***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night-When “Stewball” Stu Ruled The Highways

Click on to the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Danny and The Juniors performing Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay to set the mood for this sketch.

The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll; The Follow-Up Hits, various artists, Ace Records, 1991

Scene: Brought to mind by the be-bop cover photograph of a “boss” two-toned 1950s Oldsmobile sitting in front of a car dealership just waiting to be driven off in the “golden age of the automobile” night.

“Stewball” Stu loved cars, loved 1950s classic “boss” cars, period. And on the very top of that heap was his cherry red ’57 Chevy. The flamed-out king hell dragon of the Mainiac highways, especially those back roads around his, our, hometown, Olde Saco, close by the sea. Not for him the new stuff, the new “boss” Mustang, Mustang Sally ride I am crazy for, or would be crazy for if, (1) I was older than my current no-driver, no legal driver fifteen, and (2) I had any kind of dough except the few bucks I grab doing this and that, mainly that.

And how do I know about Stewball’s preferences, prejudices if you want to put it that way? Well I, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, have been riding “shot-gun” to Stewball’s driver for the past several months, ever since I proved my metal, my Stu-worthy metal, when I “scrammed” a while back when Stu moved in on me and a hot date I had with a local Lolita and three was a crowd.

Ya, Stu and me are tight, tight as a nineteen year guy who is the king of the roads around here can be with a fifteen year old guy with no dough, no drivers’ license, no sister for him to drool over, and zero, maybe minus zero, mechanical skills to back him up. So you see me flaking out on that Lolita thing meant a lot to Stewball, although he is not a guy that you can figure something on, not easy figuring anyhow. [Hey, by the way, by the very big way, that Stewball moniker is strictly between you and me. Some of the guys that hung around his garage (really his bent out of shape trailer home rigged up with all kinds of automobile-fixing stuff all over the place) started to call him Stewball among ourselves after we observed, observed for the sixty-fifth time, Stu loaded before noon on some rotgut Southern Comfort that he swore kept him sober, unlike whiskey. Like I say don’t spread that around because Stu in one tough hombre. I once saw him chain-whip a guy just for kind of eyeing a Lolita (not the one I butted out on) that was sitting next to him in that cherry red Chevy at Jimmy Joe’s Diner, the one down on Route One, not the one over on Atlantic Avenue. Enough said, okay.]

Let me tell you about one time a few months back when Stu proved, for the umpteenth time (although my first time, first really seeing him in action glory time), why no one can come close to him as king of these roads around herr, and maybe any. It was a Friday night, an October Friday night, just starting to get to be defroster or car heater time so it had to be then. Stu, who lives over on Tobacco Road (I won’t tell you his real address because, like he says, what people don’t know is just fine with him and the girls all know where he is anyway. Ya, that’s a real Stu-ism) picked me up at my house on Albamarle Street (got that girls, Albamarle) like he always does, sometime between seven and eight, also as usual.

We then make the loop. First down Atlantic passed the Colonial Donut Shoppe (they serve other stuff there too) to see if there was a stray clover (A Stu-ism for a girl, origin unknown) or two looking to erase the gloomy, lonely night coming on. (I hoped two, two girls that is, because while I am glad, glad as hell, that I did right by Stu with that "hot" Lolita (and she was hot, maybe too hot for me then, not now) I don’t want to make a habit of it, being Stu’s “shot-gun,” or not. No dice. So off to Lanny’s Bowl-World over on Sea Street. Guess it is kind of early because no dice there either. Well, it’s off to “headquarters,” Jimmy Joe’s Diner on Main Street (really Route One but everybody local calls it Main).

Now Jimmy Joe’s has been Stu’s headquarters for so long that he has a “reserved” spot there. Yes, right in front just to the left on the entrance so that he can “scope” (Stu-ism) the scene (read: girls, Josh-ism). Jimmy Joe, the owner, felt that Stu was so good for business, Friday night hot teenage girls crowding the place looking for fast-driving guys and fast, or slow, driving guys, ready to, well you know I don’t have to draw you a diagram, business so he had no problem with the arrangement. Except this Friday night, this October Friday night, Stu’s reserved spot is occupied, occupied by a two-toned, low-riding 1956 Oldsmobile that even I can see had been worked on, worked hard on to create maximum horse-power in the minimum time. And inside that Oldsmobile sat one Duke McKay, a guy some of us had heard of, from down in Kittery near the New Hampshire border. So maybe Duke, not knowing the local rules, parked in that spot by accident. Ya that seems like the right answer.

No way though. Why? Because sitting right next old Duke, actually almost on top of him is that Lolita that I made way for to help Stu. Said Lolita (not her real name because she was, and is, as I write, uh, not “of age” so Lolita is a good enough moniker) looking very fine, very fine indeed, as Stu goes over to the Oldsmobile to give Duke the what for. I can almost hear the chains coming out.

But Stu must have had some kind of jinx on him, or Lolita put one on him, because all he did was make Duke a proposition. Beat Stu in a “chicken run” and the parking spot, Lolita, and the unofficial king of the road title were his. Lose, and he was gone (without chain-whipping I hoped) from Olde Saco, permanently, minus Lolita. Now I can see where this Lolita is worth getting a little steamed up about. But take it from me Stu, until just this minute, was strictly a love them or leave them guy (leave them to me, please). Duke, with eight million pounds of bravado, answered quickly like any true road-warrior does when challenged and just uttered, “On.” And we are off, although not before Lolita gives Stu some madness femme fatale look. A look, a pout really, which you couldn’t tell if she was in Stu’s corner or wanted to see him in hell. Girls, damn.

