Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-“Attractive Labour”
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Attractive Labour”
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends – he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master’s and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor fulfill the following seven conditions:
1. That every laborer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages.
2. That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
3. That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
4. That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
5. That the workshops and husbandry offer the laborer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.
6. That the division of labor be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
7. That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be in full enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism, whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable, and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day (besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district, behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Attractive Labour”
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends – he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master’s and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor fulfill the following seven conditions:
1. That every laborer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages.
2. That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
3. That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
4. That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
5. That the workshops and husbandry offer the laborer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.
6. That the division of labor be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
7. That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be in full enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism, whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable, and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day (besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district, behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.
On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side
Markin comment:
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
A Criticism of American Affairs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 226;
Written: in early August, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, August 9, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The crisis, which at the moment reigns in the United States has been brought about by two causes: military and political.
Had the last campaign been conducted according to a single strategic plan, the main army of the West was then bound, as previously explained in these columns, to exploit its successes in Kentucky and Tennessee to make its way through north Alabama to Georgia and to seize the railway junctions there at Decatur, Milledgeville, etc. The link between the Eastern and Western armies of the secessionists would thereby have been broken and their mutual support rendered impossible. Instead of this, the Kentucky army marched south down the Mississippi in the direction of New Orleans and its victory near Memphis had no other result than to dispatch the greater part of Beauregard’s troops to Richmond, so that the Confederates, with a superior army in a superior position, here now suddenly confronted McClellan, who had not exploited the defeat of the enemy’s troops at Yorktown and Williamsburg and, moreover, had from the first split up his own forces. McClellan’s generalship, already described
by us previously, was in itself sufficient to ensure the ruin of the biggest and best disciplined army. Finally, War Secretary Stanton committed an unpardonable error. To make an impression abroad, he suspended recruiting after the conquest of Tennessee and so condemned the army to be constantly weakened, just when it was most in need of reinforcements for a rapid, decisive offensive. Despite the strategic blunders and despite McClellan’s generalship, with a steady influx of recruits the war, if not decided, had hitherto been rapidly nearing a victorious end. Stanton’s step was all the more disastrous since the South had at that precise moment enlisted every man from 18 to 35 years old and therefore staked everything on a single card. It is those men, who have been trained in the meantime, that give the Confederates the upper hand almost everywhere and secure them the initiative. They held Halleck fast, dislodged Curtis from Arkansas, beat McClellan, and under Stonewall Jackson gave the signal for the guerilla raids that are now already pushing forward as far as the Ohio.
In part, the military causes of the crisis are connected with the political ones. It was the influence of the Democratic Party that elevated an incompetent like McClellan to the position of Commander-in-Chief of all the military forces of the North, because he had been a supporter of Breckinridge. It is anxious regard for the wishes, advantages and interests of the spokesmen of the border slave states that has so far broken off the Civil War’s point of principle and deprived it of its soul, so to speak. The “loyal” slaveholders of these border states saw to it that the fugitive slave laws dictated by the South ... were maintained and the sympathies of the Negroes for the North forcibly suppressed, that no general could venture to put a company of Negroes in the field and that slavery was finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South -Into its invulnerable horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-bodied men in the South can be put into the field!
At the present moment, when secession’s stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states are making even greater claims. However, Lincoln’s appeal to them, in which he threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, shows that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Abolition of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but he knows that he cannot resist it for long. Hence his urgent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under advantageous contractual conditions. He knows that only the continuance of slavery in the border states has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War — the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.
Meanwhile, during its first session Congress, now adjourned, decreed a series of important measures that we shall briefly summarise here.
Apart from its financial legislation, it passed the Homestead Bill, which the Northern masses had long striven for in vain; in accordance with this Bill, part of the state lands is given gratis to the colonists, whether indigenous or new-comers, for cultivation. It abolished slavery in Columbia and the national capital, with monetary compensation for the former slaveholders. Slavery was declared “forever impossible” in all the Territories of the United States. The Act, under which the new State of West Virginia is admitted into the Union, prescribes abolition of slavery by stages and declares that all Negro children born after July 4, 1863, are born free. The conditions of this emancipation by stages are on the whole borrowed from the law that was enacted 70 years ago in Pennsylvania for the same purpose . By a fourth Act all the slaves of rebels are to be emancipated, as soon as they fall into the hands of the republican army. Another law, which is now being put into effect for the first time, provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and put into the field against the South. The independence of the Negro republics of Liberia and Haiti has been recognised and, finally, a treaty on the abolition of the slave trade has been concluded with Britain.
