Markin comment:
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***********
Chant Sheet
Chant #1 Boston escucha . Estamos en la lucha
Chant #2 De norte a sur De este a oeste Ganaremos esta lucha Cueste lo que cueste
Chant #3
Con la Union
Pa lante Siempre Pa'Iante
Con el Pueblo
Pa'Iante Siempre Pa'Iante
Nuestros ninos
Pa'Iante Siempre Pa'Iante
Unidos
Pa'Iante Siempre Pa'Iante
Chant #4
Esta lucha no se para
Ni con nieve! Ni con agua!
Chant #5 No pare Sigue Sigue
Chant #6 Que queremos? Justicia!!! Cuando? Ahora!!!
Chant #7
Estamos aqui en la calle porque se puede
Si Se Puede
Marchando por la justicia porque se puede
Si Se Puede
Exigiendo nuestros derechos porque se
puede
Si Se Puede
Chant #7
Arriba la Union Abajo la explotacion
Chant #8 Miren Escuchen Venga lo que venga Si aqui no hay justicia Aqui va haber candela
Chant #9 Se Puede? Si Se Puede!!!
Chant #10
Hey people What
I got a story What
I'll tell the whole wide world this is union territory
Chant #11
Ante up!
We want good jobs
Ante up!
We'll fight the boss!
Ante up!
We need healthcare
Ante up!
WE AINT GOING NOWHERE!
Chant #12
Here's a little story that must be told
About a big bad union with so much soul
SEIU
Is on a roll
Fighting hard organize
All across the globe
Chant #13 Mira! Oye! Que se mueve? Somos el 99!
Chant #14
Cuando luchamos? Ganamos! When we fight? We win!
Friday, May 25, 2012
From The SEIU Boston-The Struggle Continues- Victory To The Saint James Street Janitors!
Capital Properties, the owner of 31 St. James Avenue, recently made the decision to hire an irresponsible contractor, Crystal Bright, to
provide cleaning services there. Crystal Bright pays poverty wages, and did not make an offer of employment to the dedicated contracted janitors who had cleaned the building for years.
Crystal Bright is a bottom feeder that undermines regional wage and labor standards. These types of irresponsible contractors often use tactics to undercut responsible contractors, such as denying workers a voice
on the job or misclassifying workers as independent contractors in order to avoid paying payroll taxes and workers compensation insurance.
Today, a delegation of the displaced contracted janitors and community supporters traveled to New York City to speak with Capital Properties about the company's decision to hire an irresponsible contractor and how it harms hardworking families in Boston.
Over the past several years, the janitorial industry as whole — including workers, cleaning contractors, building owners, elected leaders, and the Boston community at large - have come together to ensure that Boston is lifting the standards of the janitorial industry. In 2002, thousands of janitors in the Boston region went on strike to improve the standards of the cleaning industry. In the coming months, 14,000 janitors will be negotiating a new contract to continue improving standards for this industry.
Crystal Bright is trying to turn good jobs into bad by undermining the standards that Boston has worked so hard to create. As a building owner, Capital Properties can ensure that the cleaning jobs at 31 St. James are good , jobs—not poverty-wage jobs—by choosing a responsible
cleaning contractor.
Please call Capital Properties at 212-980-0090 and urge them to help create good jobs, not poverty-wage jobs, for property service workers in Boston.
seiu615.org * SEIU Local 615 * 26 West St. Boston, MA 02111 * 617-523-6150 * facebook.com/seiu615 * @seiu615
Crystal Bright unfair. No request to cease services or deliveries.
provide cleaning services there. Crystal Bright pays poverty wages, and did not make an offer of employment to the dedicated contracted janitors who had cleaned the building for years.
Crystal Bright is a bottom feeder that undermines regional wage and labor standards. These types of irresponsible contractors often use tactics to undercut responsible contractors, such as denying workers a voice
on the job or misclassifying workers as independent contractors in order to avoid paying payroll taxes and workers compensation insurance.
Today, a delegation of the displaced contracted janitors and community supporters traveled to New York City to speak with Capital Properties about the company's decision to hire an irresponsible contractor and how it harms hardworking families in Boston.
Over the past several years, the janitorial industry as whole — including workers, cleaning contractors, building owners, elected leaders, and the Boston community at large - have come together to ensure that Boston is lifting the standards of the janitorial industry. In 2002, thousands of janitors in the Boston region went on strike to improve the standards of the cleaning industry. In the coming months, 14,000 janitors will be negotiating a new contract to continue improving standards for this industry.
Crystal Bright is trying to turn good jobs into bad by undermining the standards that Boston has worked so hard to create. As a building owner, Capital Properties can ensure that the cleaning jobs at 31 St. James are good , jobs—not poverty-wage jobs—by choosing a responsible
cleaning contractor.
Please call Capital Properties at 212-980-0090 and urge them to help create good jobs, not poverty-wage jobs, for property service workers in Boston.
seiu615.org * SEIU Local 615 * 26 West St. Boston, MA 02111 * 617-523-6150 * facebook.com/seiu615 * @seiu615
Crystal Bright unfair. No request to cease services or deliveries.
The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-"Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism"
Link to:
http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Mariann G. Wizard : 'Inside/Out': The Poetry of Marilyn Buck
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
***********
BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : 'Inside/Out': The Poetry of Marilyn Buck
Inside/Out':
The poetry of Marilyn Buck
By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012
The Rag Blog's Mariann Wizard will join fellow poets Czarina Aggabao Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Jorge Renaud, Michelle Mejia, and Jane Madrigal (San Quilmas) at "Inside/Out: a Reading and Celebration of a new poetry book by former political prisoner Marilyn Buck," presented by Red Salmon Arts at 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at Resistencia Book Store, 1801-A South First St., Austin.
[Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck; Foreword by David Meltzer (2012: City Lights Books, San Francisco); Paperback; 128 pp.; $13.95.]
Marilyn Buck's fellow poet and mentor David Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting her in Dublin Federal Correctional Center (prison), she expressed a desire to be known "not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet."
For this collection, racing against uterine cancer until her death, she and a small group of now-surviving artistic and political friends (Meltzer, Felix Shafer, and Miranda Bergman, with poet Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger) selected 63 poems that will give general poetry lovers their first real opportunity to savor her body of work.
Marilyn Buck was a Ragstaffer in Austin and Newsreel activist in San Francisco before becoming active in the Black Liberation movement. She died in August, 2010, in her 63rd year, after 25 years in federal prison and 19 days of freedom.
She began writing poetry in prison as one of the few means of self-expression open to her. As she wrote in her Master's thesis, On Becoming a Poet and Artist: Beyond Censorship to Re-Imagination (New College of California, Fall 1999, author's copy), "I was a censored person by virtue of being a political prisoner. Ironically, defiance of State censorship reduced me to self-censorship. Nevertheless, I needed to affirm myself... I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly."
Buck's earlier collections (a chapbook, Rescue the Word [San Francisco and New York: Friends of Marilyn Buck, 2001], and a CD, Wild Poppies [San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2004]), and other published works, while including poems that didn't spring from political or criminal convictions or fugitive experience, leaned heavily in that direction and by her choice.
While Inside/Out certainly doesn't slight her political and prison-related work, we may also see several other facets of a woman who was much more than a one-dimensional icon. In almost all, she preserves her hallmark "spare... but flagrant" style.
Some selections will be familiar to Buck's readers, and already beloved. "Clandestine Kisses" celebrates love against the rules with defiant elán. Like many of her poems, it summons a vision of irrepressible life finding a foothold in a world of steel and concrete.
"Woman with Cat and Iris" is another understated, sleight-of-hand creation: a tranquil Sunday morning illusion of normalcy dissolves in clanging steel doors and the shouts of guards, but the cat and flower linger, Cheshire-like, in the mind.
Marilyn wrote often about how the human mind can escape the sterility of prison, even for a moment; road maps, perhaps, for other prisoners, of whatever barred crucible, with "Gone" the most direct. "Night Showers," celebrating washing off the pain and grief of each day along with its grit and grime, and "Woman's Jazz Band Performs at Women's Theater" also mine this theme.
Incarceration is in large part a punishment because of its sensory deprivation. Deprivation from color, movement, textures, tastes, rain, the moon, etc., loom large in Buck's work, but as Meltzer notes, it also bursts with music.
The jazz cadences of her longer poems beg for a saxophone's honk and moan, a conga's quick counterpoint. The centrality of music and poetry in liberation struggles past and present, personal and political, is never lost on her. Here are a few lines from the previously unpublished "Reading Poetry":
Chao Ut reads Vietnamese poetry
I tell her she reads well
she smiles...
she reads another poem
it sounds like music, I say
yes I'll read it again
the way we everyday talk
she reads
do you hear?
yes, I say...
Or this, from "Boston Post Road Blues":
...I wait in the car's darkness I count
minutes and coins
11:00 I step through blinking neon
into the vacant booth drop coins
and hear a click
the plum-colored voice
Baby I'm here
trumpet notes tap along my spine
my delight a waterfall
blues turn bold
intimate in the dark…
Buck had a dry, playful wit, well-known to friends but seldom given rein in her published work. It's nice to find it here in a few poems such as "Definition":
when I was much younger
than I am now
my mom told me
look out for tall dark strangers
I thought she meant
look for one
Many poems seen for the first time in this collection are intensely personal. "Our Giant" recalls the darker side of Marilyn's father. Louis Buck was defrocked as an Episcopal priest for opposing segregation. Crosses were burned on the family's lawn during Marilyn's childhood.
A courageous, outspoken crusader to the world, he was a controlling tyrant to his wife and children, demanding perfection, as he defined it, from each of them:
brooding Irish Atlas
props long-legged baby
in the window of a '47 car
(a car I remember better
than my father's sweet attentions)
the only clue left of kindness
a bled-orange Kodacolor
a handsome rundown football player
like a thundering giant
he dangled our lives from his fingertips
four morsels
we hovered over the chasm of his rage
our tears seasoned his wounds
swallowed whole
we were regurgitated
each daybreak...
When Marilyn's increasing radicalism led to her involvement in Black Liberation groups embracing armed self-defense, their estrangement increased. After she became a fugitive from the law, she and her father had no contact for many years.
Yes Louis' uncompromising ideals and stubborn courage clearly informed much of her own conduct, including, some might say, the self-destructive parts. Their reconciliation before his death was extremely important to Marilyn. Here she expresses the terror, admiration, and eventual compassion he inspired:
...he was our giant, defrocked
he stomped in "jesus sandals"
stained the silken robes
of rich men's hypocrisy
a jeremiah in farmboy overalls
and starched Mexican wedding shirt
titanic storms flayed his flesh
too angry to leave this too-small world…
Her mother, Virginia, to whom the volume is dedicated, is also recalled in "Loss." Her death from the same type of cancer that would claim Marilyn was not only a grievous loss in itself, but a blow to the hope that Marilyn might survive to a healthy old age in freedom.
Virginia Buck defied (and eventually divorced) Louis, visiting as often as possible the daughter she "could not save... from vengeful-suited men nor from myself." Marilyn was not allowed to attend either parent's funeral, another deprivation that took a deep emotional toll.
Besides her poetry, much still uncollected, Marilyn Buck over time developed her ability to express herself "sparely yet flagrantly," making significant contributions to radical and liberation theory and discussion, contributing to numerous journals and publications.