A chicken race, for the squares, is nothing but a race between two cars (usually two), two fast teenager-driven cars, done late at night or early in the morning out on some desolate road, sometimes straight, sometimes not. The idea is to get a fast start and keep the accelerator on the floor as long as possible before some flame-out. For Olde Saco runs they use the beach down at the Squaw Rock end since it is long, flat, and wide even at high tide, and the loser either winds up in the dunes or the ocean, usually the latter, ruining a perfectly good car but that is the way it is. Most importantly it is out of sight of the cops until too late.

So about two in the morning one could see a ’57 cherry red Chevy lining up, with me as a “second,” against a ’56 Oldsmobile, with Lolita as Duke’s “second.” Jimmy Joe’s son, Billy, acted as starter as usual. And they are off. Duke got an extremely fast start and was maybe thirty yards ahead of us and it looked like we done for when Stu opened up from somewhere and flat out “smoked” the side of Duke Olds sending his vehicle off into the ocean, soon to sputter in the roaring waves, and oblivion. Stu stopped the Chevy, backed up the several hundred yards to the vicinity of the distressed Oldsmobile, opened up the passenger side door and escorted Lolita, as nice as you please, to his king hell Chevy. And she was smiling, smiling very, well let’s put it this way, Stu’s got a big treat coming. And Josh? Well, Stu yells over “Hey, Josh, hope you find a ride home tonight.” But do you see what I mean about Stewball Stu being the king of the roads around here. What a guy.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-No Academic Posts For War Criminals!: Bloody Bundy Must Go! ("Young Spartacus," October 1979)

Markin comment on this series:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.

This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
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From the pages of Young Spartacus, October, 1979:

No Academic Posts For War Criminals!: Bloody Bundy Must Go! ("Young Spartacus," October 1979)

NEW YORK—"No academic posts for mass murderers! McGeorge Bundy, chief strategic advisor on Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese. Demonstrate, today, 12 noon, Bobst Library. Drive war criminal Bundy off campus!" On the morning of October 2 the Spartacus Youth League's sound-truck drove through the New York University campus to build for a militant protest against the appointment of McGeorge Bundy to a post in the history department. NYU students and several campus workers swelled the ranks of the SYL's contingent in a 50-strong picket line demonstration.

The demonstrators chanted "Bloody Bundy -you can't hide, we charge you with -genocide!" and "Bundy, Eichmann, Pinochet, the working class will not forget!" And nationally-known NYU professor Bertell Oilman and supporters of the Spartacist League/ SYL spoke at a spirited rally. The demonstration drew a large crowd of observers which included 15 Moonies, anti-communist fanatics who repeatedly sought to provoke a physical fight. But the disciplined protesters easily prevented any disruption.

The anti-Bundy protest created a great deal of controversy on the NYU campus, including front-page coverage in the NYU student paper. A professor commented that "having a demonstration at NYU was itself a revolution," on a campus which has not seen much political activity in the last five years. Unaccustomed to militant protests, some students fully expected the SYL to drag Bundy out of his offices and string him up from Washington Square Arch. But such justice for Bundy and others of his ilk rightfully belongs to the families of his victims. Ship Bundy to Hanoi for trial!

McGeorge Bundy once told a New York Times reporter, "I'm not sure I engage in a great deal of introspection" (22 May). And no wonder! As an SYL leaflet stated,

"Bundy was the No. 1 author of U.S. imperialism's strategy of air and naval' against the North—carpet bombing, napalming villages, the mining of harbors and the bombing of dikes...Vietnam was the U.S.' dirtiest war and Bundy's hands are blood red from the slaughter of Vietnamese men, women and children."

After the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic Bundy demanded that the Communists "be incarcerated in concentration camps" (Sidney Lens, The Nation, 2 May 1966)! Following a stint as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy is today again serving U.S. imperialism as an advisor to Carter on the "Soviet/Cuban military threat." This is the imperialist mastermind the NYU administration wants to clothe in academic respectability. The SYL says: drive this war criminal off campus!

Speaking in solidarity with the SYL's action, Bertell Oilman agreed that Bundy was certainly a war criminal, and noted that by NYU's criteria the shah of Iran would be a good candidate for a teaching post. Ollman, who was denied an academic post at the University of Maryland because of his left-wing political views, focused much of his case against Bundy's appointment on this grounds that this former Harvard deal lacked "scholarly" credentials. The SYL, however, couldn't care less about the number of degrees Bundy has or what his academic standing is. For us the question is his responsibility for the crimes of U.S. imperialism. As Michael Weinstein, president of the SYL's NYU chapter, put it: "Bundy is not an academic apologist, he is a shameless executor of mass murder— Bundy must be driven away— not for his views but for his deeds."

This point went right over the head of the editors of the NYU student paper the Washington Square News. They went into a tizzy, charging that the SYL is against academic freedom. "Bundy is a man who will bring both prestige and valuable knowledge to the university, they wrote. The editors may think it's fine for the Bundys of the world to bid their time at the universities until the are called on again to plan the next imperialist slaughter, but their past and future victims have a rather differert view. As one student wrote:

"It ought to delight the masterminds of the German War Machine, who can finally leave South America and bring valuable knowledge of history to Universities all over the nation... wonder if Bundy and his crowd would be as forgiving and forgetting of draft dodgers and AWOLs, whose crime was NOT wanting to kill people."

Kissinger, Friedman... Now Bundy

Bundy is not the only imperialist mass murderer who has sought to carve out "respectable" academic niche. The SYL sprang into action in 1977 when Nixon' right-hand man Henry Kissinger was offered a post at Columbia University John Alcorn, SYLer at Columbia recalled that effort in his speech to the NYU demonstrators: "We had the same situation Kissinger, another architect—just like Bundy—of mass murder
in Indochina, was offered an honorary professorship. The Spartacus Youth
League initiated a united-front campaign to prevent this scum from getting
an academic post. The SYL led a campaign, successfully, to keep Kissinger off campus at Columbia. It can be done!"