Thus, no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
A Criticism of American Affairs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 226;
Written: in early August, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, August 9, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The crisis, which at the moment reigns in the United States has been brought about by two causes: military and political.
Had the last campaign been conducted according to a single strategic plan, the main army of the West was then bound, as previously explained in these columns, to exploit its successes in Kentucky and Tennessee to make its way through north Alabama to Georgia and to seize the railway junctions there at Decatur, Milledgeville, etc. The link between the Eastern and Western armies of the secessionists would thereby have been broken and their mutual support rendered impossible. Instead of this, the Kentucky army marched south down the Mississippi in the direction of New Orleans and its victory near Memphis had no other result than to dispatch the greater part of Beauregard’s troops to Richmond, so that the Confederates, with a superior army in a superior position, here now suddenly confronted McClellan, who had not exploited the defeat of the enemy’s troops at Yorktown and Williamsburg and, moreover, had from the first split up his own forces. McClellan’s generalship, already described
by us previously, was in itself sufficient to ensure the ruin of the biggest and best disciplined army. Finally, War Secretary Stanton committed an unpardonable error. To make an impression abroad, he suspended recruiting after the conquest of Tennessee and so condemned the army to be constantly weakened, just when it was most in need of reinforcements for a rapid, decisive offensive. Despite the strategic blunders and despite McClellan’s generalship, with a steady influx of recruits the war, if not decided, had hitherto been rapidly nearing a victorious end. Stanton’s step was all the more disastrous since the South had at that precise moment enlisted every man from 18 to 35 years old and therefore staked everything on a single card. It is those men, who have been trained in the meantime, that give the Confederates the upper hand almost everywhere and secure them the initiative. They held Halleck fast, dislodged Curtis from Arkansas, beat McClellan, and under Stonewall Jackson gave the signal for the guerilla raids that are now already pushing forward as far as the Ohio.
In part, the military causes of the crisis are connected with the political ones. It was the influence of the Democratic Party that elevated an incompetent like McClellan to the position of Commander-in-Chief of all the military forces of the North, because he had been a supporter of Breckinridge. It is anxious regard for the wishes, advantages and interests of the spokesmen of the border slave states that has so far broken off the Civil War’s point of principle and deprived it of its soul, so to speak. The “loyal” slaveholders of these border states saw to it that the fugitive slave laws dictated by the South ... were maintained and the sympathies of the Negroes for the North forcibly suppressed, that no general could venture to put a company of Negroes in the field and that slavery was finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South -Into its invulnerable horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-bodied men in the South can be put into the field!
At the present moment, when secession’s stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states are making even greater claims. However, Lincoln’s appeal to them, in which he threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, shows that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Abolition of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but he knows that he cannot resist it for long. Hence his urgent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under advantageous contractual conditions. He knows that only the continuance of slavery in the border states has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War — the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.
Meanwhile, during its first session Congress, now adjourned, decreed a series of important measures that we shall briefly summarise here.
Apart from its financial legislation, it passed the Homestead Bill, which the Northern masses had long striven for in vain; in accordance with this Bill, part of the state lands is given gratis to the colonists, whether indigenous or new-comers, for cultivation. It abolished slavery in Columbia and the national capital, with monetary compensation for the former slaveholders. Slavery was declared “forever impossible” in all the Territories of the United States. The Act, under which the new State of West Virginia is admitted into the Union, prescribes abolition of slavery by stages and declares that all Negro children born after July 4, 1863, are born free. The conditions of this emancipation by stages are on the whole borrowed from the law that was enacted 70 years ago in Pennsylvania for the same purpose . By a fourth Act all the slaves of rebels are to be emancipated, as soon as they fall into the hands of the republican army. Another law, which is now being put into effect for the first time, provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and put into the field against the South. The independence of the Negro republics of Liberia and Haiti has been recognised and, finally, a treaty on the abolition of the slave trade has been concluded with Britain.