She taught herself Spanish, and in 2008 City Lights published her translation of exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi's collection, State of Exile, in a bilingual volume.
In prison, Marilyn became a certified literacy instructor and taught hundreds of women to read. She learned and taught yoga, became an advocate for women's healthcare, and organized AIDS education and prisoner fundraising activities. She mentored uncountable prisoners, prisoners' family members, and poets around the world. She was a voracious reader who maintained a vast and varied correspondence, including with my grateful self.
One fault with Inside/Out is that is doesn't tell when the poems were written, except those with dates in their titles. This would have been useful not only to academic readers but to friends and fellow poets who will long to know when such epic works as "Blake's Milton: Poetic Apocalypse" and "Revelation" were composed. Much longer than most of her other poems, these works blaze with intense visions wherein prison walls have neither substance nor meaning, such as these lines from "Revelation":
...Do you see demons and desolation, hear sounds
of screams, wailing? Or smell sulfur burn
behind your tongue – a taste of wormwood
and aloes? Or encounter the touch as a torch upon the skin?
You imagine fire but it might be ice...
There are no apologies here, no appeals for special consideration. As she rejected white-skin privilege in life, binding herself to oppressed people in words and deeds, Marilyn Buck sought no deathbed, deus ex machina salvation from prison, cancer, or the condemnation of the self-righteous.
For those who loved and miss her, Inside/Out is a special gift, long dreamed-of. For those who don't know her, or who've had limited knowledge of her as person or poet, here she is at last free to speak outside State restraints. No more bars, shackles, solitary confinements, or super-max jails.
The last poem included is "The First Year You Learn to Wear the Robes":
his teacher told him on stepping into the Zen priesthood
to wrap one robe and then another, is not as simple as it looks
rather this is not a simple matter of getting dressed, not a covering
a process of finding oneself inside one's situation,
revelation
a prisoner must learn to wear robes of absence
prepared to live this day
In my heart, I see Buck's eager spirit wearing new robes now, a rebel angel inspiring poets and activists around the world to work compassionately yet relentlessly for justice, peace, and freedom. She lives this day, and tomorrow, in the words left behind.
[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]
Inset art above: Hand-rubbed woodcut print of Marilyn Buck by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, from her forthcoming collaborative project/exhibition: "Revolutionary Women Woodcuts."
Read articles (and poems) by and about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.
The Rag Blog
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
***********
BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : 'Inside/Out': The Poetry of Marilyn Buck
Inside/Out':
The poetry of Marilyn Buck
By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012
The Rag Blog's Mariann Wizard will join fellow poets Czarina Aggabao Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Jorge Renaud, Michelle Mejia, and Jane Madrigal (San Quilmas) at "Inside/Out: a Reading and Celebration of a new poetry book by former political prisoner Marilyn Buck," presented by Red Salmon Arts at 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at Resistencia Book Store, 1801-A South First St., Austin.
[Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck; Foreword by David Meltzer (2012: City Lights Books, San Francisco); Paperback; 128 pp.; $13.95.]
Marilyn Buck's fellow poet and mentor David Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting her in Dublin Federal Correctional Center (prison), she expressed a desire to be known "not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet."
For this collection, racing against uterine cancer until her death, she and a small group of now-surviving artistic and political friends (Meltzer, Felix Shafer, and Miranda Bergman, with poet Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger) selected 63 poems that will give general poetry lovers their first real opportunity to savor her body of work.
Marilyn Buck was a Ragstaffer in Austin and Newsreel activist in San Francisco before becoming active in the Black Liberation movement. She died in August, 2010, in her 63rd year, after 25 years in federal prison and 19 days of freedom.
She began writing poetry in prison as one of the few means of self-expression open to her. As she wrote in her Master's thesis, On Becoming a Poet and Artist: Beyond Censorship to Re-Imagination (New College of California, Fall 1999, author's copy), "I was a censored person by virtue of being a political prisoner. Ironically, defiance of State censorship reduced me to self-censorship. Nevertheless, I needed to affirm myself... I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly."
Buck's earlier collections (a chapbook, Rescue the Word [San Francisco and New York: Friends of Marilyn Buck, 2001], and a CD, Wild Poppies [San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2004]), and other published works, while including poems that didn't spring from political or criminal convictions or fugitive experience, leaned heavily in that direction and by her choice.
While Inside/Out certainly doesn't slight her political and prison-related work, we may also see several other facets of a woman who was much more than a one-dimensional icon. In almost all, she preserves her hallmark "spare... but flagrant" style.
Some selections will be familiar to Buck's readers, and already beloved. "Clandestine Kisses" celebrates love against the rules with defiant elán. Like many of her poems, it summons a vision of irrepressible life finding a foothold in a world of steel and concrete.
"Woman with Cat and Iris" is another understated, sleight-of-hand creation: a tranquil Sunday morning illusion of normalcy dissolves in clanging steel doors and the shouts of guards, but the cat and flower linger, Cheshire-like, in the mind.
Marilyn wrote often about how the human mind can escape the sterility of prison, even for a moment; road maps, perhaps, for other prisoners, of whatever barred crucible, with "Gone" the most direct. "Night Showers," celebrating washing off the pain and grief of each day along with its grit and grime, and "Woman's Jazz Band Performs at Women's Theater" also mine this theme.
Incarceration is in large part a punishment because of its sensory deprivation. Deprivation from color, movement, textures, tastes, rain, the moon, etc., loom large in Buck's work, but as Meltzer notes, it also bursts with music.
The jazz cadences of her longer poems beg for a saxophone's honk and moan, a conga's quick counterpoint. The centrality of music and poetry in liberation struggles past and present, personal and political, is never lost on her. Here are a few lines from the previously unpublished "Reading Poetry":
Chao Ut reads Vietnamese poetry
I tell her she reads well
she smiles...
she reads another poem
it sounds like music, I say
yes I'll read it again
the way we everyday talk
she reads
do you hear?
yes, I say...
Or this, from "Boston Post Road Blues":
...I wait in the car's darkness I count
minutes and coins
11:00 I step through blinking neon
into the vacant booth drop coins
and hear a click
the plum-colored voice
Baby I'm here
trumpet notes tap along my spine
my delight a waterfall
blues turn bold
intimate in the dark…
Buck had a dry, playful wit, well-known to friends but seldom given rein in her published work. It's nice to find it here in a few poems such as "Definition":
when I was much younger
than I am now
my mom told me
look out for tall dark strangers
I thought she meant
look for one
Many poems seen for the first time in this collection are intensely personal. "Our Giant" recalls the darker side of Marilyn's father. Louis Buck was defrocked as an Episcopal priest for opposing segregation. Crosses were burned on the family's lawn during Marilyn's childhood.
A courageous, outspoken crusader to the world, he was a controlling tyrant to his wife and children, demanding perfection, as he defined it, from each of them:
brooding Irish Atlas
props long-legged baby
in the window of a '47 car
(a car I remember better
than my father's sweet attentions)
the only clue left of kindness
a bled-orange Kodacolor
a handsome rundown football player
like a thundering giant
he dangled our lives from his fingertips
four morsels
we hovered over the chasm of his rage
our tears seasoned his wounds
swallowed whole
we were regurgitated
each daybreak...
When Marilyn's increasing radicalism led to her involvement in Black Liberation groups embracing armed self-defense, their estrangement increased. After she became a fugitive from the law, she and her father had no contact for many years.
Yes Louis' uncompromising ideals and stubborn courage clearly informed much of her own conduct, including, some might say, the self-destructive parts. Their reconciliation before his death was extremely important to Marilyn. Here she expresses the terror, admiration, and eventual compassion he inspired:
...he was our giant, defrocked
he stomped in "jesus sandals"
stained the silken robes
of rich men's hypocrisy
a jeremiah in farmboy overalls
and starched Mexican wedding shirt
titanic storms flayed his flesh
too angry to leave this too-small world…
Her mother, Virginia, to whom the volume is dedicated, is also recalled in "Loss." Her death from the same type of cancer that would claim Marilyn was not only a grievous loss in itself, but a blow to the hope that Marilyn might survive to a healthy old age in freedom.
Virginia Buck defied (and eventually divorced) Louis, visiting as often as possible the daughter she "could not save... from vengeful-suited men nor from myself." Marilyn was not allowed to attend either parent's funeral, another deprivation that took a deep emotional toll.
Besides her poetry, much still uncollected, Marilyn Buck over time developed her ability to express herself "sparely yet flagrantly," making significant contributions to radical and liberation theory and discussion, contributing to numerous journals and publications.
She taught herself Spanish, and in 2008 City Lights published her translation of exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi's collection, State of Exile, in a bilingual volume.
In prison, Marilyn became a certified literacy instructor and taught hundreds of women to read. She learned and taught yoga, became an advocate for women's healthcare, and organized AIDS education and prisoner fundraising activities. She mentored uncountable prisoners, prisoners' family members, and poets around the world. She was a voracious reader who maintained a vast and varied correspondence, including with my grateful self.
One fault with Inside/Out is that is doesn't tell when the poems were written, except those with dates in their titles. This would have been useful not only to academic readers but to friends and fellow poets who will long to know when such epic works as "Blake's Milton: Poetic Apocalypse" and "Revelation" were composed. Much longer than most of her other poems, these works blaze with intense visions wherein prison walls have neither substance nor meaning, such as these lines from "Revelation":
...Do you see demons and desolation, hear sounds
of screams, wailing? Or smell sulfur burn
behind your tongue – a taste of wormwood
and aloes? Or encounter the touch as a torch upon the skin?
You imagine fire but it might be ice...
There are no apologies here, no appeals for special consideration. As she rejected white-skin privilege in life, binding herself to oppressed people in words and deeds, Marilyn Buck sought no deathbed, deus ex machina salvation from prison, cancer, or the condemnation of the self-righteous.
For those who loved and miss her, Inside/Out is a special gift, long dreamed-of. For those who don't know her, or who've had limited knowledge of her as person or poet, here she is at last free to speak outside State restraints. No more bars, shackles, solitary confinements, or super-max jails.
The last poem included is "The First Year You Learn to Wear the Robes":
his teacher told him on stepping into the Zen priesthood
to wrap one robe and then another, is not as simple as it looks
rather this is not a simple matter of getting dressed, not a covering
a process of finding oneself inside one's situation,
revelation
a prisoner must learn to wear robes of absence
prepared to live this day
In my heart, I see Buck's eager spirit wearing new robes now, a rebel angel inspiring poets and activists around the world to work compassionately yet relentlessly for justice, peace, and freedom. She lives this day, and tomorrow, in the words left behind.
[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]
Inset art above: Hand-rubbed woodcut print of Marilyn Buck by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, from her forthcoming collaborative project/exhibition: "Revolutionary Women Woodcuts."
Read articles (and poems) by and about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.
The Rag Blog
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
Click on the headline to link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website-The relevance of the Transitional Programme today – Introduction to the Indonesian edition
Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
***********
The relevance of the Transitional Programme today – Introduction to the Indonesian edition –Part One
Written by Alan Woods Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Twenty years ago the powerful repressive Stalinist police states fell one after another under the pressure of mass upsurges. The collapse of Stalinism was a dramatic event and a turning point in world history. But in retrospect it will be seen as only the prelude to something even more dramatic: the death agony of world capitalism.