University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman is another "respectable academic" who has been the focus of SYL protests. Friedman thought he could hush-hush his active collaboration with the savage, U.S.-backed military regime of Pinochet in Chile as he continued to teach economics. As an advisor to the junta Friedman engineered a "shock treatment" for the Chilean economy which brought starvation and massive hardships to thousands of workers and peasants. The SYL broke the diplomatic silence over Friedman's murderous role with a 1975 campaign which received nationwide publicity.

In the past few years the SYL has also demonstrated against the likes of Nguyen Cao Ky, former vice president of South Vietnam and an open admirer of Hitler, in Cleveland in 1975; against Vietnam war criminal Sam "Mad Dog" Huntington at Harvard in 1978 and most recently against Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in Boston. The SYL has also been active in struggles to oust the CIA and ROTC from the campuses, and in 1977 the SYL led a successful mobilization to drive a bunch of Nazis off the San Francisco State campus and then beat back an administration witchhunt.

Loony Moonies: The South Korea Connection
Coming on the heels of Carter': nationally televised speech on Soviet troops in Cuba, the SYL demonstration included signs demanding "Carter/ Bundy: Hands Off Cuba!" and "Sink SALT! Defend Cuba and the USSR!" One of the most popular chants was "Hey, hey, what do you say, U.S. out of Guantanamo Bay!" As a speaker explained at the rally: "The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist organization. The Stalinists who rule in Russia and Vietnam are our bitter enemies. We stand for political revolution in those countries to overthrow the ruling bureaucracies. But we defend those countries 100 percent against U.S. imperialism!"
The 15 provocateurs from Sun Myung Moon's anti-communist Unification Church went nuts at the SYL's defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states. But their howls of "SYL-KGB" and "Communists off campus" were drowned out by the demonstrators who chanted "Crazy Moonies, they may pray, but they're running dogs for the CIA!" and "Down with the Moonies! For a united socialist Korea!" Having come originally to seek to provoke a "rumble," the Moonies decided that discretion was the better part of valor when they were confronted by a number of trade

Numerous investigations have documented the Moonies' sinister connections to the South Korean CIA; lately, a detailed expose by Francine du Plessix Grey appeared in the New York Review of Books. The purpose of Moonie outfits is to foment anti-communism in the U.S. and to build public support for an ever more aggressive anti-communist U.S. foreign policy. To this end. Moon and his cohorts have established a "Freedom Leadership Foundation," which conducts right-wing propaganda activities in Washington; a "Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation," which serves as a public-relations outlet for the brutally repressive dictatorship of South Korea's Pak Chung Hi; an "International Federation for Victory Over Communism," which coordinates the Moonies' pro-imperialist activities on a world scale and last but not least the "Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles," which serves as the campus home for people like those who tried to mix it up at the Bundy demonstration.

Moon himself is a multimillionaire industrialist with interests in heavy machinery plants, titanium, marble, shotguns and ginseng tea. Wild-eyed Moonies can be seen on the streets of New York City and at local airports pushing their slick daily newspaper.

The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.

Markin comment:

Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!

From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!

U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.


U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.


Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!

The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend Our Unions!-Defend The Oakland Commune!

Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (Octoer 1978)

Markin comment on this series:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.

This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
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From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (October 1978)

BOSTON, September 27—Samuel P. Huntington, one of the principal strategists and apologists for the vicious air war which devastated the countryside of Vietnam, is returning to Harvard this semester. After two years of service with Jimmy Carter's "human rights" crusade, Huntington is returning to wrap himself in the robes of respectable academia. to lecture twice a week on governmental theory. But this facade must not obscure the ugly reality. Samuel Huntington is complicit in mass murder he is a war criminal.

The U.S. air war, against Indochina ranks as one of this century’s most horrible atrocities. Millions of tons of explosives were rained upon the villages in Vietnam in- order to terrorize into submission a people who had been fighting imperialism and colonialism for decades. With calculated savagery, the U.S. unleashed weapons designed solely for their ability to maim, as carcinogenic, fetus-deforming chemical defoliants blanketed half of Vietnam's arable land. Prominent among the academic lackies who braintrusted these genocidal policies was Sam Huntington.

Unfortunately for this war criminal, his Harvard homecoming was not as uneventful as he might have liked. On September 26, a demonstration was staged outside Huntington's class by an ad hoc committee initiated by the Spartacus Youth League to protest his return to academia. While the demonstration was small, having been boycotted by the Harvard divestment "left," the campaign against Huntington certainly had its impact. The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial by two supporters of the SYL documenting Huntington's crimes. And the serenity of the morning air in Harvard Yard was certainly shattered by the loud chants of the demonstrators charging Huntington with complicity in mass murder.

Huntington's "Credentials"

In the late I960's, Huntington headed the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the South East Asia Development Advisory Group, a committee which played an important role in the develop-ment of State Department policy. While much of the work of this committee was cloaked in secrecy, there is strong evidence of its ominous nature. At the May 1969 meeting, for example, Huntington presented a paper entitled "Getting Ready for Political Competition in Vietnam." In this document he advocated electoral manipulation, control of the media and "inducements and coercions."

Huntington's preferred strategy for "political competition" was much more direct. In the July 1968 issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote:

"If the 'direct application of mechanical und conventional power' takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary warfare no longer operate... "In an absent-minded way the United States may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation.' The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly bring the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power."

The mere authorship of these sentences indicts Huntington as a cold-blooded vulture. For what Huntington advocated with such antiseptic pedantry was nothing less than the elimination of the rural base of the National Liberation Front by reducing the Vietnamese countryside to corpses, embers and rubble. What Huntington calls "urbanization and modernization" had, in reality, the effect of driving terrified millions into the cities, swelling Saigon's population tenfold and creating a class of homeless and urban poor by pounding the villages with napalm and fragmentation bombs. "Urbanization and modernization" meant the destruction of the fabric of Vietnamese life— begging, prostitution, starvation and disease became the norms of existence.

