Uno de Mayo!- Un Dia Sin Los Obreros!
*Ni trabajo!
*Ni escuela!
*Ni compras!
*Fiesta en las calles del Distro Financiero!
Comenzamos en 7 por la manana en el cruce Federal y Franklin en Boston!
www.occupymay1st.org
www.bostonmayday.org
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
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
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
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs-"Powderly And Gompers" (Two Early American Labor Leaders)(1890)
From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie here has done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie here has done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs-"Agitation And Agitators" (1890)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive article listed in the headline website.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie here has done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie here has done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- American Communist Leader (CP And SWP)s James P. Cannon At The End (1974)-A Parable And A Paradox
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
The Political Evolution of James P. Cannon-A Parable And A Paradox
BOOK REVIEW
James P. Cannon: A Political Tribute, Education For Socialists, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
To set the tone for this review here is a little parable, of sorts:
At the beginning of my conscious political career, back in the mist of time, which started out as a youthful liberal Americans For Democratic Action (ADA)-type activist in the early 1960’s I distinctly remember an older liberal politician at some event pointing out someone to me as an American Communist Party member. Apparently that information was passed on to me in order to make me shudder at the mere thought of it. Just as distinctly I remember, despite the continuing residue of the McCarthyite “red scare” at that time, merely shrugging my shoulders as if to say “so what”. Later, as I moved leftward toward a more social-democratic type political stance I was actively seeking out communists in order to form an anti-imperialist united front on Vietnam (although that is putting my politics in that situation in far too sophisticated a manner). Finding a publicly identifiable one then, however, was as scarce as hen’s teeth (if one was looking outside their friendly roost inside, deep inside, the Democratic Party). Finally, as I moved farther left and became radicalized whenever I ran into a Communist Party member at an event I would think- “oh, no there goes our radical edge,” or words to that effect.
Now what does this little parable have to do with a review of a political tribute to an old revolutionary leader, James P. Cannon, at the time of his death in 1974 and about whom I have spilled much ink on in this space defending him as a man who in his prime could have led an American socialist revolution. Well, when I went looking for serious revolutionaries to work in the early 1970s I had the same opinion of the organization that he helped found and nurture, the Socialist Workers Party, as I did toward the Communist Party. In short, whatever virtues Cannon brought to that organization in his prime and whatever lingering loyalties he had to that party by the time of his death the torch had passed to others in other organizations to carry out his work. Such things happen all the time in politics.
Thus this document, put out by the organization that honored his name THEN if not his earlier political history other than in a formal sense, has more value as a slice of radical history than as a trustworthy account of the work of one James P. Cannon. There is a very big disconnect between the work that Cannon reminiscences about here and the actual practice of the SWP, except to use the authority of his name to cover their essentially liberal programmatic efforts. To put it simply the various interviews, conducted mainly in the last year of Cannon’s life, that make up the bulk of this pamphlet are the words of an eighty year old man who is to the LEFT of his party. He is still ever the party loyalist but it is to the history of his party.
There is a very important section in this short pamphlet that every radical should read that contains an interview with Cannon in 1973 about proper class struggle legal defense work. Cannon won his spurs, and solidified his position as an early Communist Party leader, with his leadership of the party’s legal defense arm the International Labor Defense (ILD). Cannon has interesting comments about the role of that organization in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the key labor defense struggle of the 1920’s. The main point for today’s radicals to understand is the fundamental principle of left and labor politics codified in the old slogan- “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Moreover, the operational norm for such work is a non-sectarian united front. Everybody works together to win the case at hand while maintaining their own political independent. This, sadly, has been honored more in the breech than in the observance.
I would also note, to reinforce my statement about the aged Cannon above, that his reminisces about the old labor defense days did not gibe with what was the main SWP political program in the early 1970s after the demise of the anti-war movement. At that time, as the Nixon/Watergate issues were heating up, the SWP put forth a campaign exclusively centered on suing the federal government for various violation of its democratic rights throughout its history- the infamous “Watersuit.” While no one on the left denies the need to fight for our own political existence by challenging the government through the legal process when appropriate the whole thrust of the SWP’s work in this period was to continue to cater to the liberals with whom they had become very conformable working with in the anti-war movement. Cannon accepted this program as good coin, at least in the interview. We are not obliged to follow him in that commendation.
This pamphlet also contains a few other interviews of note about the history of the American left and labor movement in the first half of the 20th century. One deals with this various radical figures that Cannon ran across in his long political life, some as associates, and some as opponents. Another deals with the black liberation struggle although not fully enough to warrant comment here. The one I believe worthy of comment is “Youth and The Socialist Movement, Cannon’s understanding of the role of youth in building the movement throughout his long career. This article makes points that should be useful for us to think about today in the Obamian age, an age to a large extent created by the energies of youth looking for a way out of the long night of the Bush years.
Cannon noted that the radicalization of the 1930s was spearheaded mainly by young workers. Students and other middle class youth then were more likely to be “scabs” or political conservatives than allies of the working class. In the radicalization of the 1960s, aided by the surge in college enrollment, the movement was headed by non-working class youth. The impending radicalization of youth in this, the early part of the 21st century, may very well combine both those elements from the beginning. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a fight? That is something the younger James P. Cannon could appreciate. Let me finish with this-at this late date the proper way to pay political tribute to James P. Cannon is to work to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. That would be a very fitting tribute.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
The Political Evolution of James P. Cannon-A Parable And A Paradox
BOOK REVIEW
James P. Cannon: A Political Tribute, Education For Socialists, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974
To set the tone for this review here is a little parable, of sorts:
At the beginning of my conscious political career, back in the mist of time, which started out as a youthful liberal Americans For Democratic Action (ADA)-type activist in the early 1960’s I distinctly remember an older liberal politician at some event pointing out someone to me as an American Communist Party member. Apparently that information was passed on to me in order to make me shudder at the mere thought of it. Just as distinctly I remember, despite the continuing residue of the McCarthyite “red scare” at that time, merely shrugging my shoulders as if to say “so what”. Later, as I moved leftward toward a more social-democratic type political stance I was actively seeking out communists in order to form an anti-imperialist united front on Vietnam (although that is putting my politics in that situation in far too sophisticated a manner). Finding a publicly identifiable one then, however, was as scarce as hen’s teeth (if one was looking outside their friendly roost inside, deep inside, the Democratic Party). Finally, as I moved farther left and became radicalized whenever I ran into a Communist Party member at an event I would think- “oh, no there goes our radical edge,” or words to that effect.
Now what does this little parable have to do with a review of a political tribute to an old revolutionary leader, James P. Cannon, at the time of his death in 1974 and about whom I have spilled much ink on in this space defending him as a man who in his prime could have led an American socialist revolution. Well, when I went looking for serious revolutionaries to work in the early 1970s I had the same opinion of the organization that he helped found and nurture, the Socialist Workers Party, as I did toward the Communist Party. In short, whatever virtues Cannon brought to that organization in his prime and whatever lingering loyalties he had to that party by the time of his death the torch had passed to others in other organizations to carry out his work. Such things happen all the time in politics.
Thus this document, put out by the organization that honored his name THEN if not his earlier political history other than in a formal sense, has more value as a slice of radical history than as a trustworthy account of the work of one James P. Cannon. There is a very big disconnect between the work that Cannon reminiscences about here and the actual practice of the SWP, except to use the authority of his name to cover their essentially liberal programmatic efforts. To put it simply the various interviews, conducted mainly in the last year of Cannon’s life, that make up the bulk of this pamphlet are the words of an eighty year old man who is to the LEFT of his party. He is still ever the party loyalist but it is to the history of his party.
There is a very important section in this short pamphlet that every radical should read that contains an interview with Cannon in 1973 about proper class struggle legal defense work. Cannon won his spurs, and solidified his position as an early Communist Party leader, with his leadership of the party’s legal defense arm the International Labor Defense (ILD). Cannon has interesting comments about the role of that organization in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the key labor defense struggle of the 1920’s. The main point for today’s radicals to understand is the fundamental principle of left and labor politics codified in the old slogan- “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Moreover, the operational norm for such work is a non-sectarian united front. Everybody works together to win the case at hand while maintaining their own political independent. This, sadly, has been honored more in the breech than in the observance.
I would also note, to reinforce my statement about the aged Cannon above, that his reminisces about the old labor defense days did not gibe with what was the main SWP political program in the early 1970s after the demise of the anti-war movement. At that time, as the Nixon/Watergate issues were heating up, the SWP put forth a campaign exclusively centered on suing the federal government for various violation of its democratic rights throughout its history- the infamous “Watersuit.” While no one on the left denies the need to fight for our own political existence by challenging the government through the legal process when appropriate the whole thrust of the SWP’s work in this period was to continue to cater to the liberals with whom they had become very conformable working with in the anti-war movement. Cannon accepted this program as good coin, at least in the interview. We are not obliged to follow him in that commendation.
This pamphlet also contains a few other interviews of note about the history of the American left and labor movement in the first half of the 20th century. One deals with this various radical figures that Cannon ran across in his long political life, some as associates, and some as opponents. Another deals with the black liberation struggle although not fully enough to warrant comment here. The one I believe worthy of comment is “Youth and The Socialist Movement, Cannon’s understanding of the role of youth in building the movement throughout his long career. This article makes points that should be useful for us to think about today in the Obamian age, an age to a large extent created by the energies of youth looking for a way out of the long night of the Bush years.
