Man’s Fate-Redux
He, Frank Jackman, didn’t know exactly how he was talked into attending his fourth, or was it fifth, anti-war conference in the space of three weeks. “Jesus,” Frank said to himself, “I just got out of the stockade a few weeks ago and I have been going non-stop ever since.” The details of that Army stockade time need not detain us here, except to say, as Frank said to anybody who asked, that he did what he had to do to stop that “goddam war in Vietnam (exact quote),” he would do it again, and the clincher that closed the conversational point, “next”. And if that was all Frank needed to say about the subject then that was all that needed to be said, next.
That next though was the “come on” that brought Frank up to the foothills of the White Mountains of New Hampshire for that conference that snowy February weekend of 1971. Unlike most “movement” events, unlike the previous four (five?) conferences that he had attended (and maybe from time immemorial), he was going to be given a stipend, small but actual dough, for his work, a bed, an actual bed and not some hard-pressed upon sympathizer’s vacant floor, and said bed would be in his own single room. Beyond that he heard that there would be some interesting people coming, and before you get your notebook out to write down the movement worthies that were coming, Frank’s hearing centered on the hard fact that some interesting women were coming. After all Frank had been in the stockade, and after all in 1971 we were only on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement at a time before such thoughts, at least in public, or in the public prints, became very dicey, very dicey indeed.
And so Frank began hitch-hiking that snow-covered February day U.S. 93 to save some dough, although as part of that “come on” he actually had been given money for a bus ticket as well. But he wanted to get a “feel” for the country and who and what was out there, especially the plethora of yellow brick road school buses and VW’s converted into love mobiles that he had heard about while inside. After a couple of interesting rides and one, well, scary one he arrived at his destination.
As he approached the entrance to the main building, the conference center itself, he could hear inside Elizabeth Cotten’ s Freight Train, in an upbeat Peter, Paul and Mary-style version complete with Bleecker Street reference, being covered just then near the well firewood- stocked, well-stoked fireplace of the great room of this old time religious order assembly hall by some upstart urban folkie a long way from his home and a long way from that 1960s folk revival minute that Frank remembered. Yes, this was the right place, the right place indeed.
Meanwhile, in the front hall entrance that he was then approaching adjacent to that great room where that old-time folkie and his old-time tune were being heard by a small early-bird arrival gathering crowd who never tired of the song, and who this night certainly did not tire of being close by the huge well stocked, well-stoked fireplace where the old brother, hell, let’s give him a name, Eric, Eric from Vermont, okay, was holding forth was starting to fill with more arrivals to be checked in and button-holed. The place, for the curious: the Shaker Farms Peace Pavilion (formerly just plain vanilla Shaker Farms Assembly Hall but the “trust fund babies” who bought and donated the site, and paid for Frank’s stipend, ah, insisted in their, of course, anonymous way on the added signature) the scene of umpteen peace conferences, anti-war parlays, alternative world vision seminars, non-violent role-playing skits, and personal witness actions worked out. A handy hospice for worn-out ideas, ditto frustrations, and an off-hand small victory or two.
And Frank, fresh from the stockade or not, was starting to be a picture of his tribal brothers seen at this gathering of the faithful and determined. A young ruddy-complexioned man, twenty-something, brown hair starting to fill out on the sides and down the back, a brown beard starting to go beyond wisp, sporting slightly scuffed high-top black boots, hell army boots, denim bell-bottomed trousers, army-jacket one size too large, always one size too large, stared across the great hall. The garment “style” just described obviously reflecting a recent discharge from some army, some shooting army, that aimed to join another less rigid army, if less rigid are the right words for the explosion among the young of his generation, the generation of ’68.
But all that was so much off-hand description, so much political foreplay. Frank was watching, watching carefully for those interesting women “promised” during the “come on” pitch that brought him to these damn snowy outback hills. He, no question, a city boy was unconformable being more than five feet away from city lights, asphalt city streets (the snowy road up to the farm entrance was rutted, dirt rutted), and a bookstore. As he panned the conference room that he just entered Frank eyed, fierce piercing blue-eyes that spoke of ancient sadnesses and a little treachery eyed, a young woman on the other side of the room. A dark-haired, pert, petite young woman, who was also present at that same umpteenth helter-skelter workshop in order to save this or that part of this wicked old world. And she eyed him right back. They both would laugh later and call it kid hide-and-seek eying. But that was later.
Just then though they kept up their “war” of peek and half- peek (and half whimsical smiles thrown in) until Frank was called up by Stanley Bloom, yes, that Stanley, well-known for his organizing exploits the year before when he almost single-handedly organized the student strikes after Kent State. After firing up the crowd with the need to think “outside the box,” up the ante and finish the job of ending the damn war (exact quote) Frank moved to the side to talk to Marge Goodwin, the organizer of this confab. In between the political back and forth he inquired about that dark-haired young woman. Marge replied, “Oh, Joyell Davin, she is from the Peace Action committee, they spear-headed the rallies out in front of Fort Shaw last year trying to get you out of the stockade.” Bingo.
Needless to say that at intermission Frank drew a bee-line for Joyell. As he approached her he simply shook her hand gently and said in a half-whisper (a half whisper that they would remember later, although they did not laugh at that one), “Thanks, for your work last year at Fort Shaw on my behalf, I appreciated it and it helped me get through the time.” And that was that. Joyell blushed profusely but something in that simple introduction started an avalanche of conversation about this and that. Who remembers except that it was incessant as if to stop would start the impending world madness outside of that little space between them. What did stop it was the call back to the second session. But before they parted Frank, half-sheepishly, a little kid-like said, “Maybe we can talk later, after the session is over.” And Joyell, usually no shy violet, although a little intimidated by Frank’s “movement” heavy-footstep heroics, blurted out instantly, “We’d better.” Frank shot back just as quickly, “Well I guess that is an order, right?” They laughed, laughed an adventures ahead laugh.
And, of course, they did meet later. Later came, came, evening session complete, as they were sitting across from each other in the great room, the great fireplace room where Eric was going through his second rendition of Freight Train to get the room revved up for his big stuff. Frank came over and asked, back to whisper again asked, if Joyell would like to go outside for a breath of fresh winter air. Or maybe somewhere else, another room inside, if she didn’t like the cold or snow. No second request was necessary, and no coyness on her part, as she quickly went to the coat rack and put on her coat, scarf, and boots. .
They talked, or rather she talked a blue streak, a soft-spoken blue streak like Frank’s manner was contagious and maybe it was, and then he would ask a question, and ask it in such a way that he really wanted to know, know her for her answer and not just to ask, polite ask. As they walked, and walked, and as the snow got deeper she kind of fell, kind of helpless on purpose fell. On purpose fell expecting that he might kiss her. But all he did was pick her up, firmly, held her in his arms just a fraction of a second, but a fraction of a second enough to let her know, and let her feel, that they had not seen the last of each other. And just for that cold, snow-driven February night, as war raged on in some distance land, and as she gathered in her tangled emotions after many romantic stumbles and man disappointments, that thought was enough.
And they kept eying each other through immediate snows, immediate back to the city safe-haven snows, gentle first kisses and downy beds, leafy spring bike rides on suburban trails (safe asphalt trails), be-bop dead of night drug hazes (better left unrecorded just in case the statute of limitations has not run out), east coast hitch-hike trips to some forlorn demo for this or that cause in a world increasingly full of hurts and oppressions in need of mending and someone to do something about them, massive explorations of the blue-pink great American West night in army-like pup tent and surplus sleeping bags, some misunderstandings, some serious misunderstandings, some rages against the night, some double rages against the day and night, some fitful irresolute break-ups, some infidelities (agreed to, or not), some two-roads-taken, and then, strictly reflecting that young man’s, Frank’s, broken-down sense of the world, silence, no more words spoken, in anger or otherwise.
Except later, much later, some cosmic message spoken by him speaking of that helter-skelter meeting, the snowy night, the walk, and the “moment” when he first held her firmly, to keep her from falling, without a kiss, but with an understanding that their stars had crossed, and he, they, knew some high adventure was ahead. The unadorned cosmic message was all that was left. Why hadn’t he had the sense to have a sense of her needs and kiss her right there in those immediate falling snows?
Friday, March 02, 2012
In Honor Of The On The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"The Third International After Lenin"
Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the document mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
After the struggle inside the Russian Communist Party in the mid-1920s around internal party democracy and the economics of the transition period the Leon Trotsky-led Left Opposition (and later the International Left Opposition) concentrated on Communist International policies. And chief among them was the contour and fate of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. While Leon Trotsky was not around to write about the successful revolution of 1949 he did write many polemics on that second revolution and how, in the end, it like in Russian would have to follow the path that he outlined in his Theory Of Permanent Revolution in order to be successful. In the event, although successful, it never developed those soviet forms that would have eased the transition to socialism. This material is still very helpful in sorting things out, and readable.
Markin comment:
After the struggle inside the Russian Communist Party in the mid-1920s around internal party democracy and the economics of the transition period the Leon Trotsky-led Left Opposition (and later the International Left Opposition) concentrated on Communist International policies. And chief among them was the contour and fate of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. While Leon Trotsky was not around to write about the successful revolution of 1949 he did write many polemics on that second revolution and how, in the end, it like in Russian would have to follow the path that he outlined in his Theory Of Permanent Revolution in order to be successful. In the event, although successful, it never developed those soviet forms that would have eased the transition to socialism. This material is still very helpful in sorting things out, and readable.
Thursday, March 01, 2012
What Joyell Found Out About Herself-Redux-Elizabeth Cotten Is In The House –A CD Review-
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Elizabeth Cotten performing her famous road song blues, Freight Train.
Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes, Elizabeth Cotten, Smithstonian Folkways, 1989
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Please don’t say what train I’m on,
So they won’t know where I’ve gone.
-Chorus from ancient folk blues artist Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train.
As this story unfolds, Elizabeth Cotten’ s Freight Train, in an upbeat Peter, Paul and Mary-style version complete with Bleecker Street reference, is being covered just then near the well firewood- stocked, well-stoked fireplace of the great room in a hard winter, February version, snow-covered rural New Hampshire old time religious order assembly hall by some upstart urban folkie a long way from his home and a long way from that 1960s folk revival minute that then had had even jaded aficionados from the generation of ’68 clamoring for more.
Meanwhile, the front hall entrance adjacent to that great room where that old-time folkie and his old-time tune are being heard by a small early-bird arrival gathering crowd who never tire of the song, and who this night certainly do not tire of being close by the huge well stocked, well-stoked fireplace where the old brother, hell, let’s give him a name, Eric, Eric from Vermont, okay, is holding forth is starting to fill with more arrivals to be checked in and button-holed. The place, for the curious: the Shaker Farms Peace Pavilion (formerly just plain vanilla Shaker Farms Assembly Hall but the “trust fund babies” who bought and donated the site, ah, insisted in their, of course, anonymous way on the added signature) the scene of umpteen peace conferences, anti-war parlays, alternative world vision seminars, non-violent role-playing skits, and personal witness actions worked out. A handy hospice for worn-out ideas, ditto frustrations, and an off-hand small victory or two.