The sickening apologies in bourgeois journals were only the starting point of Huntington's role in this effort. He did not merely comment on U.S. policy; he helped formulate it. Not only did he serve as chairman of the Council on Vietnam of the South' East Asia Development Advisory Group, but he acted as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and the Institute for Defense Analysis. Huntington is clearly not just another right-wing academic who supported the war. He is an important member of the imperialist brain trust and a war criminal. The SYL opposes Huntington’s appointment not primarily because of his ideas, but for the unspeakable atrocities for which he bears responsibility.

The "Mad Dog" of "Human Rights"

For the past two years, Huntington has been director of national security planning in the Carter administration, essentially functioning as Zbigniew Brzezinski's chief assistant. The key role of this assistant in the White House dramatically exposes the lie contained in Carter's "human rights" campaign. For two years, the Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League have maintained that the Carter crusade is but an attempt to refurbish the moral authority of U.S. imperialism in order to build popular support for a renewed aggressive foreign policy. Both in an immediate and ultimate sense the central targets of this effort are those countries in which capitalism has been overthrown, most importantly the Soviet Union. This campaign represents an ominous threat to the world's working masses. For U.S. imperialism, the major prop of virtually every reactionary tyrant on the face of the earth, will bring "human rights" to the world the way LB.I and Nixon brought "democracy" to Vietnam.

Huntingdon's role in the Carter administration is testimony to the sinister motives at the base of the "human rights" campaign. For in Huntington we see the genocidal maniac turned "human rights" advocate. Hunt-ingot is so strident in his anti-communism that within the administration he was reportedly known as "Mad Dog." It was Huntington who drafted the main Carter strategic assessment last year. Presidential Review Memoran¬dum-10, which heralded the passing of "detente" and mandated a new generation of weapons of destruction.

Huntington's return to the Harvard faculty exposes the hypocrisy behind the
ruckus raised by university president Derek Bok concerning covert CIA recruitment on campus last spring. The administration's insistence that all CIA recruiters on campus reveal themselves to university officials is but a feeble attempt to cover Harvard's obscene complicity with the intelligence agencies with a veil of virginal innocence. Harvard's hypocrisy is so monumental as to be laughable: this is the university that provides the brains that plan CIA "dirty tricks" from alumnus John F. Kennedy to alumnus and professor Henry Kissinger. Harvard graduates, officials and faculty members have masterminded U.S. imperialism's military engagements from the Bay of Pigs to the terror bombings in Vietnam. Bok's only apparent request is that imperialism's hit men inform him of their activities on campus.

Protest Huntington!

A protest directed against the return of a faculty member is almost certain to raise the issue of academic freedom. But .academic freedom is not the point. We do not single out Huntington for his thoughts, but rather for his deeds. While it is certainly true that such universities as Harvard have no shortage of intellectual mercenaries, the Huntingtons and Kissingers are special cases. Hunting-ton's central role in the murder and oppression of millions should provoke outrage and protest at Harvard.

It is significant that the sizable divestment movement on campus refused to participate in the SYL-initiated campaign. More concerned with salving their consciences than actively opposing the representatives and activities of imperialism, these divestment radicals prefer to spend their energies pleading with the Harvard Corporation to develop a more moral investment policy. Those in the divestment movement who tail the "human rights" crusade may have trouble discerning whether this "Mad Dog" cold-warrior is friend or foe.

Many of today's students were quite young during the ravaging of Vietnam and may not even recall the horrible destruction and the nightly body counts that passed across the television screen on the evening news. For them, the liberal assumptions inherent in the demands of the divestment movement are not so naturally repugnant as they might have been to the late 1960's antiwar activist. Campaigns like that initiated by the SYL against Huntington will help to bring about a renewed awareness of imperialism's crimes and the complicity of the bourgeois universities to a new generation of students. It is the task of a communist youth organization to bring the understanding to the campuses that the main reactionary power in the world is the American bourgeoisie. And one way of doing that is to expose the professors turned executors of imperialist reaction and to demand that they not be allowed to peacefully don the robes of academic respectability.

Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night- Ya, Crime Doesn’t Pay-So What- James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the early film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

DVD Review

The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, MGM, 1946

Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he goes to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Yes, our boy, our never let your feet stand still for a minute on the road boy Frank (played by John Garfield) in the 1940s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s classic masterpiece crime noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, had it bad, bad as a man could have it. Bad a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora (played by a very, very blonde Lana Turner) walked through the Twin Oaks café door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she is nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for Frank to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy Frank. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.

See not only is Ms. Cora a Ms. but a real live 1940s Mrs. married to Nick, the owner of Twin Oaks. And Nick is nothing but an old guy, an old penny-pinching guy with small dreams getting smaller, whom Cora married on the rebound from, well, from something, something bad from the look of Nick. Yes, Nick is definitely nothing but a third party “has been” once the chemistry starts between Frank and Cora, starts to really get going as will often happen once you take those midnight swims in the white-flecked, our homeland the sea, pacific, Pacific Ocean just above slumming Los Angeles before the criss-cross roads took away many of the scenes. If Nick was smart he would watch his back very carefully because I smell murder in the air, hellish highway murder, once our sweet go-getter Cora coos to Frank that it is, and I quote, “the only way.” The only way to that white picket fence heaven old Nick is too cheap to buy her.