Thus, no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947, Zed, London 1990, pp.230, £9.95
Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa 1930-1947, Zed, London 1990, pp.230, £9.95
Here is the book which will undoubtedly be the standard reference for its period for South African trade unions and their associated politics. The weaknesses of independent black and working class political organisations made the trade unions of pivotal importance during the whole of this time. Yet the trade unions themselves were often more glimpses of what might have been than anything else. The trade unions considered here were mostly short-lived, fissiparous, and individually all too frequently left hardly a trace. Despite all of this, however, this is a landmark book which is essential for any real understanding of the politics of South Africa then or subsequently.
The material is densely packed and immensely detailed, but justifiably so; perseverance will be rewarded. Nevertheless to the extent that this is not quite a full Making of the South African Working Class, some peripheral prior knowledge or reading would be useful. The period before 1930 is still sparsely covered and little known. A broad overview of the earliest phases of industrialisation would have been very helpful, as also would have been a review of the attempts of the early Communist Party and its forerunners to forge a unity in struggle between black and white workers. Decent alternative sources for either are few and hard to come by. Perhaps they need a volume in their own right, but in the meantime part of this essential supplement is available from Baruch Hirson himself in his articles in the journal Searchlight South Africa.
The 1928 Non-European Federation trade unions are dismissed in one sentence as “revolutionary unions ... in line with Profintern directives ... they paid little heed to the workers’ immediate needs” (p.40). But this hardly does justice to the attempts of the remarkable S.P. Bunting, the original and later shamefully treated CPSA leader, to circumvent the most damaging Moscow directives. Even despite this abrupt dismissal, however, it is still evident that the destruction of these unions by the CP purges of 1929-31 was a disaster. Genuine trade union militants of the highest calibre, Gana Makabeni to name but one, were permanently soured in their relations with white Socialists, and set off on courses of their own; many more were lost for ever. The scars and repercussions of this catastrophe far outweighed and outlived the tiny embryonic entities which had made up the Non-European Federation.
That the cudgels were taken up not just by those few black activists forceful and resourceful enough to go it alone, but also by the even tinier handful of South African Trotskyists should be of no surprise to the readers of this journal. Indeed it was the experience of the 1929-31 South African purges and their impact on the putative Non-European trade unions that was central to the creation of the Trotskyist nuclei in South Africa. One of these nuclei, a group in Johannesburg centred around ex-CPSA activists Ralph Lee and Murray Gow Purdy, made strenuous efforts to take up where the old Federation unions had left off. To struggle simultaneously against both the prevailing conditions in South Africa as a whole and the poison and suspicion engendered by the CPSA was, however, a superhuman task. This group, the only one of the small Trotskyist groups seriously to tackle the trade union question, effectively disintegrated as key members made their way to Britain in two waves in 1935 and 1937. Their story still remains to be told in full. There is some brief mention of them on page 41, but this misdates Lee’s departure to the earlier 1935 date. New material which could have given more flesh to these bones has come to light too late to have been included.
These are relatively small gripes blown up considerably, for what then follows in terms of the trade union developments of the later 1930s and 1940s is seminal. The later efforts of the lone Trotskyist Max Gordon, who inherited Lee’s Laundry Workers Union, can only command admiration. But the motives of the philanthropically funded Race Relations Institute in underwriting both his, and other non-confrontational trade union ventures will exercise minds. So too will all the ramifications of the gradually unfolded fact that the mine workers were amongst the last and least easily reached groups of workers to be unionised; secondary industry workers came first.
The rôle of the CPSA is one of the continual frustration of all that could have been. Individual members could play courageous and constructive rôles; but nothing any of these individuals could do could outweigh the original and continuing damage of the Stalinist subordination of the real interests of the workers to externally prescribed manoeuvrings. After the throttling of the earlier trade unions at birth, the courting of black nationalism was Stalinism’s next most enduring and problematical legacy. The destructive factionalism which this fostered in later township, anti-Pass Laws and trade union developments cannot help but be apparent from a study such as this.
Factionalism was probably inevitable, but the activities of the CPSA fostered it rather than combatted it. The resultant quagmire was never successfully coped with by the Trotskyists either; though their attempts to seek a correct relationship between black and white workers, black nationalism, and urban and rural struggle make fascinating and still relevant reading.
The finale of the book is with the great postwar struggles and revolts which culminated in the brutally suppressed and semi-insurrectionary 1946 miners’ strike. Again the Trotskyists were not absent. The Workers International League made highly significant efforts to promote both unity and a revolutionary perspective, and succeeded in establishing an important Progressive Trade Union Group. Baruch Hirson himself played an important rôle in these struggles alongside a now returned but rapidly fading Ralph Lee. Again, however, it is a glimpse of what might have been. The WIL had turned in on itself, suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of frustration and impotence, and had ceased to exist even before the last act in this saga, the 1946 miners’ strike, was played out.
