipyard (abandoned now) and Sea Street. Yes, those streets and places from the old public housing project down in the Germantown section of Adamsville surely evoke imagines of the near-by sea that touched its edges, of long ago sailing ships, and of battles fought off some mist-driven coast by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And with the wherewithal to hold on to their booty (no, not that booty, dough, prizes, stuff like that) But, of course, we know that anyone with even a passing attachment to Adamsville had to have an instinctual love of the sea, and fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings.
Today I look to the landward side of that troubled housing project peninsula, that isolated expanse of land jutting out of the water and filled with wreckage of another kind, the human kind . No, this will not be a sociological survey of working class pathologies made inevitable by the relentless struggle to scramble for life's necessities, the culture of poverty, or the like. Nor will it be a political screed about rising against the monsters that held us down, or the need for such a rising. Nor even about the poetic license necessary to cobble pretty words together to speak of the death of dreams, dreamless dreams or, maybe, just accepting small dreams to fit a small life. Rather, I am driven by the jumble of images that passed through the thoughts of a ragamuffin of a project boy as he tried to make sense out of a world that he did not create, and that he had no say in.
Ah, the scenes. Warm, sticky, humid summer nights, the air filled with the pungent, overpowering soapy fragrance from the Proctor & Gamble factory across the channel that never quite left one's nostrils. Waking up each morning to face the now vanished Fore River Shipyard superstructure; hearing the distant clang of metals being worked to shape; and, the sight of flickering welding torches binding metals together. The endless rust-encrusted, low-riding oil tankers coming through the channel guided to port by high whistle-blowing tugs.
The interminable wait for the lifeline, seemingly never on time, Eastern Mass bus that took one and all in and out through that single Palmer Street escape route to greater Adamsville. Or that then imposing central housing authority building where I was sent by my mother, too proud to go herself, with the monthly rent, usually short. Oh, did I mention Carter's Variety Store, the sole store for us all the way to Sea Street but police take notice off limits to corners boys young or old, another lifeline. Many a time I reached in Ma's pocketbook to steal money, or committed other small hoodlum wanna-be larcenies, in order to hike down that long road and get my sugar-drenched stash (candy bars, soda, a.k.a. tonic but that word is long gone, Twinkles, Moon Pies, and so on, sugar-drenched all)
And the kids. Well, the idea in those “golden” post-war days was that the projects were a way-station to better things, or at least that was the hope. So there was plenty of turn-over of friends but there was a core of kids, kids like me and my brothers, who stayed long enough to learn the ropes. Or get beaten down by guys just a little hungrier, a little stronger, or with just a little bigger chip on their shoulder. Every guy had to prove himself, tough or not, by hanging with guys that were "really" tough. That was the ethos, and "thems were the rules." Rules that seemed to come out of eternity’s time, and like eternity never challenged.
I took my fair share of nicks but also, for a moment, well for more than a moment as it turned out, I was swayed by the gangster lifestyle. Hell, it looked easy. With old elementary school classmate Rickie B., Denny knows who I am talking about, who, later, served twenty years, maybe more for all know, for a series of armed robberies, I worked my first "clip" in some downtown Adamsville Square jewelry store, Sid’s I think, the one with all the onyx rings on display in the front and the twelve signs about how you could have anything in the place on very easy terms, only a million installments (with interest piling up, of course). No, thanks. The clip, again for the clueless, is nothing but kids’ stuff, strictly for amateurs because no professional thief would risk his or her good name for such a low-rent payoff. The deal was one guy went in and got the salesperson’s attention while the other guy ripped off whatever was “hanging low on the tree.” In that arrangement I was usually the “tree” guy not because I had quick hands, although come to think of it I did (and big eyes, big greedy eyes for all the booty, and you know what booty means here now since I told you before), but because I didn’t have the knack of talking gibberish to adults. Hell, you probably did the clip yourself, maybe for kicks. And then forgot about it for some other less screwy kick. Not me.
Okay, so at that point maybe every kid, every curious kid ready in whatever manner to challenge authority and I (and most of my then corner boys, although not Denny if I recall correctly) are even. Here is the tie-breaker though. Moving on, I was the "holder" for more expansive enterprises with George H. (who, later, got killed when a drug deal he was promoting, a lonely gringo deal down in Mexico, went south on him). See George was a true artist, a true sneak thief who was able to get into any house by stealth and sheer determination. Mainly houses up in Adams Shore where people actually had stuff worth stealing unlike in the projects where the stuff was so much Bargain Center specials (the local Wal-Mart-like operation of its day). He needed me for two, no three, things. First, I was the “look-out” and even the clueless know what that means. Secondly, I actually held and carried some of the loot that he passed to me out of the window or door, and one time out a backyard bulkhead (the good stuff, televisions, silverware, a stamp collection, a coin collection, and some other stuff that I have forgotten about, was in the basement family room). Lastly, as George started to draw school and police attention I actually “held” the stuff in a safe location (which I will not disclose here just in case the various statutes of limitations have not run out). That went on for a while but George got busted for something else, some unruly child baloney rap thing, and that was that.
That was just a kid’s gangster moment, right? It was not all larcenies and kid dreams of some “big score” to get himself, and his family, out from under though. It couldn’t be for a kid, or the whole world, poor as it was, would have just collapsed over my head, and I would not be here to honor Denny’s request.
Oh, the different things that came up. Oddball things like Christmas tree bonfires on New Year’s Eve where we scurried like rats just as soon as neighbors put their trees out to be taken away in order to assemble them on the beach ready to be fired up and welcome in the new year. Or annual Halloween hooliganism where we, in a sugar frenzy, worked the neighborhood trick or treat racket hitting every house like the 82nd Airborne Division, or some such elite unit running amok in Baghdad or some Iraqi town ...
Hey, wait a minute, all this is so much eyewash because what, at least in my memory's eye, is the driving "projects" image is the "great awakening." Girls. Girls turning from sticks to shapes just around the time that I started to notice the difference, and being interested in that different if not always sure about what it meant. You don’t need a book to figure that out, although maybe it would have helped. And being fascinated and ill at ease at the same time around them, and being a moonstruck kid on every girl that gave me a passing glance, or what I thought was a passing glance, and the shoe leather-wearing out marathon walking, thinking about what to do about them, especially when the intelligence-gatherers told you about a girl who liked you. And the innocent, mostly dreaded, little petting parties, in dank little basements that served as 'family rooms' for each apartment, trying to be picked by the one you want to pick you and, well, you get the drift. Remind me to tell you some time, and here is where Denny comes in, how we put together, a bunch of corner-less corner boys, a ragtag doo wop group one summer for the express, the sole, the only purpose of, well, luring girls to the back of the school where we hung out. And it worked.
Now a lot of this is stuff any kid goes through, except just not in "the projects." And some of it is truly "projects" stuff - which way will he go, good or bad? But this next thing kind of ties it together. Just about the time when I was seriously committed to a petty criminal lifestyle, that “holding” stuff with my corner boy comrade George, I found the Thomas Crane Library branch that was then in the Adamsville South Elementary School (now further up the street toward Adamsville Square). And one summer I just started to read every biography or other interesting book they had in the Children's Section. While looking, longingly, over at the forbidden Adult Section on the other side of the room for the good stuff. And I dreamed. Yes, I am a "projects" boy, and I survived to tell the tale. Is that good enough for you, Denny?
Tom Waits Jersey Girl Lyrics
Got no time for the corner boys,
Down in the street makin' all that noise,
Don't want no whores on eighth avenue,
Cause tonight i'm gonna be with you.
'cause tonight i'm gonna take that ride,
Across the river to the jersey side,
Take my baby to the carnival,
And i'll take you all on the rides.
Down the shore everything's alright,
You're with your baby on a saturday night,
Don't you know that all my dreams come true,
When i'm walkin' down the street with you,
Sing sha la la la la la sha la la la.
You know she thrills me with all her charms,
When i'm wrapped up in my baby's arms,
My little angel gives me everything,
I know someday that she'll wear my ring.
So don't bother me cause i got no time,
I'm on my way to see that girl of mine,
Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world,
When you're in love with a jersey girl,
Sing sha la la la la la la.
And i call your name, i can't sleep at night,
Sha la la la la la la.
"Ain't Got No Time For The Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise"- The first line from Tom Waits classic working class love song, Jersey Girl. The best version of the song by Tom Waits is the one that you can link to on YouTube above.
***********
Peter Paul Markin, Adamsville Housing Authority Alumnus and North Adamsville, Class Of 1964, (although most AHA alumni graduated from cross-town rival, Adamsville High) comment:
Funny how some stories get their start. A few years back one of my old Adamsville South Elementary corner boys, Denny Romano, he of the squeaky burgeoning tenor in our impromptu 1950s back end of the school-yard summer nights doo wop group (and I of the squeaky bass, low, very low bass) “connected” with me again. He did so not through this site but through one of those looking for old high school graduate-based Internet sites that relentlessly track you down just as, in your dotage; you think you have finally gotten out from under that last remnant speck of fighting off the last forty years of your teen alienation and teen angst.
Denny asked me to speak of the old “corner boy” days down at “the projects,” the Adamsville Housing Authority low-rent housing where the desperately poor, temporarily so or not, were warehoused in our town in the post-World War II good night when some returning veteran fathers needed a helping hand to get them going back into civilian life. Corner boys, in case you were clueless (or too young to know of anything but mall rat-dom), were guys, mainly, who “hung out” together. Poor boy, no money, no other place to go, or with no transportation to get some place, hung out in front of a million mom and pop variety corner variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner bowling alleys, corner fast food joints, hell, even corner gas stations in some real small towns from what some guys have told me when I asked them. Here is the odd part though. Ya, we were corner boys even that young, although we had no corner, no official corner like a corner mom and pop variety store, or a pizza parlor like I did later at Doc’s Drugstore in middle school and then as the king hell king’s scribe to Frankie Riley in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor but just the back end of the elementary school, as long as we were quiet and nobody cried murder and mayhem to the cops. The following, in any case, a little revised, represents my “homage” to Denny and the gang from those by-gone days and even the girls that ninety-three point four percent of the time I was scared to death of/ fascinated by. Well, some things haven’t changed anyway.
*******
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, the Old Sailor’s Home, the Shipyard (abandoned now) and Sea Street. Yes, those streets and places from the old public housing project down in the Germantown section of Adamsville surely evoke imagines of the near-by sea that touched its edges, of long ago sailing ships, and of battles fought off some mist-driven coast by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. And with the wherewithal to hold on to their booty (no, not that booty, dough, prizes, stuff like that) But, of course, we know that anyone with even a passing attachment to Adamsville had to have an instinctual love of the sea, and fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings.
Today I look to the landward side of that troubled housing project peninsula, that isolated expanse of land jutting out of the water and filled with wreckage of another kind, the human kind . No, this will not be a sociological survey of working class pathologies made inevitable by the relentless struggle to scramble for life's necessities, the culture of poverty, or the like. Nor will it be a political screed about rising against the monsters that held us down, or the need for such a rising. Nor even about the poetic license necessary to cobble pretty words together to speak of the death of dreams, dreamless dreams or, maybe, just accepting small dreams to fit a small life. Rather, I am driven by the jumble of images that passed through the thoughts of a ragamuffin of a project boy as he tried to make sense out of a world that he did not create, and that he had no say in.
Ah, the scenes. Warm, sticky, humid summer nights, the air filled with the pungent, overpowering soapy fragrance from the Proctor & Gamble factory across the channel that never quite left one's nostrils. Waking up each morning to face the now vanished Fore River Shipyard superstructure; hearing the distant clang of metals being worked to shape; and, the sight of flickering welding torches binding metals together. The endless rust-encrusted, low-riding oil tankers coming through the channel guided to port by high whistle-blowing tugs.
The interminable wait for the lifeline, seemingly never on time, Eastern Mass bus that took one and all in and out through that single Palmer Street escape route to greater Adamsville. Or that then imposing central housing authority building where I was sent by my mother, too proud to go herself, with the monthly rent, usually short. Oh, did I mention Carter's Variety Store, the sole store for us all the way to Sea Street but police take notice off limits to corners boys young or old, another lifeline. Many a time I reached in Ma's pocketbook to steal money, or committed other small hoodlum wanna-be larcenies, in order to hike down that long road and get my sugar-drenched stash (candy bars, soda, a.k.a. tonic but that word is long gone, Twinkles, Moon Pies, and so on, sugar-drenched all)
And the kids. Well, the idea in those “golden” post-war days was that the projects were a way-station to better things, or at least that was the hope. So there was plenty of turn-over of friends but there was a core of kids, kids like me and my brothers, who stayed long enough to learn the ropes. Or get beaten down by guys just a little hungrier, a little stronger, or with just a little bigger chip on their shoulder. Every guy had to prove himself, tough or not, by hanging with guys that were "really" tough. That was the ethos, and "thems were the rules." Rules that seemed to come out of eternity’s time, and like eternity never challenged.
I took my fair share of nicks but also, for a moment, well for more than a moment as it turned out, I was swayed by the gangster lifestyle. Hell, it looked easy. With old elementary school classmate Rickie B., Denny knows who I am talking about, who, later, served twenty years, maybe more for all know, for a series of armed robberies, I worked my first "clip" in some downtown Adamsville Square jewelry store, Sid’s I think, the one with all the onyx rings on display in the front and the twelve signs about how you could have anything in the place on very easy terms, only a million installments (with interest piling up, of course). No, thanks. The clip, again for the clueless, is nothing but kids’ stuff, strictly for amateurs because no professional thief would risk his or her good name for such a low-rent payoff. The deal was one guy went in and got the salesperson’s attention while the other guy ripped off whatever was “hanging low on the tree.” In that arrangement I was usually the “tree” guy not because I had quick hands, although come to think of it I did (and big eyes, big greedy eyes for all the booty, and you know what booty means here now since I told you before), but because I didn’t have the knack of talking gibberish to adults. Hell, you probably did the clip yourself, maybe for kicks. And then forgot about it for some other less screwy kick. Not me.