That very last part, that desperate victory last part, is what keeps the place afloat, afloat in this oddball of a hellish anti-war year 1971 when even hardened and steeled old-time peace activists against the Vietnam War are starting to believe they will be entitled to Social Security for their efforts before this bloody war is over. Hence the urgency behind this particular great room fireplace warm, complete with booked-in urban folkie singer, umpteenth anti-war conference. But onward brothers and sisters and let us listen in to the following conversation overheard in that now crowded front hall:
“Hi, Joyell, glad you could make it to the conference. Are you by yourself or did you bring Steve with you?” asked Jim Sweeney, one of the big honchos, one of the big organizational honchos and that is what matters these dog days when all hope appears to have been abandoned, these now fading days of the antiwar movement trying yet again to conference jump start the opposition to Nixon’s bloody escalations and stealthy tricky maneuvers.
“Good to see you too, Jim,” answered Joyell, who said it in such a singsong way that she and Jim Sweeney, obviously, had been in some mystic time, maybe some summer of love time before everything and everybody needed twelve coats of armor, emotional armor, just to move from point A to point B, more than fellows at one of those umpteen peace things. Joyell knew, knew from some serious reflection last summer, that she had put on a few more armor coats herself and, hell, she was just a self-confessed rank and filer. Their “thing” had just faded though for lack of energy, lack of high “ism” politics on Joyell’s part unlike frenetic Jim, and for the cold, hard fact that Jim at the time wanted to devote himself totally to the “movement” and could not “commit” to a personal relationship.
“Jesus, can’t any guy commit to anything for more than ten minutes,” Joyell thought to herself. From the weathered look on his face Jim was still in high thrall to “saving the earth” although rumor had it that Marge Goodwin, ya, that Marge Goodwin, the “mother” of organizers every since she almost single-handedly called out the national student strike in 1970, almost had her hooks into him, into him bad from all reports.
“No, Steve and I are not together anymore since he split to “find himself” on some freight train heading west, heading west fast away from me, I think. But you don’t want to hear that story, and besides we have to push on against this damn war, Steve or no Steve and his goddamn freight smoke-trailing dreams.” What Joyell didn’t say was that she was half-glad, no quarter-glad, Steve had split since the last couple of months had been hell. A fight a day it seemed, two a day at the end.
Reason: Steve too was not ready to “commit” to a personal relationship what with the whole world going to hell in hand-basket (his expression). Besides they all had plenty of time, a life-time to get “serious” and, forbidden words, “settle down.” Here is where the quarter-glad part comes in. Steve was getting in kind of heavy with some Weathermen-types and while that did not cause an argument a day between them it didn’t help. Joyell half expected to hear that Steve, Steve the meek pacifist, a freaking meek Catholic Worker guy just a couple years before, blew up something, or got blown up. Jesus, she thought, was I that hard to take, hard to get along with.
“I’m sorry to hear that Joyell. Maybe when we get a break later we can talk.” Of course, and maybe for the same Steve smoke-trailing-freight-dream-escape-seeking-the-great-American be-bop night reason, or maybe a heroic end traced out since boyhood redemptions reason, Jim and Joyell never would meet later, as Jim would be tied up, well, tied up in whatever organizational thing he was honcho of these days. Their time too had irrevocably passed. And now, and from here on in, this is Joyell’s time, her story, her voice as she enters the spacious but cold, distant from the well-stoked fireplace cold, conference room to the left of the great room with its rickety elongated table weighted down with timeless banging against ten thousand flickered night dreams, scarecrow chairs that caused more than one modern arched-back to falter helplessly, and unhealthy air, air make rank from too many spent speeches, and spent dreams.
*******
“Who is that guy over in the corner, that green corner coach, the guy with the kind of wispy just starting to fill out brown beard, and those fierce piercing goy blue eyes, that I just passed? I’ve not seen him around before,” Joyell asked herself and then Marge Goodwin, expecting Marge the crackerjack organizer of everything from antiwar marches to save the, and you can fill in the blank, to know all the players. Moreover Marge and Joyell got along well enough for Joyell to ask such a question, “girl talk,” they called it between themselves although to the “men” this was a book sealed with seven seals since the “correct” thing was to put such girlish things back in prehistoric times, four or five years ago okay. Joyell also sensed that since Marge’s “thing” with Jim hadn’t worked out they had something in common, although nothing was ever said. Nor would it be.
“Oh, that’s Frank Jackman, the anti-war GI who just got out of the stockade over at Fort Shaw last week and he is ready to do some work with us,” volunteered Marge. Later that evening Joyell would hear from a reliable source that Marge had gotten, or had tried to get, very familiar with the ex-army soldier resister. Marge had a thing for “heroic” guys. Heroic guys being guys like Jim, Joan Baez’s hubby, David Harris, who had refused draft induction, the Berrigan Brothers who were getting ready to do time for draft board record destruction (although she, Marge, couldn’t get that damn Catholic trick part that drove their actions) and now this Frank Jackman who had done a year, a tough soldier non-soldier year, some of it in solidarity, in the stockade for refusing go to Vietnam (and refusing to wear the military uniform at one point). Joyell also heard from another source that evening that it was no dice between Marge and Frank. This source thought it was that Marge, always getting what Marge wanted when it came to “movement men,” figured this guy would just cave in and take the ride. Not this guy, no way, not after taking on the “big boys” over at Fort Shaw. No dice, huh. That’s a point in his favor. But that was later fuel.
“Oh, that’s why his beard is so wispy and he is wearing those silly high top polished black boots and that size too big Army jacket with those bell-bottomed jeans. He certainly has the idea of what it takes to fit in here,” Joyell figured out, figured out loud. Marge just nodded, nodded kind of dismissively that she was right. And then left to do some organization business setting up the evening’s work.
And then suddenly, she, Joyell Davin (suitably Americanized, naturally, a couple of generations back), freshly-damaged in love’s unequal battles but apparently not ready to throw in the towel, got very quiet, very quiet like she always did when some guy caught her eye, well, more than her eye tonight, now that Steve was so much train smoke out in the cornfields somewhere. Maybe it was the New York City armor-coated brashness, hell Manhattan grow-up hard and necessary brashness required in a too many people universe, and learned from her very opinionated father, that her quietness tried to rein in at times like this so guys, guys like this Frank, wouldn’t be thrown off. But whatever it was that drove her quietness she was taking her peeks, her quiet half- peeks really, at this guy. With Steve, and a few other guys, it was mostly full steam ahead and let the devil take the hinter- post. This time her clock said take it easy, jesus, take it easy.
And as she found herself catching herself taking more and more of those telltale peeks she noticed, noticed almost by instinct, almost by some mystical sense that he was “checking” her out, although their dueling eyes had not met. Then, after Jim had finished giving the opening address about what the conferees were trying to do, this Frank Jackman stood up quickly without introduction and started talking, in a firm voice, about the need to up the ante, to create havoc in the streets, and in the army camps. And do it now, and with some sense of urgency. But he said it all in such way that everybody in the room, all forty or fifty of them, knew, or should have known, that this was not some ragtag wispy–bearded fly-by-night “days of rage” kid spirit, freshly bell-bottom pants minted, but some kind of revolutionary, some kind of radical anyway, who had thought about things a lot and wasn’t just a flame-thrower like she had seen too many of lately, including Steve, before he went to find himself.
When Frank was done he looked, half-looked really, quickly in her direction like he was seeking her, and just her, approval. And like he needed to know and know right this minute that she approved. She blushed, and hoped it did not show. And hoped that she had read his look in her direction correctly. But before that blush could subside she blushed again when out of nowhere this Frank gave her a another look, a serious checking out look if she knew her “movement” men, not a leer like some drunken barroom guy, or “come on, honey,” like a schoolboy but a let’s talk high “ism” talk later, and see what happens later, later. Maybe this umpteenth conference would work out after all.
So our Joyell was not surprised, not surprised at all, when during the break, the blessed break after two non-stop hours of waiting, Francis Alexander Jackman (that’s what he was called from when he was a kid and it kind of stuck but he preferred simply Frank) came up behind, tapped her gently on the shoulder to get her attention, introduced himself without fanfare or with any heroic poses, and thanked her for her work on his behalf.
“What do you mean, Frank?” she asked, bewildered by the question. “Oh, when your Peace Action committee came up to Fort Shaw and demonstrated for my freedom,” he replied in kind of a whisper voice, very different from his public voice, a voice that had known some tough times recently and maybe long ago too, but that soft whisper was what she needed, needed to hear from a righteous man, just now. The shrill of Steve’s voice, and a couple of others in her string of forgotten luck, still echoed in her brain.
“That was you? I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t know that was you, sorry, that was about a year ago and I have been going non-stop with this antiwar march and that women’s lib things. Were you in the stockade all that time?” she continued.
“Ya,” just a ya, not forlorn or anything like that but just a simple statement of fact, of the fact that he had needed to do what he did and that was that, next question, came that soft reply like this Frank and she were on some same wave-length. She was confused, confused more than a little that he had that strong effect on her after about five minutes of just general conversation.
Just then Marge, super-organizer but, as Joyell had already gathered intelligence on by then, not above having the last say in her little romances with the newest heroes of the movement, or trying to, called to Frank that Stanley Bloom, the big national anti-war organizer, wanted his input into something. But before he left soft -whispering still, calm still, unlike when he talked, talked peace action talk, he mentioned kind of kid-like, bashful kid-like, maybe they could meet later. Joyell could barely contain herself, and although she usually acted bashfully at these times, kind of a studied bashfulness starting out, even with Steve and some of the movement guys, she just blurted out, “We’d better.” He replied, a little stronger of voice than that previous whisper, “I guess that is a command, right?” And they both laughed, laughed an adventure ahead laugh.
Later came, evening session complete, as they were sitting across from each other in the great room, the great fireplace room where Eric was going through his second rendition of Freight Train to get the room revved up for his big stuff. Frank came over and asked, back to whisper asked, if Joyell would like to go outside for a breath of fresh winter air. Or maybe somewhere else, another room inside perhaps if she didn’t like the cold or snow. No second request was necessary, and no coyness on her part either with this guy, as she quickly went to the coat rack and put on her coat, scarf, and boots. And so it went.
They talked, or rather she talked a blue streak, a soft-spoken blue streak like Frank’s manner was contagious, and maybe it was. Then he would ask a question, and ask it in such a way that he really wanted to know, know her for her answer and not just to ask, polite ask. As they walked, and walked, and as the snow got deeper as they moved away from the pavilion she kind of fell, kind of helpless on purpose fell. On purpose fell expecting that he might kiss her. But all he did was pick her up, gently but firmly, held her in his arms just a fraction of a second, but a fraction of a second enough to let her know, and let her feel, that they had not seen the last of each other. And just for that cold, snow-driven February night, as war raged on in some distance land, and as she gathered in her tangled emotions after many romantic stumbles and man disappointments, that thought was enough.
Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes, Elizabeth Cotten, Smithstonian Folkways, 1989
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Freight train, freight train going so fast,
Please don’t say what train I’m on,
So they won’t know where I’ve gone.
-Chorus from ancient folk blues artist Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train.
As this story unfolds, Elizabeth Cotten’ s Freight Train, in an upbeat Peter, Paul and Mary-style version complete with Bleecker Street reference, is being covered just then near the well firewood- stocked, well-stoked fireplace of the great room in a hard winter, February version, snow-covered rural New Hampshire old time religious order assembly hall by some upstart urban folkie a long way from his home and a long way from that 1960s folk revival minute that then had had even jaded aficionados from the generation of ’68 clamoring for more.
Meanwhile, the front hall entrance adjacent to that great room where that old-time folkie and his old-time tune are being heard by a small early-bird arrival gathering crowd who never tire of the song, and who this night certainly do not tire of being close by the huge well stocked, well-stoked fireplace where the old brother, hell, let’s give him a name, Eric, Eric from Vermont, okay, is holding forth is starting to fill with more arrivals to be checked in and button-holed. The place, for the curious: the Shaker Farms Peace Pavilion (formerly just plain vanilla Shaker Farms Assembly Hall but the “trust fund babies” who bought and donated the site, ah, insisted in their, of course, anonymous way on the added signature) the scene of umpteen peace conferences, anti-war parlays, alternative world vision seminars, non-violent role-playing skits, and personal witness actions worked out. A handy hospice for worn-out ideas, ditto frustrations, and an off-hand small victory or two.
That very last part, that desperate victory last part, is what keeps the place afloat, afloat in this oddball of a hellish anti-war year 1971 when even hardened and steeled old-time peace activists against the Vietnam War are starting to believe they will be entitled to Social Security for their efforts before this bloody war is over. Hence the urgency behind this particular great room fireplace warm, complete with booked-in urban folkie singer, umpteenth anti-war conference. But onward brothers and sisters and let us listen in to the following conversation overheard in that now crowded front hall:
“Hi, Joyell, glad you could make it to the conference. Are you by yourself or did you bring Steve with you?” asked Jim Sweeney, one of the big honchos, one of the big organizational honchos and that is what matters these dog days when all hope appears to have been abandoned, these now fading days of the antiwar movement trying yet again to conference jump start the opposition to Nixon’s bloody escalations and stealthy tricky maneuvers.
“Good to see you too, Jim,” answered Joyell, who said it in such a singsong way that she and Jim Sweeney, obviously, had been in some mystic time, maybe some summer of love time before everything and everybody needed twelve coats of armor, emotional armor, just to move from point A to point B, more than fellows at one of those umpteen peace things. Joyell knew, knew from some serious reflection last summer, that she had put on a few more armor coats herself and, hell, she was just a self-confessed rank and filer. Their “thing” had just faded though for lack of energy, lack of high “ism” politics on Joyell’s part unlike frenetic Jim, and for the cold, hard fact that Jim at the time wanted to devote himself totally to the “movement” and could not “commit” to a personal relationship.
“Jesus, can’t any guy commit to anything for more than ten minutes,” Joyell thought to herself. From the weathered look on his face Jim was still in high thrall to “saving the earth” although rumor had it that Marge Goodwin, ya, that Marge Goodwin, the “mother” of organizers every since she almost single-handedly called out the national student strike in 1970, almost had her hooks into him, into him bad from all reports.
“No, Steve and I are not together anymore since he split to “find himself” on some freight train heading west, heading west fast away from me, I think. But you don’t want to hear that story, and besides we have to push on against this damn war, Steve or no Steve and his goddamn freight smoke-trailing dreams.” What Joyell didn’t say was that she was half-glad, no quarter-glad, Steve had split since the last couple of months had been hell. A fight a day it seemed, two a day at the end.
Reason: Steve too was not ready to “commit” to a personal relationship what with the whole world going to hell in hand-basket (his expression). Besides they all had plenty of time, a life-time to get “serious” and, forbidden words, “settle down.” Here is where the quarter-glad part comes in. Steve was getting in kind of heavy with some Weathermen-types and while that did not cause an argument a day between them it didn’t help. Joyell half expected to hear that Steve, Steve the meek pacifist, a freaking meek Catholic Worker guy just a couple years before, blew up something, or got blown up. Jesus, she thought, was I that hard to take, hard to get along with.
“I’m sorry to hear that Joyell. Maybe when we get a break later we can talk.” Of course, and maybe for the same Steve smoke-trailing-freight-dream-escape-seeking-the-great-American be-bop night reason, or maybe a heroic end traced out since boyhood redemptions reason, Jim and Joyell never would meet later, as Jim would be tied up, well, tied up in whatever organizational thing he was honcho of these days. Their time too had irrevocably passed. And now, and from here on in, this is Joyell’s time, her story, her voice as she enters the spacious but cold, distant from the well-stoked fireplace cold, conference room to the left of the great room with its rickety elongated table weighted down with timeless banging against ten thousand flickered night dreams, scarecrow chairs that caused more than one modern arched-back to falter helplessly, and unhealthy air, air make rank from too many spent speeches, and spent dreams.
*******
“Who is that guy over in the corner, that green corner coach, the guy with the kind of wispy just starting to fill out brown beard, and those fierce piercing goy blue eyes, that I just passed? I’ve not seen him around before,” Joyell asked herself and then Marge Goodwin, expecting Marge the crackerjack organizer of everything from antiwar marches to save the, and you can fill in the blank, to know all the players. Moreover Marge and Joyell got along well enough for Joyell to ask such a question, “girl talk,” they called it between themselves although to the “men” this was a book sealed with seven seals since the “correct” thing was to put such girlish things back in prehistoric times, four or five years ago okay. Joyell also sensed that since Marge’s “thing” with Jim hadn’t worked out they had something in common, although nothing was ever said. Nor would it be.
“Oh, that’s Frank Jackman, the anti-war GI who just got out of the stockade over at Fort Shaw last week and he is ready to do some work with us,” volunteered Marge. Later that evening Joyell would hear from a reliable source that Marge had gotten, or had tried to get, very familiar with the ex-army soldier resister. Marge had a thing for “heroic” guys. Heroic guys being guys like Jim, Joan Baez’s hubby, David Harris, who had refused draft induction, the Berrigan Brothers who were getting ready to do time for draft board record destruction (although she, Marge, couldn’t get that damn Catholic trick part that drove their actions) and now this Frank Jackman who had done a year, a tough soldier non-soldier year, some of it in solidarity, in the stockade for refusing go to Vietnam (and refusing to wear the military uniform at one point). Joyell also heard from another source that evening that it was no dice between Marge and Frank. This source thought it was that Marge, always getting what Marge wanted when it came to “movement men,” figured this guy would just cave in and take the ride. Not this guy, no way, not after taking on the “big boys” over at Fort Shaw. No dice, huh. That’s a point in his favor. But that was later fuel.
“Oh, that’s why his beard is so wispy and he is wearing those silly high top polished black boots and that size too big Army jacket with those bell-bottomed jeans. He certainly has the idea of what it takes to fit in here,” Joyell figured out, figured out loud. Marge just nodded, nodded kind of dismissively that she was right. And then left to do some organization business setting up the evening’s work.
And then suddenly, she, Joyell Davin (suitably Americanized, naturally, a couple of generations back), freshly-damaged in love’s unequal battles but apparently not ready to throw in the towel, got very quiet, very quiet like she always did when some guy caught her eye, well, more than her eye tonight, now that Steve was so much train smoke out in the cornfields somewhere. Maybe it was the New York City armor-coated brashness, hell Manhattan grow-up hard and necessary brashness required in a too many people universe, and learned from her very opinionated father, that her quietness tried to rein in at times like this so guys, guys like this Frank, wouldn’t be thrown off. But whatever it was that drove her quietness she was taking her peeks, her quiet half- peeks really, at this guy. With Steve, and a few other guys, it was mostly full steam ahead and let the devil take the hinter- post. This time her clock said take it easy, jesus, take it easy.
And as she found herself catching herself taking more and more of those telltale peeks she noticed, noticed almost by instinct, almost by some mystical sense that he was “checking” her out, although their dueling eyes had not met. Then, after Jim had finished giving the opening address about what the conferees were trying to do, this Frank Jackman stood up quickly without introduction and started talking, in a firm voice, about the need to up the ante, to create havoc in the streets, and in the army camps. And do it now, and with some sense of urgency. But he said it all in such way that everybody in the room, all forty or fifty of them, knew, or should have known, that this was not some ragtag wispy–bearded fly-by-night “days of rage” kid spirit, freshly bell-bottom pants minted, but some kind of revolutionary, some kind of radical anyway, who had thought about things a lot and wasn’t just a flame-thrower like she had seen too many of lately, including Steve, before he went to find himself.
When Frank was done he looked, half-looked really, quickly in her direction like he was seeking her, and just her, approval. And like he needed to know and know right this minute that she approved. She blushed, and hoped it did not show. And hoped that she had read his look in her direction correctly. But before that blush could subside she blushed again when out of nowhere this Frank gave her a another look, a serious checking out look if she knew her “movement” men, not a leer like some drunken barroom guy, or “come on, honey,” like a schoolboy but a let’s talk high “ism” talk later, and see what happens later, later. Maybe this umpteenth conference would work out after all.
So our Joyell was not surprised, not surprised at all, when during the break, the blessed break after two non-stop hours of waiting, Francis Alexander Jackman (that’s what he was called from when he was a kid and it kind of stuck but he preferred simply Frank) came up behind, tapped her gently on the shoulder to get her attention, introduced himself without fanfare or with any heroic poses, and thanked her for her work on his behalf.
“What do you mean, Frank?” she asked, bewildered by the question. “Oh, when your Peace Action committee came up to Fort Shaw and demonstrated for my freedom,” he replied in kind of a whisper voice, very different from his public voice, a voice that had known some tough times recently and maybe long ago too, but that soft whisper was what she needed, needed to hear from a righteous man, just now. The shrill of Steve’s voice, and a couple of others in her string of forgotten luck, still echoed in her brain.
“That was you? I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t know that was you, sorry, that was about a year ago and I have been going non-stop with this antiwar march and that women’s lib things. Were you in the stockade all that time?” she continued.
“Ya,” just a ya, not forlorn or anything like that but just a simple statement of fact, of the fact that he had needed to do what he did and that was that, next question, came that soft reply like this Frank and she were on some same wave-length. She was confused, confused more than a little that he had that strong effect on her after about five minutes of just general conversation.