Leon TrotskyThe fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the bureaucratic Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe provoked a wave of euphoria in the West. The demise of Stalinism was heralded as the "end of Socialism." The final victory of the "free market" was trumpeted from the pages of learned journals from Tokyo to New York. The strategists of capital were exultant. Everything would be for the best in the best of all capitalist worlds. But only a few years later all these dreams of the bourgeoisie and the reformists lie in ashes.
Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to proclaim the "end of history." By this he meant that capitalism was now the only possible system for humanity, and that revolution was henceforth off the agenda. But the since then the wheel of history has turned 180 degrees. All the optimistic predictions of the bourgeoisie have been reduced to rubble.
The collapse of Stalinism was not the end of history, but only the first act in a drama, which has ended in the most serious crisis in the history of world capitalism. The unprecedented ideological offensive against the ideas of Marxism has now reached its limits. In society as in classical mechanics it is true that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And a general reaction against capitalist barbarism has begun.
Written in 1938, Trotsky’s remarkable work T he Transitional Programme seems even more relevant today than when it was written. For a long time it appeared that Trotsky’s prognosis referred to a distant historical period, as remote from present day reality as some far-flung galaxy is from the earth. On the surface capitalism appeared to have successfully solved its problems and the Marxian theory of crisis seemed to be out of date.
Now all this has been stood on its head. The bourgeois economists are unable to explain the present crisis, which they said would never occur. Official economics presents a picture of confusion, incompetence and disarray. Not long ago Paul Krugman, a prominent economist, confessed that for the past 30 years macroeconomic theory has been “at best spectacularly useless, at worst, positively harmful”.
By contrast, The Transitional Programme now seems to have been written, not 73 years ago, but yesterday. Its description of the state of the world economy can be applied to the present crisis without changing a single dot or comma. Here we see the colossal superiority of the Marxist method.
Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Programme: “The capitalists are tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes closed.” Today, however, it is necessary to make just one change to that affirmation. Nowadays the capitalists are tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes wide open. They can see what’s happening. They can see what’s coming. But they can do absolutely nothing to prevent it.
The bourgeoisie is not capable of understanding the real causes of crises. Their main theory is really a throwback to Say’s Law, which says that supply and demand will eventually balance, and if left to themselves, the markets will find the correct level. This theory leaves out of account the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist economy, in which there is no automatic correlation between supply and demand and always tends towards overproduction.
The problem for the bourgeoisie is that it used up the instruments that should be used to get out of a slump in order to delay the onset of recession. Now they cannot have recourse to these methods precisely when they need them. How can they reduce the rate if interest, when it is already close to zero? And how can they increase state expenditure, when the state is already bankrupt? And how can they expand credit, when people are struggling to pay off the colossal burden of debt left over from the boom period?
To these questions the bourgeois have no answer. The continuation of this decrepit and degenerate system threatens to drag the entire world down into an abyss of crises, unemployment, suffering and degradation. It threatens to undermine all the gains of the past, and even to threaten the existence of human culture and civilization. What is required is a fundamental transformation of society from top to bottom. The words of Karl Marx retain all their power today: the alternative before humankind is: socialism or barbarism.
But how is this great transformation to be achieved? The socialist revolution cannot be achieved by the actions of a small minority. It can only be carried out by the masses themselves. But how can the small forces of revolutionary Marxism conquer the masses? How can we advance from “A” to “B”? This central question is answered by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme.
The Transitional Programme is an attempt to link the struggle for slogans for bettering the condition of the masses to the idea of the Socialist Revolution through transitional slogans. As distinct from the old minimum and maximum programme of the Social Democracy, the Transitional Programme represents the transition from capitalism to the socialist revolution.
The socialist revolution would be unthinkable without the day-to-day struggle for advance under capitalism. Only in and through the struggle can the working class acquire the necessary experience and organization to challenge the capitalist system. Sectarians and ultra lefts cannot understand this. They stand aloof from the day-to-day struggles of the workers, and therefore doom themselves to impotence.
The task of the advanced guard of the proletariat is not to lecture the masses from the sidelines. In order to find a road to the masses, it is necessary to fight alongside them, to participate in each and every struggle, for even the most modest gains, while at each stage linking the struggle to the perspective of socialist revolution. Herein is the essence of transitional demands.
>Trotsky versus Stalin
The power of Trotsky’s ideas is clear today to any unbiased person. But when he wrote this document, the man who was, together with Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, the founder of the Red Army, was living the life of a lonely exile, persecuted and driven from one country to another: one man against the whole world.
In all the annals of history we will scarcely find a similar case when all the resources of a vast state apparatus were mobilized to destroy one man. In vain Trotsky strove to find a place of exile. All the doors of the so-called western democracies were firmly shut against him, in what the French surrealist poet Andre Breton described as “the planet without a visa”.
Expelled from the Communist Party of Russia in 1927 as the result of the machinations of Stalin and his bureaucratic apparat, Trotsky was later sent into exile (1929) in far-off Turkey. By such bureaucratic means Stalin and his henchmen thought they would silence the leader of the Bolshevik-Leninists (the Left Opposition). But they were mistaken. Trotsky would not be silenced.
From his exile on the island of Prinkipo, he organized the counter attack of the genuine forces of Bolshevism-Leninism. Trotsky set up the International Left Opposition, which began to regroup all those who remained loyal to the ideas of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party and October.
Incapable of answering Trotsky’s political arguments, Stalin and the bureaucracy answered with acts of repression. The Left Opposition in Russia was suppressed by force and its members sacked from their jobs, harassed, and later arrested, imprisoned and murdered. This was the start of a systematic persecution that involved the murder of all Trotsky’s comrades, collaborators, friends and even his children. Finally in Mexico in August 1940 Stalin succeeded in his main aim: the assassination of Trotsky.
The Fourth International
Trotsky founded the International Left opposition in order to regroup all those who remained true to the ideas of Bolshevik-Leninism. Though formally expelled from the ranks of the Communist Parties and the Communist International (Comintern), Trotsky and his followers still considered themselves to be part of the Communist movement, fighting for readmission and for the reform of the Communist Parties, the Communist International and the USSR.
The betrayal of the German working class in 1933, arising from the failure of the Communist International to offer a united front to the Social Democratic workers against Hitler, was a turning-point. When even this terrible defeat did not create a ripple in their ranks, Trotsky was forced to conclude that the Communist International was dead as a force for world socialism. It was now necessary to prepare the way for the organisation of a Fourth International, untarnished with the crimes and betrayals which besmirched the Reformist and Stalinist Internationals.
In the main, the pre-war period was one of preparation and orientation and selection of cadres or leading elements to be trained and steeled theoretically and practically. In contrast to the sectarian groups, Trotsky always addressed himself to the mass organizations of the working class. He did not adopt a tone of shrill denunciation when dealing with the reformist workers, but followed Lenin's slogan: Patiently explain.
Trotsky's method, like that of Marx and Lenin, was a combination of two things: an implacable defence of ideas and principles, and an extremely flexible approach to tactics and organizational questions. We can see this method in the Transitional Programme and in all Trotsky’s discussions with his collaborators at this time.
But Trotsky faced many difficulties. As in the days after the collapse of the Second International, the revolutionary internationalists were small and isolated. The forces of the new international were weak and immature. Even more serious was the total isolation from the proletarian mass organizations. This worried Trotsky greatly.
As a means fo overcoming the isolation of the movement from the mass organizations of the Social Democracy and Communist party, Trotsky advocated entry into the Social Democratic parties in France, Britain and other countries in the 1930s. In order to win the best workers, it was necessary to find a way of influencing them. This could only be done by working together with them in the mass organizations. This flexible approach was a means of preparing the cadres for the great events which impended.
The defeats of the working class in Germany, France and in the civil war in Spain, the result of the policies of the Second and Third Internationals, prepared the way for the Second World War, confronting the new International with new challenges. It was in this atmosphere that the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International took place.
But there were problems from the very start. Many of the cadres were disoriented by the collapse of the Third International and demoralized by the rise of Stalinism. Most were inclined towards sectarianism and ultra leftism. Fortunately they had the guidance and assistance of Trotsky, and the perspectives of great historical events.
But the leading cadres lacked the necessary theoretical depth to think independently. The assassination of Trotsky in August 1940 dealt a devastating blow to the young and untested forces of the International. They never understood Trotsky’s method and were incapable of adjusting to the new situation that developed during and after the Second World War.
Trotsky’s prognosis falsified
Unfortunately, the leaders of the Fourth International were not up to the level of the tasks posed by history. In 1938 Trotsky predicted that within ten years nothing would be left of the old traitor organizations, and the Fourth International would have become the decisive revolutionary force on the planet. The basic analysis was correct, but every prognosis is conditional; the multiplicity of factors, economically, politically, socially, can always result in a different development than that foreseen.
The perspective of Trotsky was that of war, which in its turn would provoke revolution. This is not the place to deal with the extremely complex unfolding of the Second World War. War is the most complicated of all equations. The result of the Second World War was foreseen by nobody. Neither Trotsky nor Roosevelt, neither Hitler nor Stalin foresaw it.
As predicted by Trotsky, the War gave a tremendous impetus to revolution in Italy, Greece, France, Britain, Eastern Europe and the Colonial countries. But, for reasons not anticipated by Trotsky, the revolutionary wave was headed off by the betrayals of Stalinism and reformism. In place of revolution in Western Europe, we had counter-revolution in a democratic form.
The betrayal of the Stalinists and reformists provided the political precondition for a new period of capitalist upswing from 1948-73. The perspectives worked out by Trotsky in 1938 were falsified by history. In Eastern Europe, the Stalinists took over and set up new deformed workers states, in the image of Stalin's Moscow. The victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 further strengthened Stalinism for a whole period.
The degeneration and collapse of the Fourth International after Trotsky's death was mainly due to objective factors - mighty economic upswings of world capitalism, the renewed illusion in reformism and Stalinism, meant that, for a whole period, the forces of genuine Marxism could not expect big gains. However, the leaders of the IV International made serious mistakes that in the end wrecked the new International.
In war, in periods of advance, good generals are important. But in a period of retreat, they are more important still. With good generals, you can retreat in good order, with a minimum of losses, keeping your forces intact, to prepare for a more favourable situation. With bad generals, you turn a defeat into a rout.
These new historical phenomena, although foreshadowed in Trotsky's writings, were a closed book to the so-called leaders of the International. Deprived of Trotsky's leadership the leaders of the Fourth made a series of fundamental mistakes. We cannot go here into the details of the disastrous policies pursued by the leaders of the so-called Fourth International. These are dealt with elsewhere (see Ted Grant’s The Programme of the International). Suffice it to say that not one of these people was capable of analysing the new situation, or adjusting to it. That spelled disaster for the International, which was still-born.
Only the leadership of the RCP in Britain was able to readjust to the new situation on a world scale after 1945. For this we have to thank one man - Ted Grant. His writings on economics, war, the colonial revolution, and particularly Stalinism, were, and still remain, classics of modern Marxism. It was on this basis that the forces of genuine Marxism were able to regroup and build under difficult conditions.