Okay, so at that point maybe every kid, every curious kid ready in whatever manner to challenge authority and I (and most of my then corner boys, although not Denny if I recall correctly) are even. Here is the tie-breaker though. Moving on, I was the "holder" for more expansive enterprises with George H. (who, later, got killed when a drug deal he was promoting, a lonely gringo deal down in Mexico, went south on him). See George was a true artist, a true sneak thief who was able to get into any house by stealth and sheer determination. Mainly houses up in Adams Shore where people actually had stuff worth stealing unlike in the projects where the stuff was so much Bargain Center specials (the local Wal-Mart-like operation of its day). He needed me for two, no three, things. First, I was the “look-out” and even the clueless know what that means. Secondly, I actually held and carried some of the loot that he passed to me out of the window or door, and one time out a backyard bulkhead (the good stuff, televisions, silverware, a stamp collection, a coin collection, and some other stuff that I have forgotten about, was in the basement family room). Lastly, as George started to draw school and police attention I actually “held” the stuff in a safe location (which I will not disclose here just in case the various statutes of limitations have not run out). That went on for a while but George got busted for something else, some unruly child baloney rap thing, and that was that.
That was just a kid’s gangster moment, right? It was not all larcenies and kid dreams of some “big score” to get himself, and his family, out from under though. It couldn’t be for a kid, or the whole world, poor as it was, would have just collapsed over my head, and I would not be here to honor Denny’s request.
Oh, the different things that came up. Oddball things like Christmas tree bonfires on New Year’s Eve where we scurried like rats just as soon as neighbors put their trees out to be taken away in order to assemble them on the beach ready to be fired up and welcome in the new year. Or annual Halloween hooliganism where we, in a sugar frenzy, worked the neighborhood trick or treat racket hitting every house like the 82nd Airborne Division, or some such elite unit running amok in Baghdad or some Iraqi town ...
Hey, wait a minute, all this is so much eyewash because what, at least in my memory's eye, is the driving "projects" image is the "great awakening." Girls. Girls turning from sticks to shapes just around the time that I started to notice the difference, and being interested in that different if not always sure about what it meant. You don’t need a book to figure that out, although maybe it would have helped. And being fascinated and ill at ease at the same time around them, and being a moonstruck kid on every girl that gave me a passing glance, or what I thought was a passing glance, and the shoe leather-wearing out marathon walking, thinking about what to do about them, especially when the intelligence-gatherers told you about a girl who liked you. And the innocent, mostly dreaded, little petting parties, in dank little basements that served as 'family rooms' for each apartment, trying to be picked by the one you want to pick you and, well, you get the drift. Remind me to tell you some time, and here is where Denny comes in, how we put together, a bunch of corner-less corner boys, a ragtag doo wop group one summer for the express, the sole, the only purpose of, well, luring girls to the back of the school where we hung out. And it worked.
Now a lot of this is stuff any kid goes through, except just not in "the projects." And some of it is truly "projects" stuff - which way will he go, good or bad? But this next thing kind of ties it together. Just about the time when I was seriously committed to a petty criminal lifestyle, that “holding” stuff with my corner boy comrade George, I found the Thomas Crane Library branch that was then in the Adamsville South Elementary School (now further up the street toward Adamsville Square). And one summer I just started to read every biography or other interesting book they had in the Children's Section. While looking, longingly, over at the forbidden Adult Section on the other side of the room for the good stuff. And I dreamed. Yes, I am a "projects" boy, and I survived to tell the tale. Is that good enough for you, Denny?
Tom Waits Jersey Girl Lyrics
Got no time for the corner boys,
Down in the street makin' all that noise,
Don't want no whores on eighth avenue,
Cause tonight i'm gonna be with you.
'cause tonight i'm gonna take that ride,
Across the river to the jersey side,
Take my baby to the carnival,
And i'll take you all on the rides.
Down the shore everything's alright,
You're with your baby on a saturday night,
Don't you know that all my dreams come true,
When i'm walkin' down the street with you,
Sing sha la la la la la sha la la la.
You know she thrills me with all her charms,
When i'm wrapped up in my baby's arms,
My little angel gives me everything,
I know someday that she'll wear my ring.
So don't bother me cause i got no time,
I'm on my way to see that girl of mine,
Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world,
When you're in love with a jersey girl,
Sing sha la la la la la la.
And i call your name, i can't sleep at night,
Sha la la la la la la.
Shoot ‘Em Up, Bang “Em Up- Johnny Depp’s (Antonio Banderas And Salma Hayek Too)-“One Upon A Time In Mexico"- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Once Upon A Time In Mexico.
DVD Review
Once Upon A Time In Mexico, starring Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, 2004
This one may be a little too close for comfort these days what with the almost daily carnage reported from the drug wars in Mexico but anything that has Johnny Depp in it will at least get my attention. Although Johnny is not always up to par, Sweeney Todd seemed, well, too bizarre even for him, he is not afraid to take on quirky roles in the interest of making some memorable characters. Here he plays an upfront (literally) CIA agent down in Mexico to help defuse what looks like an attempt by the bad guys to knock off what passes for a good guy el presidente there and take over the government. To do, whatever. Yes, I know the plot sounds very familiar. Also familiar in this third part of the trilogy is the Angel-Diablo avenger of the people’s wrongs, and his own personal wrongs (wife, played by Salma Hayek, in flash-backs killed by the bad guys), Antonio Banderas. Of course that means plenty of shoot ‘em up, bang ‘em up as the two sides fire every thing they have at each other. And equally true, of course, the bad guys get their just desserts. Johnny will get a citation from the bosses at Langley for this one for sure.
P.S. Here is one thing that has always intrigued about shoot 'em up movies and it was really obvious here. Now I am no expert of weaponry, although I know how to handle a gun but Antonio Banderas’ shooting from every hip at random would seem to be foolhardy. Not only that but his chances of hitting anybody in the real world that way would seem minimal. On the other hand even the elite forces of the opponent seem, always, to be something out of the gang that could not shoot straight. The good guys must have the angels on their side, right?
DVD Review
Once Upon A Time In Mexico, starring Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, 2004
This one may be a little too close for comfort these days what with the almost daily carnage reported from the drug wars in Mexico but anything that has Johnny Depp in it will at least get my attention. Although Johnny is not always up to par, Sweeney Todd seemed, well, too bizarre even for him, he is not afraid to take on quirky roles in the interest of making some memorable characters. Here he plays an upfront (literally) CIA agent down in Mexico to help defuse what looks like an attempt by the bad guys to knock off what passes for a good guy el presidente there and take over the government. To do, whatever. Yes, I know the plot sounds very familiar. Also familiar in this third part of the trilogy is the Angel-Diablo avenger of the people’s wrongs, and his own personal wrongs (wife, played by Salma Hayek, in flash-backs killed by the bad guys), Antonio Banderas. Of course that means plenty of shoot ‘em up, bang ‘em up as the two sides fire every thing they have at each other. And equally true, of course, the bad guys get their just desserts. Johnny will get a citation from the bosses at Langley for this one for sure.
P.S. Here is one thing that has always intrigued about shoot 'em up movies and it was really obvious here. Now I am no expert of weaponry, although I know how to handle a gun but Antonio Banderas’ shooting from every hip at random would seem to be foolhardy. Not only that but his chances of hitting anybody in the real world that way would seem minimal. On the other hand even the elite forces of the opponent seem, always, to be something out of the gang that could not shoot straight. The good guys must have the angels on their side, right?
Monday, September 26, 2011
From The Pages Of "Australasian Spartacist"-Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!-No Deportations!
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!
No Deportations!
We reprint below a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) letter sent to the federal Attorney-General on 26 May protesting the charging of refugees over demonstrations at Villawood on 20 April. Since then, on 9 June, federal police again fired “bean-bag” bullets and used capsicum spray to suppress an angry protest by refugees at the Christmas Island detention centre. The protest reportedly erupted in response to further rejections of asylum claims. Shortly afterwards, federal police charged 18 asylum seekers over the earlier 13 March Christmas Island protest. As with those charged following the Villawood protests, they face being denied a permanent visa if convicted.
Refugees are kept imprisoned for months, and even years, under constant threat of being deported to countries where they can face brutal punishment, persecution and death. This torture of desperate people, many seeking asylum from reactionary terror, has led to growing acts of self-harm. There have been numerous deaths in detention. This does not include the hundreds who have died making the treacherous sea voyage, such as the estimated 50 men, women and children who horrifically drowned when their boat crashed on rocks off Christmas Island on 15 December last year.
We say: Drop all the charges against the refugee protesters! No deportations! The trade unions must be mobilised to defend refugees and immigrants, and fight against all the government’s racist immigration laws.
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League.
* * *
We protest the federal Labor government’s brutal crackdown following a wave of desperate protests by refugees including at the remote Christmas Island and Sydney Villawood detention centres.
On 13 March up to 300 protesting detainees at Christmas Island were tear-gassed and fired upon by federal police using “bean-bag” bullets, reportedly breaking the leg of one detainee. On 20 April up to 100 protested at the Villawood detention centre, culminating in an eleven-day rooftop protest. Following the Villawood protests, 22 men were taken to Silverwater jail and held in solitary confinement. Seven have been charged with offences including affray and destroying or damaging property by fire. Outrageously some of those charged could face up to twelve years imprisonment. Two refugees from Christmas Island are also threatened with charges from separate alleged incidents. Meanwhile the government has vindictively put in place measures that deny permanent visas to those it deems to have committed an offence while in custody. But the real crime is that the government incarcerates and denies basic rights to desperate people who have already risked their lives fleeing poverty, oppression and war.
Under the Labor government’s grotesque regime of mandatory detention some 7,000 men, women and children languish in the many refugee detention centres across the country. There have been at least six deaths in these hellholes in the last eight months. It is a measure of the racist barbarism of the Australian capitalist state that it incarcerates and seeks to deport Iraqi, Afghan and Tamil refugees back to countries that the Australian imperialist military has directly taken part in the destruction of, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, or, in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Australian government backed the Sinhala-chauvinist government in its murderous war against the Tamil population.
We condemn the federal government’s persecution and repression of defiant refugees and demand: Drop the charges against the detention centre detainees! No deportations! Release the refugees! Close the detention centres! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
Winter 2011
Drop the Charges Against Refugee Protesters!
No Deportations!
We reprint below a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) letter sent to the federal Attorney-General on 26 May protesting the charging of refugees over demonstrations at Villawood on 20 April. Since then, on 9 June, federal police again fired “bean-bag” bullets and used capsicum spray to suppress an angry protest by refugees at the Christmas Island detention centre. The protest reportedly erupted in response to further rejections of asylum claims. Shortly afterwards, federal police charged 18 asylum seekers over the earlier 13 March Christmas Island protest. As with those charged following the Villawood protests, they face being denied a permanent visa if convicted.
Refugees are kept imprisoned for months, and even years, under constant threat of being deported to countries where they can face brutal punishment, persecution and death. This torture of desperate people, many seeking asylum from reactionary terror, has led to growing acts of self-harm. There have been numerous deaths in detention. This does not include the hundreds who have died making the treacherous sea voyage, such as the estimated 50 men, women and children who horrifically drowned when their boat crashed on rocks off Christmas Island on 15 December last year.
We say: Drop all the charges against the refugee protesters! No deportations! The trade unions must be mobilised to defend refugees and immigrants, and fight against all the government’s racist immigration laws.
The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League.
* * *
We protest the federal Labor government’s brutal crackdown following a wave of desperate protests by refugees including at the remote Christmas Island and Sydney Villawood detention centres.
On 13 March up to 300 protesting detainees at Christmas Island were tear-gassed and fired upon by federal police using “bean-bag” bullets, reportedly breaking the leg of one detainee. On 20 April up to 100 protested at the Villawood detention centre, culminating in an eleven-day rooftop protest. Following the Villawood protests, 22 men were taken to Silverwater jail and held in solitary confinement. Seven have been charged with offences including affray and destroying or damaging property by fire. Outrageously some of those charged could face up to twelve years imprisonment. Two refugees from Christmas Island are also threatened with charges from separate alleged incidents. Meanwhile the government has vindictively put in place measures that deny permanent visas to those it deems to have committed an offence while in custody. But the real crime is that the government incarcerates and denies basic rights to desperate people who have already risked their lives fleeing poverty, oppression and war.
Under the Labor government’s grotesque regime of mandatory detention some 7,000 men, women and children languish in the many refugee detention centres across the country. There have been at least six deaths in these hellholes in the last eight months. It is a measure of the racist barbarism of the Australian capitalist state that it incarcerates and seeks to deport Iraqi, Afghan and Tamil refugees back to countries that the Australian imperialist military has directly taken part in the destruction of, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, or, in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Australian government backed the Sinhala-chauvinist government in its murderous war against the Tamil population.