Cannon noted that the radicalization of the 1930s was spearheaded mainly by young workers. Students and other middle class youth then were more likely to be “scabs” or political conservatives than allies of the working class. In the radicalization of the 1960s, aided by the surge in college enrollment, the movement was headed by non-working class youth. The impending radicalization of youth in this, the early part of the 21st century, may very well combine both those elements from the beginning. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a fight? That is something the younger James P. Cannon could appreciate. Let me finish with this-at this late date the proper way to pay political tribute to James P. Cannon is to work to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. That would be a very fitting tribute.
Uno de Mayo (Martes) En Boston !- Un Dia Sin Los Obreros!-Huelga Generale!
Uno de Mayo!- Un Dia Sin Los Obreros!
*Ni trabajo!
*Ni escuela!
*Ni compras!
*Fiesta en las calles del Distro Financiero!
Comenzamos en 7 por la manana en el cruce Federal y Franklin en Boston!
www.occupymay1st.org
www.bostonmayday.org
*Ni trabajo!
*Ni escuela!
*Ni compras!
*Fiesta en las calles del Distro Financiero!
Comenzamos en 7 por la manana en el cruce Federal y Franklin en Boston!
www.occupymay1st.org
www.bostonmayday.org
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning Today-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 24, 2012
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Drop All Charges Against Chicano Activist Carlos Montes!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
***********
13 April 2012
Drop All Charges Against Carlos Montes!
On March 27, a Los Angeles judge dismissed two out of six felony charges against Chicano activist Carlos Montes, who is a supporter of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and writes for its newspaper, Fight Back! Montes is a victim of an FBI frame-up of 24 leftists, antiwar organizers and union activists. Beginning in September 2010, the FBI raided their homes and offices, mainly in the Midwest. The Feds investigated them for “material support to terrorism” due to their activities in solidarity with the oppressed in Latin America and the Near East and for helping to organize protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (see “Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010).
On 17 May 2011, the FBI and a Los Angeles Sheriff’s SWAT team broke down Montes’ door and ransacked his home, seizing his notes and papers. Using reactionary gun control laws, the agents arrested Montes on bogus charges of violating a firearms code, falsely alleging he had a felony on his record and therefore cannot own a gun. This claim originates from a 1969 student strike for black, Chicano and women’s studies at East L.A. College in which protesters were beaten and arrested by police. On his way home, Montes was arrested and accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy—with an empty soda can! However, as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression points out, “according to a recent court document, this charge was sentenced as a misdemeanor. The prosecution is basing its case on this 42-year-old misdemeanor, disguising it as a bogus felony” (fightbacknews.org, 25 March).
We print below a speech by Diana Coleman at a March 27 protest in defense of Carlos Montes called by the L.A. Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which was held outside the Los Angeles Superior Courts Building. The protest was attended by FRSO supporters and other leftists, including former SDS organizer Eric Gardner. In her remarks, comrade Coleman refers to a 2008 rally where Gardner argued the importance of “holding the Obama administration to their antiwar promises” (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The FRSO, for its part, claimed that Obama’s victory was “stunning” and represented “a blow against racism.” As we have repeatedly noted, Barack Obama, as head of U.S. imperialism, has simply carried out the pledge he made as a candidate: to uphold the interests of the racist capitalist ruling class against workers and the oppressed at home and abroad, not least by extending the reach of the rulers’ “war on terror.”
* * *
On behalf of the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, we have come to these hearings to defend Carlos Montes against the government/FBI witchhunt and to demand that all charges be dropped! This case, along with the raids and grand jury subpoenas in the Midwest against Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, is part of the Obama administration’s war on civil liberties. This is a blatant political frame-up targeting Montes because of his 40-plus years of leftist political activism and his work with Freedom Road.
In vastly expanding the state’s repressive powers in the name of the “war on terror,” the capitalist government has slashed the fundamental rights of association and speech. The Obama administration has one-upped the Bush regime in its war on civil liberties, deported more immigrants than Bush ever did, and has continued U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad with a vengeance. During the 2008 elections liberals and reformist leftists including Freedom Road pushed the dangerous illusion that Obama would reverse the worst policies of George Bush. I remember Eric here, who is nicely holding the megaphone, arguing this line at a UCLA SDS rally. We Marxists of the SL say no! Democrats, no less than Republicans, are the enemies of working people.
What is needed is a class-struggle defense which looks to the power of the multiracial working class, which is the ultimate target of the “anti-terror” witchhunt and which alone has the social power and interest in smashing capitalist rule and replacing it with a workers state. Any illusions in the neutrality of the state or the courts undermine a serious defense. The courts, prisons and police exist to maintain through organized violence the rule of the capitalist class over the workers and oppressed. But ultimately what the racist capitalist rulers can get away with is determined by the level of class struggle. And there will be no real justice until the imperialist exploiters are swept away through socialist revolution. Drop all charges against Carlos Montes! An injury to one is an injury to all!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1000, 13 April 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
***********
13 April 2012
Drop All Charges Against Carlos Montes!
On March 27, a Los Angeles judge dismissed two out of six felony charges against Chicano activist Carlos Montes, who is a supporter of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and writes for its newspaper, Fight Back! Montes is a victim of an FBI frame-up of 24 leftists, antiwar organizers and union activists. Beginning in September 2010, the FBI raided their homes and offices, mainly in the Midwest. The Feds investigated them for “material support to terrorism” due to their activities in solidarity with the oppressed in Latin America and the Near East and for helping to organize protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (see “Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010).
On 17 May 2011, the FBI and a Los Angeles Sheriff’s SWAT team broke down Montes’ door and ransacked his home, seizing his notes and papers. Using reactionary gun control laws, the agents arrested Montes on bogus charges of violating a firearms code, falsely alleging he had a felony on his record and therefore cannot own a gun. This claim originates from a 1969 student strike for black, Chicano and women’s studies at East L.A. College in which protesters were beaten and arrested by police. On his way home, Montes was arrested and accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy—with an empty soda can! However, as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression points out, “according to a recent court document, this charge was sentenced as a misdemeanor. The prosecution is basing its case on this 42-year-old misdemeanor, disguising it as a bogus felony” (fightbacknews.org, 25 March).
We print below a speech by Diana Coleman at a March 27 protest in defense of Carlos Montes called by the L.A. Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which was held outside the Los Angeles Superior Courts Building. The protest was attended by FRSO supporters and other leftists, including former SDS organizer Eric Gardner. In her remarks, comrade Coleman refers to a 2008 rally where Gardner argued the importance of “holding the Obama administration to their antiwar promises” (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The FRSO, for its part, claimed that Obama’s victory was “stunning” and represented “a blow against racism.” As we have repeatedly noted, Barack Obama, as head of U.S. imperialism, has simply carried out the pledge he made as a candidate: to uphold the interests of the racist capitalist ruling class against workers and the oppressed at home and abroad, not least by extending the reach of the rulers’ “war on terror.”
* * *
On behalf of the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, we have come to these hearings to defend Carlos Montes against the government/FBI witchhunt and to demand that all charges be dropped! This case, along with the raids and grand jury subpoenas in the Midwest against Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, is part of the Obama administration’s war on civil liberties. This is a blatant political frame-up targeting Montes because of his 40-plus years of leftist political activism and his work with Freedom Road.
In vastly expanding the state’s repressive powers in the name of the “war on terror,” the capitalist government has slashed the fundamental rights of association and speech. The Obama administration has one-upped the Bush regime in its war on civil liberties, deported more immigrants than Bush ever did, and has continued U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad with a vengeance. During the 2008 elections liberals and reformist leftists including Freedom Road pushed the dangerous illusion that Obama would reverse the worst policies of George Bush. I remember Eric here, who is nicely holding the megaphone, arguing this line at a UCLA SDS rally. We Marxists of the SL say no! Democrats, no less than Republicans, are the enemies of working people.
What is needed is a class-struggle defense which looks to the power of the multiracial working class, which is the ultimate target of the “anti-terror” witchhunt and which alone has the social power and interest in smashing capitalist rule and replacing it with a workers state. Any illusions in the neutrality of the state or the courts undermine a serious defense. The courts, prisons and police exist to maintain through organized violence the rule of the capitalist class over the workers and oppressed. But ultimately what the racist capitalist rulers can get away with is determined by the level of class struggle. And there will be no real justice until the imperialist exploiters are swept away through socialist revolution. Drop all charges against Carlos Montes! An injury to one is an injury to all!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1000, 13 April 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Drop All Charges Against Chicano Activist Carlos Montes!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
************
Workers Vanguard No. 1000
13 April 2012
Drop All Charges Against Carlos Montes!
On March 27, a Los Angeles judge dismissed two out of six felony charges against Chicano activist Carlos Montes, who is a supporter of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and writes for its newspaper, Fight Back! Montes is a victim of an FBI frame-up of 24 leftists, antiwar organizers and union activists. Beginning in September 2010, the FBI raided their homes and offices, mainly in the Midwest. The Feds investigated them for “material support to terrorism” due to their activities in solidarity with the oppressed in Latin America and the Near East and for helping to organize protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (see “Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010).
On 17 May 2011, the FBI and a Los Angeles Sheriff’s SWAT team broke down Montes’ door and ransacked his home, seizing his notes and papers. Using reactionary gun control laws, the agents arrested Montes on bogus charges of violating a firearms code, falsely alleging he had a felony on his record and therefore cannot own a gun. This claim originates from a 1969 student strike for black, Chicano and women’s studies at East L.A. College in which protesters were beaten and arrested by police. On his way home, Montes was arrested and accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy—with an empty soda can! However, as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression points out, “according to a recent court document, this charge was sentenced as a misdemeanor. The prosecution is basing its case on this 42-year-old misdemeanor, disguising it as a bogus felony” (fightbacknews.org, 25 March).