The 1946 revolt was crushed and black trade unions subsequently banned. The “formation of trade unions and their conversion into a base for a working class movement” had only ever been seen as the “prime task” by Trotskyists, and not even by all of these. Other forces, including by no means least the CPSA, had seen to it that this task had not been realised. In 1946, as in 1930, a promising development had been snuffed out; the way was opened for the domination of very different forces in the 1950s. The 1946 strike had even seen some interventions by some of the more militant figures within the ANC, these were figures who lent support to the strike, but only “because it was part of the African’s struggle against white domination”; not because of any conception “of the African worker as central to the struggle” [my emphasis]. These figures were Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. The workers of South Africa are still paying the price of the failures of the 1930s and 1940s, and may have to pay still further for the still current policies of these same figures and their SACP associates; this is not just a purely academic study.
Ian Hunter
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning On Wednesday April 25th - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case and the April 24th and 25th support rallies on his behalf.
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Out in the Robert Mitchum Crime Noir Night-Kind Of- “The Racket”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Robert Mitchum’s The Racket.
The Racket, starring Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, 1951.
Elsewhere in this space I have noted my love for film noir. The black and white photography, the story lines, the sparse and functional language. However, not all film noir is created equal and that is the case here. Robert Mitchum along with Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas and Orson Welles were the masters of this genre. However this one falls flat as Mitchum plays the old-fashioned steady reliable no nonsense cop
untainted by the corrupt public officials around him. Robert Ryan as an old fashioned small time crime boss who is not hip to the new ways of doing criminal business is a wooden stereotype as are his henchmen. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the tension between these old foes. If you want to see Mitchum when he reached for the noir stars see Out Of The Past. Then you will know what I mean when I say not all film noir is created equal.
The Racket, starring Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, 1951.
Elsewhere in this space I have noted my love for film noir. The black and white photography, the story lines, the sparse and functional language. However, not all film noir is created equal and that is the case here. Robert Mitchum along with Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas and Orson Welles were the masters of this genre. However this one falls flat as Mitchum plays the old-fashioned steady reliable no nonsense cop
untainted by the corrupt public officials around him. Robert Ryan as an old fashioned small time crime boss who is not hip to the new ways of doing criminal business is a wooden stereotype as are his henchmen. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the tension between these old foes. If you want to see Mitchum when he reached for the noir stars see Out Of The Past. Then you will know what I mean when I say not all film noir is created equal.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Democratic Socialists Of America (DSA) Ropes In Occupy Youth for the Democrats
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
As Cops Launch New Attacks at Zuccotti Park
DSA Ropes In Occupy Youth for the Democrats
MARCH 24—On the night of March 17, protesters from Occupy Wall Street gathered in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of the tent protest. Then the NYPD moved in. Not content with their brutalization of protesters in November, when the park was cleared in a nighttime raid, cops again viciously attacked protesters and arrested more than 70. One woman who went into seizures after arrest was prevented from receiving medical attention for over ten minutes, and she is now facing a felony charge of assaulting an officer. As protesters left the Wall Street area and marched up Broadway, cops slammed the head of a medic into a glass door, breaking the panel.
At least three of the protesters face felony charges. Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg was bullish on the cop assault, saying, “You want to get arrested? We’ll accommodate you.” There have been more arrests since then, including today at an Occupy protest against police brutality. We demand: Drop all the charges now!
Looking for some answers to the grinding capitalist economic crisis and the constant cop attacks on protesters, some Occupy activists were drawn to the annual Left Forum last weekend only a few blocks from Zuccotti Park. Run by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the event adopted the theme “Occupy the System: Confronting Global Capitalism.”
From the time of its origins under Michael Harrington, the DSA has “occupied” a position inside the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism. What it seeks to do today is to channel protest against the austerity demanded by Wall Street to make working people pay for the global capitalist economic crisis into support for the same Democratic Party that is overseeing these attacks from the White House. The Occupy movement’s refrain of the “99 percent” versus the “1 percent” has touched a chord among broad sections of society. But that vague populist notion obscures the fundamental class divide in society between the working class and the capitalist class, whose obscene wealth is gained through exploiting workers’ labor. Occupy spokesmen’s embrace of this country’s supposed “democratic values”—certainly music to the DSA’s ears—also serves to disguise the class nature of the capitalist state and its political parties.