Basing himself on the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, comrade Ted was able to keep together a small group of loyal comrades in the dark and difficult years of capitalist upswing that followed the Second World War, when the forces of genuine Marxism were reduced to a tiny handful internationally. Today the International Marxist Tendency – the organization that was founded by Ted Grant, has kept alive the programme, the theory, the methods and the ideas of Marxism and holds high the banner of Leon Trotsky – the banner that alone can bring victory.
The relevance of the Transitional Programme today – Introduction to the Indonesian edition –Part Two
Written by Alan Woods Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Nowhere is the Transitional Programme more relevant than in Indonesia – a country that occupies a very important place in the perspectives for world revolution. Its working class has a rich revolutionary tradition, which still survives though it was drowned in blood in 1965.
The Indonesian Revolution
Suharto came to power on the basis of the mass murder of supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party. These atrocities were planned and carried out with the active participation of the imperialists. For thirty-two years, this bloody tyrant ruled Indonesia with a rod of iron, having come to power over the corpses of over a million people.
For three decades extreme violence was used against Indonesian farmers, workers and urban poor. For all this timethese so-called democrats were content to turn a blind eye to Suharto’s bloody dictatorship, because he gave them the necessary “stability” to rob and exploit the Indonesian people. To the very last minute, Washington tried to back up Suharto and the dictatorship.
Suharto was overthrown by the revolutionary movement of the masses. Once it began, the movement quickly acquired an all-Indonesian character. What was extraordinary is not only the sweep of the movement but also the lightening speed with which consciousness developed, passing rapidly from an elementary protest against worsening living standards to open political protests in the teeth of repression and police violence.
From the beginning the workers showed their unerring revolutionary instinct by supporting the students. Numerous reports bear witness to the fact that workers participated on the students’ demonstrations: Only the revolutionary movement of the Indonesian proletariat, uniting in struggle with the students, peasants and oppressed nationalities, can carry through the transformation of society.
This shows that te Indonesian working class is very strong and willing to fight. Once it is organised to fight under the banner of the socialist revolution, it would be an unstoppable force. But the absence of a genuine Bolshevik leadership derailed the magnificent movement that began in 1998. We said at the time that this is the beginning of the revolution, not only in Indonesia but in the whole of Asia, but warned that the false policies of the leaders could end in defeat. We wrote the following:
“The revolutionary potential is immense. But, in the absence of the subjective factor, so is the potential for defeat. Over a period of two, three or five years, the question of power will be posed before the working class one time after another. If there existed even a small revolutionary nucleus, the entire situation could be transformed. but in the absence of this, And with the disastrous policies being pursued by the CP leadership [PRD, the People’s Democratic Party], the magnificent revolution in Indonesia can again end in defeat.
“The revolution will pass through various stages, of which we are now merely witnessing the first act. The possibility of victory for the working class will depend on the quality of the leadership. The students and workers have already displayed great courage and initiative. Armed with a correct programme and perspective, victory would be assured. But if the necessary leadership is not built, then chaos can develop, and even elements of barbarism, as in Uganda and Somalia, leading to the break-up of Indonesia. Either the greatest of victories or the most terrible of defeats—these are the only two options before the Indonesian revolution.”
This remains true today. Temporarily the Indonesian Revolution has been side-tracked onto the road of so-called bourgeois democracy. This means that the same old oppressors remain in control. This is the dictatorship of Capital disguised as democracy.
The decisive factor that is missing is the subjective factor—a revolutionary party and leadership capable of providing the necessary organisation, programme and perspective to unite the movement and guide it to the seizure of power. If a genuine communist party had existed, it would have quickly moved towards taking power. Only the lack of the subjective factor prevented this from coming about in 1998.
The leaders of the movement – especially the PRD youth who were trained in the Menshevik/Stalinist two-stage theory – who in 1998 advocated the slogan demokrasi and postponed the struggle for socialism to a dim and distant futurewere misleading the masses. If democracy to mean anything, it must mean the transfer of power to the overwhelming majority of the people: the workers and poor peasants.
That is why the slogan demokrasi is being replaced on the streets by the call for revolusi. The demand for socialism will grow to the degree that the workers and peasants realize that their most elementary needs cannot be satisfied as long as the land, the banks and big industries remain in the hands of a tiny minority of wealthy parasites.
Only the democratic rule of the working class can cleanse Indonesian society of all the accumulated filth and corruption of the past and commence the movement in the direction of a socialist society.
The relevance of Trotskyism today
The sickness of the 21st century is well known to students of history. We can observe the same symptoms in every period of decline, when a given socio-economic system has exhausted its potential and become a brake on human development.
Capitalism has long ago reached its limits. It is no longer capable of developing the means of production as it once did. It is no longer capable of offering meaningful reforms. In fact, it is no longer able to tolerate the continuation of the reforms of the past that provided at least some of the elements of a semi-civilized existence in the advanced capitalist countries.
Now all the gains so painfully won by the working class in the past are under threat. But the workers and youth will not surrender their conquests without a fight. The stage is set for an unprecedented explosion of the class struggle.
On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the very existence of the human race is threatened by the ravishing of the planet in the name of profit; mass unemployment, which was confidently asserted to be a thing of the past, has reappeared in all the advanced countries of capitalism, not to speak of the nightmare of poverty, ignorance, wars and epidemics which constantly afflict two thirds of humanity in the so-called "Third World." There is war after war and terrorism is spreading like a dark stain all over the planet. On all sides there is pessimism and a deep sense of foreboding about the future, mingled with irrational and mystical tendencies.
The bourgeois economists, politicians, and journalists understand nothing of what is happening. Only dialectical materialism can help us to understand what is happening on a world scale. The bourgeois empirical method is incapable of understanding the processes that are at work at a deeper level. Dialectics teaches us things can and do and will suddenly change into their opposite.
The Arab revolution is a fundamental turning point in history. Events are moving at lightning speed. Since just the beginning of 2011, we have witnessed the Arab Revolution. This is a symptom that something fundamental has changed in the entire situation. The Arab Revolution appeared to the bourgeoisie as something inexplicable. It seemed to it happened suddenly, without warning. In reality it was an expression of the impasse of capitalism on a world scale.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been an avalanche of books which claim to “expose” the October Revolution and its most important leaders, Lenin and Trotsky. There is nothing new in this. For the ruling class it is never sufficient to defeat a revolution. It is necessary to cover it with a mountain of lies and slanders, to eradicate its memory. The purpose of this is clear: to discredit the Bolshevik revolution in the eyes of the new generation.
But these attacks will not be able to halt the march of history. Today the ideas of Leon Trotsky are more relevant than ever before. They find an ever-growing echo in the ranks of the workers’ movement in all countries. Even in the ranks of the Communist Parties, where previously the ideas of Trotsky were reviled, the rank and file is looking to them with growing interest and sympathy as the only real Marxist explanation of the degeneration and collapse of the USSR.
All over the world a new generation is beginning to move into action. We see the same revolutionary ferment everywhere: from Tunisia to Egypt, from Spain to Greece. Even in the USA, we have seen the movement in Wisconsin and the mass anti-capitalist demonstrations in New York. With differing speeds and intensity, it is the same process that is unfolding on a world scale.
>The new generation is looking for a banner, a programme and an idea and is increasingly revolutionary in outlook. To this new generation the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky offer a guide and compass that they will need in order to find their way to the road that leads to socialism – the revolutionary road. It is to this new generation of fighters that I dedicate the Indonesian translation of these important works of Marxism.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
***********
The relevance of the Transitional Programme today – Introduction to the Indonesian edition –Part One
Written by Alan Woods Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Twenty years ago the powerful repressive Stalinist police states fell one after another under the pressure of mass upsurges. The collapse of Stalinism was a dramatic event and a turning point in world history. But in retrospect it will be seen as only the prelude to something even more dramatic: the death agony of world capitalism.
Leon TrotskyThe fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the bureaucratic Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe provoked a wave of euphoria in the West. The demise of Stalinism was heralded as the "end of Socialism." The final victory of the "free market" was trumpeted from the pages of learned journals from Tokyo to New York. The strategists of capital were exultant. Everything would be for the best in the best of all capitalist worlds. But only a few years later all these dreams of the bourgeoisie and the reformists lie in ashes.
Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to proclaim the "end of history." By this he meant that capitalism was now the only possible system for humanity, and that revolution was henceforth off the agenda. But the since then the wheel of history has turned 180 degrees. All the optimistic predictions of the bourgeoisie have been reduced to rubble.
The collapse of Stalinism was not the end of history, but only the first act in a drama, which has ended in the most serious crisis in the history of world capitalism. The unprecedented ideological offensive against the ideas of Marxism has now reached its limits. In society as in classical mechanics it is true that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And a general reaction against capitalist barbarism has begun.
Written in 1938, Trotsky’s remarkable work T he Transitional Programme seems even more relevant today than when it was written. For a long time it appeared that Trotsky’s prognosis referred to a distant historical period, as remote from present day reality as some far-flung galaxy is from the earth. On the surface capitalism appeared to have successfully solved its problems and the Marxian theory of crisis seemed to be out of date.
Now all this has been stood on its head. The bourgeois economists are unable to explain the present crisis, which they said would never occur. Official economics presents a picture of confusion, incompetence and disarray. Not long ago Paul Krugman, a prominent economist, confessed that for the past 30 years macroeconomic theory has been “at best spectacularly useless, at worst, positively harmful”.
By contrast, The Transitional Programme now seems to have been written, not 73 years ago, but yesterday. Its description of the state of the world economy can be applied to the present crisis without changing a single dot or comma. Here we see the colossal superiority of the Marxist method.
Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Programme: “The capitalists are tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes closed.” Today, however, it is necessary to make just one change to that affirmation. Nowadays the capitalists are tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes wide open. They can see what’s happening. They can see what’s coming. But they can do absolutely nothing to prevent it.
The bourgeoisie is not capable of understanding the real causes of crises. Their main theory is really a throwback to Say’s Law, which says that supply and demand will eventually balance, and if left to themselves, the markets will find the correct level. This theory leaves out of account the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist economy, in which there is no automatic correlation between supply and demand and always tends towards overproduction.
The problem for the bourgeoisie is that it used up the instruments that should be used to get out of a slump in order to delay the onset of recession. Now they cannot have recourse to these methods precisely when they need them. How can they reduce the rate if interest, when it is already close to zero? And how can they increase state expenditure, when the state is already bankrupt? And how can they expand credit, when people are struggling to pay off the colossal burden of debt left over from the boom period?
To these questions the bourgeois have no answer. The continuation of this decrepit and degenerate system threatens to drag the entire world down into an abyss of crises, unemployment, suffering and degradation. It threatens to undermine all the gains of the past, and even to threaten the existence of human culture and civilization. What is required is a fundamental transformation of society from top to bottom. The words of Karl Marx retain all their power today: the alternative before humankind is: socialism or barbarism.
But how is this great transformation to be achieved? The socialist revolution cannot be achieved by the actions of a small minority. It can only be carried out by the masses themselves. But how can the small forces of revolutionary Marxism conquer the masses? How can we advance from “A” to “B”? This central question is answered by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme.
The Transitional Programme is an attempt to link the struggle for slogans for bettering the condition of the masses to the idea of the Socialist Revolution through transitional slogans. As distinct from the old minimum and maximum programme of the Social Democracy, the Transitional Programme represents the transition from capitalism to the socialist revolution.