We condemn the federal government’s persecution and repression of defiant refugees and demand: Drop the charges against the detention centre detainees! No deportations! Release the refugees! Close the detention centres! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
From The Pages Of "Australasian Spartacist"- ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
Click on the headline to link to other articles from this issue of Australasian Spartacist
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Federal Budget Pummels the Poor
ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
From its draconian anti-union legislation to its brutal treatment of refugees and bloody militarism abroad, the minority federal ALP government, propped up by the Greens and “independents,” is an enemy of working people and the oppressed. That this government is thoroughly dedicated to administering in the interests of the Australian capitalist rulers was driven home yet again by the May federal budget. In aiming to slash $22 billion in spending over the next four years, the budget is framed to make workers and the poor pay for the massive deficit racked up by the government in its attempts to “save capitalism” with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Pushing mantras such as getting the budget “back in the black,” the government is targeting the neediest for cruel welfare cuts. In some cases this will not only threaten the livelihoods but the very lives of recipients. Under punitive new regulations access to the disabilities pension will be sharply curtailed. Disabled people deemed capable of working by the government are threatened with losing their pensions unless they submit to demeaning quarterly Centrelink interviews to prove they have been looking for work. Unemployed youth under 21 years of age will lose $43 a week from their benefits while poverty-stricken single parents (overwhelmingly women) will have their paltry pensions slashed by $56 per week when their child turns twelve. Alongside this, the government aims to slash more than 1,200 jobs from Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. These attacks on the poor take place as the cost of living for basic items such as electricity, water, groceries, education, health and accommodation are escalating. With soaring housing costs, including skyrocketing rents, thousands have been thrown onto the streets. As for public transport and hospitals, they sink deeper into disrepair.
Meanwhile the government’s punitive and racist welfare “quarantining” that accompanied the 2007 police and military occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is being extended to more communities in Queensland and Western Australia. This extension of welfare “quarantining,” which in NT Aboriginal communities combines with puritanical prohibition on alcohol and pornography, is in the service of an ever-increasing state intervention into the lives of the oppressed and working people.
Prime Minister Gillard openly competes with the Liberal/National opposition leader Tony Abbott over who can put forward the most reactionary social and economic policies. The current budget cuts targeting single parents and unemployed youth are designed to reinforce the grip of the family on women and youth. A key prop for the maintenance of capitalist rule and source of women’s oppression, the institution of the family, backed by church and state, is upheld to instil conservative obedience to the “values” of bourgeois morality and to raise the next generation of wage slaves for industry and cannon fodder for future imperialist wars. In Australia, where wife-beating is rife and a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner or ex-partner, the cuts to the single-parent benefit will help drive women and children back to the horror of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the mining giants and banks rake in record profits, the bourgeois media is aggressively demanding deeper cuts to welfare as the ruling class worries about the effects of a future bust of the resources boom on the budget bottom line.
In representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, Gillard has long been a crusader against welfare. In 2007, speaking at a meeting of the Sydney Institute, she announced, “The old days of passive welfare for those able to contribute are gone.” Today this threat comes under the guise of what she now calls “The Dignity of Work.” This is the modern version of the cruder “dole bludgers” moniker used to single out, blame and victimise the unemployed and all welfare recipients for the failings of the capitalist system to provide decent education, training and jobs. Thus the budget also targeted the estimated 230,000 long-term unemployed, who will be required to do 11 months of work-for-the-dole or lose their payments from July next year.
By forcing people off welfare the government aims to create an even larger pool of desperate people for the bosses to ruthlessly exploit and to use as a wedge to drive down the conditions of all workers. With workers shackled at every turn by the union tops’ kow-towing to Labor’s anti-union legislation, for many the “dignity of work” means being exploited in a casual and/or part-time job for barely subsistence wages under a dictatorial boss, usually backed by vicious supervisors who enforce unsafe working conditions. Hundreds of workers are killed every year at work. Amidst this increasing denigration and brutalisation of the working class, slashing of welfare and blaming the victims of this irrational profit-gouging system, the budget assured a new round of company tax cuts.
All over the capitalist world, workers have been suffering the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With unemployment and house foreclosures threatening the lives of millions, capitalist governments have ramped up union-busting attacks and vicious austerity measures. In response, workers across Europe, from Britain, to Spain, France and Greece, have mobilised in massive defensive struggles, including strikes and protests, against these attacks. But, simultaneously, the misleaders of the working class have pushed parliamentary reformist illusions and virulent protectionism. This serves to tie the proletariat and their unions to “their” own capitalist rulers while whipping up racist reaction and dividing workers along national lines.
Resources Boom Masks Rotting Capitalist System
In Australia, the effects of the global economic crisis have been masked by the ongoing massive demand for resources, above all by the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which has pushed the terms of trade to the highest level in 140 years. But the economy that exists outside the resources sector is stagnant or going backwards. And it is being made sicker by the resources boom, which has sent the dollar soaring, creating inflationary pressures and driving up the cost of exports. Together these factors have contributed to downturns in retail, construction and manufacturing.
Exacerbated by recent natural disasters, the Australian economy just experienced its biggest quarterly contraction in 20 years. And it is the workers who are being made to pay. The official unemployment rate of 4.9 percent hides the real level of joblessness, estimated at around 6.9 percent and growing daily. Hardly a week goes by where a manufacturing plant or retail store doesn’t close and/or hundreds don’t lose their jobs. In June, the clothing chain Colorado announced that it would close 140 stores across the country, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in manufacturing in the last three years.
The ALP government, with help from the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, has held the economic crisis up as a club against workers’ struggles, arguing that any proletarian struggle would sabotage the national economy. Such nationalist class-collaborationist poison serves to derail class struggle by instilling in the proletariat the lie that workers, who are forced to sell their labour power to survive, and the capitalists, who grow fat profiting from the wealth produced by the workers, have fundamental interests in common.
There is a burning need for class-struggle opposition to the bourgeoisie’s onslaughts. With its hands on the levers of production the proletariat uniquely has the potential social power and interest to sweep away this irrational exploitative system. What’s needed is a revolutionary workers party that fights to unleash the proletariat’s social power in a struggle not just for its own class interests but for all the oppressed. Based on the understanding that the interests of the working class and the capitalist rulers are irreconcilably counterposed, such a leadership would not only seek to defend and improve the present conditions of the proletariat but fight to lead the working class in sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when the workers took power in their own hands, seizing the banks, the factories, mines, mills and other means of production from the hands of the capitalists, and established a proletarian state based on workers soviets (councils) and an internationalist program. It will take world socialist revolution, leading to the collectivisation of the means of production and economic planning on an international scale, to provide a future for humanity.
For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Racist Capitalism
While slashing welfare, Labor’s federal budget also showered in excess of one billion dollars on “border security,” including the vile campaign to demonise and punish the small numbers of refugees arriving by boat. The mandatory and long-term incarceration of refugees in inhumane detention centres, often ending in deportation, has driven many detainees to repeated desperate protests (see article, page 1). The May budget coincided with the Labor government announcing its despicable proposed deal with the Malaysian government to barter 800 asylum seekers currently in detention in Australia for “resettling” 1,000 refugees per year from Malaysia for the next four years. The bourgeoisie’s hysterical campaign against refugees is being used to promote xenophobic nationalism and inflame racial hostilities in order to keep the working class divided and to deflect it from the much needed struggle against the capitalist rulers who are driving down the conditions of all. Sharp opposition to racism and chauvinism is vital to the unity and integrity of the working class and to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes. We say: Down with the bi-partisan war on refugees! No deportations! Close the detention camps! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
There is deep-seated worker hostility to the capitalist rulers’ all-sided attacks. On 8 June, thousands of women community sector workers, who assist the disabled and downtrodden, marched for equal pay in major cities across the country. A week later, angry New South Wales public sector workers rallied in their thousands against the Liberal state government’s legislation effectively imposing pay cuts. Pilots, engineers and transport workers are seething at Qantas management’s union-busting attempts to outsource jobs and drive down working conditions. And waterside workers, fed up with unsafe work conditions, have struck against the vicious union-busters at Patrick Stevedores.
To carry out the needed class-struggle fight against the government’s and bosses’ anti-worker attacks requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats who channel workers’ anger into support for the ALP and the bosses’ courts while sowing nationalism and protectionist poison. In May, when Patrick Stevedores provocatively closed down its container terminals and refused to pay wharfies in response to union bans in defence of job safety and a wage rise, the hidebound MUA bureaucrats quickly took a dive. Faced with Patrick’s provocation, they called off the bans and appealed to the “national” interest, seeking to appease the exporters who were baying for union blood. MUA national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, grovelled “We’ve listened to the concerns of the rural community and responded accordingly,” while his deputy, Mick Doleman, played the nationalist card railing that Patrick was “unAustralian” and “owns the decision to shut down the ports...” (“MUA Saves Patrick from itself,” MUA web site, 27 May). The MUA tops’ response is a far cry from the militant class-struggle actions—including solid strikes with mass pickets to shut down the ports—that helped build the waterfront unions. As the bosses’ labour lieutenants, union bureaucrats throughout the country have increasingly sacrificed class-struggle weapons. As a result, the union movement has shrunk to only 18 percent of the workforce as the bosses escalate their attacks.
Rather than mobilising their worker base in a fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops invest great energy and purpose into promoting the bosses’ reactionary defence of state and nation. In the face of Qantas management’s open union-busting threats, Transport Workers Union honcho Tony Sheldon recently linked his opposition to Qantas’ attempts to cut costs by outsourcing labour, to “security” and “border protection” at Australian airports. As reported in the Weekend Australian Financial Review (7-8 May), Sheldon despicably ranted at a recent union-sponsored aviation forum that “there were ‘gaping holes’ in the system for ensuring that workers allowed into the secure sections of airports were subject to background checks and held an Aviation Security Identity Card.” Pro-capitalist to the core, Sheldon told the AFR that he was “of the strong view, to put to our delegates and our members, that we should take industrial action over that matter because it’s fundamental to frontline security of the aviation industry and it’s one that Qantas has avoided for a very long time.”
Helping to enforce the “security” of fortress “White Australia” is the kiss of death for the trade unions. It buys into the government’s reactionary “war on terror,” which has not only served to divide the working class by whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred, but has shredded civil liberties while greatly expanding the repressive powers of the state, targeting all working people. The draconian powers of the witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which targets militant construction unionists for persecution and fines, are modelled on “anti-terror” laws introduced under the former Liberal/Coalition government of John Howard with the avid backing of the ALP Opposition.
In seeking to endear themselves to the bourgeoisie by trumpeting their defence of national borders and “protecting” Australian industry, class-collaborationist union misleaders poison potential for working-class solidarity at home and with workers’ struggles abroad. Understanding that it is not overseas workers but the irrational capitalist system that causes unemployment and exploitation, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would take up the fight to defend jobs at the bosses’ expense and seek to unite the employed and unemployed in common struggles around common demands. In opposition to sackings it would fight for jobs for all through a shorter work week at no loss in pay and for a massive program of public works to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of decaying capitalist society. It would fight to organise non-unionised workers and for union hiring and training, with all workers (women, youth and immigrants) on union wages and conditions.
A revolutionary leadership would be first and foremost internationalist. In fighting for solidarity actions between workers across national boundaries, it would draw on immigrant workers’ experience of class struggle abroad and their living links to workers overseas. It would stand sharply opposed to the union tops’ nationalist bile and cringing loyalty to the capitalist state. Consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, the bourgeois state is an instrument of organised violence that exists to defend the capitalist exploiters against the strivings of the proletariat and oppressed. As Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin explained in his powerful 1917 treatise, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state cannot be reformed or wielded in the interests of the working class and oppressed; it must be shattered through workers revolution.
Not Laborite Reformism But a Communist Perspective
Following the release of the budget, the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism brayed in unison about the attacks by Labor. “Federal Budget 2011-12 Lies and deception” wrote the Communist Party’s The Guardian. “Budget 2011: A budget for billionaires” declared Green Left Weekly. In their article “Desperately seeking surplus,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) sagely warned “By embracing the rhetoric about public debt and the importance of budget surplus, the Gillard government has signalled the likelihood of more savage cuts in the future....” True enough. But who do the cynical hacks who lead these organisations think they are kidding? For all their moaning about the federal ALP government’s attacks, these reformist groups gave back-handed support to the ALP in last October’s federal elections through the preferential voting system or, in the case of SAlt, simply advocated “giving a first preference vote to either Labor, the Greens or others who are genuinely left-wing...” (SAlt election statement, 9 July 2010).
The CPA, Socialist Alliance and SAlt, each with their own particular brand of liberal-reformist program, all push the lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the capitalist state, particularly when administered by Labor, can serve the interests of the working class. But whichever party is in power under capitalism it serves to administer capitalism on behalf of the capitalist class. In contrast, fighting for an independent proletarian-centred program, we in the Spartacist League forthrightly called for “No Vote to Labor! No Vote to Bourgeois Greens!” in the 2010 elections. Noting that both the Liberal/National Coalition and Labor were in a reactionary race to sell themselves to the capitalist rulers we wrote, “For the working class and oppressed, the only thing on offer in the upcoming Australian federal election is more capitalist austerity and reaction” (see “‘White Australia’ Elections: Racism, Austerity, Repression,” ASp No. 210, Spring 2010).
We fight to win militant workers, revolutionary-minded youth and anti-racist fighters to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party. Such a party can only be built in opposition to, and in struggle against, the politics of the ALP and Laborite trade-union bureaucrats who sap and derail the fighting power of the working class by pushing the lie that there can be a partnership between labour and capital. The ALP is what Marxists term a bourgeois workers party, historically based on the trade unions but thoroughly committed to maintaining the capitalist order. It is necessary to replace the misleaders in the unions with a class-struggle leadership, linked to a multiracial revolutionary workers party that is committed to smashing capitalist rule and establishing a new social order run by those who produce the wealth: the working class.
The drive to extract ever greater profit from workers’ labour, the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and refugees, the blood-drenched imperialist carnage from Iraq to Afghanistan, the all-sided social bigotry targeting women and gays—all these are part of the system of capitalist rule. That system must be destroyed root and branch by workers revolution. Proletarian seizure of state power would abolish private ownership of the means of production, collectivise industry and establish a planned socialist economy. Only then will the wealth and productive capacity of society serve the needs of the majority and not the profits of a tiny layer. Ultimately only international working-class rule based on the fight for communism can eliminate the poverty, oppression and misery endemic to this decaying and barbaric capitalist order.
Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Federal Budget Pummels the Poor
ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
From its draconian anti-union legislation to its brutal treatment of refugees and bloody militarism abroad, the minority federal ALP government, propped up by the Greens and “independents,” is an enemy of working people and the oppressed. That this government is thoroughly dedicated to administering in the interests of the Australian capitalist rulers was driven home yet again by the May federal budget. In aiming to slash $22 billion in spending over the next four years, the budget is framed to make workers and the poor pay for the massive deficit racked up by the government in its attempts to “save capitalism” with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Pushing mantras such as getting the budget “back in the black,” the government is targeting the neediest for cruel welfare cuts. In some cases this will not only threaten the livelihoods but the very lives of recipients. Under punitive new regulations access to the disabilities pension will be sharply curtailed. Disabled people deemed capable of working by the government are threatened with losing their pensions unless they submit to demeaning quarterly Centrelink interviews to prove they have been looking for work. Unemployed youth under 21 years of age will lose $43 a week from their benefits while poverty-stricken single parents (overwhelmingly women) will have their paltry pensions slashed by $56 per week when their child turns twelve. Alongside this, the government aims to slash more than 1,200 jobs from Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. These attacks on the poor take place as the cost of living for basic items such as electricity, water, groceries, education, health and accommodation are escalating. With soaring housing costs, including skyrocketing rents, thousands have been thrown onto the streets. As for public transport and hospitals, they sink deeper into disrepair.
Meanwhile the government’s punitive and racist welfare “quarantining” that accompanied the 2007 police and military occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is being extended to more communities in Queensland and Western Australia. This extension of welfare “quarantining,” which in NT Aboriginal communities combines with puritanical prohibition on alcohol and pornography, is in the service of an ever-increasing state intervention into the lives of the oppressed and working people.
Prime Minister Gillard openly competes with the Liberal/National opposition leader Tony Abbott over who can put forward the most reactionary social and economic policies. The current budget cuts targeting single parents and unemployed youth are designed to reinforce the grip of the family on women and youth. A key prop for the maintenance of capitalist rule and source of women’s oppression, the institution of the family, backed by church and state, is upheld to instil conservative obedience to the “values” of bourgeois morality and to raise the next generation of wage slaves for industry and cannon fodder for future imperialist wars. In Australia, where wife-beating is rife and a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner or ex-partner, the cuts to the single-parent benefit will help drive women and children back to the horror of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the mining giants and banks rake in record profits, the bourgeois media is aggressively demanding deeper cuts to welfare as the ruling class worries about the effects of a future bust of the resources boom on the budget bottom line.
In representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, Gillard has long been a crusader against welfare. In 2007, speaking at a meeting of the Sydney Institute, she announced, “The old days of passive welfare for those able to contribute are gone.” Today this threat comes under the guise of what she now calls “The Dignity of Work.” This is the modern version of the cruder “dole bludgers” moniker used to single out, blame and victimise the unemployed and all welfare recipients for the failings of the capitalist system to provide decent education, training and jobs. Thus the budget also targeted the estimated 230,000 long-term unemployed, who will be required to do 11 months of work-for-the-dole or lose their payments from July next year.
By forcing people off welfare the government aims to create an even larger pool of desperate people for the bosses to ruthlessly exploit and to use as a wedge to drive down the conditions of all workers. With workers shackled at every turn by the union tops’ kow-towing to Labor’s anti-union legislation, for many the “dignity of work” means being exploited in a casual and/or part-time job for barely subsistence wages under a dictatorial boss, usually backed by vicious supervisors who enforce unsafe working conditions. Hundreds of workers are killed every year at work. Amidst this increasing denigration and brutalisation of the working class, slashing of welfare and blaming the victims of this irrational profit-gouging system, the budget assured a new round of company tax cuts.
All over the capitalist world, workers have been suffering the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With unemployment and house foreclosures threatening the lives of millions, capitalist governments have ramped up union-busting attacks and vicious austerity measures. In response, workers across Europe, from Britain, to Spain, France and Greece, have mobilised in massive defensive struggles, including strikes and protests, against these attacks. But, simultaneously, the misleaders of the working class have pushed parliamentary reformist illusions and virulent protectionism. This serves to tie the proletariat and their unions to “their” own capitalist rulers while whipping up racist reaction and dividing workers along national lines.
Resources Boom Masks Rotting Capitalist System
In Australia, the effects of the global economic crisis have been masked by the ongoing massive demand for resources, above all by the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which has pushed the terms of trade to the highest level in 140 years. But the economy that exists outside the resources sector is stagnant or going backwards. And it is being made sicker by the resources boom, which has sent the dollar soaring, creating inflationary pressures and driving up the cost of exports. Together these factors have contributed to downturns in retail, construction and manufacturing.
Exacerbated by recent natural disasters, the Australian economy just experienced its biggest quarterly contraction in 20 years. And it is the workers who are being made to pay. The official unemployment rate of 4.9 percent hides the real level of joblessness, estimated at around 6.9 percent and growing daily. Hardly a week goes by where a manufacturing plant or retail store doesn’t close and/or hundreds don’t lose their jobs. In June, the clothing chain Colorado announced that it would close 140 stores across the country, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in manufacturing in the last three years.
The ALP government, with help from the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, has held the economic crisis up as a club against workers’ struggles, arguing that any proletarian struggle would sabotage the national economy. Such nationalist class-collaborationist poison serves to derail class struggle by instilling in the proletariat the lie that workers, who are forced to sell their labour power to survive, and the capitalists, who grow fat profiting from the wealth produced by the workers, have fundamental interests in common.
There is a burning need for class-struggle opposition to the bourgeoisie’s onslaughts. With its hands on the levers of production the proletariat uniquely has the potential social power and interest to sweep away this irrational exploitative system. What’s needed is a revolutionary workers party that fights to unleash the proletariat’s social power in a struggle not just for its own class interests but for all the oppressed. Based on the understanding that the interests of the working class and the capitalist rulers are irreconcilably counterposed, such a leadership would not only seek to defend and improve the present conditions of the proletariat but fight to lead the working class in sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when the workers took power in their own hands, seizing the banks, the factories, mines, mills and other means of production from the hands of the capitalists, and established a proletarian state based on workers soviets (councils) and an internationalist program. It will take world socialist revolution, leading to the collectivisation of the means of production and economic planning on an international scale, to provide a future for humanity.
For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Racist Capitalism
While slashing welfare, Labor’s federal budget also showered in excess of one billion dollars on “border security,” including the vile campaign to demonise and punish the small numbers of refugees arriving by boat. The mandatory and long-term incarceration of refugees in inhumane detention centres, often ending in deportation, has driven many detainees to repeated desperate protests (see article, page 1). The May budget coincided with the Labor government announcing its despicable proposed deal with the Malaysian government to barter 800 asylum seekers currently in detention in Australia for “resettling” 1,000 refugees per year from Malaysia for the next four years. The bourgeoisie’s hysterical campaign against refugees is being used to promote xenophobic nationalism and inflame racial hostilities in order to keep the working class divided and to deflect it from the much needed struggle against the capitalist rulers who are driving down the conditions of all. Sharp opposition to racism and chauvinism is vital to the unity and integrity of the working class and to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes. We say: Down with the bi-partisan war on refugees! No deportations! Close the detention camps! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
There is deep-seated worker hostility to the capitalist rulers’ all-sided attacks. On 8 June, thousands of women community sector workers, who assist the disabled and downtrodden, marched for equal pay in major cities across the country. A week later, angry New South Wales public sector workers rallied in their thousands against the Liberal state government’s legislation effectively imposing pay cuts. Pilots, engineers and transport workers are seething at Qantas management’s union-busting attempts to outsource jobs and drive down working conditions. And waterside workers, fed up with unsafe work conditions, have struck against the vicious union-busters at Patrick Stevedores.
To carry out the needed class-struggle fight against the government’s and bosses’ anti-worker attacks requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats who channel workers’ anger into support for the ALP and the bosses’ courts while sowing nationalism and protectionist poison. In May, when Patrick Stevedores provocatively closed down its container terminals and refused to pay wharfies in response to union bans in defence of job safety and a wage rise, the hidebound MUA bureaucrats quickly took a dive. Faced with Patrick’s provocation, they called off the bans and appealed to the “national” interest, seeking to appease the exporters who were baying for union blood. MUA national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, grovelled “We’ve listened to the concerns of the rural community and responded accordingly,” while his deputy, Mick Doleman, played the nationalist card railing that Patrick was “unAustralian” and “owns the decision to shut down the ports...” (“MUA Saves Patrick from itself,” MUA web site, 27 May). The MUA tops’ response is a far cry from the militant class-struggle actions—including solid strikes with mass pickets to shut down the ports—that helped build the waterfront unions. As the bosses’ labour lieutenants, union bureaucrats throughout the country have increasingly sacrificed class-struggle weapons. As a result, the union movement has shrunk to only 18 percent of the workforce as the bosses escalate their attacks.
Rather than mobilising their worker base in a fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops invest great energy and purpose into promoting the bosses’ reactionary defence of state and nation. In the face of Qantas management’s open union-busting threats, Transport Workers Union honcho Tony Sheldon recently linked his opposition to Qantas’ attempts to cut costs by outsourcing labour, to “security” and “border protection” at Australian airports. As reported in the Weekend Australian Financial Review (7-8 May), Sheldon despicably ranted at a recent union-sponsored aviation forum that “there were ‘gaping holes’ in the system for ensuring that workers allowed into the secure sections of airports were subject to background checks and held an Aviation Security Identity Card.” Pro-capitalist to the core, Sheldon told the AFR that he was “of the strong view, to put to our delegates and our members, that we should take industrial action over that matter because it’s fundamental to frontline security of the aviation industry and it’s one that Qantas has avoided for a very long time.”
Helping to enforce the “security” of fortress “White Australia” is the kiss of death for the trade unions. It buys into the government’s reactionary “war on terror,” which has not only served to divide the working class by whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred, but has shredded civil liberties while greatly expanding the repressive powers of the state, targeting all working people. The draconian powers of the witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which targets militant construction unionists for persecution and fines, are modelled on “anti-terror” laws introduced under the former Liberal/Coalition government of John Howard with the avid backing of the ALP Opposition.
In seeking to endear themselves to the bourgeoisie by trumpeting their defence of national borders and “protecting” Australian industry, class-collaborationist union misleaders poison potential for working-class solidarity at home and with workers’ struggles abroad. Understanding that it is not overseas workers but the irrational capitalist system that causes unemployment and exploitation, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would take up the fight to defend jobs at the bosses’ expense and seek to unite the employed and unemployed in common struggles around common demands. In opposition to sackings it would fight for jobs for all through a shorter work week at no loss in pay and for a massive program of public works to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of decaying capitalist society. It would fight to organise non-unionised workers and for union hiring and training, with all workers (women, youth and immigrants) on union wages and conditions.
A revolutionary leadership would be first and foremost internationalist. In fighting for solidarity actions between workers across national boundaries, it would draw on immigrant workers’ experience of class struggle abroad and their living links to workers overseas. It would stand sharply opposed to the union tops’ nationalist bile and cringing loyalty to the capitalist state. Consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, the bourgeois state is an instrument of organised violence that exists to defend the capitalist exploiters against the strivings of the proletariat and oppressed. As Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin explained in his powerful 1917 treatise, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state cannot be reformed or wielded in the interests of the working class and oppressed; it must be shattered through workers revolution.
Not Laborite Reformism But a Communist Perspective
Following the release of the budget, the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism brayed in unison about the attacks by Labor. “Federal Budget 2011-12 Lies and deception” wrote the Communist Party’s The Guardian. “Budget 2011: A budget for billionaires” declared Green Left Weekly. In their article “Desperately seeking surplus,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) sagely warned “By embracing the rhetoric about public debt and the importance of budget surplus, the Gillard government has signalled the likelihood of more savage cuts in the future....” True enough. But who do the cynical hacks who lead these organisations think they are kidding? For all their moaning about the federal ALP government’s attacks, these reformist groups gave back-handed support to the ALP in last October’s federal elections through the preferential voting system or, in the case of SAlt, simply advocated “giving a first preference vote to either Labor, the Greens or others who are genuinely left-wing...” (SAlt election statement, 9 July 2010).
The CPA, Socialist Alliance and SAlt, each with their own particular brand of liberal-reformist program, all push the lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the capitalist state, particularly when administered by Labor, can serve the interests of the working class. But whichever party is in power under capitalism it serves to administer capitalism on behalf of the capitalist class. In contrast, fighting for an independent proletarian-centred program, we in the Spartacist League forthrightly called for “No Vote to Labor! No Vote to Bourgeois Greens!” in the 2010 elections. Noting that both the Liberal/National Coalition and Labor were in a reactionary race to sell themselves to the capitalist rulers we wrote, “For the working class and oppressed, the only thing on offer in the upcoming Australian federal election is more capitalist austerity and reaction” (see “‘White Australia’ Elections: Racism, Austerity, Repression,” ASp No. 210, Spring 2010).
We fight to win militant workers, revolutionary-minded youth and anti-racist fighters to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party. Such a party can only be built in opposition to, and in struggle against, the politics of the ALP and Laborite trade-union bureaucrats who sap and derail the fighting power of the working class by pushing the lie that there can be a partnership between labour and capital. The ALP is what Marxists term a bourgeois workers party, historically based on the trade unions but thoroughly committed to maintaining the capitalist order. It is necessary to replace the misleaders in the unions with a class-struggle leadership, linked to a multiracial revolutionary workers party that is committed to smashing capitalist rule and establishing a new social order run by those who produce the wealth: the working class.