Leading DSAers Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West were featured at a showcase session on Occupy and “the Future of the Democratic Left” that trumpeted the 50th anniversary of Harrington’s book The Other America. The book was one way that Harrington helped braintrust the bogus “war on poverty” declared by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in 1964. (Harrington, it should be noted, was the titular head of the Socialist Party for years while that party supported U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam.) The “war on poverty” was one part of the capitalist rulers’ attempt to undercut and co-opt the tumultuous struggles for black equality that had shaken up the country. But for Piven, this policy turned the Democrats into the “party of the poor.” Piven also proclaimed that Harrington’s notion of a “culture of poverty” among the country’s dispossessed would later be “misunderstood” by mainstream and right-wing bourgeois ideologues to blame impoverished blacks and whites for their own condition.
In the discussion period, a Spartacist League speaker pointed out that, three years ago, his comrade was shouted down at a very similar panel when she declared that it was criminal for socialists, working-class and black militants to support the Democrat Barack Obama’s election as president. Our speaker continued:
“I don’t know about Michael Harrington’s ‘culture’ being misunderstood, but there’s no misunderstanding that he said the place for socialists was in the Democratic Party, perpetuating the lie that that’s the party for poor people, for workers, for immigrants and black people. Three years since, auto workers are working themselves to death, if they are new workers, for $15 an hour in wages because of Obama’s bailout of the auto companies. We’ve had an expansion of the ‘war on terror’; attacks on democratic rights at home and the codification of assassination of U.S. citizens overseas; an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.
“This is the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism. If you want a question, here’s one: What does the Democratic Party becoming the ‘party of the poor’ in the ’60s mean for the Vietnamese workers and peasants, who scored the biggest victory for poor people around the world when they defeated U.S. imperialism, under the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?”
Calling for a revolutionary workers party, our speaker concluded by saying that the way to get rid of the capitalist exploiters was to take the road of the Bolsheviks.
It is not lost on the DSA that some radical-minded Occupy protesters are less than enthusiastic about becoming voting cattle for Obama’s re-election. In response to our speaker, Cornel West played up his image as a “radical” black spokesman in offering that “the Democratic Party has never been a party fundamentally concerned with poor people.” But this statement was in the service of promoting pro-Democratic Party pressure politics, a strategy embraced by not only the DSA but the entire reformist left. West declared that the Democratic Party “has made concessions when poor and working people created movements and put pressure, and brought pressure to bear on the system.” Piven said straight out that she would be very glad to see Obama and the Congressional Democrats win big in November.
The false notion that the interests of the working class and minorities run through the Democratic Party has long served to chain the exploited and the oppressed to the brutal, crisis-ridden capitalist system. In peddling this lie to generations of activists, the DSA faithfully follows Michael Harrington’s dictum to be the “left wing of the possible,” acting as a roadblock to the development of class consciousness and its political expression: the independence of the working class from all the parties of the capitalist class enemy.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
As Cops Launch New Attacks at Zuccotti Park
DSA Ropes In Occupy Youth for the Democrats
MARCH 24—On the night of March 17, protesters from Occupy Wall Street gathered in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of the tent protest. Then the NYPD moved in. Not content with their brutalization of protesters in November, when the park was cleared in a nighttime raid, cops again viciously attacked protesters and arrested more than 70. One woman who went into seizures after arrest was prevented from receiving medical attention for over ten minutes, and she is now facing a felony charge of assaulting an officer. As protesters left the Wall Street area and marched up Broadway, cops slammed the head of a medic into a glass door, breaking the panel.
At least three of the protesters face felony charges. Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg was bullish on the cop assault, saying, “You want to get arrested? We’ll accommodate you.” There have been more arrests since then, including today at an Occupy protest against police brutality. We demand: Drop all the charges now!
Looking for some answers to the grinding capitalist economic crisis and the constant cop attacks on protesters, some Occupy activists were drawn to the annual Left Forum last weekend only a few blocks from Zuccotti Park. Run by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the event adopted the theme “Occupy the System: Confronting Global Capitalism.”