Needless to say, if you have read any of James M. Cain’s crime novels or short stories, there have to be a few twists and turns in the plot before the inevitable, and I mean inevitable in its fullest sense, road to perdition narrows and there is no escape from the grim fate that those who play with fate usually have to suffer. Here the inflamed lovers botch the first attempted murder of Nick but arouse so much suspicion from a very conveniently located neighboring District Attorney that they will not just get to go about their merry ways.

Moreover, have you been paying attention? Cora’s got her hooks in Frank so bad that you know there will be another attempt. And there was, and it was “successful.” And they got away with it after some nifty legal maneuvering that would do any modern defense attorney proud. Except you know as well as I do, and if you have ever read any previous crime noir review of mine, you damn well know that it can’t just be left like that. Crime, brothers and sisters, does not pay even for the mere legally not guilty. And that is where Frank’s smile, or half-smile, comes in. Because in the end he faces the chair not for Nick’s death, but for her’s. And all he cared about by then was whether she would in death forgive him. Ya, our boy Frank had it bad, real bad and that is what makes this a classic crime noir, no question. But Frank don’t feel bad there are about three billion guys who have gone through those same hoops for a dame, including this writer, although I personally tend to sultry brunettes not blondes.

The Latest From The "Partisan Defense Committee" Website- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.

Markin comment:

Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!

The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners

Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.

Markin comment:

Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners

The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the lates information in his case.

Markin comment:

Free Bradley Manning! Free all class-war prisoners!

From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions!- Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.

Markin comment:

We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!

U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.


U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!

The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend Our Unions!-Defend The Oakland Commune!

Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!

From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-West Coast Ports Shut Down - A Big Step Forward for Occupy and Labor

Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (ICL) website.

West Coast Ports Shut Down - A Big Step Forward for Occupy and Labor

Dec 17, 2011

By Ty Moore and Kerry Finnan and Ramy Khalil

Port terminals up and down the west coast were successfully shut down on December 12 – a major victory for both the Occupy Wall Street and labor movements.

The December 12 port shutdowns were organized to strike back against systematic police violence when police repressed and evicted occupations in city after city across the country, violating citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly. The port shutdowns were also organized to show solidarity with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), who is waging an historic struggle against multinational grain exporter EGT, and also highly exploited port truck drivers in Long Beach, California and elsewhere who are fighting to win a union contract.

The west coast port blockade marked an extremely significant step forward for the Occupy movement. This coordinated disruption of international commerce significantly expanded upon the successful shutdown of the Port of Oakland six weeks before on November 2. By directly disrupting international trade and taking up common causes with the labor movement, the Occupy movement escalated its tactics from its initial approach of symbolic occupations of central squares to actively shutting corporations down and cutting into their profits.


The port actions overcame the opposition of a vast array of opponents—city politicians, the police, the corporate media, full page newspaper ads (which the Port of Oakland spent tens of thousands of dollars on) and even the ILWU’s national leaders. The ILWU officials, resting on the most conservative traditions within the labor movement, discouraged the action, claiming that the Occupy movement called it without consulting the ILWU beforehand.

Although Occupy organizers definitely should have made clear proposals for collaboration with ILWU leaders earlier, the Occupy movement and rank-and-file workers were correct to go forward with the action, which succeeded in substantially disrupting business at several ports, in spite of the determined opposition of the richest 1%.

This daring, successful action demonstrated a remarkable confidence and power on the part of the Occupy movement. The action was centered around Occupy Oakland, which has stepped into a national leadership role, providing a more working-class, racially diverse, and militant face for the Occupy movement. The ports shutdown also demonstrated the growth of anti-capitalist and even socialist politics in the U.S. Boots Riley, for example, the lead singer of the socialist hip-hop group The Coup, featured prominently in press conferences and interviews in the run-up to December 12.

Highlights

Radical, socialist ideas and labor strikes, often dismissed as utopian and ineffective, captured the imagination of thousands of workers and young people who succeeded in shutting down ports in Oakland, Portland, and Longview. Ports were also partially or temporarily shut down in LA, Long Beach, Hueneme, San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C.

Solidarity blockades took place in Bellingham, Washington and at Wal-Mart distribution centers in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque. Occupy Wall Street protesters stormed financial institutions in New York City. Solidarity protests also took place in Coos Bay, Tacoma, Anchorage, Houston, Hawaii, Canada—and even Japan!

Many rank-and-file longshore workers helped organize and participate in the action which was called in solidarity with the ILWU in Longview, a small port town in southwest Washington which is waging one of the most militant labor struggles in years. The ILWU has operated the Longview port since 1927, and now the multinational grain exporter EGT is attempting to break its legal contract with the powerful union by contracting the work out to a weaker, more conservative union, Operating Engineers Local 701, which is attempting to scab on the ILWU. ILWU members in Longview, Seattle, and Tacoma were arrested and pepper sprayed in the fall for defiant acts of civil disobedience—including unauthorized wildcat strikes, blocking trains, dumping grain on train tracks, and damaging grain terminals and trains.

Not only longshore workers participate in the December 12 ports shutdown but also many port truckers refused to load or unload trucks. In fact, port truckers and immigrant rights groups in Los Angeles were the ones who originally called for shutting down ports to protest SSA Marine, a shipping company partially owned by Goldman Sachs, for increasingly using independent contractors in their trucking operations to keep unions out. Many of these workers are extremely exploited immigrants, as they describe in their inspiring letter supporting shutting down the ports. Immigrant truckers had successfully shut the Port of Los Angeles down once before on May Day in 2006, the enormous national strike of immigrant workers, "The Day without an Immigrant.”

The largest protests on December 12 were in Oakland where 500 protesters set up a picket line at the port as early as 5:30 a.m. By 10 a.m. the ILWU asked a port arbitrator to determine whether the community picket represented a safety hazard. The union later sent home 150 of its 200 members, which generated enthusiastic celebrations among picketers. Marches later in the day attracted as many as 4,000 people that succeeded in shutting down the ports’ second shift.