We print below a speech by Diana Coleman at a March 27 protest in defense of Carlos Montes called by the L.A. Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which was held outside the Los Angeles Superior Courts Building. The protest was attended by FRSO supporters and other leftists, including former SDS organizer Eric Gardner. In her remarks, comrade Coleman refers to a 2008 rally where Gardner argued the importance of “holding the Obama administration to their antiwar promises” (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The FRSO, for its part, claimed that Obama’s victory was “stunning” and represented “a blow against racism.” As we have repeatedly noted, Barack Obama, as head of U.S. imperialism, has simply carried out the pledge he made as a candidate: to uphold the interests of the racist capitalist ruling class against workers and the oppressed at home and abroad, not least by extending the reach of the rulers’ “war on terror.”
* * *
On behalf of the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, we have come to these hearings to defend Carlos Montes against the government/FBI witchhunt and to demand that all charges be dropped! This case, along with the raids and grand jury subpoenas in the Midwest against Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, is part of the Obama administration’s war on civil liberties. This is a blatant political frame-up targeting Montes because of his 40-plus years of leftist political activism and his work with Freedom Road.
In vastly expanding the state’s repressive powers in the name of the “war on terror,” the capitalist government has slashed the fundamental rights of association and speech. The Obama administration has one-upped the Bush regime in its war on civil liberties, deported more immigrants than Bush ever did, and has continued U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad with a vengeance. During the 2008 elections liberals and reformist leftists including Freedom Road pushed the dangerous illusion that Obama would reverse the worst policies of George Bush. I remember Eric here, who is nicely holding the megaphone, arguing this line at a UCLA SDS rally. We Marxists of the SL say no! Democrats, no less than Republicans, are the enemies of working people.
What is needed is a class-struggle defense which looks to the power of the multiracial working class, which is the ultimate target of the “anti-terror” witchhunt and which alone has the social power and interest in smashing capitalist rule and replacing it with a workers state. Any illusions in the neutrality of the state or the courts undermine a serious defense. The courts, prisons and police exist to maintain through organized violence the rule of the capitalist class over the workers and oppressed. But ultimately what the racist capitalist rulers can get away with is determined by the level of class struggle. And there will be no real justice until the imperialist exploiters are swept away through socialist revolution. Drop all charges against Carlos Montes! An injury to one is an injury to all!
************
Workers Vanguard No. 1000
13 April 2012
Drop All Charges Against Carlos Montes!
On March 27, a Los Angeles judge dismissed two out of six felony charges against Chicano activist Carlos Montes, who is a supporter of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and writes for its newspaper, Fight Back! Montes is a victim of an FBI frame-up of 24 leftists, antiwar organizers and union activists. Beginning in September 2010, the FBI raided their homes and offices, mainly in the Midwest. The Feds investigated them for “material support to terrorism” due to their activities in solidarity with the oppressed in Latin America and the Near East and for helping to organize protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (see “Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010).
On 17 May 2011, the FBI and a Los Angeles Sheriff’s SWAT team broke down Montes’ door and ransacked his home, seizing his notes and papers. Using reactionary gun control laws, the agents arrested Montes on bogus charges of violating a firearms code, falsely alleging he had a felony on his record and therefore cannot own a gun. This claim originates from a 1969 student strike for black, Chicano and women’s studies at East L.A. College in which protesters were beaten and arrested by police. On his way home, Montes was arrested and accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy—with an empty soda can! However, as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression points out, “according to a recent court document, this charge was sentenced as a misdemeanor. The prosecution is basing its case on this 42-year-old misdemeanor, disguising it as a bogus felony” (fightbacknews.org, 25 March).
We print below a speech by Diana Coleman at a March 27 protest in defense of Carlos Montes called by the L.A. Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which was held outside the Los Angeles Superior Courts Building. The protest was attended by FRSO supporters and other leftists, including former SDS organizer Eric Gardner. In her remarks, comrade Coleman refers to a 2008 rally where Gardner argued the importance of “holding the Obama administration to their antiwar promises” (see “UCLA SDS Hitches Skateboard to Obama Bandwagon,” WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The FRSO, for its part, claimed that Obama’s victory was “stunning” and represented “a blow against racism.” As we have repeatedly noted, Barack Obama, as head of U.S. imperialism, has simply carried out the pledge he made as a candidate: to uphold the interests of the racist capitalist ruling class against workers and the oppressed at home and abroad, not least by extending the reach of the rulers’ “war on terror.”
* * *
On behalf of the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, we have come to these hearings to defend Carlos Montes against the government/FBI witchhunt and to demand that all charges be dropped! This case, along with the raids and grand jury subpoenas in the Midwest against Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, is part of the Obama administration’s war on civil liberties. This is a blatant political frame-up targeting Montes because of his 40-plus years of leftist political activism and his work with Freedom Road.
In vastly expanding the state’s repressive powers in the name of the “war on terror,” the capitalist government has slashed the fundamental rights of association and speech. The Obama administration has one-upped the Bush regime in its war on civil liberties, deported more immigrants than Bush ever did, and has continued U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad with a vengeance. During the 2008 elections liberals and reformist leftists including Freedom Road pushed the dangerous illusion that Obama would reverse the worst policies of George Bush. I remember Eric here, who is nicely holding the megaphone, arguing this line at a UCLA SDS rally. We Marxists of the SL say no! Democrats, no less than Republicans, are the enemies of working people.
What is needed is a class-struggle defense which looks to the power of the multiracial working class, which is the ultimate target of the “anti-terror” witchhunt and which alone has the social power and interest in smashing capitalist rule and replacing it with a workers state. Any illusions in the neutrality of the state or the courts undermine a serious defense. The courts, prisons and police exist to maintain through organized violence the rule of the capitalist class over the workers and oppressed. But ultimately what the racist capitalist rulers can get away with is determined by the level of class struggle. And there will be no real justice until the imperialist exploiters are swept away through socialist revolution. Drop all charges against Carlos Montes! An injury to one is an injury to all!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-U.S. Imperialists Hands Off the World!-Down With Starvation Sanctions Against Iran!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
*************
Workers Vanguard No. 1000
13 April 2012
U.S. Imperialists Hands Off the World!-Down With Starvation Sanctions Against Iran!
APRIL 9—Further ratcheting up imperialist pressures against Iran, the U.S. and its European Union allies are preparing to issue an ultimatum that Tehran immediately close the recently completed Fordo nuclear facility, which is deep underground, and stop further enrichment of uranium. The demands of the Western powers, which claim that Iran is a few steps from developing weapons-grade uranium, are to be delivered at a meeting scheduled to begin later this week in Istanbul. As reported in the New York Times (7 April), President Obama calls this “Iran’s ‘last chance’ to resolve its nuclear confrontation with the United Nations and the West diplomatically.” Obama had already invoked the prospect of war to get Iran to bow to the imperialist diktat. He has declared that “all options are on the table” and assured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly threatened air strikes, that the U.S. “has Israel’s back.”
The main weapon the imperialists have been wielding against Iran is an economic siege, which they have recently intensified. Beginning in November, the U.S., in coordination with Britain and Canada, moved to implement a virtual international financial quarantine of Iran. Last month, all businesses and banks in Iran were barred from accessing the system that arranges international money transfers. The embargo includes the central bank, which handles the export of crude oil. As a result of economic sanctions, the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, has dropped sharply and inflation is skyrocketing, led by soaring food and gas prices. With unemployment shooting steadily upward, Hyundai Motors has closed down its factory in Iran for fear of being penalized under the sanctions. Some essential household goods are impossible to obtain. The austerity is exacerbated by Tehran’s ban on hundreds of imported items, an effort intended to stem the decline of its currency.
The latest sanctions are aimed to strike at the heart of Iran’s economy: its oil exports. The European Union, whose member states currently buy 20 percent of Iran’s oil, plans to initiate a ban on all Iranian oil imports in July. The U.S. sanctions include measures to penalize countries that import Iranian oil and any bank handling payment for such sales can be denied access to the U.S. financial system. Under pressure from Washington, Turkey has declared that it will slash its purchases of Iranian oil by 20 percent. Other big buyers, including Japan, South Africa and India, have also indicated that they will reduce their orders, while China too has been buying less. To make up for the shortfall, the Saudis have promised to increase oil production to a 30-year high.
The stated purpose of the sanctions and military threats is to stop Iran’s purported program to develop nuclear weapons—an effort the Iranian government has always denied and for which even pro-imperialist analysts and U.S. intelligence agencies admit there is no evidence. It is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy for the U.S. rulers, echoed by imperialist Britain and France as well as Israel, to declaim that Iran has “no right” to pursue the development of nuclear weapons. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 14 largest military spenders combined and possesses by far the world’s greatest supply of nukes as well as massive stores of highly enriched uranium. It stands alone in having used atomic weapons, incinerating some 200,000 Japanese civilians in the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 at the end of World War II. The purpose of that massacre was to send a message to the Soviet Union that U.S. imperialism meant to reign supreme.
There are clear indications that Iran has no plans to build an atomic bomb, as its government has repeatedly said. It should be noted that the 20 percent uranium enrichment level cited by the imperialists as approaching the level that can be used in weapons is the same needed for medical isotopes for cancer treatment. In 2007, the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) conceded that Iran had dismantled efforts to build an atomic bomb four years earlier. However, last November the IAEA released a report darkly hinting at “indications” that “some activities” related to nuclear weapons may have continued after 2003 and “may still be ongoing.” The facade of neutrality upheld by the IAEA, a body of the United Nations, was exposed by a cable released by WikiLeaks in which the agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, was described by an American official as “solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program” (London Guardian, 23 March).