Just then Marge, super-organizer but, as Joyell had already gathered intelligence on by then, not above having the last say in her little romances with the newest heroes of the movement, or trying to, called to Frank that Stanley Bloom, the big national anti-war organizer, wanted his input into something. But before he left soft -whispering still, calm still, unlike when he talked, talked peace action talk, he mentioned kind of kid-like, bashful kid-like, maybe they could meet later. Joyell could barely contain herself, and although she usually acted bashfully at these times, kind of a studied bashfulness starting out, even with Steve and some of the movement guys, she just blurted out, “We’d better.” He replied, a little stronger of voice than that previous whisper, “I guess that is a command, right?” And they both laughed, laughed an adventure ahead laugh.
Later came, evening session complete, as they were sitting across from each other in the great room, the great fireplace room where Eric was going through his second rendition of Freight Train to get the room revved up for his big stuff. Frank came over and asked, back to whisper asked, if Joyell would like to go outside for a breath of fresh winter air. Or maybe somewhere else, another room inside perhaps if she didn’t like the cold or snow. No second request was necessary, and no coyness on her part either with this guy, as she quickly went to the coat rack and put on her coat, scarf, and boots. And so it went.
They talked, or rather she talked a blue streak, a soft-spoken blue streak like Frank’s manner was contagious, and maybe it was. Then he would ask a question, and ask it in such a way that he really wanted to know, know her for her answer and not just to ask, polite ask. As they walked, and walked, and as the snow got deeper as they moved away from the pavilion she kind of fell, kind of helpless on purpose fell. On purpose fell expecting that he might kiss her. But all he did was pick her up, gently but firmly, held her in his arms just a fraction of a second, but a fraction of a second enough to let her know, and let her feel, that they had not seen the last of each other. And just for that cold, snow-driven February night, as war raged on in some distance land, and as she gathered in her tangled emotions after many romantic stumbles and man disappointments, that thought was enough.
You Don’t Need Thomas Wolfe To Know You Can’t Go Home Again-Redux
Damn memory twist. Damn memory stick. No, not the techno-gismo gadget, the old noggin, noodle, gray matter or whatever you call the place, the dark hidden place mainly, where memory haunts you every once in a while. And won’t let go of you. Won’t let go of you like it will not let go of me lately. Damn stick.
Who knows when you first realized that, to use Thomas Wolfe’s book title as reference and refrain, you can’t go home again ever, even in deep memory recess, in deep memory haunt. Certainly it was not when you were young, a mere child, memories then came and went like the flittering light, or like some unwashed foam-flecked ocean wave receding as fast as it hit the receiving shore sand. Later, in young adult time, you were just too freaking busy, busy making the stuff of memories, to actually pay attention. So, maybe, it works like this once you get that memory bank filled and overflowing filled they come back, come back in memory haunt fashion. All I know is that a few years back, bank filled or not, I felt that old time feeling, and worst, tried to do something about it. Tried to change the course of events already etched in stone, to rewrite history if you like. Silly me, although easier to say now than then.
See, memory makes no sense, makes no stored-away sense, unless it can be properly subjected to certain tests. The could have, would have, should have tests. Like a penitent reprobate you think through, seriously think through, a variation of the theme of how you could have kept that old chestnut from Sunday school times about obeying and honoring parents and kin better. Stuff like that. Hey, after all that is where you got your memory chance anyway. And probably, like me, you have your armful of regrets about why you missed this thing and that, did or did not do the other thing. But I am here to speak of no avails, no avails at all when the deal goes down.
The storm and stress of any growing up absurd in any period in America (or anywhere else for that matter but I am here so I will keep it narrow) need not detain us here. You know the where-were-you-late last night-did-you-know-Johnny- X-did-(or didn’t)- do-this-or-that-what-are-you-going-to-make-of-your-life, and I have run out of hyphens drill. The maddened jail break-out from the home nest has taken many forms, especially in the 1960s, but the fall-out lasted much longer, much, much longer. Then just when you were ready to call a truce, an adult to adult armed truce, ten thousand childhood foam-flecked ocean wave came washing to shore and you had to start over from square one. Then some dark shadow time hovered over the earth and you didn’t get to observe that truce, or anything else. Then you realized, you finally realized, that some hurts, harms, and just plain orneriness could not (the could have test, see) have been resolved this side of heaven’s door. It was just too basic, to primordial to get resolved. Next.
A scrabble. Two young tow-headed boys, fast friend and fierce enemies, walking along the hard-scrabble beach throwing stones, really trying to skip stones to see who can skip their stone the farthest. Eighteen young boys haphazardly “bucking up” sides in a game of baseball, a nineteenth boy left out. One young boy, walking, endlessly walking, in the 1950s fetid sweaty shirt night, passes a certain she’s house afraid to glance in the window for fear of discovery. Another boy, a little older, walking some fugitive streets mulling over this or that endless question, that endless he-she question. A teenage boy, late at night, yet another sultry sticky summer’s night, clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers (no knock-offs either), black of course, long, un-cuffed chino pants runs dustbowl oval laps in search of glory. Two teenage boys, one clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers, black of course, and those vagrant black, un-cuffed chinos, the other a variation of the same, sit on the steps of some granite-gray high school and talk of dreams, small dreams but dreams. A teenage boy, the Chuck Taylor-shod boy, does not drive a ’57 Chevy, does not belong to the school great books club where he might find kindred spirits, does not belong to the glee club, does not go to the senior prom, and, emphatically does not go on Saturday night, honey she girl in tow, to watch the “submarine” race down at that eternal foam-flecked wave ocean swells beach. And no amount of later money, no amount of time, early or late, and no amount of desire, ditto, can change that. None. Next
Two teenage boys, one clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers, black of course in the 1960s night, and those vagrant black, un-cuffed chinos, the other a variation of the same, except no Chucks, some sleek-toed running shoes, sit on the steps of some granite-gray high school and talk of dreams, small dreams, inconsequential, but dreams. Well, maybe no so small dreams but small expectations. But with a fierce desire to get out from under, under hard rocks, and the key is to run, run like there was no mercy in the world. One boy, the Chuck Taylor sneaker-less boy, ran like the demons and had his glory, his fifteen minutes, although he did not know that was what he had had then. He thought he could fuel himself forever on such fumes, and crashed. The other, ran like he was running in cement, just hardening cement, but he had big dreams, big social dreams anyway, and he never did get his fifteen minutes of fame. Secret: he didn’t need them although he desperately wanted them, wanted his hero moment. And, maybe, when the great Mandela made its unseemly turn, that was why that schoolboy-shared memory on granite-gray steps could never sustain ancient times, or should have. Next
An old man, a 2009 old man if you must know although the year only framed the frenzy, an overwrought man, endlessly pacing within a few feet parameter, endlessly speaking of Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans, maybe Trigger too, who knows, as if they were right in front of him, nodded to another man, a little younger but still old, 2009 old, and who rolled his eyes every time a reference was made Roy, Dale, The Cisco Kid, or some Annie Oakley of the older man’s mind. The younger man, who had known the older man in his youth, known him well, although they had not spoken for many years, started to speak about some movie, some movie like The Gladiator just to change the topic. The older man, listened for a few seconds, then spoke of black and white television cowgirls and their fates, maybe Belle Starr, old-time rustlers and desperadoes, and occasionally of black-hatted Hopalong Cassidy. The younger man, sensing an opening, spoke of Neal Cassady. Who? Futile. Totally futile. Next
A young man, brown hair starting to fill out, a brown beard starting to go beyond wisp, sporting slightly scuffed high-top black boots, hell army boots, denim bell-bottomed trousers, army-jacket one size too large, always one size too large, stared across the great hall. The garment “style” just described reflecting a recent discharge from some army, some shooting army, that aimed to join another less rigid army, if less rigid are the right words for the explosion among the young of his generation, the generation of ’68. He eyed, fierce piercing goy blue-eyes that spoke of ancient sadnesses and a little treachery eyed, a young woman on the other side of the room, a dark-haired, pert, petite young woman, who was also present at that same umpteenth helter-skelter workshop to save this or that part of this wicked old world. And she eyed him right back. And they kept eying each other through immediate snows, gentle first kisses, leafy bikes rides, be-bop dead of night drug hazes, east coast hitch-hike trips, massive explorations of the blue-pink great American West night, some misunderstandings, some serious misunderstandings, some rages against the night, some double rages against the day and night, some fitful irresolute break-ups, some infidelities (agreed to, or not), some two-roads-taken, and then, strictly reflecting that young man’s broken-down sense of the world, silence, no more words spoken, in anger or otherwise. Except later, much later, some cosmic message spoken by him speaking of that helter-skelter meeting, the snowy night, the walk, and the “moment” when he first held her firmly, to keep her from falling, without a kiss, but with an understanding that their stars had crossed, and he, they, knew some high adventure was ahead. The unadorned cosmic message was all that was left. What hadn’t he had the sense to have a sense of her and kiss her right there in those immediate falling snows? Next.
No, no next, didn’t you get it, you can’t go home again.
Who knows when you first realized that, to use Thomas Wolfe’s book title as reference and refrain, you can’t go home again ever, even in deep memory recess, in deep memory haunt. Certainly it was not when you were young, a mere child, memories then came and went like the flittering light, or like some unwashed foam-flecked ocean wave receding as fast as it hit the receiving shore sand. Later, in young adult time, you were just too freaking busy, busy making the stuff of memories, to actually pay attention. So, maybe, it works like this once you get that memory bank filled and overflowing filled they come back, come back in memory haunt fashion. All I know is that a few years back, bank filled or not, I felt that old time feeling, and worst, tried to do something about it. Tried to change the course of events already etched in stone, to rewrite history if you like. Silly me, although easier to say now than then.
See, memory makes no sense, makes no stored-away sense, unless it can be properly subjected to certain tests. The could have, would have, should have tests. Like a penitent reprobate you think through, seriously think through, a variation of the theme of how you could have kept that old chestnut from Sunday school times about obeying and honoring parents and kin better. Stuff like that. Hey, after all that is where you got your memory chance anyway. And probably, like me, you have your armful of regrets about why you missed this thing and that, did or did not do the other thing. But I am here to speak of no avails, no avails at all when the deal goes down.
The storm and stress of any growing up absurd in any period in America (or anywhere else for that matter but I am here so I will keep it narrow) need not detain us here. You know the where-were-you-late last night-did-you-know-Johnny- X-did-(or didn’t)- do-this-or-that-what-are-you-going-to-make-of-your-life, and I have run out of hyphens drill. The maddened jail break-out from the home nest has taken many forms, especially in the 1960s, but the fall-out lasted much longer, much, much longer. Then just when you were ready to call a truce, an adult to adult armed truce, ten thousand childhood foam-flecked ocean wave came washing to shore and you had to start over from square one. Then some dark shadow time hovered over the earth and you didn’t get to observe that truce, or anything else. Then you realized, you finally realized, that some hurts, harms, and just plain orneriness could not (the could have test, see) have been resolved this side of heaven’s door. It was just too basic, to primordial to get resolved. Next.