In Seattle, a protest of 500 people grew to over 1,000 who successfully blockaded Terminals 5 and 18, chanting “Shut down the west coast! Hit’em where it hurts most!” Police responded by lobbing concussion grenades, firing pepper spray and tear gas, arresting peaceful protesters, and hitting at least one peaceful protester.

In Bellingham, Washington over 80 protesters blocked BNSF train tracks to show solidarity with west coast port blockade and to protest the proposed construction of North America’s largest coal export terminal just north of Bellingham. Twelve protesters were arrested, including Jordan Quinn from Socialist Alternative. Five protesters locked their necks together with bike locks in order to obstruct trains for a longer time before police finally succeeded in cutting the locks off.


Protesters were released from jail the next morning, but they will face charges of trespassing and obstructing an officer at a preliminary trial on February 13. Occupy activists are calling on the community to help organize a protest movement and pack the courthouse on February 13 to demand that both charges be dropped.

Lessons

The December 12 port blockades helped translate slogans like "we are the 99%," which point generally toward the reality of class divisions in society, into a clearer sharper expression of class conflict. The ports shutdown shined a light on the source of the ruling class’s power—their ownership and control of corporations and capital. It also demonstrated the sources of the working class’s power—our ability to refuse to work, our numbers, our level of organization, our fighting spirit, and our ideas. In this sense, it’s very positive that the Occupy movement responded to the police repression by moving toward strike action and building links with the powerful unions and the working class.


The ILWU is among the most militant and democratic unions in the U.S. with a long and proud tradition of honoring community picket lines and shutting down the ports in support of left-wing political movements. The ILWU recently shut ports down in support of the Occupy movement on November 2, the anti-war and immigrant rights movements on May 1, 2008, the anti-WTO protests in 1999, the anti-Apartheid movement in 1977 and 1984, and many other times.


On December 6, 2011, however, the ILWU International Officers issued a public statement supporting the general goals of the Occupy movement but opposing the west coast port blockade. The corporate-owned media seized on this statement and repeated the ILWU leaders’ opposition to the action repeatedly the following week.


The ILWU leaders’ statement attempted to portray the action as organized by people outside the ILWU. In reality, a number of ILWU activists, as well as Teamster activists and the Oakland Education Association (teachers' union), helped organize and support the action in Oakland and in other areas. See, for example, the December 9 press conference, particularly the ILWU member, the third official speaker.


In reality, the ILWU leaders’ opposition to shutting down the ports had little to do with the Occupy movement’s lack of communication and much more to do with the ILWU leaders’ pro-capitalist conservative politics. The ILWU International Officers may feel threatened by the radical unauthorized wildcat strikes and militant civil disobedience that took place against EGT as well as by rank-and-file members who have been emboldened by the Occupy movement and are now pressing moderate union leaders to fight harder.


For example, in Longview, where ILWU local 21 has set a heroic example of how to wage a labor battle, the local President Dan Coffman publicly supported the ports shutdown, despite his ILWU superiors opposing the action. In a live telephone call to the Occupy Oakland port rally, he declared, "You are an inspiration to our members… you are the labor movement."


The emergence of these sorts of militant actions shows why it is so crucial that the Occupy movement builds closer ties with rank-and-file workers, union opposition groups, and union leaders who are prepared to wage militant struggles.


Occupy activists were hasty to call this action without first contacting more of the elected ILWU leaders. If occupiers had approached union officials early on about setting up a community picket and publicly appealed for ILWU support, this would have undermined the conservative union leaders’ attempts to portray occupiers as failing to communicate.


Unions have been weakened significantly since the 1980s, but they nonetheless remain the largest, most powerful working-class organizations we have to challenge the 1%. Unions have the ability to organize strikes, shut the economy down, get political candidates elected to office, and challenge the ruling class’s control over society. So it’s vital that occupiers as well as rank-and-file union activists learn how to effectively overcome the resistance of conservative union leaders.


In this case, not only should occupiers have communicated with the unions’ established representatives to avoid being painted as having failed to communicate, but it would have helped if rank-and-file workers developed their own organized group inside the union that promoted involvement in actions like the ports shut down. A stronger organized mobilization by the rank-and-file workers would have placed even greater pressure on ILWU leaders from within the union itself to adopt a friendlier stance toward the action or else risk having their authority undermined by an active union opposition.

Next Steps

The successful shutting down of ports on December 12 has provided a boost to the confidence and influence of rank-and-file activists within the ILWU, other unions, and the left within the Occupy movement. The emerging alliance between Occupy and rank-and-file labor activists has set a positive precedent for future community-labor struggles and strikes. The controversy around December 12 exposed the conservative tendencies among the current labor leaders, showing the need for union members to elect class-struggle orientated union leaders who will return to the fighting socialist traditions which made organized labor a mighty force in U.S. society.


Very soon, there may be another major battle for the ILWU. An EGT ship is expected to arrive in Longview, WA to ship grain to Asia any week now, and it will probably be escorted by the Coast Guard and police. When that ship arrives, if EGT tries to use non-ILWU labor, ILWU Local 21 will call on all unions to mobilize everyone they can to Longview to fight back. The Occupy movement, unions, and ordinary people everywhere must begin preparing now to mobilize a massive show of solidarity for this likely battle.

In preparation, it would send a powerful message to EGT and the ruling class if the Occupy movement, ILWU, Teamsters, and other allies started working together now to prepare to shut down the west coast ports once again. This would need to be organized more strategically and tactfully this time by discussing with labor leaders beforehand, organizing rank-and-file workplace and community mobilization committees, and appealing to union members to discuss and vote for the action.