The fact that Iran does not have nukes makes a military attack by Israel and/or the imperialists that much more of a possibility. As we have repeatedly stressed, in the face of imperialist nuclear blackmail and continuing military threats, Iran has every reason to pursue getting nuclear weapons and adequate delivery systems to deter attack. In the event of military attack by the imperialists or their Israeli accomplices, working people internationally must take a clear side with Iran. As Marxists, we do not give the least political support to Iran’s reactionary Islamic regime. But it is the U.S. imperialist rulers who are the principal enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed.
In the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has demonstrated its capacity to destroy regimes and in the process massacre hundreds of thousands of its victims. It is also clear that one by-product of these imperialist “triumphs” has been the unleashing of myriad national, religious and tribal rivalries, and, in the case of Iraq, the growing influence of Iran’s rulers. Those U.S. allies that sent small military contingents to Iraq and Afghanistan received nothing for their efforts except harsh criticism at home and, for the most part, have withdrawn their forces or are in the process of doing so.
Most significantly, the economies of the major capitalist powers are in the tank. Renewed war-mongering in the region has only served to increase the existing speculative bubble in oil prices and, thus, the prospects for a deepening of the worldwide recession. Faced with epidemic unemployment and savage assaults on living standards, working people in the U.S. are ill-disposed to the continuing presence of military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as to the prospects of new wars. The fight against the depredations wrought by America’s rulers at home and abroad requires that the working class break its ties with the capitalist masters, primarily manifested in its allegiance to the Democratic Party. The road forward lies in forging a proletarian party that is based on the principle that the working class shares no common interest with the bosses and is devoted to the overthrow of the bourgeois order through socialist revolution.
Defend North Korea!
If the hype about Iranian nukes sounds like “Return of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” it is because, at bottom, it is a continuation of Washington’s drive to assert its domination of the planet. That drive was qualitatively increased after the counterrevolutionary overthrow of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, which removed a strategic counterweight to U.S. imperialism.
The recipe for asserting such dominance varies little, as seen in the lead-up to the war and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Ten years of inspections by the imperialists’ agents of the IAEA guaranteed that the country was effectively disarmed. During the decade or so of UN sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime, an estimated one and a half million people, the majority of them children, died due to malnutrition, dirty drinking water and lack of medical supplies.
The arrogant rulers of U.S. imperialism feel no restraint in issuing their ultimatums. At last month’s “nuclear security summit” in Seoul, South Korea, Barack Obama lashed out at both capitalist Iran and the bureaucratically deformed workers state of North Korea. Backed by Japan and Britain, Obama demanded that North Korea stop a satellite launch planned for mid April, claiming that this would violate a ban on missile activity by the country. The Stalinist regime in Pyongyang, which says that the satellite is meant for surveys of North Korea’s countryside, answered that “we will never give up the right to launch a peaceful satellite, a legitimate right of a sovereign state and an essential step for economic development” (London Telegraph, 27 March).
Attempting to blackmail North Korea into relinquishing key means of defense, the U.S. over the past two decades has offered to provide aid if Pyongyang forgoes all military improvements, including the development of nuclear capacity and of ballistic rockets. In the latest deal, reached at the end of February, Washington agreed to provide 240,000 tons of food aid provided that North Korea end its uranium enrichment program and tests of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons. Mobilizing its Asian allies and client states behind it, the U.S. has threatened to abort the deal if the satellite mission goes forward. Japan and South Korea have threatened to (try to) shoot down the missile if it passes over their territories.
The U.S. launched the Korean War in 1950 to smash social revolution on the peninsula and to pursue the overthrow of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state that was created the year before. A peace treaty was never signed, and America’s South Korean client state refused to sign the armistice agreement between the U.S. and the North. Washington sees the Korean peninsula as a potential staging area from which to launch a counterrevolutionary assault on China. Since the Korean War, the U.S. has maintained a massive military presence in the South, today numbering 28,500 troops, while subjecting the North to military encirclement and embargo. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and bases from South Korea.
With the counterrevolution in the USSR, the economy of North Korea, which had made substantial advances because of its crucial links to the Soviet Union, was devastated. The country is now heavily reliant on Chinese aid and trade. Its sole strength is its substantial military power.
Whatever the intent of the upcoming missile launch, North Korea’s efforts to maintain and expand its military strength, including the development of nuclear capability, must be defended. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states—North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba—against imperialism and internal capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies, whose policies are encapsulated in the reactionary dogma of “building socialism in one country.” Opposing the fight for international proletarian revolution, the privileged bureaucracies instead pursue a futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, undermining the defense of those states against the class enemy.
A stark expression of Stalinist treachery is Beijing’s complicity in attempts to disarm North Korea. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has joined four capitalist countries in round after round of “talks” aimed at suppressing North Korea’s nuclear development. This only strengthens the hands of the U.S., Japanese and European imperialists, who seek the overthrow of the Peoples Republic of China—the largest and most powerful of the remaining deformed workers states—and the transformation of the Chinese mainland back into a sphere of untrammeled exploitation. Defense of China, which is highly dependent on the flow of Iranian oil, is also undermined by the CCP bureaucracy’s support to all four previous rounds of UN sanctions against Iran.
Earlier this month, 180 U.S. Marines arrived in Darwin in northern Australia, the first installment of a planned 2,500 troops to be stationed there as part of the growing encirclement of China. In the name of “fighting terrorism,” the U.S. has in the past decade enhanced its military presence in the Philippines and resumed open military relations with Indonesia, in addition to establishing bases in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Washington has also strengthened military ties with the Japanese imperialists and continues to buttress capitalist Taiwan. We join our comrades of the Spartacist Group Japan in calling to smash the counterrevolutionary alliance of U.S. and Japanese imperialism through workers revolution on both sides of the Pacific.
Intrigues Against Iran
The imperialist powers that have Iran in their crosshairs today have historically provided support for Israel’s nuclear program while helping to maintain a veil over the extent of the Zionists’ nuclear stockpile. The international working class is indebted to Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, who in 1986 revealed that Israel had acquired an arsenal of some 200 nuclear warheads. For his heroic exposure of the scale of this doomsday machine, which targeted the USSR as well as countries in the Near East, Vanunu was convicted of treason and served 18 years in prison. He has been forbidden to leave Israel since his release in 2004.
Iran has also been on the receiving end of covert operations by Israel, Britain and the U.S. In January, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan became the latest victim of a series of assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists. This comes in the context of unexplained bomb explosions at nuclear facilities. Earlier the Stuxnet computer virus had disabled many centrifuges in Iran’s enrichment facilities. Today, the U.S. continues to send surveillance drones over Iran, which seized one of the spy vehicles after it crashed last year. As the Washington Post (7 April) reports, the drone flights are “only a small part of a broad espionage campaign involving the NSA [National Security Agency], which intercepts e-mail and electronic communications, as well as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which scours satellite imagery.”
In their war drive against Iran, Israel’s Zionist rulers have the backing of the venal capitalist rulers of many neighboring Arab states. Exacerbating religious tensions in the region, Sunni Muslim states led by Saudi Arabia have become increasingly belligerent toward Shi’ite Iran. Saudi Arabia, a massively armed and repressive sheikdom, has been a linchpin of U.S. domination of the oil-rich Gulf region since the 1940s. Regarding Iran, Saudi King Abdullah has been egging on the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.” While drawing down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is reportedly planning to beef up its military contingent in Kuwait while reinforcing its naval presence in the Persian Gulf and strengthening its military alliance with Gulf states. Meanwhile, NATO has begun operating a new anti-missile radar system on Turkish soil, 435 miles from Iran.
Iran has become further isolated in the region by the instability in Syria, Tehran’s most significant Arab ally. Syria is a patchwork of potentially hostile ethnic, national and sectarian groupings where the ruling minority Alawites hold sway over the Sunni majority, Kurds, Druze and others. For over a year, Bashar al-Assad’s reactionary Ba’athist regime has faced, and brutally repressed, an insurgency dominated by reactionary forces centrally from the Sunni Muslim population and backed by sundry imperialist and regional powers. The U.S., Britain and Turkey have given their blessing to the arming of the Syrian rebels, using proxies to avoid openly flouting UN sanctions against Syria. The three countries have said that “they could welcome Saudi and Qatari efforts to give weapons to the rebel Free Syrian Army” (Financial Times, 1 April), while the U.S. is chipping in with “non-lethal” aid as well as drone surveillance flights.
Key Syrian opposition leaders have appealed for imperialist intervention, echoing the “rebels” who became willing tools for the NATO terror bombing of Libya last year (see article, page 12). The Libyan opposition to the rule of the bourgeois strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi initially took the form of a low-intensity civil war overlaid by tribal and regional divisions, a conflict in which revolutionary Marxists had no side. But when the imperialist bombing began, we did have a side: for defense of semicolonial Libya against imperialist attack while giving no political support to the Qaddafi regime. Today we demand: Imperialist hands off Syria! In the event of imperialist attack, we would stand for the defense of Syria while maintaining proletarian political opposition to Assad’s bloodsoaked rule.
Iran and Proletarian Revolution
The Near East is a battleground of imperialist rivalries, mainly driven by the need to control the region’s oil reserves. The region is also characterized by deepgoing oppression—of women, of national, religious and ethnic minorities as well as homosexuals. Iran’s working people, youth and women have been chafing under the mullahs’ rule, as have its many national and ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis and Turks. The multinational Iranian working class, leading all the oppressed behind it, must overthrow the Persian-chauvinist, clericalist regime. Key to this perspective is the forging of a Leninist workers party that fights for proletarian rule in Iran and the broader region. This is necessarily linked to the need for workers in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere to sweep away the rapacious imperialist rulers through workers revolutions.