A scrabble. Two young tow-headed boys, fast friend and fierce enemies, walking along the hard-scrabble beach throwing stones, really trying to skip stones to see who can skip their stone the farthest. Eighteen young boys haphazardly “bucking up” sides in a game of baseball, a nineteenth boy left out. One young boy, walking, endlessly walking, in the 1950s fetid sweaty shirt night, passes a certain she’s house afraid to glance in the window for fear of discovery. Another boy, a little older, walking some fugitive streets mulling over this or that endless question, that endless he-she question. A teenage boy, late at night, yet another sultry sticky summer’s night, clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers (no knock-offs either), black of course, long, un-cuffed chino pants runs dustbowl oval laps in search of glory. Two teenage boys, one clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers, black of course, and those vagrant black, un-cuffed chinos, the other a variation of the same, sit on the steps of some granite-gray high school and talk of dreams, small dreams but dreams. A teenage boy, the Chuck Taylor-shod boy, does not drive a ’57 Chevy, does not belong to the school great books club where he might find kindred spirits, does not belong to the glee club, does not go to the senior prom, and, emphatically does not go on Saturday night, honey she girl in tow, to watch the “submarine” race down at that eternal foam-flecked wave ocean swells beach. And no amount of later money, no amount of time, early or late, and no amount of desire, ditto, can change that. None. Next
Two teenage boys, one clad in tee-shirt, Chuck Taylor sneakers, black of course in the 1960s night, and those vagrant black, un-cuffed chinos, the other a variation of the same, except no Chucks, some sleek-toed running shoes, sit on the steps of some granite-gray high school and talk of dreams, small dreams, inconsequential, but dreams. Well, maybe no so small dreams but small expectations. But with a fierce desire to get out from under, under hard rocks, and the key is to run, run like there was no mercy in the world. One boy, the Chuck Taylor sneaker-less boy, ran like the demons and had his glory, his fifteen minutes, although he did not know that was what he had had then. He thought he could fuel himself forever on such fumes, and crashed. The other, ran like he was running in cement, just hardening cement, but he had big dreams, big social dreams anyway, and he never did get his fifteen minutes of fame. Secret: he didn’t need them although he desperately wanted them, wanted his hero moment. And, maybe, when the great Mandela made its unseemly turn, that was why that schoolboy-shared memory on granite-gray steps could never sustain ancient times, or should have. Next
An old man, a 2009 old man if you must know although the year only framed the frenzy, an overwrought man, endlessly pacing within a few feet parameter, endlessly speaking of Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans, maybe Trigger too, who knows, as if they were right in front of him, nodded to another man, a little younger but still old, 2009 old, and who rolled his eyes every time a reference was made Roy, Dale, The Cisco Kid, or some Annie Oakley of the older man’s mind. The younger man, who had known the older man in his youth, known him well, although they had not spoken for many years, started to speak about some movie, some movie like The Gladiator just to change the topic. The older man, listened for a few seconds, then spoke of black and white television cowgirls and their fates, maybe Belle Starr, old-time rustlers and desperadoes, and occasionally of black-hatted Hopalong Cassidy. The younger man, sensing an opening, spoke of Neal Cassady. Who? Futile. Totally futile. Next
A young man, brown hair starting to fill out, a brown beard starting to go beyond wisp, sporting slightly scuffed high-top black boots, hell army boots, denim bell-bottomed trousers, army-jacket one size too large, always one size too large, stared across the great hall. The garment “style” just described reflecting a recent discharge from some army, some shooting army, that aimed to join another less rigid army, if less rigid are the right words for the explosion among the young of his generation, the generation of ’68. He eyed, fierce piercing goy blue-eyes that spoke of ancient sadnesses and a little treachery eyed, a young woman on the other side of the room, a dark-haired, pert, petite young woman, who was also present at that same umpteenth helter-skelter workshop to save this or that part of this wicked old world. And she eyed him right back. And they kept eying each other through immediate snows, gentle first kisses, leafy bikes rides, be-bop dead of night drug hazes, east coast hitch-hike trips, massive explorations of the blue-pink great American West night, some misunderstandings, some serious misunderstandings, some rages against the night, some double rages against the day and night, some fitful irresolute break-ups, some infidelities (agreed to, or not), some two-roads-taken, and then, strictly reflecting that young man’s broken-down sense of the world, silence, no more words spoken, in anger or otherwise. Except later, much later, some cosmic message spoken by him speaking of that helter-skelter meeting, the snowy night, the walk, and the “moment” when he first held her firmly, to keep her from falling, without a kiss, but with an understanding that their stars had crossed, and he, they, knew some high adventure was ahead. The unadorned cosmic message was all that was left. What hadn’t he had the sense to have a sense of her and kiss her right there in those immediate falling snows? Next.
No, no next, didn’t you get it, you can’t go home again.
The Latest From The “Occupy May 1st” Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May 1st website. Occupy May Day which has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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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, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
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Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.
Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.
This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.
Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.
The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.
The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.
And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out in Boston on May Day 2012.
******
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!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.
Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.
This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.
Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.
The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.
The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.
And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out in Boston on May Day 2012.
The Latest From The “Occupy May Day" FaceBook Page- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May Day Facebook Page website. Occupy May Day has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
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!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
• Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
•
•
• Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
•
• Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
•
• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
•
• Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
•
• We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
•
• These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
•
• Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
•
• It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
******
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!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
• Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
•
•
• Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
•
• Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
•
• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
•
• Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
•
• We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
•
• These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
•
• Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
•
• It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
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, 2011and the defend of the longshormen’s union at Longview. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date 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 on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
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!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
All out on May Day 2012.
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, 2011and the defend of the longshormen’s union at Longview. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date 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 on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
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!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
All out on May Day 2012.
From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)-Theses on Communist Work in the Trade Unions
Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
********
Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Theses on Communist Work in the Trade Unions
(Date of adoption unknown)
1. The State of the Trade-Union Movement
1 Over the last two years, which have seen a world-wide capitalist offensive, the trade-union movement everywhere has lost considerable strength. In all but a few countries (Germany and Austria) the trade unions have declined; they have lost the mass of their members. This decline in membership can be explained on the one hand by the powerful bourgeois offensive, and on the other hand by the inability of the reformist unions to put up any serious opposition to the capitalist attack and to defend the basic interests of the workers.
2 The capitalist offensive and the continuation of class collaboration have both added to working-class disillusionment. In the eyes of many workers the union organisations have lost their credibility because they failed to resist the capitalist offensive and were unable or even unwilling to maintain the positions already won. Events have clearly highlighted the barrenness of reformism.
3 The international trade-union movement is characterised by a lack of inner cohesion, by the steady rate at which quite important sections of the proletariat are leaving the unions, and by the policy, stubbornly held to by the reformists, of class collaboration “with the aim of using capital in the interests of labour”. In reality, however, capital has always used the reformist organisations for its own ends by involving and implicating them in the reduction of the living standards of the working masses.
The recent period has seen the existence of extremely close links between the bourgeois governments and the reformist leaders and an even greater subordination of the interests of the working masses to the interests of the ruling classes.
II. The Amsterdam International’s Attack on the Revolutionary Trade Unions
4 The reformist leaders, yielding to bourgeois pressure all along the line, have also begun an attack on the revolutionary workers. Since there has been serious concern among the working masses over the reluctance of the trade unions to organise opposition to the capitalist offensive, the reformist leaders are trying to rid the workers’ organisations of revolutionary ideas by launching an organised offensive against the revolutionary trade-union movement. Their aim is to use all the means at their disposal to demoralise and disrupt the revolutionary minority and so strengthen the shaken position of the bourgeoisie.
5 To maintain their power in the future, the leaders of the Amsterdam International have even gone so far as to expel not just separate groups or individuals, but entire organisations. They have firmly decided to stay always in the majority, to keep the organisation in their own hands and to resist in particular any threat from the revolutionary elements adhering to the Comintern or the Profintern. In this way they hope at least to keep control of the apparatus and all the financial resources of the workers’ organisations. The leaders of the French General Confederation of Labour have acted in this way. Heading in the same direction are the reformist leaders in Czechoslovakia, and following them the leaders of the All-German Federation of Trade Unions. The interests of the bourgeoisie require a split in the trade-union movement.
6 Simultaneously with the reformists’ attack on the revolutionary workers in each country, a similar offensive was launched at the international level; the various international trade unions adhering to the Amsterdam International systematically expelled the revolutionary unions and refused to readmit them. So, for example, the world congresses of the miners, textile workers, white-collar workers, agricultural workers, woodworkers, building workers and communications workers have refused to admit the Russian and several other trade unions simply because they belong to the Profintern.
7 This reformist campaign against the revolutionary trade unions is an exact reflection of the international capitalist campaign against the working class, and pursues the same aims: the strengthening of capitalism at the expense of the working masses, the consolidation of reformism in the trade unions and the weakening of the militant elements by expelling them and depriving them of any possibility of seizing the means of production and, at the same time, power.
III. Anarchism and Communism
8 At the same time as the Amsterdam reformists were conducting their offensive against the Communist trade-union movement, the anarchists began a similar ‘offensive’ against the Communist International, the Communist Parties and the Communist cells in the unions. Some anarcho-syndicalist organisations came out openly against the Communist International and the Russian revolution, despite their solemn adherence to the Communist International in 1920 and their declarations of full support for the Russian proletariat and the October revolution. A similar process can be observed in the Italian syndicalist union, among the German localists and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, and likewise in the various syndicalist groups in France, Holland and Sweden.
9 Under the slogan of the independence of the trade unions from the Communist. Parties, many syndicalist organisations (National Workers’ Proletariat* in Holland, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Italian syndicalist union, etc.) have begun to exclude supporters of the Red International of Labour Unions, particularly when they are Communists. The slogan of trade-union independence has turned into an anti-Communist, i.e., a counter-revolutionary, slogan. Furthermore, it echoes the slogan used by the reformists, who also stress independence in their politics, though their dependence on the national and international bourgeoisie is no secret.
10 The attacks by the anarchists on the Communist International, the Profintern and the Russian revolution have led to confusion and division in their own ranks. The most advanced workers have protested against such ideas. Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have split into a number of tendencies and groups, which have been waging a bitter fight amongst themselves for and against the Profintern, for and against the dictatorship of the proletariat.
IV. Neutrality and Independence
11 The influence of the bourgeoisie on the proletariat is reflected in the theory of the neutrality of the trade-union movement. The implication of this theory is that the trade unions should restrict themselves to purely craft and economic matters, and should not try to put forward any general class aims. Neutrality has always been a bourgeois theory, and revolutionary Marxism has resolutely opposed it. Trade unions which have no general class aims, i.e., aims directed at the overthrow of the capitalist system, are, despite their proletarian composition, the best defenders of the bourgeois order and bourgeois society.
12 From time immemorial the theory of neutrality has been based on the assertion that the trade unions must concern themselves only with economic questions and in no circumstances interfere in politics. The bourgeoisie has always endeavoured to separate politics and economics, for it is well aware that no serious danger will threaten its rule while it manages to keep the working class within the narrow confines of pure trade unionism.