The socialist revolution would be unthinkable without the day-to-day struggle for advance under capitalism. Only in and through the struggle can the working class acquire the necessary experience and organization to challenge the capitalist system. Sectarians and ultra lefts cannot understand this. They stand aloof from the day-to-day struggles of the workers, and therefore doom themselves to impotence.
The task of the advanced guard of the proletariat is not to lecture the masses from the sidelines. In order to find a road to the masses, it is necessary to fight alongside them, to participate in each and every struggle, for even the most modest gains, while at each stage linking the struggle to the perspective of socialist revolution. Herein is the essence of transitional demands.
>Trotsky versus Stalin
The power of Trotsky’s ideas is clear today to any unbiased person. But when he wrote this document, the man who was, together with Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, the founder of the Red Army, was living the life of a lonely exile, persecuted and driven from one country to another: one man against the whole world.
In all the annals of history we will scarcely find a similar case when all the resources of a vast state apparatus were mobilized to destroy one man. In vain Trotsky strove to find a place of exile. All the doors of the so-called western democracies were firmly shut against him, in what the French surrealist poet Andre Breton described as “the planet without a visa”.
Expelled from the Communist Party of Russia in 1927 as the result of the machinations of Stalin and his bureaucratic apparat, Trotsky was later sent into exile (1929) in far-off Turkey. By such bureaucratic means Stalin and his henchmen thought they would silence the leader of the Bolshevik-Leninists (the Left Opposition). But they were mistaken. Trotsky would not be silenced.
From his exile on the island of Prinkipo, he organized the counter attack of the genuine forces of Bolshevism-Leninism. Trotsky set up the International Left Opposition, which began to regroup all those who remained loyal to the ideas of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party and October.
Incapable of answering Trotsky’s political arguments, Stalin and the bureaucracy answered with acts of repression. The Left Opposition in Russia was suppressed by force and its members sacked from their jobs, harassed, and later arrested, imprisoned and murdered. This was the start of a systematic persecution that involved the murder of all Trotsky’s comrades, collaborators, friends and even his children. Finally in Mexico in August 1940 Stalin succeeded in his main aim: the assassination of Trotsky.
The Fourth International
Trotsky founded the International Left opposition in order to regroup all those who remained true to the ideas of Bolshevik-Leninism. Though formally expelled from the ranks of the Communist Parties and the Communist International (Comintern), Trotsky and his followers still considered themselves to be part of the Communist movement, fighting for readmission and for the reform of the Communist Parties, the Communist International and the USSR.
The betrayal of the German working class in 1933, arising from the failure of the Communist International to offer a united front to the Social Democratic workers against Hitler, was a turning-point. When even this terrible defeat did not create a ripple in their ranks, Trotsky was forced to conclude that the Communist International was dead as a force for world socialism. It was now necessary to prepare the way for the organisation of a Fourth International, untarnished with the crimes and betrayals which besmirched the Reformist and Stalinist Internationals.
In the main, the pre-war period was one of preparation and orientation and selection of cadres or leading elements to be trained and steeled theoretically and practically. In contrast to the sectarian groups, Trotsky always addressed himself to the mass organizations of the working class. He did not adopt a tone of shrill denunciation when dealing with the reformist workers, but followed Lenin's slogan: Patiently explain.
Trotsky's method, like that of Marx and Lenin, was a combination of two things: an implacable defence of ideas and principles, and an extremely flexible approach to tactics and organizational questions. We can see this method in the Transitional Programme and in all Trotsky’s discussions with his collaborators at this time.
But Trotsky faced many difficulties. As in the days after the collapse of the Second International, the revolutionary internationalists were small and isolated. The forces of the new international were weak and immature. Even more serious was the total isolation from the proletarian mass organizations. This worried Trotsky greatly.
As a means fo overcoming the isolation of the movement from the mass organizations of the Social Democracy and Communist party, Trotsky advocated entry into the Social Democratic parties in France, Britain and other countries in the 1930s. In order to win the best workers, it was necessary to find a way of influencing them. This could only be done by working together with them in the mass organizations. This flexible approach was a means of preparing the cadres for the great events which impended.
The defeats of the working class in Germany, France and in the civil war in Spain, the result of the policies of the Second and Third Internationals, prepared the way for the Second World War, confronting the new International with new challenges. It was in this atmosphere that the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International took place.
But there were problems from the very start. Many of the cadres were disoriented by the collapse of the Third International and demoralized by the rise of Stalinism. Most were inclined towards sectarianism and ultra leftism. Fortunately they had the guidance and assistance of Trotsky, and the perspectives of great historical events.
But the leading cadres lacked the necessary theoretical depth to think independently. The assassination of Trotsky in August 1940 dealt a devastating blow to the young and untested forces of the International. They never understood Trotsky’s method and were incapable of adjusting to the new situation that developed during and after the Second World War.
Trotsky’s prognosis falsified
Unfortunately, the leaders of the Fourth International were not up to the level of the tasks posed by history. In 1938 Trotsky predicted that within ten years nothing would be left of the old traitor organizations, and the Fourth International would have become the decisive revolutionary force on the planet. The basic analysis was correct, but every prognosis is conditional; the multiplicity of factors, economically, politically, socially, can always result in a different development than that foreseen.
The perspective of Trotsky was that of war, which in its turn would provoke revolution. This is not the place to deal with the extremely complex unfolding of the Second World War. War is the most complicated of all equations. The result of the Second World War was foreseen by nobody. Neither Trotsky nor Roosevelt, neither Hitler nor Stalin foresaw it.
As predicted by Trotsky, the War gave a tremendous impetus to revolution in Italy, Greece, France, Britain, Eastern Europe and the Colonial countries. But, for reasons not anticipated by Trotsky, the revolutionary wave was headed off by the betrayals of Stalinism and reformism. In place of revolution in Western Europe, we had counter-revolution in a democratic form.
The betrayal of the Stalinists and reformists provided the political precondition for a new period of capitalist upswing from 1948-73. The perspectives worked out by Trotsky in 1938 were falsified by history. In Eastern Europe, the Stalinists took over and set up new deformed workers states, in the image of Stalin's Moscow. The victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 further strengthened Stalinism for a whole period.
The degeneration and collapse of the Fourth International after Trotsky's death was mainly due to objective factors - mighty economic upswings of world capitalism, the renewed illusion in reformism and Stalinism, meant that, for a whole period, the forces of genuine Marxism could not expect big gains. However, the leaders of the IV International made serious mistakes that in the end wrecked the new International.
In war, in periods of advance, good generals are important. But in a period of retreat, they are more important still. With good generals, you can retreat in good order, with a minimum of losses, keeping your forces intact, to prepare for a more favourable situation. With bad generals, you turn a defeat into a rout.
These new historical phenomena, although foreshadowed in Trotsky's writings, were a closed book to the so-called leaders of the International. Deprived of Trotsky's leadership the leaders of the Fourth made a series of fundamental mistakes. We cannot go here into the details of the disastrous policies pursued by the leaders of the so-called Fourth International. These are dealt with elsewhere (see Ted Grant’s The Programme of the International). Suffice it to say that not one of these people was capable of analysing the new situation, or adjusting to it. That spelled disaster for the International, which was still-born.
Only the leadership of the RCP in Britain was able to readjust to the new situation on a world scale after 1945. For this we have to thank one man - Ted Grant. His writings on economics, war, the colonial revolution, and particularly Stalinism, were, and still remain, classics of modern Marxism. It was on this basis that the forces of genuine Marxism were able to regroup and build under difficult conditions.
Basing himself on the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, comrade Ted was able to keep together a small group of loyal comrades in the dark and difficult years of capitalist upswing that followed the Second World War, when the forces of genuine Marxism were reduced to a tiny handful internationally. Today the International Marxist Tendency – the organization that was founded by Ted Grant, has kept alive the programme, the theory, the methods and the ideas of Marxism and holds high the banner of Leon Trotsky – the banner that alone can bring victory.
The relevance of the Transitional Programme today – Introduction to the Indonesian edition –Part Two
Written by Alan Woods Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Nowhere is the Transitional Programme more relevant than in Indonesia – a country that occupies a very important place in the perspectives for world revolution. Its working class has a rich revolutionary tradition, which still survives though it was drowned in blood in 1965.
The Indonesian Revolution
Suharto came to power on the basis of the mass murder of supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party. These atrocities were planned and carried out with the active participation of the imperialists. For thirty-two years, this bloody tyrant ruled Indonesia with a rod of iron, having come to power over the corpses of over a million people.
For three decades extreme violence was used against Indonesian farmers, workers and urban poor. For all this timethese so-called democrats were content to turn a blind eye to Suharto’s bloody dictatorship, because he gave them the necessary “stability” to rob and exploit the Indonesian people. To the very last minute, Washington tried to back up Suharto and the dictatorship.
Suharto was overthrown by the revolutionary movement of the masses. Once it began, the movement quickly acquired an all-Indonesian character. What was extraordinary is not only the sweep of the movement but also the lightening speed with which consciousness developed, passing rapidly from an elementary protest against worsening living standards to open political protests in the teeth of repression and police violence.
From the beginning the workers showed their unerring revolutionary instinct by supporting the students. Numerous reports bear witness to the fact that workers participated on the students’ demonstrations: Only the revolutionary movement of the Indonesian proletariat, uniting in struggle with the students, peasants and oppressed nationalities, can carry through the transformation of society.
This shows that te Indonesian working class is very strong and willing to fight. Once it is organised to fight under the banner of the socialist revolution, it would be an unstoppable force. But the absence of a genuine Bolshevik leadership derailed the magnificent movement that began in 1998. We said at the time that this is the beginning of the revolution, not only in Indonesia but in the whole of Asia, but warned that the false policies of the leaders could end in defeat. We wrote the following:
“The revolutionary potential is immense. But, in the absence of the subjective factor, so is the potential for defeat. Over a period of two, three or five years, the question of power will be posed before the working class one time after another. If there existed even a small revolutionary nucleus, the entire situation could be transformed. but in the absence of this, And with the disastrous policies being pursued by the CP leadership [PRD, the People’s Democratic Party], the magnificent revolution in Indonesia can again end in defeat.
“The revolution will pass through various stages, of which we are now merely witnessing the first act. The possibility of victory for the working class will depend on the quality of the leadership. The students and workers have already displayed great courage and initiative. Armed with a correct programme and perspective, victory would be assured. But if the necessary leadership is not built, then chaos can develop, and even elements of barbarism, as in Uganda and Somalia, leading to the break-up of Indonesia. Either the greatest of victories or the most terrible of defeats—these are the only two options before the Indonesian revolution.”
This remains true today. Temporarily the Indonesian Revolution has been side-tracked onto the road of so-called bourgeois democracy. This means that the same old oppressors remain in control. This is the dictatorship of Capital disguised as democracy.
The decisive factor that is missing is the subjective factor—a revolutionary party and leadership capable of providing the necessary organisation, programme and perspective to unite the movement and guide it to the seizure of power. If a genuine communist party had existed, it would have quickly moved towards taking power. Only the lack of the subjective factor prevented this from coming about in 1998.