The “Iranian revolution” that brought the Islamist regime to power in 1979 was hailed by almost the entire left internationally, including the once-powerful Iranian left. The mass mobilizations that toppled the hated U.S.-backed regime of Shah Pahlavi were channelled into support for the Islamic hierarchy under Ayatollah Khomeini, who seized power and went on to crush struggles by workers and oppressed national minorities and subject women to intensified oppression under sharia law. Trade unions were smashed, and leftists were jailed and executed. Uniquely, the international Spartacist tendency, forerunner of the International Communist League, championed the proletariat’s class interests against the forces of Islamic reaction. We said: Down with the Shah! Down with the mullahs! Workers to power!
Iran’s multinational proletariat has suffered decades of intense repression. Today, along with most other layers of Iranian society, it is further ground down by the imperialist economic stranglehold and the regime’s austerity measures. To emerge as a class fighting in its own interest and in the interest of all the impoverished and oppressed, it must be broken from religious fundamentalism and all bourgeois political forces, including “pro-democracy” outfits like the bourgeois “Green Movement of Hope,” which itself is led by clerical authorities.
That movement emerged in 2009 during the presidential elections between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Moussavi, a “reform” cleric who was prime minister for eight years under Khomeini. After losing the utterly fraudulent election, Moussavi placed himself at the head of the subsequent mass protests. About a year ago, Moussavi was placed under house arrest, from which he continues to organize the “Green Movement.” Moussavi is no less a butcher than his rivals in the current regime. While he was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, untold thousands of leftists, Kurds and women’s rights activists were slaughtered in the prisons and buried in mass graves. A decade later, in 1999, militant student protests were drowned in blood by the government of Mohammad Khatami, now a Moussavi ally.
In Iran as elsewhere, the key to mobilizing the proletariat in its class interests is the leadership of a revolutionary workers party modeled on the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the workers to power in the Russian October Revolution of 1917. The International Communist League is dedicated to building such parties throughout the world as sections of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
*************
Workers Vanguard No. 1000
13 April 2012
U.S. Imperialists Hands Off the World!-Down With Starvation Sanctions Against Iran!
APRIL 9—Further ratcheting up imperialist pressures against Iran, the U.S. and its European Union allies are preparing to issue an ultimatum that Tehran immediately close the recently completed Fordo nuclear facility, which is deep underground, and stop further enrichment of uranium. The demands of the Western powers, which claim that Iran is a few steps from developing weapons-grade uranium, are to be delivered at a meeting scheduled to begin later this week in Istanbul. As reported in the New York Times (7 April), President Obama calls this “Iran’s ‘last chance’ to resolve its nuclear confrontation with the United Nations and the West diplomatically.” Obama had already invoked the prospect of war to get Iran to bow to the imperialist diktat. He has declared that “all options are on the table” and assured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly threatened air strikes, that the U.S. “has Israel’s back.”
The main weapon the imperialists have been wielding against Iran is an economic siege, which they have recently intensified. Beginning in November, the U.S., in coordination with Britain and Canada, moved to implement a virtual international financial quarantine of Iran. Last month, all businesses and banks in Iran were barred from accessing the system that arranges international money transfers. The embargo includes the central bank, which handles the export of crude oil. As a result of economic sanctions, the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, has dropped sharply and inflation is skyrocketing, led by soaring food and gas prices. With unemployment shooting steadily upward, Hyundai Motors has closed down its factory in Iran for fear of being penalized under the sanctions. Some essential household goods are impossible to obtain. The austerity is exacerbated by Tehran’s ban on hundreds of imported items, an effort intended to stem the decline of its currency.
The latest sanctions are aimed to strike at the heart of Iran’s economy: its oil exports. The European Union, whose member states currently buy 20 percent of Iran’s oil, plans to initiate a ban on all Iranian oil imports in July. The U.S. sanctions include measures to penalize countries that import Iranian oil and any bank handling payment for such sales can be denied access to the U.S. financial system. Under pressure from Washington, Turkey has declared that it will slash its purchases of Iranian oil by 20 percent. Other big buyers, including Japan, South Africa and India, have also indicated that they will reduce their orders, while China too has been buying less. To make up for the shortfall, the Saudis have promised to increase oil production to a 30-year high.
The stated purpose of the sanctions and military threats is to stop Iran’s purported program to develop nuclear weapons—an effort the Iranian government has always denied and for which even pro-imperialist analysts and U.S. intelligence agencies admit there is no evidence. It is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy for the U.S. rulers, echoed by imperialist Britain and France as well as Israel, to declaim that Iran has “no right” to pursue the development of nuclear weapons. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 14 largest military spenders combined and possesses by far the world’s greatest supply of nukes as well as massive stores of highly enriched uranium. It stands alone in having used atomic weapons, incinerating some 200,000 Japanese civilians in the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 at the end of World War II. The purpose of that massacre was to send a message to the Soviet Union that U.S. imperialism meant to reign supreme.
There are clear indications that Iran has no plans to build an atomic bomb, as its government has repeatedly said. It should be noted that the 20 percent uranium enrichment level cited by the imperialists as approaching the level that can be used in weapons is the same needed for medical isotopes for cancer treatment. In 2007, the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) conceded that Iran had dismantled efforts to build an atomic bomb four years earlier. However, last November the IAEA released a report darkly hinting at “indications” that “some activities” related to nuclear weapons may have continued after 2003 and “may still be ongoing.” The facade of neutrality upheld by the IAEA, a body of the United Nations, was exposed by a cable released by WikiLeaks in which the agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, was described by an American official as “solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program” (London Guardian, 23 March).
The fact that Iran does not have nukes makes a military attack by Israel and/or the imperialists that much more of a possibility. As we have repeatedly stressed, in the face of imperialist nuclear blackmail and continuing military threats, Iran has every reason to pursue getting nuclear weapons and adequate delivery systems to deter attack. In the event of military attack by the imperialists or their Israeli accomplices, working people internationally must take a clear side with Iran. As Marxists, we do not give the least political support to Iran’s reactionary Islamic regime. But it is the U.S. imperialist rulers who are the principal enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed.
In the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has demonstrated its capacity to destroy regimes and in the process massacre hundreds of thousands of its victims. It is also clear that one by-product of these imperialist “triumphs” has been the unleashing of myriad national, religious and tribal rivalries, and, in the case of Iraq, the growing influence of Iran’s rulers. Those U.S. allies that sent small military contingents to Iraq and Afghanistan received nothing for their efforts except harsh criticism at home and, for the most part, have withdrawn their forces or are in the process of doing so.
Most significantly, the economies of the major capitalist powers are in the tank. Renewed war-mongering in the region has only served to increase the existing speculative bubble in oil prices and, thus, the prospects for a deepening of the worldwide recession. Faced with epidemic unemployment and savage assaults on living standards, working people in the U.S. are ill-disposed to the continuing presence of military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as to the prospects of new wars. The fight against the depredations wrought by America’s rulers at home and abroad requires that the working class break its ties with the capitalist masters, primarily manifested in its allegiance to the Democratic Party. The road forward lies in forging a proletarian party that is based on the principle that the working class shares no common interest with the bosses and is devoted to the overthrow of the bourgeois order through socialist revolution.
Defend North Korea!
If the hype about Iranian nukes sounds like “Return of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” it is because, at bottom, it is a continuation of Washington’s drive to assert its domination of the planet. That drive was qualitatively increased after the counterrevolutionary overthrow of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, which removed a strategic counterweight to U.S. imperialism.
The recipe for asserting such dominance varies little, as seen in the lead-up to the war and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Ten years of inspections by the imperialists’ agents of the IAEA guaranteed that the country was effectively disarmed. During the decade or so of UN sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime, an estimated one and a half million people, the majority of them children, died due to malnutrition, dirty drinking water and lack of medical supplies.
The arrogant rulers of U.S. imperialism feel no restraint in issuing their ultimatums. At last month’s “nuclear security summit” in Seoul, South Korea, Barack Obama lashed out at both capitalist Iran and the bureaucratically deformed workers state of North Korea. Backed by Japan and Britain, Obama demanded that North Korea stop a satellite launch planned for mid April, claiming that this would violate a ban on missile activity by the country. The Stalinist regime in Pyongyang, which says that the satellite is meant for surveys of North Korea’s countryside, answered that “we will never give up the right to launch a peaceful satellite, a legitimate right of a sovereign state and an essential step for economic development” (London Telegraph, 27 March).
Attempting to blackmail North Korea into relinquishing key means of defense, the U.S. over the past two decades has offered to provide aid if Pyongyang forgoes all military improvements, including the development of nuclear capacity and of ballistic rockets. In the latest deal, reached at the end of February, Washington agreed to provide 240,000 tons of food aid provided that North Korea end its uranium enrichment program and tests of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons. Mobilizing its Asian allies and client states behind it, the U.S. has threatened to abort the deal if the satellite mission goes forward. Japan and South Korea have threatened to (try to) shoot down the missile if it passes over their territories.
The U.S. launched the Korean War in 1950 to smash social revolution on the peninsula and to pursue the overthrow of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state that was created the year before. A peace treaty was never signed, and America’s South Korean client state refused to sign the armistice agreement between the U.S. and the North. Washington sees the Korean peninsula as a potential staging area from which to launch a counterrevolutionary assault on China. Since the Korean War, the U.S. has maintained a massive military presence in the South, today numbering 28,500 troops, while subjecting the North to military encirclement and embargo. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and bases from South Korea.
With the counterrevolution in the USSR, the economy of North Korea, which had made substantial advances because of its crucial links to the Soviet Union, was devastated. The country is now heavily reliant on Chinese aid and trade. Its sole strength is its substantial military power.