December 12 was certainly a big step forward for both the Occupy and labor movements. But a better organized shut down of west coast ports — particularly when the EGT ship arrives to load grain bound for Asia — would send the capitalist elite an even stronger message about workers’ power.

*******
“This System Has Got to Die, Hella Hella Occupy!”
Report from Oakland
By Ty Moore

On December 12, by 5:30 a.m., a 500-strong rally set out to picket the three main entrances to the Port of Oakland. Despite lines of cops in riot gear and helicopters flying overhead, all three main entrances to the port were effectively picketed in lively, confident demonstrations. One of the most popular chants was "This system has got to die! Hella, hella, occupy!"


We were mostly young people, but longshore workers and truckers joined in, honked horns, and raised fists in support. Lines of backed-up trucks sat idle, and eventually the riot police gave up and left the scene, evoking cheers. Shortly after, it was announced that the longshore workers’ shift had been officially canceled, evoking more cheers.


The afternoon rally in downtown Oakland was much larger. Around 2,000 heard 1960s civil rights leader Angela Davis speak, as well as Scott Olsen, the Iraq veteran recovering from Oakland Police shooting him in the head with a tear gas canister at an October Occupy protest.


Another march of at least 2,000 from West Oakland BART station arrived at the port shortly later. The march was transformed into a victory rally when word arrived that the evening shift on the port had also been canceled! Multiple sound trucks blasted music. Activists delivered radical speeches. Messages of labor solidarity and calls for multiracial unity were mixed with condemnations of capitalism and calls for changing the system and revolution. Protest signs mass produced by Occupy Oakland expressed clear statements of labor solidarity.


There was clearly a very radical, self-confident mood. The crowd was mostly youthful and very multiracial. People knew we were at the forefront of the national Occupy movement, creating a more militant tone with a more politically conscious leadership.

********
Report and Interview from Pitched Battles at the Port of Seattle
By Kerry Finnan

In Seattle, roughly 500 people—mostly Occupy supporters—departed from Westlake Center at 1 p.m. for the Port of Seattle, hoping to shut down Goldman Sachs owned Terminal 18. By the time the march arrived for the 3 p.m. rally/blockade, our numbers had grown to 1,000-strong.


The marchers were largely well received by truck drivers at the port, many of whom honked in solidarity and took Socialist Alternative’s leaflet calling for rank-and-file unionists to support the blockade and pressure their leadership to back future actions against the 1%. The mood was electric. Many had feared negative media coverage and condemnations from the ILWU’s conservative leadership would result in a march of only a few hundred. These concerns proved unfounded as boisterous chants rang out including a crowd favorite “Shut down the west coast! Hit’em where it hurts most!”


Protesters made good on this threat shortly after significant numbers reached the entrance to Terminal 18 and barricaded two lanes of the road with all manner of debris. A standoff with the police ensued. After a time, good news reached the protesters that the ILWU had called off the evening shift scheduled to work the terminal. About half the contingent marched off in triumph toward Terminal 5—the only other terminal scheduled for work that day—in hopes of shutting it down as well.


With the numbers back at Terminal 18 reduced to half their previous size, police began preparing to break the barricade. Officers moved in on horseback, driving the protestors back. They then formed a line while holding their bicycles at chest level and moved forward, viciously jabbing those who stood in the way. It wasn’t long before pepper spray, tear gas and flash-bang grenades were unleashed on the crowd, despite protesters’ overwhelmingly peaceful behavior. One officer even lunged on top of a fallen protestor and punched the person three to four times before returning to his position on the line of bicycles.


When the street was cleared at last, many peaceful protesters who had come to speak out against the devastating economic practices of the 1% retreated, bruised and breathless due to the actions of the police whose job ostensibly is to serve and protect the 99%. This blatant disregard for public safety in the act of protecting the private property of the 1% dissolved illusions regarding which class in society the police really serve.


During those minutes of chaos, Becky Zarkh, a member of Socialist Alternative’s Olympia branch, was arrested and later charged with assaulting an officer and obstruction. Below she answers several questions about her experiences:

Why did you feel it was important to participate in the west coast port blockade?

Becky: I felt it was important to encourage solidarity among all workers in contrast to the divisive message being put forward by the ILWU’s senior leadership.

Can you describe the series of events that led to your arrest?


Becky: I was directing traffic with another Socialist Alternative activist allowing port workers to leave the area after their shifts were over. Once the police began moving in to remove the barricade, I locked arms with an Occupy Seattle medic and other protestors. The mounted police were trying to move us over to the sidewalk. They accomplished this by having the horses swing their bodies into people throwing them back.


Suddenly a flash-bang grenade exploded near me which dispersed the crowd. I felt someone grab me by my hair and throw me to the ground. Next thing I knew, an officer handcuffed me while I lay on my stomach then jerked me upright while the rest of the police went about clearing the street of protestors.


When I asked the officer what I was being charged with, he responded that I had hit another officer, which I had not. The officer who claimed I had hit him then questioned me and forced me to take photos with him. I was then placed into the police vehicle, taken to a holding cell, and finally brought to the downtown Seattle Police station. At no point was I read my Miranda rights.


[End of Interview with Becky]


After the crowd was dispersed from Terminal 18, many headed to Terminal 5, joining forces with those trying to shut down the second point of commerce. This time the police stayed back as protestors linked arms in several rows, preventing anyone from using the terminal’s front gate.


Hours passed uneventfully until it was confirmed that the arbitrator whose job it was to decide whether ILWU workers could safely reach the work site canceled the last shift of the day. The protestors cheered jubilantly having won a complete victory—shutting down both port terminals used by the 1% to enrich themselves at the expense of the 99%. An impromptu General Assembly was called both to celebrate the day’s successes but also to discuss ways future actions could be improved.