From the time of its origins under Michael Harrington, the DSA has “occupied” a position inside the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism. What it seeks to do today is to channel protest against the austerity demanded by Wall Street to make working people pay for the global capitalist economic crisis into support for the same Democratic Party that is overseeing these attacks from the White House. The Occupy movement’s refrain of the “99 percent” versus the “1 percent” has touched a chord among broad sections of society. But that vague populist notion obscures the fundamental class divide in society between the working class and the capitalist class, whose obscene wealth is gained through exploiting workers’ labor. Occupy spokesmen’s embrace of this country’s supposed “democratic values”—certainly music to the DSA’s ears—also serves to disguise the class nature of the capitalist state and its political parties.
Leading DSAers Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West were featured at a showcase session on Occupy and “the Future of the Democratic Left” that trumpeted the 50th anniversary of Harrington’s book The Other America. The book was one way that Harrington helped braintrust the bogus “war on poverty” declared by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in 1964. (Harrington, it should be noted, was the titular head of the Socialist Party for years while that party supported U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam.) The “war on poverty” was one part of the capitalist rulers’ attempt to undercut and co-opt the tumultuous struggles for black equality that had shaken up the country. But for Piven, this policy turned the Democrats into the “party of the poor.” Piven also proclaimed that Harrington’s notion of a “culture of poverty” among the country’s dispossessed would later be “misunderstood” by mainstream and right-wing bourgeois ideologues to blame impoverished blacks and whites for their own condition.
In the discussion period, a Spartacist League speaker pointed out that, three years ago, his comrade was shouted down at a very similar panel when she declared that it was criminal for socialists, working-class and black militants to support the Democrat Barack Obama’s election as president. Our speaker continued:
“I don’t know about Michael Harrington’s ‘culture’ being misunderstood, but there’s no misunderstanding that he said the place for socialists was in the Democratic Party, perpetuating the lie that that’s the party for poor people, for workers, for immigrants and black people. Three years since, auto workers are working themselves to death, if they are new workers, for $15 an hour in wages because of Obama’s bailout of the auto companies. We’ve had an expansion of the ‘war on terror’; attacks on democratic rights at home and the codification of assassination of U.S. citizens overseas; an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.
“This is the Democratic Party of U.S. imperialism. If you want a question, here’s one: What does the Democratic Party becoming the ‘party of the poor’ in the ’60s mean for the Vietnamese workers and peasants, who scored the biggest victory for poor people around the world when they defeated U.S. imperialism, under the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?”
Calling for a revolutionary workers party, our speaker concluded by saying that the way to get rid of the capitalist exploiters was to take the road of the Bolsheviks.
It is not lost on the DSA that some radical-minded Occupy protesters are less than enthusiastic about becoming voting cattle for Obama’s re-election. In response to our speaker, Cornel West played up his image as a “radical” black spokesman in offering that “the Democratic Party has never been a party fundamentally concerned with poor people.” But this statement was in the service of promoting pro-Democratic Party pressure politics, a strategy embraced by not only the DSA but the entire reformist left. West declared that the Democratic Party “has made concessions when poor and working people created movements and put pressure, and brought pressure to bear on the system.” Piven said straight out that she would be very glad to see Obama and the Congressional Democrats win big in November.
The false notion that the interests of the working class and minorities run through the Democratic Party has long served to chain the exploited and the oppressed to the brutal, crisis-ridden capitalist system. In peddling this lie to generations of activists, the DSA faithfully follows Michael Harrington’s dictum to be the “left wing of the possible,” acting as a roadblock to the development of class consciousness and its political expression: the independence of the working class from all the parties of the capitalist class enemy.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From The Late Communist Leader James P. Cannon-"Those Who Labor Must Rule!"
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
(Quote of the Week)
In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century.
A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.
The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle.
We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.
Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.
—James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
(Quote of the Week)
In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century.
A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.
The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle.
We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.
Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.
—James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-French Elections: No Choice for Workers
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
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Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
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Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
Capitalist State Fuels Racist Vigilantes
Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America
MARCH 26—The racist killing one month ago of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, has touched off a wave of protest that continues in cities and towns coast to coast. Trayvon’s anguished parents have spoken a bitter truth known to all black families: what happened on February 26 could happen to anyone like him—at the hands of either lone-wolf racists or police thugs-in-blue. Nearly 50 years after civil rights legislation established formal legal equality, a young black man had his life stolen simply for being who he was in this sick, racist society. And his killer to this day remains free, his act sanctioned by a state law that gives free rein to such vigilantism.