13 The separation of politics and economics is also upheld by the Fanarchist elements who are working in the trade unions and trying to divert the workers’ movement from any involvement in political questions on the grounds that all politics is harmful to the working class. This theory, in essence purely bourgeois, is presented as a defence of independence; this independence is then taken to imply a state of hostility between the trade unions and the proletarian Communist Parties and a declaration of war on the Communist workers’ movement in the name of that same glorious independence and autonomy.
14 Hostility to politics tends to weaken the militancy of the working masses and leads to a fight against Communist ideas, the embodiment of Communist class consciousness among the workers. Independence in its purely anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist forms is an anti-Communist theory. As such, it must be most resolutely opposed, or it will lead, at best, to isolation from Communist ideas and the polarisation of the trade unions and the Communist Parties and, at worst, to a bitter fight by the union organisations against the Communist Parties, Communism and social revolution.
15 The theory of independence, as it is propagated by the French, Italian and Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, is in effect the battle-cry of anarchism in its fight against Communism. Communists must initiate a determined battle of ideas within the trade-union movement to counter any attempt to spread anarchist theories under the flag of independence and bring about a split in the united workers’ movement, especially if the attempt is being made in a way that would hamper and delay the victory of the working class.
V. Syndicalism and Communism
16 The anarcho-syndicalists confuse trade unions (syndicates) with syndicalism and declare their anarcho-syndicalist party to be the only genuinely revolutionary organisation capable of achieving the overall aims of the proletariat. A trade union is nothing more nor less than a non-partisan mass organisation uniting workers of all political tendencies, while syndicalism is simply one of the political tendencies existing at the base of these organisations. Although syndicalism, in comparison with the world-outlook of trade-unionism, [meant in the sense of an exclusive concern with bread-and-butter issues of wages and conditions] is a major step forward, many of its characteristics and tendencies are very dangerous and must be vigorously argued against.
17 Communists cannot and must not, for the sake of abstract anarcho-syndicalist principles, give up their right to organise cells and groups among the rank and file of any trade union, regardless of its tendency. No one can take this right from them. Naturally, Communists will co-ordinate their work in the syndicalist organisations with the work of those syndicalists who have learnt something from the war and the revolution.
18 Communists in the trade-union movement must take the initiative in forming a bloc with the revolutionary workers of other tendencies. Those closest to the Communists in the union movement are the Communist-syndicalists who accept the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and in debate with other anarcho-syndicalists defend the need to establish a workers’ government. Joint action presupposes the existence of a certain degree of organisation among the Communists. When Communists are scattered and act in isolation they cannot represent a serious force and are deprived of the opportunity to coordinate their work with that of others.
19 Communists must firmly and consistently defend their Communist principles and oppose the anarchists’ anti-Communist theories, which do great harm to the working class by insisting on the independence of the trade-union movement and the separation of economics and politics. Within the trade unions that support these theories, Communists must endeavour to co-ordinate their own work against reformism and anarcho-syndicalist verbalism with the work of all those revolutionary elements who are for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
20 In countries where the revolutionary-syndicalist unions are reasonably significant (France) and where, for a whole series of historical reasons, a definite distrust with regard to political parties has been created and still exists among certain circles of revolutionary workers, the local Communists may reach an agreement with the syndicalists to establish methods of joint work and practical co-operation in both defence and attack. Obviously local conditions and the state of the workers’ movement will determine whether this is carried out.
VI. The Struggle for Trade-Union Unity
21 Despite the fierce anti-Communist witch-hunts being stirred up everywhere by the reformists, we must continue to fight for the slogan of the Communist International – against the splitting of the trade unions – with the same militancy with which we have fought for it up till now. The reformists are trying to use expulsions to provoke a split. Their aim in systematically driving the best elements out of the unions is to make the Communists lose their patience and nerve, so that instead of completing their carefully thought-out plan to win the trade unions from within the Communists will leave the unions and come out in favour of a split. The reformists, however, will not succeed.
22 The splitting of the trade unions, especially in present conditions, is a major threat to the entire workers’ movement. The split would set the working class back many years, for the bourgeoisie would have the opportunity to destroy even the most elementary gains of the proletariat unopposed. There is no question but that Communists must, using all the means and all the forces at the disposal of their organisations, prevent a split in the trade unions and oppose these criminal attempts to split the united trade-union movement.
23 In countries which have two parallel trade-union organisations (Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, etc.), Communists must begin a systematic fight for their unification. Since the aim is to unite the trade-union organisations that have already split, it would be self-defeating to tear individual Communists and workers away from the reformist unions and bring them into their own revolutionary unions. Every reformist union should have its share of ferment, its Communist yeast. Greater Communist activity in both organisations is the basic prerequisite for restoring the unity that has been lost.
24 The preservation as well as the restoration of trade-union unity is possible only if the Communists have a practical action programme that can be applied in each individual country and in every branch of production. By using the practical experience of everyday struggle, the disparate elements of the workers’ movement can be gathered together and united and, where the trade unions are split, the necessary preconditions for organisational unification can be created. Every Communist must remember that a split in the trade-union movement is not only a distinct threat to the gains of the working class but also an immense danger to the social revolution. The reformists’ efforts to split the trade unions must be crushed at the outset, but this can be achieved only by serious organisational and political work among the working masses.
VII. The Fight Against the Expulsion of Communists
25 The expulsion of Communists has one aim: to confuse the revolutionary movement by separating the working masses from their leaders. This is why Communists can on no account restrict themselves to the forms and methods of struggle they have used up to now. An extremely critical moment for the international trade-union movement has arrived. The reformists have greatly stepped up their pressure for a split. The Communists’ desire to preserve trade-union unity has been repeatedly confirmed by a whole series of facts. We must continue to prove in practice how highly we value the unity of the trade-union movement.
26 The more obvious the splitting tactics of our opponents become, the more sharply must we emphasise the need for unity in the trade-union movement. Every factory and enterprise, every workers’ meeting must speak out in protest against the tactics of the Amsterdam reformists. The danger of a split in the trade-union movement must be forcefully raised; this should be done not just when a split is imminent, but when it becomes clear that a split is being prepared. The attempts to remove Communists from the trade unions must be put before the whole trade-union movement for discussion. The Communists are strong enough not to allow themselves to be stifled without a murmur. The working class must know who is for a split and who is for unity.
If Communists have been elected to leading posts by local organisations, they must not only protest against such a violation of their electors’ will, but must also propose specific measures of an organisational character.
27 It is most important that the Communist Party should not allow expelled members to become scattered and isolated. They must be organised into special “unions of the expelled”, a really concrete programme for their activity must be worked out, and the main thrust of all their political work must be their re-admission to the trade unions.
28 The fight against expulsions is essentially a fight for trade-union unity, and in this fight any method that advances the restoration of lost unity is a good one. Members who have been expelled should remain in contact with the opposition still within the unions and with the independent revolutionary trade unions in their particular country. Expelled groups should immediately establish close contact with the revolutionary organisations in their own countries in order to organise a joint fight against the expulsions and to co-ordinate their actions in the struggle against capital.
29 Practical measures of struggle must be extended and varied to suit the particular local conditions and circumstances. It is important that Communist groups take a clearly defined agitational position, declaring their readiness to fight, and that they do all they can to combat the danger of expulsions from the trade unions, a danger that has considerably increased as a result of the rapprochement of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals. There are no universal and definitive methods or means of fighting’ against expulsions. In this context all Communist Parties have the opportunity to use the methods they consider most effective for achieving the given end, i.e., the winning of the trade unions and the restoration of trade-union unity.
30 Communists must wage a militant fight against the exclusion of revolutionary unions from the international trade-union organisations. Communist Parties cannot and must not remain passive observers of the systematic expulsion of revolutionary unions on the sole grounds that these unions are revolutionary. The international propaganda committees set up in the different industries by the Red International of Labour Unions must be given the most active support by the Communist Parties if they are to concentrate all the available revolutionary forces and establish united international trade-union organisations. The whole campaign must be conducted under the slogan of the adherence of all unions, whatever their basic tendency and political complexion, to one international trade-union federation.
IX. Conclusion
31 The Fourth Congress of the Communist International, in steadily pursuing its aim of winning the trade unions whilst opposing the reformists’ splitting tactics, solemnly declares: wherever the Amsterdam supporters do not resort to expulsions, wherever they give Communists the opportunity to wage an ideological fight for their principles within the trade unions, Communists will struggle in a disciplined manner in the ranks of a united organisation, and will be in the front line in all conflicts and clashes with the bourgeoisie.
32 The Fourth Congress of the Communist International makes it the duty of every Communist Party to do its utmost to prevent a split in the trade unions; it makes it their duty to do everything possible to restore the unity of the trade-union movement in countries where it has been destroyed, and to persuade trade unions to adhere to the Red International of Labour Unions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
********
Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Theses on Communist Work in the Trade Unions
(Date of adoption unknown)
1. The State of the Trade-Union Movement
1 Over the last two years, which have seen a world-wide capitalist offensive, the trade-union movement everywhere has lost considerable strength. In all but a few countries (Germany and Austria) the trade unions have declined; they have lost the mass of their members. This decline in membership can be explained on the one hand by the powerful bourgeois offensive, and on the other hand by the inability of the reformist unions to put up any serious opposition to the capitalist attack and to defend the basic interests of the workers.
2 The capitalist offensive and the continuation of class collaboration have both added to working-class disillusionment. In the eyes of many workers the union organisations have lost their credibility because they failed to resist the capitalist offensive and were unable or even unwilling to maintain the positions already won. Events have clearly highlighted the barrenness of reformism.
3 The international trade-union movement is characterised by a lack of inner cohesion, by the steady rate at which quite important sections of the proletariat are leaving the unions, and by the policy, stubbornly held to by the reformists, of class collaboration “with the aim of using capital in the interests of labour”. In reality, however, capital has always used the reformist organisations for its own ends by involving and implicating them in the reduction of the living standards of the working masses.
The recent period has seen the existence of extremely close links between the bourgeois governments and the reformist leaders and an even greater subordination of the interests of the working masses to the interests of the ruling classes.
II. The Amsterdam International’s Attack on the Revolutionary Trade Unions
4 The reformist leaders, yielding to bourgeois pressure all along the line, have also begun an attack on the revolutionary workers. Since there has been serious concern among the working masses over the reluctance of the trade unions to organise opposition to the capitalist offensive, the reformist leaders are trying to rid the workers’ organisations of revolutionary ideas by launching an organised offensive against the revolutionary trade-union movement. Their aim is to use all the means at their disposal to demoralise and disrupt the revolutionary minority and so strengthen the shaken position of the bourgeoisie.
5 To maintain their power in the future, the leaders of the Amsterdam International have even gone so far as to expel not just separate groups or individuals, but entire organisations. They have firmly decided to stay always in the majority, to keep the organisation in their own hands and to resist in particular any threat from the revolutionary elements adhering to the Comintern or the Profintern. In this way they hope at least to keep control of the apparatus and all the financial resources of the workers’ organisations. The leaders of the French General Confederation of Labour have acted in this way. Heading in the same direction are the reformist leaders in Czechoslovakia, and following them the leaders of the All-German Federation of Trade Unions. The interests of the bourgeoisie require a split in the trade-union movement.