Whatever the intent of the upcoming missile launch, North Korea’s efforts to maintain and expand its military strength, including the development of nuclear capability, must be defended. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states—North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba—against imperialism and internal capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies, whose policies are encapsulated in the reactionary dogma of “building socialism in one country.” Opposing the fight for international proletarian revolution, the privileged bureaucracies instead pursue a futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, undermining the defense of those states against the class enemy.
A stark expression of Stalinist treachery is Beijing’s complicity in attempts to disarm North Korea. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has joined four capitalist countries in round after round of “talks” aimed at suppressing North Korea’s nuclear development. This only strengthens the hands of the U.S., Japanese and European imperialists, who seek the overthrow of the Peoples Republic of China—the largest and most powerful of the remaining deformed workers states—and the transformation of the Chinese mainland back into a sphere of untrammeled exploitation. Defense of China, which is highly dependent on the flow of Iranian oil, is also undermined by the CCP bureaucracy’s support to all four previous rounds of UN sanctions against Iran.
Earlier this month, 180 U.S. Marines arrived in Darwin in northern Australia, the first installment of a planned 2,500 troops to be stationed there as part of the growing encirclement of China. In the name of “fighting terrorism,” the U.S. has in the past decade enhanced its military presence in the Philippines and resumed open military relations with Indonesia, in addition to establishing bases in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Washington has also strengthened military ties with the Japanese imperialists and continues to buttress capitalist Taiwan. We join our comrades of the Spartacist Group Japan in calling to smash the counterrevolutionary alliance of U.S. and Japanese imperialism through workers revolution on both sides of the Pacific.
Intrigues Against Iran
The imperialist powers that have Iran in their crosshairs today have historically provided support for Israel’s nuclear program while helping to maintain a veil over the extent of the Zionists’ nuclear stockpile. The international working class is indebted to Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, who in 1986 revealed that Israel had acquired an arsenal of some 200 nuclear warheads. For his heroic exposure of the scale of this doomsday machine, which targeted the USSR as well as countries in the Near East, Vanunu was convicted of treason and served 18 years in prison. He has been forbidden to leave Israel since his release in 2004.
Iran has also been on the receiving end of covert operations by Israel, Britain and the U.S. In January, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan became the latest victim of a series of assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists. This comes in the context of unexplained bomb explosions at nuclear facilities. Earlier the Stuxnet computer virus had disabled many centrifuges in Iran’s enrichment facilities. Today, the U.S. continues to send surveillance drones over Iran, which seized one of the spy vehicles after it crashed last year. As the Washington Post (7 April) reports, the drone flights are “only a small part of a broad espionage campaign involving the NSA [National Security Agency], which intercepts e-mail and electronic communications, as well as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which scours satellite imagery.”
In their war drive against Iran, Israel’s Zionist rulers have the backing of the venal capitalist rulers of many neighboring Arab states. Exacerbating religious tensions in the region, Sunni Muslim states led by Saudi Arabia have become increasingly belligerent toward Shi’ite Iran. Saudi Arabia, a massively armed and repressive sheikdom, has been a linchpin of U.S. domination of the oil-rich Gulf region since the 1940s. Regarding Iran, Saudi King Abdullah has been egging on the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.” While drawing down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is reportedly planning to beef up its military contingent in Kuwait while reinforcing its naval presence in the Persian Gulf and strengthening its military alliance with Gulf states. Meanwhile, NATO has begun operating a new anti-missile radar system on Turkish soil, 435 miles from Iran.
Iran has become further isolated in the region by the instability in Syria, Tehran’s most significant Arab ally. Syria is a patchwork of potentially hostile ethnic, national and sectarian groupings where the ruling minority Alawites hold sway over the Sunni majority, Kurds, Druze and others. For over a year, Bashar al-Assad’s reactionary Ba’athist regime has faced, and brutally repressed, an insurgency dominated by reactionary forces centrally from the Sunni Muslim population and backed by sundry imperialist and regional powers. The U.S., Britain and Turkey have given their blessing to the arming of the Syrian rebels, using proxies to avoid openly flouting UN sanctions against Syria. The three countries have said that “they could welcome Saudi and Qatari efforts to give weapons to the rebel Free Syrian Army” (Financial Times, 1 April), while the U.S. is chipping in with “non-lethal” aid as well as drone surveillance flights.
Key Syrian opposition leaders have appealed for imperialist intervention, echoing the “rebels” who became willing tools for the NATO terror bombing of Libya last year (see article, page 12). The Libyan opposition to the rule of the bourgeois strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi initially took the form of a low-intensity civil war overlaid by tribal and regional divisions, a conflict in which revolutionary Marxists had no side. But when the imperialist bombing began, we did have a side: for defense of semicolonial Libya against imperialist attack while giving no political support to the Qaddafi regime. Today we demand: Imperialist hands off Syria! In the event of imperialist attack, we would stand for the defense of Syria while maintaining proletarian political opposition to Assad’s bloodsoaked rule.
Iran and Proletarian Revolution
The Near East is a battleground of imperialist rivalries, mainly driven by the need to control the region’s oil reserves. The region is also characterized by deepgoing oppression—of women, of national, religious and ethnic minorities as well as homosexuals. Iran’s working people, youth and women have been chafing under the mullahs’ rule, as have its many national and ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis and Turks. The multinational Iranian working class, leading all the oppressed behind it, must overthrow the Persian-chauvinist, clericalist regime. Key to this perspective is the forging of a Leninist workers party that fights for proletarian rule in Iran and the broader region. This is necessarily linked to the need for workers in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere to sweep away the rapacious imperialist rulers through workers revolutions.
The “Iranian revolution” that brought the Islamist regime to power in 1979 was hailed by almost the entire left internationally, including the once-powerful Iranian left. The mass mobilizations that toppled the hated U.S.-backed regime of Shah Pahlavi were channelled into support for the Islamic hierarchy under Ayatollah Khomeini, who seized power and went on to crush struggles by workers and oppressed national minorities and subject women to intensified oppression under sharia law. Trade unions were smashed, and leftists were jailed and executed. Uniquely, the international Spartacist tendency, forerunner of the International Communist League, championed the proletariat’s class interests against the forces of Islamic reaction. We said: Down with the Shah! Down with the mullahs! Workers to power!
Iran’s multinational proletariat has suffered decades of intense repression. Today, along with most other layers of Iranian society, it is further ground down by the imperialist economic stranglehold and the regime’s austerity measures. To emerge as a class fighting in its own interest and in the interest of all the impoverished and oppressed, it must be broken from religious fundamentalism and all bourgeois political forces, including “pro-democracy” outfits like the bourgeois “Green Movement of Hope,” which itself is led by clerical authorities.
That movement emerged in 2009 during the presidential elections between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Moussavi, a “reform” cleric who was prime minister for eight years under Khomeini. After losing the utterly fraudulent election, Moussavi placed himself at the head of the subsequent mass protests. About a year ago, Moussavi was placed under house arrest, from which he continues to organize the “Green Movement.” Moussavi is no less a butcher than his rivals in the current regime. While he was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, untold thousands of leftists, Kurds and women’s rights activists were slaughtered in the prisons and buried in mass graves. A decade later, in 1999, militant student protests were drowned in blood by the government of Mohammad Khatami, now a Moussavi ally.
In Iran as elsewhere, the key to mobilizing the proletariat in its class interests is the leadership of a revolutionary workers party modeled on the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the workers to power in the Russian October Revolution of 1917. The International Communist League is dedicated to building such parties throughout the world as sections of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Hayes Bickford Breakout 1962
Click on the headline to link to a photograph of a Hayes-Bickford on Huntington Avenue in Boston (no Cambridge one available) to add a little flavor to this entry.
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Two: Got The Urge For Going In Search Of The Blue- Pink Great American West Night- Hayes-Bickford Breakout 1962
Here I am again sitting, 3 o’clock in the morning sitting, bleary-eyed, slightly distracted after mulling over the back and forth of the twelve hundredth run-in (nice way to put it, right?) with Ma that has driven me out into this chilly early October 1962 morning. And where do I find myself sitting at this time of morning? Tired, but excitedly expectant, on an uncomfortable, unpadded bench seat on this rolling old clickity-clack monster of a Red Line subway car as it now waggles its way out past Kendall Station on its way to Central Square and then to the end of the line, Harvard Square. My hangout, my muse home, my night home, at least my weekend night home, my place to make sense of the world in a world that doesn’t make much sense, at least not enough much sense. Sanctuary, Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford sanctuary, misbegotten teenage boy sanctuary, recognized by august international law, recognized by sanctified canon law, or not.
That beef with Ma, that really unnumbered beef, forget about the 1200 I said before, that was just a guess, has driven me to take an “all-nighter” trip away from the travails of the old home town across Boston to the never-closed Hayes-Bickford cafeteria that beckons just as you get up the stairs from the Harvard Square subway tunnel. Damn, let me just get this off my chest and then I can tell the rest of the story. Ma said X, I pleaded for Y (hell this homestead civil war lent itself righteously to a nice algebraic formulation. You can use it too, no charge). Unbeknownst to me Y did not exist in Ma’s universe. Ever. Sound familiar? Sure, but I had to get it off my chest.