The basic story is well known. Trayvon departed from his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community to purchase Skittles and an iced tea at a 7-Eleven store. He did not return. Trayvon had been spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch enforcer. When Zimmerman called police, he described Trayvon, who had put on his hoodie in the rain, as a “real suspicious guy.” A frightened Trayvon was aware that he was being followed by a white male stranger in a car, a really suspicious guy. So he ran for safety after seeing Zimmerman stop and exit the car. Zimmerman pursued Trayvon, complaining to the police department that “these assholes...always get away.” The cops say that when they arrived, they found Trayvon dead with a gunshot to the chest and Zimmerman armed with a 9mm pistol and splattered with blood.
Trayvon’s parents then faced sheer contempt from Sanford police. Tracy Martin, the father, believed his son was missing after he didn’t return from the store. The following day, he called to report a missing person, to no avail. He then called 911 and was asked to describe his son. Police officers eventually arrived to show him a picture of his dead son with blood dripping from his mouth. Police had listed the slain teen as a “John Doe” and made no attempt to identify his body or locate his family on the day of his death.
Police who were at the crime scene helped build an alibi for Zimmerman, himself a cop wannabe. Zimmerman claimed that he fired in self-defense when Trayvon, three inches shorter and nearly 100 pounds lighter than himself, gained the upper hand in an alleged scuffle. At least three witnesses heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot and then silence.” So the cops “corrected” one witness to claim that the cry for help came not from Trayvon but from Zimmerman. The officer in charge was also in charge in 2010 when cops covered up the assault on a homeless black man by a police lieutenant’s son. (The white assailant was charged only after videotape of the assault appeared on YouTube.) In 2005, a black teenager in Sanford was fatally shot in the back by two white security guards, one of them a police volunteer and the other a cop’s son. A judge dismissed the charges against them for “lack of evidence.”
When the facts of Martin’s killing and the cop cover-up eventually came to light, masses of people demonstrated their outrage, from a student protest at historically black Florida A&M University on March 19 to a “million hoodie march” in New York City two days later and another round of demonstrations today. LeBron James and his Miami Heat basketball teammates made a powerful protest simply by being photographed in hooded sweatshirts with their heads bowed. An editorial in New York’s Amsterdam News (22 March) linked the killing to the everyday hell black people endure in this country:
“We are prejudged every day in almost every way, from the neighborhood watch captain to the rookie cop to the sales clerk who works on commission to the taxi driver who won’t pick us up to the guidance counselor who steers our children away from AP classes because they are not ‘college material.’
“We are prejudged. And that prejudice means all too often the difference between life and death, a future or a grave.”
Black Democrat and TV host Al Sharpton called it a “paradox” that a black man could be elected president while young black men were still viewed with suspicion for wearing hooded sweatshirts. What paradox? For this country’s capitalist rulers, Barack Obama’s election provided a facelift for murderous U.S. imperialism and its capitalist profit system. The day-to-day functioning of American capitalism is measured in mass unemployment, home foreclosures, cop terror and other brutalities that come down heaviest on blacks and other minorities. Putting Obama in the White House meant only that now there is a black overseer for a system that criminalizes young black men in maintaining the racial oppression that has been embedded in this country since the days of slavery. It will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of capitalism by the multiracial working class—a third American Revolution—to finally achieve black freedom and provide a decent life for all.
Vigilantism in Racist America
Zimmerman’s Neighborhood Watch was organized in September 2011 by a homeowners association under the auspices of the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman, who was studying to be a cop, was its sole volunteer. He was well known to the cops, having made 46 calls to 911 this year. As one of his black neighbors described it, it was always: “A black guy this. A black guy that.” A Zimmerman supporter claimed with sheer racist contempt that problems in the area began when foreclosures forced homeowners to rent out property to “low-lifes and gangsters,” so that the housing complex now has a slight majority of non-whites. The Sanford police chief declared that cops working with Neighborhood Watch types must determine “who in that community is not supposed to be there.”
Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense is based on a Florida “Stand Your Ground” law, an open invitation to racist vigilantism. The law was passed in 2005 amid a “get tough on crime” campaign—code for targeting black people. The 2005 law supplanted an earlier Florida law that, like those in many other states, traced its roots to English Common Law. That standard held that self-defense is justified if a person faced with attack first tries to remove himself, if feasible, from immediate danger before using deadly force. Florida’s 2005 law allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim “reasonable belief” of danger. The law also promises criminal and civil immunity for people who claim to have acted in self-defense.