6 Simultaneously with the reformists’ attack on the revolutionary workers in each country, a similar offensive was launched at the international level; the various international trade unions adhering to the Amsterdam International systematically expelled the revolutionary unions and refused to readmit them. So, for example, the world congresses of the miners, textile workers, white-collar workers, agricultural workers, woodworkers, building workers and communications workers have refused to admit the Russian and several other trade unions simply because they belong to the Profintern.
7 This reformist campaign against the revolutionary trade unions is an exact reflection of the international capitalist campaign against the working class, and pursues the same aims: the strengthening of capitalism at the expense of the working masses, the consolidation of reformism in the trade unions and the weakening of the militant elements by expelling them and depriving them of any possibility of seizing the means of production and, at the same time, power.
III. Anarchism and Communism
8 At the same time as the Amsterdam reformists were conducting their offensive against the Communist trade-union movement, the anarchists began a similar ‘offensive’ against the Communist International, the Communist Parties and the Communist cells in the unions. Some anarcho-syndicalist organisations came out openly against the Communist International and the Russian revolution, despite their solemn adherence to the Communist International in 1920 and their declarations of full support for the Russian proletariat and the October revolution. A similar process can be observed in the Italian syndicalist union, among the German localists and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, and likewise in the various syndicalist groups in France, Holland and Sweden.
9 Under the slogan of the independence of the trade unions from the Communist. Parties, many syndicalist organisations (National Workers’ Proletariat* in Holland, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Italian syndicalist union, etc.) have begun to exclude supporters of the Red International of Labour Unions, particularly when they are Communists. The slogan of trade-union independence has turned into an anti-Communist, i.e., a counter-revolutionary, slogan. Furthermore, it echoes the slogan used by the reformists, who also stress independence in their politics, though their dependence on the national and international bourgeoisie is no secret.
10 The attacks by the anarchists on the Communist International, the Profintern and the Russian revolution have led to confusion and division in their own ranks. The most advanced workers have protested against such ideas. Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have split into a number of tendencies and groups, which have been waging a bitter fight amongst themselves for and against the Profintern, for and against the dictatorship of the proletariat.
IV. Neutrality and Independence
11 The influence of the bourgeoisie on the proletariat is reflected in the theory of the neutrality of the trade-union movement. The implication of this theory is that the trade unions should restrict themselves to purely craft and economic matters, and should not try to put forward any general class aims. Neutrality has always been a bourgeois theory, and revolutionary Marxism has resolutely opposed it. Trade unions which have no general class aims, i.e., aims directed at the overthrow of the capitalist system, are, despite their proletarian composition, the best defenders of the bourgeois order and bourgeois society.
12 From time immemorial the theory of neutrality has been based on the assertion that the trade unions must concern themselves only with economic questions and in no circumstances interfere in politics. The bourgeoisie has always endeavoured to separate politics and economics, for it is well aware that no serious danger will threaten its rule while it manages to keep the working class within the narrow confines of pure trade unionism.
13 The separation of politics and economics is also upheld by the Fanarchist elements who are working in the trade unions and trying to divert the workers’ movement from any involvement in political questions on the grounds that all politics is harmful to the working class. This theory, in essence purely bourgeois, is presented as a defence of independence; this independence is then taken to imply a state of hostility between the trade unions and the proletarian Communist Parties and a declaration of war on the Communist workers’ movement in the name of that same glorious independence and autonomy.
14 Hostility to politics tends to weaken the militancy of the working masses and leads to a fight against Communist ideas, the embodiment of Communist class consciousness among the workers. Independence in its purely anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist forms is an anti-Communist theory. As such, it must be most resolutely opposed, or it will lead, at best, to isolation from Communist ideas and the polarisation of the trade unions and the Communist Parties and, at worst, to a bitter fight by the union organisations against the Communist Parties, Communism and social revolution.
15 The theory of independence, as it is propagated by the French, Italian and Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, is in effect the battle-cry of anarchism in its fight against Communism. Communists must initiate a determined battle of ideas within the trade-union movement to counter any attempt to spread anarchist theories under the flag of independence and bring about a split in the united workers’ movement, especially if the attempt is being made in a way that would hamper and delay the victory of the working class.
V. Syndicalism and Communism
16 The anarcho-syndicalists confuse trade unions (syndicates) with syndicalism and declare their anarcho-syndicalist party to be the only genuinely revolutionary organisation capable of achieving the overall aims of the proletariat. A trade union is nothing more nor less than a non-partisan mass organisation uniting workers of all political tendencies, while syndicalism is simply one of the political tendencies existing at the base of these organisations. Although syndicalism, in comparison with the world-outlook of trade-unionism, [meant in the sense of an exclusive concern with bread-and-butter issues of wages and conditions] is a major step forward, many of its characteristics and tendencies are very dangerous and must be vigorously argued against.
17 Communists cannot and must not, for the sake of abstract anarcho-syndicalist principles, give up their right to organise cells and groups among the rank and file of any trade union, regardless of its tendency. No one can take this right from them. Naturally, Communists will co-ordinate their work in the syndicalist organisations with the work of those syndicalists who have learnt something from the war and the revolution.
18 Communists in the trade-union movement must take the initiative in forming a bloc with the revolutionary workers of other tendencies. Those closest to the Communists in the union movement are the Communist-syndicalists who accept the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and in debate with other anarcho-syndicalists defend the need to establish a workers’ government. Joint action presupposes the existence of a certain degree of organisation among the Communists. When Communists are scattered and act in isolation they cannot represent a serious force and are deprived of the opportunity to coordinate their work with that of others.
19 Communists must firmly and consistently defend their Communist principles and oppose the anarchists’ anti-Communist theories, which do great harm to the working class by insisting on the independence of the trade-union movement and the separation of economics and politics. Within the trade unions that support these theories, Communists must endeavour to co-ordinate their own work against reformism and anarcho-syndicalist verbalism with the work of all those revolutionary elements who are for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
20 In countries where the revolutionary-syndicalist unions are reasonably significant (France) and where, for a whole series of historical reasons, a definite distrust with regard to political parties has been created and still exists among certain circles of revolutionary workers, the local Communists may reach an agreement with the syndicalists to establish methods of joint work and practical co-operation in both defence and attack. Obviously local conditions and the state of the workers’ movement will determine whether this is carried out.
VI. The Struggle for Trade-Union Unity
21 Despite the fierce anti-Communist witch-hunts being stirred up everywhere by the reformists, we must continue to fight for the slogan of the Communist International – against the splitting of the trade unions – with the same militancy with which we have fought for it up till now. The reformists are trying to use expulsions to provoke a split. Their aim in systematically driving the best elements out of the unions is to make the Communists lose their patience and nerve, so that instead of completing their carefully thought-out plan to win the trade unions from within the Communists will leave the unions and come out in favour of a split. The reformists, however, will not succeed.
22 The splitting of the trade unions, especially in present conditions, is a major threat to the entire workers’ movement. The split would set the working class back many years, for the bourgeoisie would have the opportunity to destroy even the most elementary gains of the proletariat unopposed. There is no question but that Communists must, using all the means and all the forces at the disposal of their organisations, prevent a split in the trade unions and oppose these criminal attempts to split the united trade-union movement.
23 In countries which have two parallel trade-union organisations (Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, etc.), Communists must begin a systematic fight for their unification. Since the aim is to unite the trade-union organisations that have already split, it would be self-defeating to tear individual Communists and workers away from the reformist unions and bring them into their own revolutionary unions. Every reformist union should have its share of ferment, its Communist yeast. Greater Communist activity in both organisations is the basic prerequisite for restoring the unity that has been lost.
24 The preservation as well as the restoration of trade-union unity is possible only if the Communists have a practical action programme that can be applied in each individual country and in every branch of production. By using the practical experience of everyday struggle, the disparate elements of the workers’ movement can be gathered together and united and, where the trade unions are split, the necessary preconditions for organisational unification can be created. Every Communist must remember that a split in the trade-union movement is not only a distinct threat to the gains of the working class but also an immense danger to the social revolution. The reformists’ efforts to split the trade unions must be crushed at the outset, but this can be achieved only by serious organisational and political work among the working masses.
VII. The Fight Against the Expulsion of Communists
25 The expulsion of Communists has one aim: to confuse the revolutionary movement by separating the working masses from their leaders. This is why Communists can on no account restrict themselves to the forms and methods of struggle they have used up to now. An extremely critical moment for the international trade-union movement has arrived. The reformists have greatly stepped up their pressure for a split. The Communists’ desire to preserve trade-union unity has been repeatedly confirmed by a whole series of facts. We must continue to prove in practice how highly we value the unity of the trade-union movement.
26 The more obvious the splitting tactics of our opponents become, the more sharply must we emphasise the need for unity in the trade-union movement. Every factory and enterprise, every workers’ meeting must speak out in protest against the tactics of the Amsterdam reformists. The danger of a split in the trade-union movement must be forcefully raised; this should be done not just when a split is imminent, but when it becomes clear that a split is being prepared. The attempts to remove Communists from the trade unions must be put before the whole trade-union movement for discussion. The Communists are strong enough not to allow themselves to be stifled without a murmur. The working class must know who is for a split and who is for unity.
If Communists have been elected to leading posts by local organisations, they must not only protest against such a violation of their electors’ will, but must also propose specific measures of an organisational character.
27 It is most important that the Communist Party should not allow expelled members to become scattered and isolated. They must be organised into special “unions of the expelled”, a really concrete programme for their activity must be worked out, and the main thrust of all their political work must be their re-admission to the trade unions.
28 The fight against expulsions is essentially a fight for trade-union unity, and in this fight any method that advances the restoration of lost unity is a good one. Members who have been expelled should remain in contact with the opposition still within the unions and with the independent revolutionary trade unions in their particular country. Expelled groups should immediately establish close contact with the revolutionary organisations in their own countries in order to organise a joint fight against the expulsions and to co-ordinate their actions in the struggle against capital.
29 Practical measures of struggle must be extended and varied to suit the particular local conditions and circumstances. It is important that Communist groups take a clearly defined agitational position, declaring their readiness to fight, and that they do all they can to combat the danger of expulsions from the trade unions, a danger that has considerably increased as a result of the rapprochement of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals. There are no universal and definitive methods or means of fighting’ against expulsions. In this context all Communist Parties have the opportunity to use the methods they consider most effective for achieving the given end, i.e., the winning of the trade unions and the restoration of trade-union unity.
30 Communists must wage a militant fight against the exclusion of revolutionary unions from the international trade-union organisations. Communist Parties cannot and must not remain passive observers of the systematic expulsion of revolutionary unions on the sole grounds that these unions are revolutionary. The international propaganda committees set up in the different industries by the Red International of Labour Unions must be given the most active support by the Communist Parties if they are to concentrate all the available revolutionary forces and establish united international trade-union organisations. The whole campaign must be conducted under the slogan of the adherence of all unions, whatever their basic tendency and political complexion, to one international trade-union federation.