After putting on my uniform, my Harvard Square “cool” uniform: over-sized flannel brownish plaid shirt, belt-less black cuff-less chino pants, black Chuck Taylor logo-ed Converse sneakers, a now ratty old windbreaker won in a Fourth of July distance race a few years back when I really was nothing but a wet-behind-the ears kid to ward off the chill, and, and the absolutely required midnight sunglasses to hide those bleary eyes from a peeking world I was ready to go. To face the unlighted night, and fight against the dawn’s rising for another day. Oh ya, I forgot, I had to sneak out of the house stealthily, run like some crazed broken- field football player down the back of the property, and, after catching my breathe, walk a couple of miles over the North Adamsville Bridge and nasty, hostile (hostile if anyone was out, and anyone was sniping for a misbegotten teenage boy, for any purpose good or evil) Dorchester streets to get to the Fields Corner subway stop. The local Eastern Mass. bus had stopped its always erratic service hours ago, and, anyway, I usually would rather walk, in any case, than wait, wait my youth away for those buses to amble along our way with their byzantine schedules.
Right now though I am thinking, as those subway car wheels rattle beneath my feet, who knows, really, how or why it starts, that wanderlust start, that strange feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have to move on, or out, or up or you will explode, except you also know, or you damn well come to know that it eats away at a man, or a woman for that matter, in different ways. Maybe way back, way back in the cradle it was that first sense that there was more to the world that the four corners of that baby world existence and that if you could just, could just get over that little, little side board there might be something better, much better over the horizon. But, frankly that just seems like too much of a literary stretch even for me, moody teenage boy that I am, to swallow so let’s just say that it started once I knew that the ocean was a way to get away, if you needed to get away. But see I didn’t figure than one out for myself even, old Kenny from the old neighborhood in third grade is the one who got me hip to that, and then Johnny James and his brother filled in the rest of the blanks and so then I was sea-worthy, dream sea-worthy anyway.
But, honestly, that sea dream stuff can only be music for the future because right now I am stuck, although I do not always feel stuck about it, trying to figure my way out of high school world, or at least figure out the raging things that I want to do after high school that fill up my daydream time (study hall time, if you really want to know). Of course, as well, that part about the ocean just mentioned, well there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my-back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that meant I had to head west. Right now west though is Harvard Square, its doings and not doings, it trumpet call to words, and sounds, and actions in the October Friday night all-night storm brewing.
The train now rounds the squeaky-sounding bend out of Central Square and stops at the underground Harvard Square station. So now I leave my pensive seat and stand waiting, waiting for the driver to release the pressure to let the sliding train door open, getting ready to jump off the old subway, two-step-at-a-time my way up the two flights of stairs and head for mecca to see if things jump for me tonight. The doors open at last. Up the two-stepped stairs I go, get to the surface and confront the old double-glassed Hayes door entrance and survey the vast table-filled room that at this hour has a few night owl stranglers spotted randomly throughout the place.
You know the old Hayes-Bickford, or one of them, if you live in Boston or New York City, or a few other places on the East Coast, don’t you? Put your tray on the metal slider (hey, I don’t know what you call that slider thing, okay) and cruise down the line from item to item behind the glass-enclosed bins of, mostly, steamy food, if you are looking for fast service, for a quick between doing things, pressing things, meal. Steamed and breaded everything from breakfast to lunch to dinner anytime topped off by dishwater quality coffee (refills on demand, if you feel lucky).
This is not the place to bring your date, certainly not your first date, except maybe for a quick cup of that coffee before going to some event, or home. What this is, really, is a place where you can hang out, and hang out with comfort, because nobody, nobody at all, is going to ask you to leave, at least if you act half-way human. And that is what this place is really about, the humans in all their human conditions doing human things, alien to you or not, that you see floating by you, as you take a seat at one of the one-size-fits all wooden tables with those red vinyl seat covered chairs replete with paper place settings, a few off-hand eating utensils and the usual obligatory array of condiments to help get down the food and drink offered here.
Let me describe who is here at this hour on an early Saturday morning in October 1962. I will not vouch for other times, or other days, but I know Friday and Saturday nights a little so I can say something about them. Of course there is the last drink at the last open barroom crowd, said bar already well-closed in blue law Massachusetts, trying to get sober enough by eating a little food to traverse the road home. Good luck. Needless to say eating food in an all-night cafeteria, any all-night cafeteria, means only one thing-the person is so caught up in a booze frenzy that he (mainly) or she (very occasionally) is desperate for anything to hang the name food on to. Frankly, except for the obligatory hard-dollar coffee-steamed to its essence, then through some mystical alchemic process re-beaned, and served in heavy ceramic mugs that keep in the warmth to keep the eyes open the food here is strictly for the, well, the desperate, drunk or sober.
I might mention a little more about the food as I go along but it is strictly to add color to this little story. Maybe, maybe it will add color to the story but this is mainly about the “literary” life at the old Hayes and the quest for the blue-pink night not the cuisine so don’t hold me to it. Here is the kicker though; there are a few, mercifully few this night, old winos, habitual drunks, and street vagabonds (I am being polite here) who are nuzzling their food, for real. This is the way that you can tell the "last drink" boys, the hail fellows well met, who are just out on the town and who probably go to one of the ten zillion colleges in the area and are drawn like moths (and like wayward high schools kids, including this writer) to the magic name, Harvard Square. They just pick at their food. Those other guys (again, mainly, guys) those habituals and professional waywards work at it like it is their last chance for salvation.
Harvard Square, bright lights, dead of nights, see the sights. That vision is nothing but a commercial, a commercial magnet for every young (and old) hustler within fifty miles of the place to come and display their “acumen”. Their hustle. Three card Monte, quick-change artistry, bait and hook, a little jack-rolling, fake dope-plying, lifting an off-hand wallet, the whole gamut of hustler con lore. On any given Harvard Square weekend night there have got to be more young, naïve, starry-eyed kids hanging out trying to be cool, but really, like me, just learning the ropes of life than you could shake a stick at to set a hustler’s heart, if he (mainly) or she (sometimes) had a heart.
I’ll tell you about a quick con that got me easy in a second but right now let me tell you that at this hour I can see a few con artists just now resting up after a hard night’s work around a couple of tables, comparing notes (or, more likely, trying to con each other, there is no honor among thieves in this little night world. Go to it boys). As to the con that got me, hey it was simple, a guy, an older guy, a twenty-five year old or something like that guy, came up to me while I was talking to a friend and said did I (we) want to get some booze. Sober, sixteen years old, and thrill-seeking I said sure (drinking booze is the coin of the realm for thrills these days, among high school kids that I know, maybe the older set, those college guys, are, I hear, experimenting with drugs but if so it is very on the QT).
He said name your poison, I did, and then he “suggested” a little something for himself. Sure, whatever is right. I gave him the money and he returned a few minutes later with a small bag with the top of a liquor bottle hanging out. He split. We went off to a private area around Harvard Yard (Phillips Brook House, I think) and got ready to have our first serious taste of booze, and maybe get rum brave enough to pick up some girls. Naturally, the bottle is a booze bottle alright but it had been opened (how long before is anyone’s guess) and filled with water. Sucker, right. Now the only reason that I am mentioning this story right now is that the guy who pulled this con is sitting, sitting like the King of Siam, just a few tables away from where I am sitting. The lesson learned for the road, for the future road that beckons: don’t accept packages from strangers without inspecting them and watch out for cons, right? No, hell no. The lesson is this: sure don’t fall for wise guy tricks but the big thing is to shake it off, forget about it if you see the con artist again. You are way to cool to let him (or occasionally her) think that they have conned you. Out loud, anyway.
But wait, I am not here at almost four o’clock in the Hayes-Bickford morning, the Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford morning, to talk about the decor, the food if that is what it is, about the clientele, humble, slick, or otherwise. I am here looking for “talent,” literary talent that is. See, I have been here enough, and have heard enough about the ”beats” (or rather pseudo-beats, or “late phase” beats at this time) and the “folkies” (music people breaking out of the Pop 40 music scene and going back to the roots of America music, way back) to know that a bunch of them, about six in all, right this minute are sitting in a far corner with a light drum tapping the beat listening to a guy in black pants(always de rigueur black), sneakers and a flannel shirt just like me reciting his latest poem. That possibility is what drove me here this night, and other nights as well. See the Hayes is known as the place where someone like Norman Mailer has his buttered toast after one of his “last drink” bouts. Or that Bob Dylan sat at that table, that table right over there, writing something on a napkin. Or some parallel poet to the one now wrapping up his seventy-seven verse imitation Allen Ginsberg's Howl master work went out to San Francisco and blew the lid off the town, the City Lights town, the literary town.
But I better, now that the five-ish dawn light is hovering after my dawdlings, trying to break through the night wars, get my droopy body down those subway stairs pretty soon and back across town before anyone at home notices that I am missing. Still I will take the hard-bitten coffee, re-beaned and all, I will take the sleepy eyes that are starting to weigh down my face, I will even take the con artists and feisty drunks just so that I can be here when somebody’s search for the blue-pink great American West night, farther west than Harvard Square night, gets launched.
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Two: Got The Urge For Going In Search Of The Blue- Pink Great American West Night- Hayes-Bickford Breakout 1962
Here I am again sitting, 3 o’clock in the morning sitting, bleary-eyed, slightly distracted after mulling over the back and forth of the twelve hundredth run-in (nice way to put it, right?) with Ma that has driven me out into this chilly early October 1962 morning. And where do I find myself sitting at this time of morning? Tired, but excitedly expectant, on an uncomfortable, unpadded bench seat on this rolling old clickity-clack monster of a Red Line subway car as it now waggles its way out past Kendall Station on its way to Central Square and then to the end of the line, Harvard Square. My hangout, my muse home, my night home, at least my weekend night home, my place to make sense of the world in a world that doesn’t make much sense, at least not enough much sense. Sanctuary, Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford sanctuary, misbegotten teenage boy sanctuary, recognized by august international law, recognized by sanctified canon law, or not.