As Marxists, we oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians, and uphold the right to armed self-defense. But we oppose the “stand your ground” law, which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.
The working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule. Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been carrying a gun. But as the Martin family’s attorney said, had Trayvon been the shooter, “he would have been arrested day one, hour one, and wouldn’t have been given bail.”
In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
From day one, liberal political spokesmen have tried to steer the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s killing into the timeworn call for the federal government to step in to make things right. At a town hall meeting in Sanford on March 21, dozens of black residents told of being profiled, humiliated and physically assaulted by the cops. National NAACP leader Ben Jealous took that occasion to say that the local police department had “gone a bit rogue” and that’s why they needed to bring in the Department of Justice. The Justice Department are the top cops of a system where daily racist terror is meted out by police in the ghettos and barrios—from NYC’s “stop and frisk” dragnet to L.A.’s “anti-gang” crackdowns. When the Feds step in, at most they enact some meaningless “reforms” or get rid of some “bad apples.” Their purpose in doing so is to clean up the cops’ image to make them more effective, and to get angry people off the streets.
Along with the military, the police, courts and prisons form the core of the capitalist state, an instrument of coercion and organized violence for the suppression of one class, the working class, by another class, the capitalists. While even many Florida state authorities say that Zimmerman went beyond his mandate in gunning down an unarmed 17-year-old, the fact is that the cops’ constant drumbeat of cracking down on crime and pursuing the “war on drugs” fosters the growth of such vigilante scum. And the police themselves feed off of vigilante violence. In promoting Neighborhood Watch outfits, the cops are building up auxiliaries to their enforcement of the murderous racist status quo. The role of such racist vigilantes was seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, as armed white patrols, along with the cops, forcibly blocked blacks from evacuating as the flood waters rose, including through outright murder.
Central Florida: Racist, Anti-Labor Bastion
Sanford is located in central Florida, whose history is indelibly marked by bloody racist terror—legal and extralegal. A center of the citrus industry, this region was developed in the aftermath of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War that smashed slavery. Northern capitalists, such as the town’s namesake, Henry Shelton Sanford, grabbed up real estate, developing orange groves and tourism as well as winter homes. When black laborers were brought in to work the orange groves, a campaign of race-terror soon followed that attacked them as competitors for “white jobs.”
In the early 1930s, the bosses struck with bloody vengeance against a union organizing drive by the United Citrus Workers (UCW). KKK nightriders terrorized organizers, crushing the UCW. In 1935, Joseph Shoemaker, a Socialist, was abducted by the Klan assisted by Tampa police. He was castrated, tarred and feathered, dying of his injuries after two weeks of suffering. In the face of such brutal terror, the Communist Party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, a CIO affiliate, soon arose and led a heroic fight for unionization. But it also faced a devastating wave of Klan terror, employer scabherding and government repression.
Florida has the distinction of being among the most brutal of Southern lynching states, as exemplified by the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, a 23-year-old sharecropper. Neal was arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff and charged with the murder of a white woman. The illiterate man was forced to sign a written confession with an X. He ended up in the hands of a mob, tortured for hours and then lynched, his body parts distributed as “souvenirs.” Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt steadfastly refused to support federal anti-lynching laws because that would have posed a break with the segregationist Dixiecrat components of his 1930s New Deal coalition.
Sanford, Florida, is itself branded in racist infamy. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a study of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, recounts the story of George Swanson Starling, who barely escaped the town with his life in 1945 after attempting to organize black tangerine pickers to demand higher wages. The following year, Jackie Robinson was run out of town when the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, went there for spring training. In response, Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey packed up and moved the team to Daytona Beach.
It took the tumultuous struggles for black rights in the 1950s and ’60s to break the back of official Jim Crow segregation in the South. The success of the liberal-led civil rights struggles was in bringing the South into alignment with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. This development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are deeply rooted in U.S. capitalism, whether or not they are officially codified in the legal sanctions of the bourgeois state. While today blacks possess formal equality under the law, this is pervasively violated in practice. And there could be no sharper example of that than the gunning down of Trayvon Martin.
The enduring color bar is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., serving to obscure the fundamental class divide in society by providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx declared in Volume I of Capital (1867): “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” It is through united class struggle that the workers can and must overcome these divisions, promoting their interests as a class against their common enemy. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons on its banners: Black liberation through socialist revolution!
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