The leaders of the movement – especially the PRD youth who were trained in the Menshevik/Stalinist two-stage theory – who in 1998 advocated the slogan demokrasi and postponed the struggle for socialism to a dim and distant futurewere misleading the masses. If democracy to mean anything, it must mean the transfer of power to the overwhelming majority of the people: the workers and poor peasants.
That is why the slogan demokrasi is being replaced on the streets by the call for revolusi. The demand for socialism will grow to the degree that the workers and peasants realize that their most elementary needs cannot be satisfied as long as the land, the banks and big industries remain in the hands of a tiny minority of wealthy parasites.
Only the democratic rule of the working class can cleanse Indonesian society of all the accumulated filth and corruption of the past and commence the movement in the direction of a socialist society.
The relevance of Trotskyism today
The sickness of the 21st century is well known to students of history. We can observe the same symptoms in every period of decline, when a given socio-economic system has exhausted its potential and become a brake on human development.
Capitalism has long ago reached its limits. It is no longer capable of developing the means of production as it once did. It is no longer capable of offering meaningful reforms. In fact, it is no longer able to tolerate the continuation of the reforms of the past that provided at least some of the elements of a semi-civilized existence in the advanced capitalist countries.
Now all the gains so painfully won by the working class in the past are under threat. But the workers and youth will not surrender their conquests without a fight. The stage is set for an unprecedented explosion of the class struggle.
On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the very existence of the human race is threatened by the ravishing of the planet in the name of profit; mass unemployment, which was confidently asserted to be a thing of the past, has reappeared in all the advanced countries of capitalism, not to speak of the nightmare of poverty, ignorance, wars and epidemics which constantly afflict two thirds of humanity in the so-called "Third World." There is war after war and terrorism is spreading like a dark stain all over the planet. On all sides there is pessimism and a deep sense of foreboding about the future, mingled with irrational and mystical tendencies.
The bourgeois economists, politicians, and journalists understand nothing of what is happening. Only dialectical materialism can help us to understand what is happening on a world scale. The bourgeois empirical method is incapable of understanding the processes that are at work at a deeper level. Dialectics teaches us things can and do and will suddenly change into their opposite.
The Arab revolution is a fundamental turning point in history. Events are moving at lightning speed. Since just the beginning of 2011, we have witnessed the Arab Revolution. This is a symptom that something fundamental has changed in the entire situation. The Arab Revolution appeared to the bourgeoisie as something inexplicable. It seemed to it happened suddenly, without warning. In reality it was an expression of the impasse of capitalism on a world scale.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been an avalanche of books which claim to “expose” the October Revolution and its most important leaders, Lenin and Trotsky. There is nothing new in this. For the ruling class it is never sufficient to defeat a revolution. It is necessary to cover it with a mountain of lies and slanders, to eradicate its memory. The purpose of this is clear: to discredit the Bolshevik revolution in the eyes of the new generation.
But these attacks will not be able to halt the march of history. Today the ideas of Leon Trotsky are more relevant than ever before. They find an ever-growing echo in the ranks of the workers’ movement in all countries. Even in the ranks of the Communist Parties, where previously the ideas of Trotsky were reviled, the rank and file is looking to them with growing interest and sympathy as the only real Marxist explanation of the degeneration and collapse of the USSR.
All over the world a new generation is beginning to move into action. We see the same revolutionary ferment everywhere: from Tunisia to Egypt, from Spain to Greece. Even in the USA, we have seen the movement in Wisconsin and the mass anti-capitalist demonstrations in New York. With differing speeds and intensity, it is the same process that is unfolding on a world scale.
>The new generation is looking for a banner, a programme and an idea and is increasingly revolutionary in outlook. To this new generation the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky offer a guide and compass that they will need in order to find their way to the road that leads to socialism – the revolutionary road. It is to this new generation of fighters that I dedicate the Indonesian translation of these important works of Marxism.
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!-U.S. Expands Domestic Spying Machine
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.
************
11 May 2012
U.S. Expands Domestic Spying Machine
Bipartisan Assault on Civil Liberties
On April 26, the House of Representatives passed the benign-sounding but deeply ominous Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Under the pretense of seeking to secure the country’s computer networks from “terrorists,” “cybercriminals” and foreign governments, CISPA provides legal authority for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Defense to obtain detailed and sensitive personal information over the Internet without first obtaining a search warrant, which is supposedly required for intercepting phone and postal communications. The legislation offers immunity to corporations that convey the information to the Feds and exempts such data troves from the government’s disclosure obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.
If enacted, CISPA will give a blessing to the massive phone and cybersnooping already securely in place. In late 2005, it was revealed that the NSA was intercepting not only communications abroad but also those of U.S. citizens, without first procuring warrants. A glimpse of the scope of such snooping was provided by retired AT&T worker Mark Klein, who came forward to reveal how the NSA had tapped into AT&T’s fiber-optic cables to obtain a copy of much of the country’s Internet data flow. Klein’s revelations became Exhibit A in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to expose and stop the illegal government data mining (see “Phone Worker Exposes Government Spying Network,” WV No. 953, 26 February 2010).
In an April 20 interview with Democracy Now!, longtime NSA staffer William Binney recalled that the system implemented at AT&T, supposedly in response to the September 11 attacks, had in fact been developed earlier. According to Binney, the NSA was “prepared to deploy about eight months before 9/11.” The NSA spy system at AT&T was set up under George W. Bush at the time of the Pentagon’s notorious Total Information Awareness project, which was run by convicted Contragate criminal John Poindexter. Following a public outcry over revelations of the project’s massive accessing of e-mail and other information on the Internet, Poindexter resigned and Congress made a show of cutting off funding for the project. In his interview, Binney declared that Poindexter’s project had been made public “to test the waters in Congress to see how they would be receptive to something they were already doing.” Binney resigned from the NSA in protest when the surveillance program he helped develop was applied to U.S. citizens.
The NSA-telecom spy network that Mark Klein revealed was just the tip of the iceberg. In San Antonio, Texas, the NSA has converted an old Sony factory nearly as large as a football stadium into a facility to intercept data. The NSA is putting the finishing touches on its Utah Data Center in the desert town of Bluffdale—a $2 billion project, five times larger than the U.S. Capitol, slated for operation next year. Coursing through its servers and routers will be complete contents of e-mails, cellphone calls, Google searches, parking receipts, travel itineraries, books purchased and much more. As revealed in an article by James Bamford in Wired magazine (15 March), the NSA has established listening posts across the country and has created a supercomputer with the aim of breaking the most sophisticated encryption codes, thus trying to remove one of the ways people can protect their privacy.
To put it bluntly, the government wants to know what you do, where you are, what political activities you engage in, what you read, what music you listen to, who you sleep with, what your bedmate reads, what his or her political affiliations are, etc. If George Orwell’s Big Brother were watching, he would be on the short end of a sibling rivalry.
The “war on terror” was launched as a rationale for both the imperialist occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and for expanding state repressive powers at home. As the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in our 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror”: “Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
Orwellian Nightmare
Forty-two Democrats joined Congressional Republicans in voting for CISPA, though other Democrats have voiced vague civil libertarian concern about the bill. CISPA now has to go before the Senate, and President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, stating apprehension that the law fails to institute “privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards.” This dance of the Democrats and Republicans is almost as old as the fox-trot. After voting nearly unanimously for the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, Democrats in Congress have made a ritual of balking at the renewal of various of its provisions, only to fall into line. When the NSA phone intercepts were first revealed, Congressional Democrats feigned outrage. But after squawking a bit they voted to authorize the NSA program in 2007 and voted for its renewal a year later. In 2009, Obama’s Justice Department won dismissal of the EFF lawsuit.
As the CEO of the most dangerous imperialist power in the world, Obama is concerned that CISPA might undermine receipt of data from the private sector, which should be done “in a way that permits appropriate sharing within the Government.” Joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes CISPA, the Obama administration proposes that such data mining be overseen not by an intelligence agency like the NSA but by a “civilian” agency, namely, the Department of Homeland Security, the massive government agency that is a centerpiece of the “war on terror.” With less fanfare, the Obama administration has reportedly drafted legislation that would force the Internet industry to insure that the government have “backdoor” access to all forms of Internet communication.
Already, by Binney’s estimate, the Feds have amassed some 20 trillion records of communications by U.S. citizens through its monitoring of the Internet. Meanwhile, cellphones are being tracked without warrants by police forces across the country, and cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and record where the user has been for at least the past month. Added to this is the FBI’s Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that is amassing tens of thousands of files on those alleged to have “acted suspiciously.” Surveillance video cameras are becoming ubiquitous, and the Feds and police departments are deploying drones the size of model airplanes to spy on the population.
A convenient tool for snooping and prying has been handed to the government by social media sites. In the current era of facebooking and tweeting, everything from one’s personal pictures and job information to political commentary and “friends” lists is made available to the public. Homeland Security has used sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for surveillance and data collection. Local police departments regularly monitor social media sites as a way to snoop and ensnare their victims in the name of “fighting crime.” Employers spy on potential job hires and impose discipline on employees for “inappropriate” off-duty conduct or “inflammatory” remarks. An article on the AlterNet Web site (16 January 2008) summarized how social networking sites are “priming a new generation for complacency in a surveillance society.” Facebook now has 840 million users worldwide.
Facebook is so financially valuable precisely because of its ability to collect enormous amounts of highly sensitive information and distribute it commercially to third parties widely and quickly. Facebook objected to an earlier Internet monitoring proposal—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—fearing that the company might be targeted for copyright infringement. But Facebook as well as Google have come out in support of CISPA. What this new legislation mandates is not fundamentally different from what Zuckerberg & Co. have been allowing the government to do all along. But it provides such Internet giants legal protection against being sued by a user for handing over their information to government agencies.
The Capitalist Terrorists’ “War on Terrorism”
First enacted under George W. Bush, the USA-Patriot Act had already given the government’s secret police vastly expanded authority to tap phones, search homes, scour financial records, interrogate librarians and place people under arrest without probable cause that a crime has been committed. But it was the Clinton administration that laid the groundwork for Bush’s war on civil liberties, which has now been extended under Obama. In the 1990s, the NSA had already begun scanning international e-mails without warrants through its Echelon program. Measures such as Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, enacted in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building, would later be expanded as part of the “war on terror.”
We have always insisted that such repressive measures—whatever their pretext—will be used against labor, leftists, blacks and others deemed opponents of the government. American history is rich with examples of this. The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, purportedly adopted to control the growth of monopolies, was used to bust strikes and break up unions as “unlawful conspiracies.” The 1970s RICO “anti-racketeering” laws, which supposedly targeted the Mafia, were used to break strikes and exert government control over unions like the Teamsters. In 2002, amid the U.S. rulers’ campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism,” the Homeland Security chief phoned the West Coast ILWU longshore union’s International president to warn that a strike would “threaten national security,” with the Bush administration later threatening to bring in Navy scabs in the event of a strike.
The capitalist rulers need their repressive state apparatus to control the workers they exploit and the minorities they oppress. The capitalists constitute a minuscule, ruthless class. They own the banks and major industries, producing nothing themselves while reaping trillions in profit out of the sweat and blood of working people and harvesting poverty, misery, death and destruction around the world. The vast class divide sows the seeds for class and social struggle.