A rank-and file ILWU member captured the spirit of the moment when he correctly pointed out that the labor and Occupy movements need to work together if either is to have any chance of breaking the 1%’s control over our economic and political structures.


Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative.org

From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Kazakhstan: We are not rioters – the government must resign-Stand In International Solidarity And Defend The Kazakhstan Workers!

Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.

Kazakhstan: We are not rioters – the government must resign

Dec 18, 2011
By CWI Reporters Russia & Kazakhstan

Below we carry the latest updates from today from CWI reporters in Russia and Kazakhstan. For all past articles about developments in Kazkahstan on Socialistworld.net then click here.

You can also see a video message from Paul Murphy MEP (CWI Ireland) to the striking oil workers posted on the Campaign Kazakhstan website here.

18/12 22:05 UPDATE: Workers being tortured!!

According to reports from the Public commission for investigating the bloody events of 16-17th December in Aktau, young workers from the “OzenMunaiGaz” company who have been arrested in Zhenaozen are being thrown into the open yard at the remand prison and are having water thrown over them. The temperature is currently MINUS 17 CELSIUS. The torturers are attempting to get the workers to admit to rioting and to give evidence against their friends. These Nazi methods must be stopped. Protest immediately to the Kazakhstan Embassy in your country and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kazakhstan at Email: mid@mid.kz and send messages of support to:

Otekeeva0103@mail.ru with copies to kazakhstansolidarity@gmail.com

Update 18/12 21:35 GMT

Thousands of police, internal ministry troops, 1500 marines equipped with modern weapons and armoured vehicles have still not succeeded in defeating the oil workers in West Kazakhstan.

Unknown persons have been driving black jeeps around Zhanaozen and firing at passers by – yesterday over 20 were wounded in this way. Today apparently gangs have been using white jeeps to try and search out worker activists. Yet unbelievably, despite the reign of terror in the city, the workers and their supporters have still managed to hold a demonstration on the central square holding white sheets with the one word “peace” written on them.

Things are a bit easier in Aktau, where over a thousand workers were able to hold a demonstration in the centre of the city – their banners read – “We are not rioters!” and “the government must resign”. Reports from there say that the workers were demanding the withdrawal of troops from Zhenaozen and were holding placards with an appeal to the police “not to shoot people”. Many of the protesters are young – they show no fear. Even though the riot police are fully equipped with automatic weapons and gas, the protesters are marching on the police shouting for Nazarbayev to go.

The strikers in Aktau have been joined by a delegation from Shepte, were yesterday there was a bitter battle for control of the main railway line, leaving one worker dead and thirteen wounded. Reports indicate this is continuing. The Independent Trade Union “Aktau” has set up a public commission of enquiry to determine the number of dead, to get agreement for a three day mourning period and action against those responsible.

Journalists have been meeting with difficulties in the region. A group of journalists due to fly from Moscow had their commercial flight cancelled. Four Russian journalists who had made it to Zhenaozen were arrested in the city centre. Murat Tungishbayev had been in Shepte before he was arrested by police and threatened at gunpoint to hand over his camera. While pictures may be better than words, he was still able to give a clear picture of what was happening. According to him, oil-production has stopped throughout the region.

The government understandably is still continuing to spread disinformation. Yesterday it spoke of the strikers deliberately breaking up a children’s birthday concert and burning a New Year tree. (The tree was burnt after the shootings). Today, some government figures are claiming that in fact there were few actual oil workers involved in the initial clashes, that the square had been occupied by bandit groups. Yet a video filmed by a police cameraman demonstrated at an Interior Ministry briefing in Astana clearly show that oil workers and supporters were gathered peacefully in the square and although there were very minor scuffles, usually the oil workers controlled their own supporters. Yet after 3 minutes, the video clearly shows troops or police marching in cordon down the street and heavy shooting can then be heard as they open fire.

Now other forces are wading in to slander and attack the strikers. The official state controlled trade unions in Kazakhstan have attacked the strikers saying that “all disagreements should be settled around the negotiating table and not on the streets”. This is after an eight month strike in which one of the main demands of the strikers has been meaningful negotiations and they have met repression, violence and the imprisonment of their lawyer for 6 years.

Internationally, some figures in the trade union movement are adding their insults. Boris Kravchenko, President of the Confederation of Labour of Russia, himself a member of President Medvedev’s council of advisors has protested about the use of violence against the workers, but added that whilst he thought that responsibility for the events, for the spilling of the blood of the oil workers lies at the door of the Kazakhstan leadership, this responsibility “should be fully shared by those political speculators, so-called “committees” and “internationals” who use the workers protests to push their own political demands, their provocative actions which push the authorities to use violent measures”.

Some left wing groups are no better. One with glee, reported a telephone call from Zhanaozen during which the witness spoke of how the oil workers were apparently gathering to celebrate 20 years of Kazakhstan’s independence. This is despite the fact that before the 16th, the mass meeting in the square had condemned the results of the 20 year’s of independence in which “the authorities have robbed ordinary people of freedom, grabbed all our wealth for themselves… For twenty years the authorities have been lying, promising us the good life but continuing to rob us again and again”. Another left wing site attempts to divert the blame from Nazarbayev by suggesting that the Kazakh oligarch Ablyazov, living in London, had provoked the conflict as part of a plan to initiate an orange revolution. Yet a third left wing site criticizes the oil workers, because “under the influence of the CWI” they have raised political slogans such as “nationalization”. Actually the oil-workers raised that demand independently of the CWI. No doubt they are also wrong to raise the “resignation of the government”.

What is remarkable, is that despite all the cynics and slanders thrown against them by their so called friends, the oil workers through their own experience are becoming politicized. Whatever the final outcome of this brutal conflict, which is completely the responsibility of the government and employers, these events will mark a new stage in the development of the workers’s movement across the country.

Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative.org