The drive to extract ever greater profit from workers’ labour, the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and refugees, the blood-drenched imperialist carnage from Iraq to Afghanistan, the all-sided social bigotry targeting women and gays—all these are part of the system of capitalist rule. That system must be destroyed root and branch by workers revolution. Proletarian seizure of state power would abolish private ownership of the means of production, collectivise industry and establish a planned socialist economy. Only then will the wealth and productive capacity of society serve the needs of the majority and not the profits of a tiny layer. Ultimately only international working-class rule based on the fight for communism can eliminate the poverty, oppression and misery endemic to this decaying and barbaric capitalist order.
From The Pages Of "Workers Hammer"-Kenya's independence struggle in the 1950s-The Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism
Click on headline to link to other articles from this issue of Workers Hammer.
Workers Hammer No. 215
Summer 2011
Kenya's independence struggle in the 1950s
The Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism
In April four elderly black Kenyans appeared in the High Court in London seeking recognition of atrocities committed against them during British imperialism’s brutal colonial rule. The Kenyan claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara are survivors of the barbaric torture that was meted out to countless thousands of black Africans in detention camps between 1952 and 1961. Of the four claimants (a fifth died before the High Court hearing) Jane Mara was subjected to sexual abuse, one man was castrated and another was beaten unconscious during an atrocity in which eleven men were clubbed to death. British imperialism pillaged and exploited Kenya and used savage repression to crush the anti-colonial revolt known as the Mau Mau uprising.
The survivors are demanding that the British state take responsibility for their treatment in the camps and that the government pay around £2 million, a trifling sum, into a welfare fund. With swinish racist arrogance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) insists that Britain cannot be held responsible, and that any atrocities that may have been committed under colonial rule became the responsibility of the Kenyan government that took over at the time of independence in 1963. Furthermore, says the FCO, too much time has elapsed for the claims to be valid.
The High Court has yet to decide whether or not the case will proceed to trial. But if the British state had got its way, the evidence in this case would never have seen the light of day. Since independence, the former colonial overlords have kept a tight lid on the documentary record of repression in Kenya. Nonetheless, much effort by researchers and advocates for the survivors has resulted in a significant victory. In May the FCO was forced to hand over 300 boxes of files, some 17,000 pages, including material relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt. The departing colonialists destroyed many of the files at independence and removed others, having “made a calculated decision not to hand over any of its colonial era files to the Kenyan government” (guardian.co.uk, 5 April). A letter dated 7 November 1967, issued under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, explains that the general practice at independence was not to hand over files that “might embarrass HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] or other governments” or members of the police or military forces (guardian.co.uk, 5 April).
The mass torture and imprisonment of Kenyans during the uprising has long been documented by historians. To this day, any attempt to expose the truth of what happened has been sharply contested by apologists for imperialism. Caroline Elkins, author of the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), who is an expert witness for the survivors in the current court case, noted that: “My book was resoundingly criticised at the time of its publication. Historian Andrew Roberts wrote that I had committed ‘blood libels against Britain’” (Guardian, 14 April). Elkins estimates that between 160,000 and 320,000 people were detained in camps and at least 100,000 killed. David Anderson, author of another major work, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s dirty war in Kenya and the end of the Empire (2005), documents 1090 hangings of alleged Mau Mau. Mark Curtis in Web of Deceit (2003) estimates that 150,000 black Kenyans died as a result of British policy in this period.
The British capitalist rulers have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale, from the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the bombing of Libya today. Much of the wealth that laid the foundations of British capitalism was acquired from trade in African slaves. Brutal subjugation of the colonial world was part and parcel of imperialism’s drive to secure world markets, cheap labour and raw materials. From Kenya to Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Nigeria and the Indian subcontinent, the globe is strewn with colonial victims of the British Empire’s pursuit of profits.
In Kenya the colonial rulers imprisoned in concentration camps a large proportion of the million and a half Kikuyu people, the country’s largest ethnic group. The Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a peasant-based revolt of the landless Kikuyu people against colonial rule that had dispossessed them of their lands, the basis of their existence. Although it was ultimately defeated, the uprising forced an end to colonial rule. In its terminal years, British rule consisted of naked state repression, culminating in an official “State of Emergency” lasting from 1952 to 1960. Arrayed against the Mau Mau was the armed might of the British colonialists combined with that of their Kenyan stooges, including the Home Guard and other forces. The colonial regime co-opted a layer of rich peasants composed of land-owning, educated Christians. These “loyalist” Kenyans included Kikuyu landowners who were deeply hostile to the landless Kikuyu masses and supported the British in suppressing them. This deep social polarisation within Kenyan society is key to understanding the independence struggle in Kenya and its outcome.
With independence in 1963 British imperialism was forced to relinquish direct rule over Kenya, just as it had been driven out of many of its other colonial holdings in Africa and Asia following World War II. Reverting to indirect domination, the imperialists now relied on the national bourgeoisie which in turn became more directly the oppressor of the masses. Nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, who had been locked up for supposed Mau Mau sympathies, was released from prison in 1961. He was correctly regarded by the imperialists as safe hands for maintaining their interests in the region. Kenyatta had denounced the Mau Mau and was regarded by the more militant leaders of the movement as a traitor to their goals of land and freedom, which indeed he was.
The national bourgeoisie that came to power in Kenya was incapable of resolving any of the fundamental problems forced on the Kenyan masses by imperialist subjugation — dire poverty, lack of education and all the attendant social and economic backwardness. The land-hungry peasants did not regain their lost lands; the plantations and large white-owned farms were not expropriated. The outcome of the Kenyan independence struggle confirms in the negative the programme of permanent revolution codified by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who with Lenin led the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriated the landlords and capitalists and granted land to the peasants. The programme of permanent revolution means that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the proletariat must draw behind it the millions of peasant poor to oust the colonial powers in a struggle for a socialist revolution against the local bourgeoisie. This requires a Leninist-Trotskyist party dedicated to international proletarian revolution both in the neo-colonial countries and in the imperialist centres.
Imperialist subjugation of Kenya
Britain first laid claim to Kenya and other East African territory when Africa was carved up by the imperialist powers in the 1880s. The rapid expansion of the system of world trade fuelled competition between dominant capitalist powers to establish spheres of influence and to control land, raw materials, markets and sources of cheap labour. In contrast to Congo and South Africa, where the imperialists extracted enormous mineral wealth, British interest in Kenya was mainly strategic. To control access to the source of the Nile, the British built a railroad from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in inland Kenya. Completed in 1901, the railway was financed by loans from the British government. The colonial overlords decided the loans would be repaid, and the cost of administering the colony would be met, through profitably farming the millions of acres of land through which the railway ran. To make this land productive, they brought in white settlers, mainly from Britain but also from South Africa, to produce cash crops.
The first British settlers arrived in 1902, lured by the British government’s promise of cheap land and unlimited cheap labour. Writer Colin Leys describes the rationale behind it thus: “The settlers would invest capital and produce crops; the railway would earn revenue by carrying them to the coast, and by carrying the imports inland they would earn abroad”, while “the government would finance its activities by levying tariffs on these imports”. The British capitalist rulers were determined to force the toiling black masses to bear the cost of imperialist domination over them. As Leys describes it:
“The highlands were ‘alienated’ to Europeans; that is, Europeans bought the land at nominal prices from the colonial administration. But at first they had neither the knowledge nor the capital to farm it very differently from the Africans on their land. They had not, moreover, come to Kenya to work as peasants. Their ‘farms’ were extremely large — an average of over 2,400 acres per ‘occupier’ in 1932. There was therefore only one solution, to make the Africans work for them. This the Africans had no reason to do, unless the Europeans had been willing to pay in wages more than Africans could earn from farming on their own account. But such wages would have meant little or no profit for the Europeans. Therefore Africans had to be compelled to work, partly by force, partly by taxation, and partly by preventing them from having access to enough land or profitable crops to enable them to pay taxes without working for wages.”
— Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975)
Roots of nationalist revolt
In order to claim the farmlands of the Central Highlands, part of the Great Rift Valley, the British slaughtered Kikuyus by the thousands. Many indigenous Kenyans driven off their lands were pushed onto “native reserves” set up by the colonial regime in 1915. These reserves were separated by ethnic grouping as part of reinforcing divisions among the Kenyans. As the population in the Kikuyu reserves grew and more British settlers seized the arable land, subsistence became even more difficult. The landless and impoverished black population was subjected to a system of racist laws regulating land, as well as a poll tax and a hut tax. There were also pass laws (kipande) like those in South Africa, prohibiting free movement including in the search for employment. Access to education for the poorest was nil; a small privileged layer was able to attend schools run by Christian churches.
The early British settlers were heavily drawn from the notoriously racist aristocracy. According to Robert Edgerton (Mau Mau, An African Crucible, 1990) “the Norfolk hotel, where they congregated when they visited Nairobi, quickly became known as the ‘House of Lords’” and “their goal was to recreate the Virginia plantocracy in which white gentlemen of breeding and leisure oversaw vast plantations worked by black men”. Sir Charles Eliot, the High Commissioner appointed to rule the East Africa Protectorate, as it was then known, proclaimed Kenya a “white man’s country”.
Outside the reserves other displaced Kikuyu became squatters on the white settlers’ farms in conditions akin to serfdom, raising their own livestock and crops for local sale in return for working the settler’s plantation. Beginning in 1925, with a surplus of available workers, the colonial government and settlers turned the screw on squatters. Rights of tenancy and to own livestock were cut back to the point where squatters laboured for the white farmers for below-subsistence wages. During the depression and World War II, forced labour was instituted to keep the settlers’ plantations functioning. By the mid-1940s there were over 200,000 registered squatters in the so-called White Highlands. With market prices for their produce set far below what the settlers earned for the same crop, the squatters were reduced to starvation conditions. Floggings by landlords were commonplace and squatters were evicted if they refused to sign new labour contracts on worse terms.
In the years leading up to the revolt the squatters were transformed from independent tenant-producers to rural, desperately impoverished wage labourers. Resistance among squatters took the form of illegal cultivation and sale of produce, mass refusal to sign new contracts and in some areas organised strikes. As described in a study by Frank Furedi, by the late 1940s, this resistance became “transformed into a militant wing of Kenyan nationalism”. The Mau Mau revolt was “the last stand of the Kikuyu squatter before his final destruction as an independent peasant producer” (The Mau Mau War in Perspective, 1989).
Although there were other ethnic groups among the squatter population, the Kikuyus were the most numerous and were subjected to special repressive measures. Pastoral groups such as the Nandi people, who included many police, were regarded by the colonialists as potential allies and largely exempted from the anti-squatter measures. By the late 1940s the movement of resistance among the squatters had linked up with resistance in the reserves and Kikuyu radicals in Nairobi.
Kenya’s agricultural resources — principally coffee, tea and sisal — were profitable cash crops grown for the export market. World War II led to increased British investment in mechanisation, resulting in vastly increased profits for the settlers while forcing more black labourers off the farms and onto the reserves, which were already unable to support their population. This fed the disparity between the landed elite and the desperate and landless masses among the black population. By 1948 the population of the colony comprised some 30,000 European settlers, 5.2 million indigenous black Africans, and 98,000 Asians who were brought in as cheap labour but were banned from owning arable land and composed a mercantile layer. The White Highlands — the best farmland in the colony — was in the hands of the white settlers, some 0.7 per cent of the population.
During WWII more than 75,000 black Kenyans joined the British Army and fought in the King’s African Rifles and other regiments in Africa, Asia and the Near East. But in contrast to white settlers who served in the British Army and were rewarded with land and low-interest loans, blacks returned to worse conditions than when they left. Many returning black soldiers were inspired by independence movements like those sweeping the Indian subcontinent. With no land, some gravitated to Nairobi where the scarcity of jobs and housing forced many into an urban lumpenproletariat. Amid mounting bitterness towards the colonial power for which they had risked their lives, landless war veterans formed an organisation called the Forty Group which would go on to play a key role in the Mau Mau.
Divisions within African nationalism
The Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) had been founded in 1924 in opposition to the theft of Kikuyu land and lack of education. Jomo Kenyatta, an educated Kikuyu who had spent some 16 years in Europe, was a leading member of the KCA at this time. On behalf of the KCA he went to London in 1929 to pressure the colonial government for better terms for the Kikuyu. But contrary to a perspective for independence, his programme was for “meaningful cooperation between the colonial state and his people” (Mau Mau and Kenya, Wunyabari Maloba, 1993). Kenyatta returned to Kenya in 1946 where he was widely revered as the Kikuyus’ leader, the “Burning Spear” who symbolised the growing anti-colonial sentiment among the black population. After the KCA was outlawed in 1941 the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed in 1944. In 1947 Kenyatta became the leader of the KAU, nominally a nationalist party of all African ethnic groups but dominated by the Kikuyu. The KAU included some trade union militants; its leaders were educated and some had lived abroad. Its demands centred on better conditions for the black population under colonial rule. Although the KAU was for independence in principle it did not see this as attainable in the near future.
The organised working class was relatively weak, but was young and combative. The trade union component of the KAU leadership represented urban workers including government clerks, taxi drivers, shop workers and others. The African Workers Federation was formed by Chege Kibachia, who organised a strike of dockers — a potentially strategic workforce — in the port city of Mombasa. He was arrested in 1947 while fighting for a general strike in Nairobi and detained in a remote outpost for ten years. In 1949 the East African Trade Union Congress was formed by Fred Kubai, who was later imprisoned, and an Asian communist, Makhan Singh. This organisation was banned in 1950 and Singh was deported and held in a remote area near the Ethiopian border for eleven years.