Democracy under capitalism provides the trappings that mask the dictatorship of capitalist exploiters over the working class and the oppressed—enforced through the cops, courts and prisons that make up the capitalist state. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote in his 1918 work The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor....
“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”
The ultimate target of the capitalist political police is the proletariat, whose role in producing the wealth of this society gives it the social power to choke off profits and to overthrow the capitalist system. At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian tsars propped up their decrepit rule by unleashing an army of agents provocateurs and Okhrana (secret police) against that country’s small but rapidly growing working class and the Marxist circles that sprouted up at the time. But this was the hallmark of a dying ruling class. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky led the Russian proletariat to power, overthrowing capitalist rule on one-sixth of the globe. While we Marxists see in that revolution a model for the proletariat of the world, the bourgeoisie to this day sees it as a calamity whose repetition must be prevented at all costs.
Government Spying from FDR to Obama
From the time he threw his hat into the ring five years ago, Obama made clear that he was dedicated to running a more efficient and effective “war on terror.” Many of those who ardently supported Obama closed their eyes and covered their ears hoping for a reversal of the excesses of the Bush years. As the Obama administration has not merely adopted those practices but bolstered and expanded them over the past three years, these liberal and reformist leftists whine like a jilted paramour.
On Obama’s watch, the Justice Department has invoked “state secrets” to shield the government from lawsuits by America’s torture victims and has greatly stepped up prosecutions for leaks to the press. Among those victimized for getting out some truth is Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing on to WikiLeaks a video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists in 2007 as well as other evidence of imperialist crimes.
Further escalating “anti-terror” repression, Obama late last year signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sanctioning the indefinite military detention of any persons, including U.S. citizens, accused of supporting “terrorism.” Under “material support” to terrorism laws, the Obama government has gone after the Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the basis of purported links to the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas. In the eyes of the U.S. rulers, the “crime” committed by these reformists—who supported Obama’s election—is siding with victims of the Zionist butchers and Colombian death squads. Obama’s Justice Department also quadrupled the sentence for 72-year-old leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who was imprisoned for zealously defending her client, a blind Islamic cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart, who has cancer, is appealing the vindictive ten-year sentence.
The reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), while not openly campaigning for Obama, celebrated his election as “the end of far too many years” of Republican rule and gushed that his victory was “transformative.” More recently, in editorials like “Claiming the Republican Agenda As His Own” (socialistworker.org, 13 July 2011), the ISO castigates Obama for betraying his constituency: “Turns out the president many expected to revive the New Deal is out to bury it instead.”
The ISO is here promoting a long-held myth, stemming from the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the interests of workers and minorities can be defended and advanced through the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Roosevelt’s New Deal consisted of palliative reforms intended to stifle the huge workers upsurge that created the mass, integrated industrial unions of the CIO in the 1930s and to legally hamstring the burgeoning labor movement. In his efforts to subordinate the working class to the capitalist state, FDR was aided by the Communist Party (CP) and other reformists who helped channel the workers’ upsurge into support for his Democratic Party.
It was under FDR that the secret police became the FBI. In fact, Democratic administrations have led the efforts to unleash such forces against the workers movement. The origins of both the U.S. political police and domestic spying apparatus were in interimperialist World War I and, following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red Scare of 1919-21 under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. The central agency in this apparatus was the newly formed Bureau of Investigation and its General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Within months of its formation in 1919, the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names—antiwar dissidents, left-wing socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World—and went on to pursue the fledgling U.S. Communist movement. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919-20 Palmer Raids.
Amid the wave of working-class radicalization that broke out in the period of the Great Depression—epitomized by the 1934 citywide strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco, all led by reds—FDR rechristened Hoover’s organization as the FBI in 1935. A year later, he gave Hoover the authority to run secret intelligence activities against the U.S.’s “enemies.” The FBI proceeded to investigate virtually every member of the Communist Party and its affiliates as well as left-wing labor leaders in the coal mining, steel, shipping, garment and newspaper industries. The FBI expanded the wiretapping of phones, which was explicitly authorized by FDR in 1940 despite being earlier declared illegal by the Supreme Court.
In 1939, five days after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, FDR gave the agency greater powers. For 20 years, Hoover had demanded an anti-subversive law. Now he got it in the form of the 1940 Smith Act. Ostensibly directed against Nazi sympathizers, the law outlawed the advocacy of revolution and membership in organizations deemed guilty of such advocacy. The Smith Act’s first victims were 18 leaders of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and leaders of the militant Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544. The SWP denounced the Second World War as an interimperialist war in which revolutionaries took no side between the competing Allied and Axis powers, while standing foursquare in defense of the Soviet Union.
It is well known that in 1942, Roosevelt ordered the roundup and detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Less well known is that more than two years earlier the FBI had started drafting lists of thousands to be rounded up in the case of a national emergency, overwhelmingly leftists. At the height of the post-WWII Cold War against the Soviet Union, liberal Democratic Congressman Hubert Humphrey was the driving force behind the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP. This was the period that gave birth to the NSA, whose overriding purpose was to spy on the Soviet Union. In the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general Ramsey Clark, the anti-Communist COINTELPRO program was expanded into a bloody vendetta against black radicals, especially the Black Panther Party, 38 of whose members were killed by police and Feds and hundreds more railroaded to prison.
For a Workers Party, Tribune of the People!
In his book Revolutionary Socialism (1918), Louis Fraina, who would play a leading role in the early American communist movement, wrote: “Government having engaged itself to promote finance-capital in its imperialistic projects, it becomes increasingly un-democratic.” He also noted the increasing power of the imperial presidency, a tendency which is “particularly strong and typical in the United States.”
Ultimately, what the government gets away with in its increasing drive to regiment the working class and most everyone else in this society is dependent on the level of class and social struggle. From the rights for workers to organize in unions to the smashing of legalized segregation, every gain for the exploited and oppressed has been won through hard and bitter struggle. And the bourgeoisie, driven by the lash of capitalist competition, has fought to take back their concessions to the masses. Formal legal restrictions were placed on the cops and the government’s political police in the wake of the massive struggles for black civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s and against the Vietnam War. But those restrictions have since been largely eroded.
The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a revolutionary workers party that would champion the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed against the vicious capitalist rulers. In so doing, such a party would impart the consciousness that the depravities of capitalist rule can only be ended once and for all with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by a workers government—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1002, 11 May 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.
************
11 May 2012
U.S. Expands Domestic Spying Machine
Bipartisan Assault on Civil Liberties
On April 26, the House of Representatives passed the benign-sounding but deeply ominous Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Under the pretense of seeking to secure the country’s computer networks from “terrorists,” “cybercriminals” and foreign governments, CISPA provides legal authority for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Defense to obtain detailed and sensitive personal information over the Internet without first obtaining a search warrant, which is supposedly required for intercepting phone and postal communications. The legislation offers immunity to corporations that convey the information to the Feds and exempts such data troves from the government’s disclosure obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.
If enacted, CISPA will give a blessing to the massive phone and cybersnooping already securely in place. In late 2005, it was revealed that the NSA was intercepting not only communications abroad but also those of U.S. citizens, without first procuring warrants. A glimpse of the scope of such snooping was provided by retired AT&T worker Mark Klein, who came forward to reveal how the NSA had tapped into AT&T’s fiber-optic cables to obtain a copy of much of the country’s Internet data flow. Klein’s revelations became Exhibit A in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to expose and stop the illegal government data mining (see “Phone Worker Exposes Government Spying Network,” WV No. 953, 26 February 2010).
In an April 20 interview with Democracy Now!, longtime NSA staffer William Binney recalled that the system implemented at AT&T, supposedly in response to the September 11 attacks, had in fact been developed earlier. According to Binney, the NSA was “prepared to deploy about eight months before 9/11.” The NSA spy system at AT&T was set up under George W. Bush at the time of the Pentagon’s notorious Total Information Awareness project, which was run by convicted Contragate criminal John Poindexter. Following a public outcry over revelations of the project’s massive accessing of e-mail and other information on the Internet, Poindexter resigned and Congress made a show of cutting off funding for the project. In his interview, Binney declared that Poindexter’s project had been made public “to test the waters in Congress to see how they would be receptive to something they were already doing.” Binney resigned from the NSA in protest when the surveillance program he helped develop was applied to U.S. citizens.
The NSA-telecom spy network that Mark Klein revealed was just the tip of the iceberg. In San Antonio, Texas, the NSA has converted an old Sony factory nearly as large as a football stadium into a facility to intercept data. The NSA is putting the finishing touches on its Utah Data Center in the desert town of Bluffdale—a $2 billion project, five times larger than the U.S. Capitol, slated for operation next year. Coursing through its servers and routers will be complete contents of e-mails, cellphone calls, Google searches, parking receipts, travel itineraries, books purchased and much more. As revealed in an article by James Bamford in Wired magazine (15 March), the NSA has established listening posts across the country and has created a supercomputer with the aim of breaking the most sophisticated encryption codes, thus trying to remove one of the ways people can protect their privacy.
To put it bluntly, the government wants to know what you do, where you are, what political activities you engage in, what you read, what music you listen to, who you sleep with, what your bedmate reads, what his or her political affiliations are, etc. If George Orwell’s Big Brother were watching, he would be on the short end of a sibling rivalry.
The “war on terror” was launched as a rationale for both the imperialist occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and for expanding state repressive powers at home. As the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in our 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror”: “Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”
Orwellian Nightmare
Forty-two Democrats joined Congressional Republicans in voting for CISPA, though other Democrats have voiced vague civil libertarian concern about the bill. CISPA now has to go before the Senate, and President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, stating apprehension that the law fails to institute “privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards.” This dance of the Democrats and Republicans is almost as old as the fox-trot. After voting nearly unanimously for the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, Democrats in Congress have made a ritual of balking at the renewal of various of its provisions, only to fall into line. When the NSA phone intercepts were first revealed, Congressional Democrats feigned outrage. But after squawking a bit they voted to authorize the NSA program in 2007 and voted for its renewal a year later. In 2009, Obama’s Justice Department won dismissal of the EFF lawsuit.
As the CEO of the most dangerous imperialist power in the world, Obama is concerned that CISPA might undermine receipt of data from the private sector, which should be done “in a way that permits appropriate sharing within the Government.” Joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes CISPA, the Obama administration proposes that such data mining be overseen not by an intelligence agency like the NSA but by a “civilian” agency, namely, the Department of Homeland Security, the massive government agency that is a centerpiece of the “war on terror.” With less fanfare, the Obama administration has reportedly drafted legislation that would force the Internet industry to insure that the government have “backdoor” access to all forms of Internet communication.
Already, by Binney’s estimate, the Feds have amassed some 20 trillion records of communications by U.S. citizens through its monitoring of the Internet. Meanwhile, cellphones are being tracked without warrants by police forces across the country, and cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and record where the user has been for at least the past month. Added to this is the FBI’s Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that is amassing tens of thousands of files on those alleged to have “acted suspiciously.” Surveillance video cameras are becoming ubiquitous, and the Feds and police departments are deploying drones the size of model airplanes to spy on the population.