That beef with Ma, that really unnumbered beef, forget about the 1200 I said before, that was just a guess, has driven me to take an “all-nighter” trip away from the travails of the old home town across Boston to the never-closed Hayes-Bickford cafeteria that beckons just as you get up the stairs from the Harvard Square subway tunnel. Damn, let me just get this off my chest and then I can tell the rest of the story. Ma said X, I pleaded for Y (hell this homestead civil war lent itself righteously to a nice algebraic formulation. You can use it too, no charge). Unbeknownst to me Y did not exist in Ma’s universe. Ever. Sound familiar? Sure, but I had to get it off my chest.
After putting on my uniform, my Harvard Square “cool” uniform: over-sized flannel brownish plaid shirt, belt-less black cuff-less chino pants, black Chuck Taylor logo-ed Converse sneakers, a now ratty old windbreaker won in a Fourth of July distance race a few years back when I really was nothing but a wet-behind-the ears kid to ward off the chill, and, and the absolutely required midnight sunglasses to hide those bleary eyes from a peeking world I was ready to go. To face the unlighted night, and fight against the dawn’s rising for another day. Oh ya, I forgot, I had to sneak out of the house stealthily, run like some crazed broken- field football player down the back of the property, and, after catching my breathe, walk a couple of miles over the North Adamsville Bridge and nasty, hostile (hostile if anyone was out, and anyone was sniping for a misbegotten teenage boy, for any purpose good or evil) Dorchester streets to get to the Fields Corner subway stop. The local Eastern Mass. bus had stopped its always erratic service hours ago, and, anyway, I usually would rather walk, in any case, than wait, wait my youth away for those buses to amble along our way with their byzantine schedules.
Right now though I am thinking, as those subway car wheels rattle beneath my feet, who knows, really, how or why it starts, that wanderlust start, that strange feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have to move on, or out, or up or you will explode, except you also know, or you damn well come to know that it eats away at a man, or a woman for that matter, in different ways. Maybe way back, way back in the cradle it was that first sense that there was more to the world that the four corners of that baby world existence and that if you could just, could just get over that little, little side board there might be something better, much better over the horizon. But, frankly that just seems like too much of a literary stretch even for me, moody teenage boy that I am, to swallow so let’s just say that it started once I knew that the ocean was a way to get away, if you needed to get away. But see I didn’t figure than one out for myself even, old Kenny from the old neighborhood in third grade is the one who got me hip to that, and then Johnny James and his brother filled in the rest of the blanks and so then I was sea-worthy, dream sea-worthy anyway.
But, honestly, that sea dream stuff can only be music for the future because right now I am stuck, although I do not always feel stuck about it, trying to figure my way out of high school world, or at least figure out the raging things that I want to do after high school that fill up my daydream time (study hall time, if you really want to know). Of course, as well, that part about the ocean just mentioned, well there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my-back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that meant I had to head west. Right now west though is Harvard Square, its doings and not doings, it trumpet call to words, and sounds, and actions in the October Friday night all-night storm brewing.
The train now rounds the squeaky-sounding bend out of Central Square and stops at the underground Harvard Square station. So now I leave my pensive seat and stand waiting, waiting for the driver to release the pressure to let the sliding train door open, getting ready to jump off the old subway, two-step-at-a-time my way up the two flights of stairs and head for mecca to see if things jump for me tonight. The doors open at last. Up the two-stepped stairs I go, get to the surface and confront the old double-glassed Hayes door entrance and survey the vast table-filled room that at this hour has a few night owl stranglers spotted randomly throughout the place.
You know the old Hayes-Bickford, or one of them, if you live in Boston or New York City, or a few other places on the East Coast, don’t you? Put your tray on the metal slider (hey, I don’t know what you call that slider thing, okay) and cruise down the line from item to item behind the glass-enclosed bins of, mostly, steamy food, if you are looking for fast service, for a quick between doing things, pressing things, meal. Steamed and breaded everything from breakfast to lunch to dinner anytime topped off by dishwater quality coffee (refills on demand, if you feel lucky).
This is not the place to bring your date, certainly not your first date, except maybe for a quick cup of that coffee before going to some event, or home. What this is, really, is a place where you can hang out, and hang out with comfort, because nobody, nobody at all, is going to ask you to leave, at least if you act half-way human. And that is what this place is really about, the humans in all their human conditions doing human things, alien to you or not, that you see floating by you, as you take a seat at one of the one-size-fits all wooden tables with those red vinyl seat covered chairs replete with paper place settings, a few off-hand eating utensils and the usual obligatory array of condiments to help get down the food and drink offered here.
Let me describe who is here at this hour on an early Saturday morning in October 1962. I will not vouch for other times, or other days, but I know Friday and Saturday nights a little so I can say something about them. Of course there is the last drink at the last open barroom crowd, said bar already well-closed in blue law Massachusetts, trying to get sober enough by eating a little food to traverse the road home. Good luck. Needless to say eating food in an all-night cafeteria, any all-night cafeteria, means only one thing-the person is so caught up in a booze frenzy that he (mainly) or she (very occasionally) is desperate for anything to hang the name food on to. Frankly, except for the obligatory hard-dollar coffee-steamed to its essence, then through some mystical alchemic process re-beaned, and served in heavy ceramic mugs that keep in the warmth to keep the eyes open the food here is strictly for the, well, the desperate, drunk or sober.
I might mention a little more about the food as I go along but it is strictly to add color to this little story. Maybe, maybe it will add color to the story but this is mainly about the “literary” life at the old Hayes and the quest for the blue-pink night not the cuisine so don’t hold me to it. Here is the kicker though; there are a few, mercifully few this night, old winos, habitual drunks, and street vagabonds (I am being polite here) who are nuzzling their food, for real. This is the way that you can tell the "last drink" boys, the hail fellows well met, who are just out on the town and who probably go to one of the ten zillion colleges in the area and are drawn like moths (and like wayward high schools kids, including this writer) to the magic name, Harvard Square. They just pick at their food. Those other guys (again, mainly, guys) those habituals and professional waywards work at it like it is their last chance for salvation.
Harvard Square, bright lights, dead of nights, see the sights. That vision is nothing but a commercial, a commercial magnet for every young (and old) hustler within fifty miles of the place to come and display their “acumen”. Their hustle. Three card Monte, quick-change artistry, bait and hook, a little jack-rolling, fake dope-plying, lifting an off-hand wallet, the whole gamut of hustler con lore. On any given Harvard Square weekend night there have got to be more young, naïve, starry-eyed kids hanging out trying to be cool, but really, like me, just learning the ropes of life than you could shake a stick at to set a hustler’s heart, if he (mainly) or she (sometimes) had a heart.
I’ll tell you about a quick con that got me easy in a second but right now let me tell you that at this hour I can see a few con artists just now resting up after a hard night’s work around a couple of tables, comparing notes (or, more likely, trying to con each other, there is no honor among thieves in this little night world. Go to it boys). As to the con that got me, hey it was simple, a guy, an older guy, a twenty-five year old or something like that guy, came up to me while I was talking to a friend and said did I (we) want to get some booze. Sober, sixteen years old, and thrill-seeking I said sure (drinking booze is the coin of the realm for thrills these days, among high school kids that I know, maybe the older set, those college guys, are, I hear, experimenting with drugs but if so it is very on the QT).
He said name your poison, I did, and then he “suggested” a little something for himself. Sure, whatever is right. I gave him the money and he returned a few minutes later with a small bag with the top of a liquor bottle hanging out. He split. We went off to a private area around Harvard Yard (Phillips Brook House, I think) and got ready to have our first serious taste of booze, and maybe get rum brave enough to pick up some girls. Naturally, the bottle is a booze bottle alright but it had been opened (how long before is anyone’s guess) and filled with water. Sucker, right. Now the only reason that I am mentioning this story right now is that the guy who pulled this con is sitting, sitting like the King of Siam, just a few tables away from where I am sitting. The lesson learned for the road, for the future road that beckons: don’t accept packages from strangers without inspecting them and watch out for cons, right? No, hell no. The lesson is this: sure don’t fall for wise guy tricks but the big thing is to shake it off, forget about it if you see the con artist again. You are way to cool to let him (or occasionally her) think that they have conned you. Out loud, anyway.
But wait, I am not here at almost four o’clock in the Hayes-Bickford morning, the Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford morning, to talk about the decor, the food if that is what it is, about the clientele, humble, slick, or otherwise. I am here looking for “talent,” literary talent that is. See, I have been here enough, and have heard enough about the ”beats” (or rather pseudo-beats, or “late phase” beats at this time) and the “folkies” (music people breaking out of the Pop 40 music scene and going back to the roots of America music, way back) to know that a bunch of them, about six in all, right this minute are sitting in a far corner with a light drum tapping the beat listening to a guy in black pants(always de rigueur black), sneakers and a flannel shirt just like me reciting his latest poem. That possibility is what drove me here this night, and other nights as well. See the Hayes is known as the place where someone like Norman Mailer has his buttered toast after one of his “last drink” bouts. Or that Bob Dylan sat at that table, that table right over there, writing something on a napkin. Or some parallel poet to the one now wrapping up his seventy-seven verse imitation Allen Ginsberg's Howl master work went out to San Francisco and blew the lid off the town, the City Lights town, the literary town.
But I better, now that the five-ish dawn light is hovering after my dawdlings, trying to break through the night wars, get my droopy body down those subway stairs pretty soon and back across town before anyone at home notices that I am missing. Still I will take the hard-bitten coffee, re-beaned and all, I will take the sleepy eyes that are starting to weigh down my face, I will even take the con artists and feisty drunks just so that I can be here when somebody’s search for the blue-pink great American West night, farther west than Harvard Square night, gets launched.
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