By late 1947 evicted squatters had become frustrated at the lack of any gains through the gradualist methods of the KAU. Members of the KCA led a militant illegal society and began using the Kikuyu oath to cement unity in struggle. The Kikuyu fighters referred to themselves as the Land Freedom Army or “the movement” but came to be called Mau Mau. The colonial rulers seized on the oathing to demonise Mau Mau and to legitimise savage repression against the Kikuyu people. The Mau Mau became the vehicle for mass resistance to the eviction of squatters from white farms. The core of the guerrilla fighters, led by WWII veterans, trained and lived in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. Their weaponry was sparse and they were barely fed and clothed — and then only due to the heroic efforts of sympathisers in the reserves.
It is impossible to overstate the extent of racist hysteria among the settlers and colonial government, which reverberated in the pages of the Daily Mail in Britain. Whole pseudoscientific theories were concocted about the “illness” particular to black Africans. Typical was the ranting of colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton who wrote: “The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy, nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed” (quoted in Mau Mau, An African Crucible).
The colonial state used widespread repression between 1950-52. However, the audacious daylight killing by Mau Mau of a prominent loyalist chief in October 1952 was seized on by the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, as a pretext for declaring a State of Emergency and letting loose a reign of terror by the security forces. Kenyatta and other KAU leaders were imprisoned and later convicted of masterminding Mau Mau in a sensationalised and rigged show trial.
The deep division between wealthy loyalist Kikuyu and the landless poor was brought home in the Lari massacre in March 1953. Lari, near the Aberdare forest not far from Nairobi, symbolised the dispossession of land once farmed by peasants and systematically stolen, much of it now in the hands of wealthy loyalists. Mau Mau fighters killed a major loyalist chief and some 97 others at Lari, indiscriminately targeting families, including many women and children. In retaliation, up to 400 Kikuyu were slaughtered by the government forces, including the Home Guard, which was a key military force alongside the British Army and the colonial forces. Eventually 71 people were hanged for the Lari killings. This episode sharply fed the racist frenzy among the settlers and in Britain and increased the polarisation among the Kikuyu people.
Under the State of Emergency the settlers, British Army and Home Guard were permitted to summarily execute anyone who failed to stop when ordered. Thousands of Kikuyu were shot on sight. The Kenya Regiment and Kenya Police Reserve, both made up of settlers, were notoriously brutal. However, many authors also stress the extreme brutality of the Home Guard, loyalists who often had personal scores to settle with their neighbours. And they were not few: there was in fact an aspect of civil war to the Mau Mau uprising, between those who had benefited from co-operation with colonialism and those who were dispossessed and recipients only of brutality and exploitation. There is a similarity to the French colonial war in Algeria that took place at the same time, in which the French imperialists killed a million people — over a tenth of the population. In both cases there was a colonial settler population and a large loyalist militia co-opted from among the indigenous population.
Virtually the entire population of one and a half million Kikuyu were rounded up and “screened” during the Emergency. In Nairobi, where the rebel command was based, the colonial forces carried out a devastating month-long siege in April 1954 known as Operation Anvil, in which all Kikuyu in the city were rounded up and up to 30,000 were taken away for further “interrogation”. Screenings were usually performed by loyalist Kikuyu who wore hoods to conceal their identities from people they had often known their entire lives. With a nod of the head, these stooges sent their neighbours to detention camps. The camps were part of a vast system of prisons, interrogation centres and torture outposts known as the “Pipeline”. This included over a hundred camps and prisons, not counting the camps run by individual loyalist chiefs and white settlers throughout the Rift Valley and central provinces. In the camps, jails and screening centres Kikuyu were starved, beaten and tortured until they “confessed”.
In 1954 the government began the “villagisation” policy of uprooting Kikuyu and resettling them in new villages — actually barbed wire-enclosed concentration camps under the control of the Home Guard and military. The villages the Kikuyu left behind were burned down and their livestock confiscated. The aim was to cut off the Mau Mau fighters’ supply lines by virtually imprisoning that part of the Kikuyu population not already in detention camps. Between June 1954 and October 1955, 1,077,500 Kikuyu were relocated to 854 “villages”. One survivor recounted to Caroline Elkins the treatment of the “villagers” by the Home Guard and British:
“some people who had refused to confess were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of their bodies while the other covered the upper part. Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit. The people inside would die writhing in the flames. Many people were dying every day. And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth.”
— The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
By 1954-55, the colonial government undertook a programme of land consolidation called the Swynnerton Plan which anticipated the land settlement that would be agreed at independence. The plan aimed to reinforce class divisions, rewarding loyalists with large parcels of land, declaring: “Former government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country” (quoted in Underdevelopment in Kenya).
By late 1956 the guerrillas had been militarily defeated but mass detention and torture continued into 1959. That same year, public opinion in Britain turned sharply against colonial rule in Kenya when evidence came to light of a massacre in Hola camp, a particularly brutal detention centre for Mau Mau, in which eleven men were beaten to death in March.
Kenya achieved independence in an international context in which British imperialism had suffered profound decline following WWII and national independence struggles had forced an end to colonial rule in India and were raging throughout Africa. The war on the part of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States was an interimperialist conflict in which the working people and oppressed masses had no side. The working class did however have a side in defence of the Soviet workers state. The Soviet Union was no longer the revolutionary workers state that it was under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, having undergone a political degeneration, beginning 1923-1924, under the bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless it remained a degenerated workers state until counterrevolution triumphed in 1991-92. It was the Soviet army’s victory over the imperialist armies of Nazi Germany that ended the carnage of WWII.
Following the war the imperialists ramped up their anti-Soviet Cold War and in the 1950s a central preoccupation of the colonial powers in Africa was to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union, which had provided support to nationalist movements, albeit within the framework of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism. At the time, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric poured forth from bourgeois-nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, leader of newly independent Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo, who was murdered by the CIA in 1961. In 1960 South African troops massacred 69 black activists at Sharpeville who were protesting the hated apartheid pass laws. The CIA worked with South African armed forces and in 1962 tipped them off to Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his 27-year imprisonment.
Kenyatta: henchman of imperialism
In a 1957 speech then British prime minister Harold Macmillan said, referring to the peoples of Africa, “if they are exposed to the full force of nationalism, it is up to us to see that they are steered away from Communism” (quoted in African Affairs, January 1970). Jomo Kenyatta was certainly an asset to the imperialists in that regard. When released from detention in August 1961 he was still widely revered by the masses and seen as the leader who would take Kenya to Uhuru (freedom). As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was imprisoned for his outspoken criticisms of the Kenyatta government, noted: “Looking at Kenyatta people tended to see what they wanted to see rather than what there was: petty bourgeois vacillations and opportunism” (quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya).
Kenyatta preached “forgiveness” towards the murderous chiefs and Home Guard who had been the eager jailers and torturers of the Kikuyu masses, saying they were “all brothers and sisters and there should be no revenge”. He assured the European landowners their property rights were safe. He became the leader of the Kenya African National Union party, composed of mainly Kikuyu and Luo people, which saw itself as successor to the KAU and which was voted into government in 1963. Formal independence of Kenya was granted in December of that year.
With regard to the all-important question of land ownership, Kenyatta & Co accepted a rotten deal which allowed for the rich Kikuyu to buy land from the white settlers, for which they could obtain loans from the British government. The large plantations and ranches owned by foreign capital were untouched. Needless to say the mass of peasants remained landless. Kenyatta and his cronies were prepared to give the white settlers everything; the black peasants received only continued poverty and repression. Mau Mau veterans who rejected the deal formed a new Kenya Land and Freedom Army demanding the return of stolen lands. The Kenyatta government cracked down on these fighters, sentencing them to long prison terms. As one of the former leaders of the radical wing of the KAU, BM Kaggia, commented bitterly: “We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial government. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land ” (East African Standard, 22 April 1965). Kenyatta turned to the police and army, just like the British who had detained him. A famous anecdote tells of a meeting two years after independence between president Kenyatta and former colonial governor Baring who was visiting. Baring said: “By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago.” Kenyatta replied: “If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same.”
Under capitalist rule, much of the wealth of the former colony continued to flow into the coffers of the erstwhile colonial masters. After independence Britain continued to dominate the economy in Kenya. The rising black bourgeoisie were at one with the propertied settlers in stifling the Asian entrepreneurs and ensuring racist economic policies and legislation discriminating against Asian-owned enterprise. Such policies culminated in the mass expulsion of Asians in 1967-68 in Kenya under so-called “Africanisation”. Soon after in Uganda, this same policy was carried out by Idi Amin to a particularly brutal degree.
The bourgeois nationalists who came to power in Kenya reinforced tribal divisions and upheld backward anti-woman practices. From the 1920s, the Kikuyu-based KCA was a vigorous defender of female genital mutilation (FGM). In response to a 1929 campaign waged by the Christian churches in Kenya in alliance with the educated elite against FGM, the KCA and Kenyatta defended FGM as part of “African culture”, thus condoning this retrograde and barbaric practice which is widespread today in parts of Africa, Asia and the Near East. There is nothing new in the British imperialist rulers hypocritically purporting to defend women’s rights in the colonial world — such as opposing suttee (immolation of widows) in India and the veil in the Islamic world — as a cynical ploy to dress up imperialist occupation as a “civilising mission”. While we fight every aspect of imperialist oppression, we vehemently oppose practices such as FGM, an especially brutal aspect of the oppression of women which maims them and means a lifetime of excruciating pain. (See “The Crime of Female Genital Mutilation”, Women and Revolution no 41, Summer/Autumn 1992.)
For permanent revolution throughout Africa
To this day Kenyan society is riven by murderous tribal and ethnic violence which is a legacy of colonial rule. At the time of Kenyatta’s death we wrote that the “Grand Old Man” of Kenya rose to the residency as a Kikuyu tribalist. We added:
“An Oxford-educated elite may be at home in the capitals of Europe, but as soon as any serious social unrest breaks out, the underlying tribalism and other indices of backwardness are quickly bared. This is not merely a holdover from the past: imperialism actually intensified and formalized ethnic rivalries with its divide-and-rule policies. Today the same patterns are fostered by the requirements of maintaining a political base in an environment of massive poverty.”
— Workers Vanguard no 214, 8 September 1978
A workers and peasants government in Kenya would expropriate the highly mechanised and capital-intensive large white-owned farms and transform them into modern large-scale collective and state farms. Councils of workers and rural toilers would decide on land distribution. A collectivised economy must be extended to neighbouring countries in the context of a socialist federation in sub-Saharan Africa.
The proletariat is the only class with the social power to bring the capitalist system to its knees and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The powerful South African proletariat is key to a revolutionary perspective in the whole region. Our comrades of Spartacist South Africa (SSA) fight to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for socialist revolution — for a black-centred workers government. Adequate housing for the millions in the townships, squatter camps and villages, electricity and water for the entire population, free quality education, the eradication of lobola (bride price) and other traditional patriarchal practices oppressive to women: these desperately needed measures require the socialist transformation of the economy and society under the dictatorship of the proletariat, fighting to promote socialist revolution throughout the African continent and worldwide. As a recent article written by the SSA said:
“As part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, a black-centred workers government would fight to extend revolution to the imperialist centres of the U.S., West Europe and Japan. It will take an international socialist planned economy to lift the urban and rural masses out of poverty and create a classless society of material abundance — the beginning of a communist society. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.”
— Workers Vanguard no 964, 10 September 2010
Workers Hammer No. 215
Summer 2011
Kenya's independence struggle in the 1950s
The Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism
In April four elderly black Kenyans appeared in the High Court in London seeking recognition of atrocities committed against them during British imperialism’s brutal colonial rule. The Kenyan claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara are survivors of the barbaric torture that was meted out to countless thousands of black Africans in detention camps between 1952 and 1961. Of the four claimants (a fifth died before the High Court hearing) Jane Mara was subjected to sexual abuse, one man was castrated and another was beaten unconscious during an atrocity in which eleven men were clubbed to death. British imperialism pillaged and exploited Kenya and used savage repression to crush the anti-colonial revolt known as the Mau Mau uprising.
The survivors are demanding that the British state take responsibility for their treatment in the camps and that the government pay around £2 million, a trifling sum, into a welfare fund. With swinish racist arrogance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) insists that Britain cannot be held responsible, and that any atrocities that may have been committed under colonial rule became the responsibility of the Kenyan government that took over at the time of independence in 1963. Furthermore, says the FCO, too much time has elapsed for the claims to be valid.
The High Court has yet to decide whether or not the case will proceed to trial. But if the British state had got its way, the evidence in this case would never have seen the light of day. Since independence, the former colonial overlords have kept a tight lid on the documentary record of repression in Kenya. Nonetheless, much effort by researchers and advocates for the survivors has resulted in a significant victory. In May the FCO was forced to hand over 300 boxes of files, some 17,000 pages, including material relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt. The departing colonialists destroyed many of the files at independence and removed others, having “made a calculated decision not to hand over any of its colonial era files to the Kenyan government” (guardian.co.uk, 5 April). A letter dated 7 November 1967, issued under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, explains that the general practice at independence was not to hand over files that “might embarrass HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] or other governments” or members of the police or military forces (guardian.co.uk, 5 April).