IX. Conclusion
31 The Fourth Congress of the Communist International, in steadily pursuing its aim of winning the trade unions whilst opposing the reformists’ splitting tactics, solemnly declares: wherever the Amsterdam supporters do not resort to expulsions, wherever they give Communists the opportunity to wage an ideological fight for their principles within the trade unions, Communists will struggle in a disciplined manner in the ranks of a united organisation, and will be in the front line in all conflicts and clashes with the bourgeoisie.
32 The Fourth Congress of the Communist International makes it the duty of every Communist Party to do its utmost to prevent a split in the trade unions; it makes it their duty to do everything possible to restore the unity of the trade-union movement in countries where it has been destroyed, and to persuade trade unions to adhere to the Red International of Labour Unions.
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From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)-Communist Party Activity in the Sphere of Education
Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
******
Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Communist Party Activity in the Sphere of Education
5 December 1922
I
1 Educational work in the ideas of Marxism is an essential task for all Communist Parties. The aim of such educational work is to improve and strengthen the educational activity of Party members and organisers. The organisers must acquire, besides a general grounding in the Marxist world-outlook, the knowledge necessary for their special sphere of work.
As the work of Communist education is an integral part of the activity of the Party as a whole, it must be placed entirely under the central control of the Party. In countries where the education of revolutionary workers has until now been largely in the hands of special organisations outside the Communist Parties, systematic work should be done by the Communists inside these organisations to establish Party control.
An “education secretariat” attached to the Central Committee of each Communist Party should be set up to supervise the educational activity of the Party as a whole. All Party members who work in proletarian educational organisations not under Party control (workers’ educational associations, proletarian universities, proletkult, labour colleges, etc.) must come under the control of Party organs and follow their directives.
To extend the Communist educational activity of the Party as opportunities and circumstances permit, central and local Party schools, day and evening classes should be set up, teachers and lecturers invited for the various groups, libraries organised, etc.
The Party must give material and moral support to the Communist youth organisation in its independent work in the sphere of education. The Communist youth organisation must have the right to attend any meetings arranged by the Party on the question of educational work.
Detailed instructions for this work should be formulated by the educational section attached to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
An international educational section is being established as part of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Its main task is to develop and clarify further the problem of Communist educational work and to co-ordinate the work of the proletarian educational organisations outside the Party. This includes the accumulation and exchange of international experience, the introduction of new methods of activity in different countries, the compiling and publishing of handbooks, text-books and other material, and the handling of any special problems in the sphere of education that may arise in particular countries. The international education section should also be responsible for developing and preparing material on the policies of the Communist Parties and the Communist International regarding schools and education in general.
The Socialist Academy in Russia is organising international preparatory courses and other similar events for comrades from the various sections of the Communist International, with the aim of developing an understanding of Marxism and providing a practical Communist education.
II Agitational Work
1 Every Party member must conduct agitation among non-Party workers. Agitation can take place whenever and wherever there are workers present: in the factories and workshops, or generally anywhere where work is going on; in the trade unions; at public meetings; in the workers’ clubs and societies, including sports clubs, choirs, tenants’ associations, co-operatives, etc.; in people’s palaces, in workers’ restaurants, on railway journeys, in the villages, and so on. Probably the most effective form of agitation is the visiting of individual homes.
2 The starting-point of such agitational work should always be related to the concrete needs and living conditions of the workers, with the aim of leading the workers on towards organised class struggle. There must be no attempts to force on those listening Communist principles and demands that are incomprehensible to them; the agitator must rouse people to fight for the basic demands of the proletariat, to fight against the capitalists and against all the wrongs of the bourgeois system.
3 Communists must actively participate in the revolutionary workers’ movement opposing the capitalists and the economic system of the bourgeois class. Their priority is to fight for the interests of the workers, disregarding personal gain and setting their comrades an example of how to agitate.
4 The Party’s Executive Committee should issue local groups with practical instructions on the regular agitational work that all Party members should conduct. It must also issue special instructions for agitational work in connection with non-routine campaigns, such as election campaigns, the campaign against high prices and for tax cuts, the movements for industrial soviets and for the unemployed, and other forms of Party activity. Copies of any instructions given should be sent to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
5 All Party members have the right to ask the appropriate people in their organisations to provide sufficiently exact and concrete information on how agitational work should be conducted. It is particularly important to give such guidelines to, and to observe how they are followed by, the, group leaders of the Communist cells, workers’ groups, “groups of ten” and the fractions. Where there are no group leaders the local groups should elect special agitators to supervise this work.
6 During the winter a report on all Party members must be made and sent to their Party organisations:
i) Does the Party member carry out agitational work among non-Party workers
a. regularly?
b. occasionally?
c. not at all?
ii) Does the Party member carry out any other Party work
a. regularly?
b. from time to time?
c. not at all?
After consulting with the Executive Committee of the Communist International, the Party Executive Committee must send all the local groups a circular which explains how clear answers can be obtained to the above-mentioned questions.
The district councils and local groups must see that these reports are completed quickly. The Party Executive Committee will send the results to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
III Informing the Membership of the Major Decisions of the Parties and of the Communist International
1 All members of the Communist International must be informed not only of the major decisions taken by their own Parties but also of the major decisions taken by the Communist International.
2 During the winter all the sections and groups must take steps to see that all Party members are acquainted with at least the programme of their own Party, the twenty-one conditions for joining the Communist International, and any decisions of the Communist International that particularly concern their own Party. Party members should be tested to ensure they have a basic knowledge of all these questions.
3 The Party organisers with responsibilities must be aware of every major tactical and organisational decision taken by the Congress; their knowledge should be tested. This is also desirable, though not compulsory, for ordinary Party members.
4 The Executive Committee of each national section must send all the local groups instructions for putting these decisions into practice. In the spring the Party Executive Committee must present the Executive Committee of the Communist International with a report on Party activity in this area.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
******
Fourth Congress of the Communist International
Communist Party Activity in the Sphere of Education
5 December 1922
I
1 Educational work in the ideas of Marxism is an essential task for all Communist Parties. The aim of such educational work is to improve and strengthen the educational activity of Party members and organisers. The organisers must acquire, besides a general grounding in the Marxist world-outlook, the knowledge necessary for their special sphere of work.
As the work of Communist education is an integral part of the activity of the Party as a whole, it must be placed entirely under the central control of the Party. In countries where the education of revolutionary workers has until now been largely in the hands of special organisations outside the Communist Parties, systematic work should be done by the Communists inside these organisations to establish Party control.
An “education secretariat” attached to the Central Committee of each Communist Party should be set up to supervise the educational activity of the Party as a whole. All Party members who work in proletarian educational organisations not under Party control (workers’ educational associations, proletarian universities, proletkult, labour colleges, etc.) must come under the control of Party organs and follow their directives.
To extend the Communist educational activity of the Party as opportunities and circumstances permit, central and local Party schools, day and evening classes should be set up, teachers and lecturers invited for the various groups, libraries organised, etc.
The Party must give material and moral support to the Communist youth organisation in its independent work in the sphere of education. The Communist youth organisation must have the right to attend any meetings arranged by the Party on the question of educational work.
Detailed instructions for this work should be formulated by the educational section attached to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
An international educational section is being established as part of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Its main task is to develop and clarify further the problem of Communist educational work and to co-ordinate the work of the proletarian educational organisations outside the Party. This includes the accumulation and exchange of international experience, the introduction of new methods of activity in different countries, the compiling and publishing of handbooks, text-books and other material, and the handling of any special problems in the sphere of education that may arise in particular countries. The international education section should also be responsible for developing and preparing material on the policies of the Communist Parties and the Communist International regarding schools and education in general.
The Socialist Academy in Russia is organising international preparatory courses and other similar events for comrades from the various sections of the Communist International, with the aim of developing an understanding of Marxism and providing a practical Communist education.
II Agitational Work
1 Every Party member must conduct agitation among non-Party workers. Agitation can take place whenever and wherever there are workers present: in the factories and workshops, or generally anywhere where work is going on; in the trade unions; at public meetings; in the workers’ clubs and societies, including sports clubs, choirs, tenants’ associations, co-operatives, etc.; in people’s palaces, in workers’ restaurants, on railway journeys, in the villages, and so on. Probably the most effective form of agitation is the visiting of individual homes.
2 The starting-point of such agitational work should always be related to the concrete needs and living conditions of the workers, with the aim of leading the workers on towards organised class struggle. There must be no attempts to force on those listening Communist principles and demands that are incomprehensible to them; the agitator must rouse people to fight for the basic demands of the proletariat, to fight against the capitalists and against all the wrongs of the bourgeois system.
3 Communists must actively participate in the revolutionary workers’ movement opposing the capitalists and the economic system of the bourgeois class. Their priority is to fight for the interests of the workers, disregarding personal gain and setting their comrades an example of how to agitate.
4 The Party’s Executive Committee should issue local groups with practical instructions on the regular agitational work that all Party members should conduct. It must also issue special instructions for agitational work in connection with non-routine campaigns, such as election campaigns, the campaign against high prices and for tax cuts, the movements for industrial soviets and for the unemployed, and other forms of Party activity. Copies of any instructions given should be sent to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
5 All Party members have the right to ask the appropriate people in their organisations to provide sufficiently exact and concrete information on how agitational work should be conducted. It is particularly important to give such guidelines to, and to observe how they are followed by, the, group leaders of the Communist cells, workers’ groups, “groups of ten” and the fractions. Where there are no group leaders the local groups should elect special agitators to supervise this work.
6 During the winter a report on all Party members must be made and sent to their Party organisations:
i) Does the Party member carry out agitational work among non-Party workers
a. regularly?
b. occasionally?
c. not at all?
ii) Does the Party member carry out any other Party work
a. regularly?
b. from time to time?
c. not at all?
After consulting with the Executive Committee of the Communist International, the Party Executive Committee must send all the local groups a circular which explains how clear answers can be obtained to the above-mentioned questions.
The district councils and local groups must see that these reports are completed quickly. The Party Executive Committee will send the results to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
III Informing the Membership of the Major Decisions of the Parties and of the Communist International
1 All members of the Communist International must be informed not only of the major decisions taken by their own Parties but also of the major decisions taken by the Communist International.
2 During the winter all the sections and groups must take steps to see that all Party members are acquainted with at least the programme of their own Party, the twenty-one conditions for joining the Communist International, and any decisions of the Communist International that particularly concern their own Party. Party members should be tested to ensure they have a basic knowledge of all these questions.
3 The Party organisers with responsibilities must be aware of every major tactical and organisational decision taken by the Congress; their knowledge should be tested. This is also desirable, though not compulsory, for ordinary Party members.
4 The Executive Committee of each national section must send all the local groups instructions for putting these decisions into practice. In the spring the Party Executive Committee must present the Executive Committee of the Communist International with a report on Party activity in this area.
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