The mass torture and imprisonment of Kenyans during the uprising has long been documented by historians. To this day, any attempt to expose the truth of what happened has been sharply contested by apologists for imperialism. Caroline Elkins, author of the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), who is an expert witness for the survivors in the current court case, noted that: “My book was resoundingly criticised at the time of its publication. Historian Andrew Roberts wrote that I had committed ‘blood libels against Britain’” (Guardian, 14 April). Elkins estimates that between 160,000 and 320,000 people were detained in camps and at least 100,000 killed. David Anderson, author of another major work, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s dirty war in Kenya and the end of the Empire (2005), documents 1090 hangings of alleged Mau Mau. Mark Curtis in Web of Deceit (2003) estimates that 150,000 black Kenyans died as a result of British policy in this period.
The British capitalist rulers have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale, from the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the bombing of Libya today. Much of the wealth that laid the foundations of British capitalism was acquired from trade in African slaves. Brutal subjugation of the colonial world was part and parcel of imperialism’s drive to secure world markets, cheap labour and raw materials. From Kenya to Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Nigeria and the Indian subcontinent, the globe is strewn with colonial victims of the British Empire’s pursuit of profits.
In Kenya the colonial rulers imprisoned in concentration camps a large proportion of the million and a half Kikuyu people, the country’s largest ethnic group. The Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a peasant-based revolt of the landless Kikuyu people against colonial rule that had dispossessed them of their lands, the basis of their existence. Although it was ultimately defeated, the uprising forced an end to colonial rule. In its terminal years, British rule consisted of naked state repression, culminating in an official “State of Emergency” lasting from 1952 to 1960. Arrayed against the Mau Mau was the armed might of the British colonialists combined with that of their Kenyan stooges, including the Home Guard and other forces. The colonial regime co-opted a layer of rich peasants composed of land-owning, educated Christians. These “loyalist” Kenyans included Kikuyu landowners who were deeply hostile to the landless Kikuyu masses and supported the British in suppressing them. This deep social polarisation within Kenyan society is key to understanding the independence struggle in Kenya and its outcome.
With independence in 1963 British imperialism was forced to relinquish direct rule over Kenya, just as it had been driven out of many of its other colonial holdings in Africa and Asia following World War II. Reverting to indirect domination, the imperialists now relied on the national bourgeoisie which in turn became more directly the oppressor of the masses. Nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, who had been locked up for supposed Mau Mau sympathies, was released from prison in 1961. He was correctly regarded by the imperialists as safe hands for maintaining their interests in the region. Kenyatta had denounced the Mau Mau and was regarded by the more militant leaders of the movement as a traitor to their goals of land and freedom, which indeed he was.
The national bourgeoisie that came to power in Kenya was incapable of resolving any of the fundamental problems forced on the Kenyan masses by imperialist subjugation — dire poverty, lack of education and all the attendant social and economic backwardness. The land-hungry peasants did not regain their lost lands; the plantations and large white-owned farms were not expropriated. The outcome of the Kenyan independence struggle confirms in the negative the programme of permanent revolution codified by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who with Lenin led the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriated the landlords and capitalists and granted land to the peasants. The programme of permanent revolution means that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the proletariat must draw behind it the millions of peasant poor to oust the colonial powers in a struggle for a socialist revolution against the local bourgeoisie. This requires a Leninist-Trotskyist party dedicated to international proletarian revolution both in the neo-colonial countries and in the imperialist centres.
Imperialist subjugation of Kenya
Britain first laid claim to Kenya and other East African territory when Africa was carved up by the imperialist powers in the 1880s. The rapid expansion of the system of world trade fuelled competition between dominant capitalist powers to establish spheres of influence and to control land, raw materials, markets and sources of cheap labour. In contrast to Congo and South Africa, where the imperialists extracted enormous mineral wealth, British interest in Kenya was mainly strategic. To control access to the source of the Nile, the British built a railroad from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in inland Kenya. Completed in 1901, the railway was financed by loans from the British government. The colonial overlords decided the loans would be repaid, and the cost of administering the colony would be met, through profitably farming the millions of acres of land through which the railway ran. To make this land productive, they brought in white settlers, mainly from Britain but also from South Africa, to produce cash crops.
The first British settlers arrived in 1902, lured by the British government’s promise of cheap land and unlimited cheap labour. Writer Colin Leys describes the rationale behind it thus: “The settlers would invest capital and produce crops; the railway would earn revenue by carrying them to the coast, and by carrying the imports inland they would earn abroad”, while “the government would finance its activities by levying tariffs on these imports”. The British capitalist rulers were determined to force the toiling black masses to bear the cost of imperialist domination over them. As Leys describes it:
“The highlands were ‘alienated’ to Europeans; that is, Europeans bought the land at nominal prices from the colonial administration. But at first they had neither the knowledge nor the capital to farm it very differently from the Africans on their land. They had not, moreover, come to Kenya to work as peasants. Their ‘farms’ were extremely large — an average of over 2,400 acres per ‘occupier’ in 1932. There was therefore only one solution, to make the Africans work for them. This the Africans had no reason to do, unless the Europeans had been willing to pay in wages more than Africans could earn from farming on their own account. But such wages would have meant little or no profit for the Europeans. Therefore Africans had to be compelled to work, partly by force, partly by taxation, and partly by preventing them from having access to enough land or profitable crops to enable them to pay taxes without working for wages.”
— Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975)
Roots of nationalist revolt
In order to claim the farmlands of the Central Highlands, part of the Great Rift Valley, the British slaughtered Kikuyus by the thousands. Many indigenous Kenyans driven off their lands were pushed onto “native reserves” set up by the colonial regime in 1915. These reserves were separated by ethnic grouping as part of reinforcing divisions among the Kenyans. As the population in the Kikuyu reserves grew and more British settlers seized the arable land, subsistence became even more difficult. The landless and impoverished black population was subjected to a system of racist laws regulating land, as well as a poll tax and a hut tax. There were also pass laws (kipande) like those in South Africa, prohibiting free movement including in the search for employment. Access to education for the poorest was nil; a small privileged layer was able to attend schools run by Christian churches.
The early British settlers were heavily drawn from the notoriously racist aristocracy. According to Robert Edgerton (Mau Mau, An African Crucible, 1990) “the Norfolk hotel, where they congregated when they visited Nairobi, quickly became known as the ‘House of Lords’” and “their goal was to recreate the Virginia plantocracy in which white gentlemen of breeding and leisure oversaw vast plantations worked by black men”. Sir Charles Eliot, the High Commissioner appointed to rule the East Africa Protectorate, as it was then known, proclaimed Kenya a “white man’s country”.
Outside the reserves other displaced Kikuyu became squatters on the white settlers’ farms in conditions akin to serfdom, raising their own livestock and crops for local sale in return for working the settler’s plantation. Beginning in 1925, with a surplus of available workers, the colonial government and settlers turned the screw on squatters. Rights of tenancy and to own livestock were cut back to the point where squatters laboured for the white farmers for below-subsistence wages. During the depression and World War II, forced labour was instituted to keep the settlers’ plantations functioning. By the mid-1940s there were over 200,000 registered squatters in the so-called White Highlands. With market prices for their produce set far below what the settlers earned for the same crop, the squatters were reduced to starvation conditions. Floggings by landlords were commonplace and squatters were evicted if they refused to sign new labour contracts on worse terms.
In the years leading up to the revolt the squatters were transformed from independent tenant-producers to rural, desperately impoverished wage labourers. Resistance among squatters took the form of illegal cultivation and sale of produce, mass refusal to sign new contracts and in some areas organised strikes. As described in a study by Frank Furedi, by the late 1940s, this resistance became “transformed into a militant wing of Kenyan nationalism”. The Mau Mau revolt was “the last stand of the Kikuyu squatter before his final destruction as an independent peasant producer” (The Mau Mau War in Perspective, 1989).
Although there were other ethnic groups among the squatter population, the Kikuyus were the most numerous and were subjected to special repressive measures. Pastoral groups such as the Nandi people, who included many police, were regarded by the colonialists as potential allies and largely exempted from the anti-squatter measures. By the late 1940s the movement of resistance among the squatters had linked up with resistance in the reserves and Kikuyu radicals in Nairobi.
Kenya’s agricultural resources — principally coffee, tea and sisal — were profitable cash crops grown for the export market. World War II led to increased British investment in mechanisation, resulting in vastly increased profits for the settlers while forcing more black labourers off the farms and onto the reserves, which were already unable to support their population. This fed the disparity between the landed elite and the desperate and landless masses among the black population. By 1948 the population of the colony comprised some 30,000 European settlers, 5.2 million indigenous black Africans, and 98,000 Asians who were brought in as cheap labour but were banned from owning arable land and composed a mercantile layer. The White Highlands — the best farmland in the colony — was in the hands of the white settlers, some 0.7 per cent of the population.
During WWII more than 75,000 black Kenyans joined the British Army and fought in the King’s African Rifles and other regiments in Africa, Asia and the Near East. But in contrast to white settlers who served in the British Army and were rewarded with land and low-interest loans, blacks returned to worse conditions than when they left. Many returning black soldiers were inspired by independence movements like those sweeping the Indian subcontinent. With no land, some gravitated to Nairobi where the scarcity of jobs and housing forced many into an urban lumpenproletariat. Amid mounting bitterness towards the colonial power for which they had risked their lives, landless war veterans formed an organisation called the Forty Group which would go on to play a key role in the Mau Mau.
Divisions within African nationalism
The Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) had been founded in 1924 in opposition to the theft of Kikuyu land and lack of education. Jomo Kenyatta, an educated Kikuyu who had spent some 16 years in Europe, was a leading member of the KCA at this time. On behalf of the KCA he went to London in 1929 to pressure the colonial government for better terms for the Kikuyu. But contrary to a perspective for independence, his programme was for “meaningful cooperation between the colonial state and his people” (Mau Mau and Kenya, Wunyabari Maloba, 1993). Kenyatta returned to Kenya in 1946 where he was widely revered as the Kikuyus’ leader, the “Burning Spear” who symbolised the growing anti-colonial sentiment among the black population. After the KCA was outlawed in 1941 the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed in 1944. In 1947 Kenyatta became the leader of the KAU, nominally a nationalist party of all African ethnic groups but dominated by the Kikuyu. The KAU included some trade union militants; its leaders were educated and some had lived abroad. Its demands centred on better conditions for the black population under colonial rule. Although the KAU was for independence in principle it did not see this as attainable in the near future.
The organised working class was relatively weak, but was young and combative. The trade union component of the KAU leadership represented urban workers including government clerks, taxi drivers, shop workers and others. The African Workers Federation was formed by Chege Kibachia, who organised a strike of dockers — a potentially strategic workforce — in the port city of Mombasa. He was arrested in 1947 while fighting for a general strike in Nairobi and detained in a remote outpost for ten years. In 1949 the East African Trade Union Congress was formed by Fred Kubai, who was later imprisoned, and an Asian communist, Makhan Singh. This organisation was banned in 1950 and Singh was deported and held in a remote area near the Ethiopian border for eleven years.
By late 1947 evicted squatters had become frustrated at the lack of any gains through the gradualist methods of the KAU. Members of the KCA led a militant illegal society and began using the Kikuyu oath to cement unity in struggle. The Kikuyu fighters referred to themselves as the Land Freedom Army or “the movement” but came to be called Mau Mau. The colonial rulers seized on the oathing to demonise Mau Mau and to legitimise savage repression against the Kikuyu people. The Mau Mau became the vehicle for mass resistance to the eviction of squatters from white farms. The core of the guerrilla fighters, led by WWII veterans, trained and lived in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. Their weaponry was sparse and they were barely fed and clothed — and then only due to the heroic efforts of sympathisers in the reserves.
It is impossible to overstate the extent of racist hysteria among the settlers and colonial government, which reverberated in the pages of the Daily Mail in Britain. Whole pseudoscientific theories were concocted about the “illness” particular to black Africans. Typical was the ranting of colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton who wrote: “The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy, nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed” (quoted in Mau Mau, An African Crucible).
The colonial state used widespread repression between 1950-52. However, the audacious daylight killing by Mau Mau of a prominent loyalist chief in October 1952 was seized on by the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, as a pretext for declaring a State of Emergency and letting loose a reign of terror by the security forces. Kenyatta and other KAU leaders were imprisoned and later convicted of masterminding Mau Mau in a sensationalised and rigged show trial.
The deep division between wealthy loyalist Kikuyu and the landless poor was brought home in the Lari massacre in March 1953. Lari, near the Aberdare forest not far from Nairobi, symbolised the dispossession of land once farmed by peasants and systematically stolen, much of it now in the hands of wealthy loyalists. Mau Mau fighters killed a major loyalist chief and some 97 others at Lari, indiscriminately targeting families, including many women and children. In retaliation, up to 400 Kikuyu were slaughtered by the government forces, including the Home Guard, which was a key military force alongside the British Army and the colonial forces. Eventually 71 people were hanged for the Lari killings. This episode sharply fed the racist frenzy among the settlers and in Britain and increased the polarisation among the Kikuyu people.
Under the State of Emergency the settlers, British Army and Home Guard were permitted to summarily execute anyone who failed to stop when ordered. Thousands of Kikuyu were shot on sight. The Kenya Regiment and Kenya Police Reserve, both made up of settlers, were notoriously brutal. However, many authors also stress the extreme brutality of the Home Guard, loyalists who often had personal scores to settle with their neighbours. And they were not few: there was in fact an aspect of civil war to the Mau Mau uprising, between those who had benefited from co-operation with colonialism and those who were dispossessed and recipients only of brutality and exploitation. There is a similarity to the French colonial war in Algeria that took place at the same time, in which the French imperialists killed a million people — over a tenth of the population. In both cases there was a colonial settler population and a large loyalist militia co-opted from among the indigenous population.
Virtually the entire population of one and a half million Kikuyu were rounded up and “screened” during the Emergency. In Nairobi, where the rebel command was based, the colonial forces carried out a devastating month-long siege in April 1954 known as Operation Anvil, in which all Kikuyu in the city were rounded up and up to 30,000 were taken away for further “interrogation”. Screenings were usually performed by loyalist Kikuyu who wore hoods to conceal their identities from people they had often known their entire lives. With a nod of the head, these stooges sent their neighbours to detention camps. The camps were part of a vast system of prisons, interrogation centres and torture outposts known as the “Pipeline”. This included over a hundred camps and prisons, not counting the camps run by individual loyalist chiefs and white settlers throughout the Rift Valley and central provinces. In the camps, jails and screening centres Kikuyu were starved, beaten and tortured until they “confessed”.
In 1954 the government began the “villagisation” policy of uprooting Kikuyu and resettling them in new villages — actually barbed wire-enclosed concentration camps under the control of the Home Guard and military. The villages the Kikuyu left behind were burned down and their livestock confiscated. The aim was to cut off the Mau Mau fighters’ supply lines by virtually imprisoning that part of the Kikuyu population not already in detention camps. Between June 1954 and October 1955, 1,077,500 Kikuyu were relocated to 854 “villages”. One survivor recounted to Caroline Elkins the treatment of the “villagers” by the Home Guard and British:
“some people who had refused to confess were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of their bodies while the other covered the upper part. Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit. The people inside would die writhing in the flames. Many people were dying every day. And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth.”
— The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
By 1954-55, the colonial government undertook a programme of land consolidation called the Swynnerton Plan which anticipated the land settlement that would be agreed at independence. The plan aimed to reinforce class divisions, rewarding loyalists with large parcels of land, declaring: “Former government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country” (quoted in Underdevelopment in Kenya).
By late 1956 the guerrillas had been militarily defeated but mass detention and torture continued into 1959. That same year, public opinion in Britain turned sharply against colonial rule in Kenya when evidence came to light of a massacre in Hola camp, a particularly brutal detention centre for Mau Mau, in which eleven men were beaten to death in March.
Kenya achieved independence in an international context in which British imperialism had suffered profound decline following WWII and national independence struggles had forced an end to colonial rule in India and were raging throughout Africa. The war on the part of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States was an interimperialist conflict in which the working people and oppressed masses had no side. The working class did however have a side in defence of the Soviet workers state. The Soviet Union was no longer the revolutionary workers state that it was under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, having undergone a political degeneration, beginning 1923-1924, under the bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless it remained a degenerated workers state until counterrevolution triumphed in 1991-92. It was the Soviet army’s victory over the imperialist armies of Nazi Germany that ended the carnage of WWII.
Following the war the imperialists ramped up their anti-Soviet Cold War and in the 1950s a central preoccupation of the colonial powers in Africa was to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union, which had provided support to nationalist movements, albeit within the framework of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism. At the time, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric poured forth from bourgeois-nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, leader of newly independent Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo, who was murdered by the CIA in 1961. In 1960 South African troops massacred 69 black activists at Sharpeville who were protesting the hated apartheid pass laws. The CIA worked with South African armed forces and in 1962 tipped them off to Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his 27-year imprisonment.
Kenyatta: henchman of imperialism
In a 1957 speech then British prime minister Harold Macmillan said, referring to the peoples of Africa, “if they are exposed to the full force of nationalism, it is up to us to see that they are steered away from Communism” (quoted in African Affairs, January 1970). Jomo Kenyatta was certainly an asset to the imperialists in that regard. When released from detention in August 1961 he was still widely revered by the masses and seen as the leader who would take Kenya to Uhuru (freedom). As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was imprisoned for his outspoken criticisms of the Kenyatta government, noted: “Looking at Kenyatta people tended to see what they wanted to see rather than what there was: petty bourgeois vacillations and opportunism” (quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya).
Kenyatta preached “forgiveness” towards the murderous chiefs and Home Guard who had been the eager jailers and torturers of the Kikuyu masses, saying they were “all brothers and sisters and there should be no revenge”. He assured the European landowners their property rights were safe. He became the leader of the Kenya African National Union party, composed of mainly Kikuyu and Luo people, which saw itself as successor to the KAU and which was voted into government in 1963. Formal independence of Kenya was granted in December of that year.
With regard to the all-important question of land ownership, Kenyatta & Co accepted a rotten deal which allowed for the rich Kikuyu to buy land from the white settlers, for which they could obtain loans from the British government. The large plantations and ranches owned by foreign capital were untouched. Needless to say the mass of peasants remained landless. Kenyatta and his cronies were prepared to give the white settlers everything; the black peasants received only continued poverty and repression. Mau Mau veterans who rejected the deal formed a new Kenya Land and Freedom Army demanding the return of stolen lands. The Kenyatta government cracked down on these fighters, sentencing them to long prison terms. As one of the former leaders of the radical wing of the KAU, BM Kaggia, commented bitterly: “We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial government. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land ” (East African Standard, 22 April 1965). Kenyatta turned to the police and army, just like the British who had detained him. A famous anecdote tells of a meeting two years after independence between president Kenyatta and former colonial governor Baring who was visiting. Baring said: “By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago.” Kenyatta replied: “If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same.”
Under capitalist rule, much of the wealth of the former colony continued to flow into the coffers of the erstwhile colonial masters. After independence Britain continued to dominate the economy in Kenya. The rising black bourgeoisie were at one with the propertied settlers in stifling the Asian entrepreneurs and ensuring racist economic policies and legislation discriminating against Asian-owned enterprise. Such policies culminated in the mass expulsion of Asians in 1967-68 in Kenya under so-called “Africanisation”. Soon after in Uganda, this same policy was carried out by Idi Amin to a particularly brutal degree.
The bourgeois nationalists who came to power in Kenya reinforced tribal divisions and upheld backward anti-woman practices. From the 1920s, the Kikuyu-based KCA was a vigorous defender of female genital mutilation (FGM). In response to a 1929 campaign waged by the Christian churches in Kenya in alliance with the educated elite against FGM, the KCA and Kenyatta defended FGM as part of “African culture”, thus condoning this retrograde and barbaric practice which is widespread today in parts of Africa, Asia and the Near East. There is nothing new in the British imperialist rulers hypocritically purporting to defend women’s rights in the colonial world — such as opposing suttee (immolation of widows) in India and the veil in the Islamic world — as a cynical ploy to dress up imperialist occupation as a “civilising mission”. While we fight every aspect of imperialist oppression, we vehemently oppose practices such as FGM, an especially brutal aspect of the oppression of women which maims them and means a lifetime of excruciating pain. (See “The Crime of Female Genital Mutilation”, Women and Revolution no 41, Summer/Autumn 1992.)
For permanent revolution throughout Africa
To this day Kenyan society is riven by murderous tribal and ethnic violence which is a legacy of colonial rule. At the time of Kenyatta’s death we wrote that the “Grand Old Man” of Kenya rose to the residency as a Kikuyu tribalist. We added:
“An Oxford-educated elite may be at home in the capitals of Europe, but as soon as any serious social unrest breaks out, the underlying tribalism and other indices of backwardness are quickly bared. This is not merely a holdover from the past: imperialism actually intensified and formalized ethnic rivalries with its divide-and-rule policies. Today the same patterns are fostered by the requirements of maintaining a political base in an environment of massive poverty.”
— Workers Vanguard no 214, 8 September 1978
A workers and peasants government in Kenya would expropriate the highly mechanised and capital-intensive large white-owned farms and transform them into modern large-scale collective and state farms. Councils of workers and rural toilers would decide on land distribution. A collectivised economy must be extended to neighbouring countries in the context of a socialist federation in sub-Saharan Africa.
The proletariat is the only class with the social power to bring the capitalist system to its knees and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The powerful South African proletariat is key to a revolutionary perspective in the whole region. Our comrades of Spartacist South Africa (SSA) fight to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for socialist revolution — for a black-centred workers government. Adequate housing for the millions in the townships, squatter camps and villages, electricity and water for the entire population, free quality education, the eradication of lobola (bride price) and other traditional patriarchal practices oppressive to women: these desperately needed measures require the socialist transformation of the economy and society under the dictatorship of the proletariat, fighting to promote socialist revolution throughout the African continent and worldwide. As a recent article written by the SSA said:
“As part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, a black-centred workers government would fight to extend revolution to the imperialist centres of the U.S., West Europe and Japan. It will take an international socialist planned economy to lift the urban and rural masses out of poverty and create a classless society of material abundance — the beginning of a communist society. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.”
— Workers Vanguard no 964, 10 September 2010
From The Pages Of "Spartacist Canada"-Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
Spartacist Canada No. 170
Fall 2011
Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
The following statement was issued on August 28 by the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the arrests of eight leftists this summer by the “anti-gang” unit of the Montreal police. On June 29, Patrice Legendre, a supporter of the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR), and three other militants were arrested in an operation involving some 30 cops. Over the next few weeks, four more activists—members and leaders of the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a 40,000-strong student union—were also picked up. The ASSÉ activists face between four and nine charges each in connection with protests against tuition fee increases last March, when students occupied the offices of the Quebec finance minister and the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities.
These arrests, part of a broader campaign of disruption and provocation, are the result of the dirty deeds of a police “anti-gang” squad called GAMMA (Guet des Activités et des Mouvements Marginaux et Anarchistes—Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements). The creation of this agency in January, along with the eight arrests, marks an intensification of a long-running war on the left by the Montreal cops.
The pretext for the first round of arrests was an altercation at this year’s May Day demonstration organized by Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). The Montreal cops routinely stage provocations against May Day protesters; this year they tried to arrest a photographer associated with Partisan, the PCR’s newspaper. As the PCR reports, “dozens of protesters responded by confronting the police, telling them to release the activist.” The cops backed off. Now police have thrown numerous serious charges against demonstrators including “assault with a weapon” and “assaulting a police officer.”
Ominously, it appears that the cops are also trying to implicate PCR supporters in an incident that occurred in Trois-Rivières a year ago in which the doors of a Canadian Forces recruitment centre were shattered by an explosive device. The PCR notes that the day after the June 29 arrests the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) installed itself in Trois-Rivières, flashing photos of the four arrested leftists. INSET, a joint “anti-terror” agency of the RCMP, CSIS, Canadian Border Services and provincial and municipal police forces in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, has harassed numerous Quebec activists, including PCR supporters.
The Montreal crackdown is part of a broader ruling-class offensive against leftists which includes the mass arrests and brutalization of G20 protesters in Toronto in 2010. Many anti-G20 activists and organizers still face trumped-up charges. This is all aimed at intimidating those who oppose the violence, poverty and war that are endemic to the system of capitalist exploitation. This system, in which a tiny minority exploits the labour of the many, cannot be maintained except by force, and that is the core purpose of the capitalist state, with its repressive laws and its cops, courts and jails.
We have many political differences with the Maoist PCR and with the political views of the ASSÉ student leaders. But in the face of this state repression, our watchword is: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” It is in the interest of the entire labour movement to defend these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of such political repression, supplemented by the bogus “war on terror,” is the multiracial working class and its struggles. The working class alone has the potential social power and material interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Drop all charges against the arrested leftists!
Fall 2011
Protest Roundup of Montreal Leftists!
The following statement was issued on August 28 by the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste.
The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the arrests of eight leftists this summer by the “anti-gang” unit of the Montreal police. On June 29, Patrice Legendre, a supporter of the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR), and three other militants were arrested in an operation involving some 30 cops. Over the next few weeks, four more activists—members and leaders of the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a 40,000-strong student union—were also picked up. The ASSÉ activists face between four and nine charges each in connection with protests against tuition fee increases last March, when students occupied the offices of the Quebec finance minister and the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities.
These arrests, part of a broader campaign of disruption and provocation, are the result of the dirty deeds of a police “anti-gang” squad called GAMMA (Guet des Activités et des Mouvements Marginaux et Anarchistes—Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements). The creation of this agency in January, along with the eight arrests, marks an intensification of a long-running war on the left by the Montreal cops.
The pretext for the first round of arrests was an altercation at this year’s May Day demonstration organized by Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). The Montreal cops routinely stage provocations against May Day protesters; this year they tried to arrest a photographer associated with Partisan, the PCR’s newspaper. As the PCR reports, “dozens of protesters responded by confronting the police, telling them to release the activist.” The cops backed off. Now police have thrown numerous serious charges against demonstrators including “assault with a weapon” and “assaulting a police officer.”
Ominously, it appears that the cops are also trying to implicate PCR supporters in an incident that occurred in Trois-Rivières a year ago in which the doors of a Canadian Forces recruitment centre were shattered by an explosive device. The PCR notes that the day after the June 29 arrests the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) installed itself in Trois-Rivières, flashing photos of the four arrested leftists. INSET, a joint “anti-terror” agency of the RCMP, CSIS, Canadian Border Services and provincial and municipal police forces in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, has harassed numerous Quebec activists, including PCR supporters.
The Montreal crackdown is part of a broader ruling-class offensive against leftists which includes the mass arrests and brutalization of G20 protesters in Toronto in 2010. Many anti-G20 activists and organizers still face trumped-up charges. This is all aimed at intimidating those who oppose the violence, poverty and war that are endemic to the system of capitalist exploitation. This system, in which a tiny minority exploits the labour of the many, cannot be maintained except by force, and that is the core purpose of the capitalist state, with its repressive laws and its cops, courts and jails.
We have many political differences with the Maoist PCR and with the political views of the ASSÉ student leaders. But in the face of this state repression, our watchword is: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” It is in the interest of the entire labour movement to defend these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of such political repression, supplemented by the bogus “war on terror,” is the multiracial working class and its struggles. The working class alone has the potential social power and material interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Drop all charges against the arrested leftists!
From The Pages Of "Spartacist Canada"-Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Spartacist Canada No. 170
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)