A convenient tool for snooping and prying has been handed to the government by social media sites. In the current era of facebooking and tweeting, everything from one’s personal pictures and job information to political commentary and “friends” lists is made available to the public. Homeland Security has used sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for surveillance and data collection. Local police departments regularly monitor social media sites as a way to snoop and ensnare their victims in the name of “fighting crime.” Employers spy on potential job hires and impose discipline on employees for “inappropriate” off-duty conduct or “inflammatory” remarks. An article on the AlterNet Web site (16 January 2008) summarized how social networking sites are “priming a new generation for complacency in a surveillance society.” Facebook now has 840 million users worldwide.
Facebook is so financially valuable precisely because of its ability to collect enormous amounts of highly sensitive information and distribute it commercially to third parties widely and quickly. Facebook objected to an earlier Internet monitoring proposal—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—fearing that the company might be targeted for copyright infringement. But Facebook as well as Google have come out in support of CISPA. What this new legislation mandates is not fundamentally different from what Zuckerberg & Co. have been allowing the government to do all along. But it provides such Internet giants legal protection against being sued by a user for handing over their information to government agencies.
The Capitalist Terrorists’ “War on Terrorism”
First enacted under George W. Bush, the USA-Patriot Act had already given the government’s secret police vastly expanded authority to tap phones, search homes, scour financial records, interrogate librarians and place people under arrest without probable cause that a crime has been committed. But it was the Clinton administration that laid the groundwork for Bush’s war on civil liberties, which has now been extended under Obama. In the 1990s, the NSA had already begun scanning international e-mails without warrants through its Echelon program. Measures such as Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, enacted in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building, would later be expanded as part of the “war on terror.”
We have always insisted that such repressive measures—whatever their pretext—will be used against labor, leftists, blacks and others deemed opponents of the government. American history is rich with examples of this. The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, purportedly adopted to control the growth of monopolies, was used to bust strikes and break up unions as “unlawful conspiracies.” The 1970s RICO “anti-racketeering” laws, which supposedly targeted the Mafia, were used to break strikes and exert government control over unions like the Teamsters. In 2002, amid the U.S. rulers’ campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism,” the Homeland Security chief phoned the West Coast ILWU longshore union’s International president to warn that a strike would “threaten national security,” with the Bush administration later threatening to bring in Navy scabs in the event of a strike.
The capitalist rulers need their repressive state apparatus to control the workers they exploit and the minorities they oppress. The capitalists constitute a minuscule, ruthless class. They own the banks and major industries, producing nothing themselves while reaping trillions in profit out of the sweat and blood of working people and harvesting poverty, misery, death and destruction around the world. The vast class divide sows the seeds for class and social struggle.
Democracy under capitalism provides the trappings that mask the dictatorship of capitalist exploiters over the working class and the oppressed—enforced through the cops, courts and prisons that make up the capitalist state. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote in his 1918 work The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor....
“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”
The ultimate target of the capitalist political police is the proletariat, whose role in producing the wealth of this society gives it the social power to choke off profits and to overthrow the capitalist system. At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian tsars propped up their decrepit rule by unleashing an army of agents provocateurs and Okhrana (secret police) against that country’s small but rapidly growing working class and the Marxist circles that sprouted up at the time. But this was the hallmark of a dying ruling class. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky led the Russian proletariat to power, overthrowing capitalist rule on one-sixth of the globe. While we Marxists see in that revolution a model for the proletariat of the world, the bourgeoisie to this day sees it as a calamity whose repetition must be prevented at all costs.
Government Spying from FDR to Obama
From the time he threw his hat into the ring five years ago, Obama made clear that he was dedicated to running a more efficient and effective “war on terror.” Many of those who ardently supported Obama closed their eyes and covered their ears hoping for a reversal of the excesses of the Bush years. As the Obama administration has not merely adopted those practices but bolstered and expanded them over the past three years, these liberal and reformist leftists whine like a jilted paramour.
On Obama’s watch, the Justice Department has invoked “state secrets” to shield the government from lawsuits by America’s torture victims and has greatly stepped up prosecutions for leaks to the press. Among those victimized for getting out some truth is Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing on to WikiLeaks a video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists in 2007 as well as other evidence of imperialist crimes.
Further escalating “anti-terror” repression, Obama late last year signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sanctioning the indefinite military detention of any persons, including U.S. citizens, accused of supporting “terrorism.” Under “material support” to terrorism laws, the Obama government has gone after the Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the basis of purported links to the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas. In the eyes of the U.S. rulers, the “crime” committed by these reformists—who supported Obama’s election—is siding with victims of the Zionist butchers and Colombian death squads. Obama’s Justice Department also quadrupled the sentence for 72-year-old leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, who was imprisoned for zealously defending her client, a blind Islamic cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart, who has cancer, is appealing the vindictive ten-year sentence.
The reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), while not openly campaigning for Obama, celebrated his election as “the end of far too many years” of Republican rule and gushed that his victory was “transformative.” More recently, in editorials like “Claiming the Republican Agenda As His Own” (socialistworker.org, 13 July 2011), the ISO castigates Obama for betraying his constituency: “Turns out the president many expected to revive the New Deal is out to bury it instead.”
The ISO is here promoting a long-held myth, stemming from the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the interests of workers and minorities can be defended and advanced through the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Roosevelt’s New Deal consisted of palliative reforms intended to stifle the huge workers upsurge that created the mass, integrated industrial unions of the CIO in the 1930s and to legally hamstring the burgeoning labor movement. In his efforts to subordinate the working class to the capitalist state, FDR was aided by the Communist Party (CP) and other reformists who helped channel the workers’ upsurge into support for his Democratic Party.
It was under FDR that the secret police became the FBI. In fact, Democratic administrations have led the efforts to unleash such forces against the workers movement. The origins of both the U.S. political police and domestic spying apparatus were in interimperialist World War I and, following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red Scare of 1919-21 under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. The central agency in this apparatus was the newly formed Bureau of Investigation and its General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Within months of its formation in 1919, the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names—antiwar dissidents, left-wing socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World—and went on to pursue the fledgling U.S. Communist movement. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919-20 Palmer Raids.
Amid the wave of working-class radicalization that broke out in the period of the Great Depression—epitomized by the 1934 citywide strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco, all led by reds—FDR rechristened Hoover’s organization as the FBI in 1935. A year later, he gave Hoover the authority to run secret intelligence activities against the U.S.’s “enemies.” The FBI proceeded to investigate virtually every member of the Communist Party and its affiliates as well as left-wing labor leaders in the coal mining, steel, shipping, garment and newspaper industries. The FBI expanded the wiretapping of phones, which was explicitly authorized by FDR in 1940 despite being earlier declared illegal by the Supreme Court.
In 1939, five days after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, FDR gave the agency greater powers. For 20 years, Hoover had demanded an anti-subversive law. Now he got it in the form of the 1940 Smith Act. Ostensibly directed against Nazi sympathizers, the law outlawed the advocacy of revolution and membership in organizations deemed guilty of such advocacy. The Smith Act’s first victims were 18 leaders of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and leaders of the militant Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544. The SWP denounced the Second World War as an interimperialist war in which revolutionaries took no side between the competing Allied and Axis powers, while standing foursquare in defense of the Soviet Union.
It is well known that in 1942, Roosevelt ordered the roundup and detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Less well known is that more than two years earlier the FBI had started drafting lists of thousands to be rounded up in the case of a national emergency, overwhelmingly leftists. At the height of the post-WWII Cold War against the Soviet Union, liberal Democratic Congressman Hubert Humphrey was the driving force behind the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP. This was the period that gave birth to the NSA, whose overriding purpose was to spy on the Soviet Union. In the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general Ramsey Clark, the anti-Communist COINTELPRO program was expanded into a bloody vendetta against black radicals, especially the Black Panther Party, 38 of whose members were killed by police and Feds and hundreds more railroaded to prison.
For a Workers Party, Tribune of the People!
In his book Revolutionary Socialism (1918), Louis Fraina, who would play a leading role in the early American communist movement, wrote: “Government having engaged itself to promote finance-capital in its imperialistic projects, it becomes increasingly un-democratic.” He also noted the increasing power of the imperial presidency, a tendency which is “particularly strong and typical in the United States.”
Ultimately, what the government gets away with in its increasing drive to regiment the working class and most everyone else in this society is dependent on the level of class and social struggle. From the rights for workers to organize in unions to the smashing of legalized segregation, every gain for the exploited and oppressed has been won through hard and bitter struggle. And the bourgeoisie, driven by the lash of capitalist competition, has fought to take back their concessions to the masses. Formal legal restrictions were placed on the cops and the government’s political police in the wake of the massive struggles for black civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s and against the Vietnam War. But those restrictions have since been largely eroded.
The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a revolutionary workers party that would champion the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed against the vicious capitalist rulers. In so doing, such a party would impart the consciousness that the depravities of capitalist rule can only be ended once and for all with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by a workers government—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1002, 11 May 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The 2012 Anti-War Season-Troops Out Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace website for the latest news.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners
Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace- In Boston- Memorial Day for Peace-May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade VFP Facebook page.
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park
Boston, Massachusetts
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park
Boston, Massachusetts
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
PHOTOS: Boston Rally in Solidarity with Chicago No NATO Protests
Click on the headline to link to an Open Media website entry on the Boston rally in support of Chicago anti-NATO protesters.
Markin comment:
Defend The Anti-NATO Protestors- Drop All Charges-Down With NATO!
Markin comment:
Defend The Anti-NATO Protestors- Drop All Charges-Down With NATO!
A Remembrance Worthy Of The Day- A Memorial Day for Peace-Join The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace In Boston-May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm-Join Us On Monday
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade VFP Facebookpage.
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line).
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line).
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Thursday, May 24, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-“A Sentimental Bankruptcy”
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“A Sentimental Bankruptcy”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: 1829 in Le Nouveau monde industrielle et sociétaire.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each of the generic features of commerce, such as speculation, bankruptcy, etc., includes a vast array of species and varieties which should have been analyzed and classified... . In discussing the hierarchy of bankruptcy I have made up a list comprising 3 orders, 9 generic types and 36 species of bankruptcy.[21] This list could easily be tripled or quadrupled. For bankruptcy has become such an art that every day someone invents a new species, especially in the realm of governmental bankruptcies where France has just made an innovation: the doubledupe or ampbidupe, which has provided the nation with a new means of despoiling itself.
Our century obliges people to adopt a facetious tone in criticising vice: castigat ridendo.[22] We are supposed to avoid the grim tone of the moralists of the last century. This would have been easy for me since in my hierarchy of bankruptcy I have described each of the 9 types and 36 species in amusing terms. Take for example the fifth type, the tactical bankruptcy. This includes 5 species: 17) the bankruptcy by squadrons; 18) the firing line bankruptcy; 19) the close column bankruptcy; 20) the wide formation bankruptcy. 21) the sharp-shooter’s bankruptcy. These five species comprise one of the types in the center of the series. They correspond exactly to military manoeuvres. Thus I have called this type the “tactical” and the one that precedes it the “manoeuvring” bankruptcy.
It would be very easy, then, to satisfy the oratorical insistence on amusing criticism — castigat ridendo — while providing a frank and truthful analysis of the vice. I could, according to the method of the journalists, present a list of the species of bankruptcy to make the reader desire a chapter on each one of them. Everyone would be interested to see how I define such species as these.
Sentimental, infantile, well-to-do, cosmopolitan; Gallant, sanctimonious, unprincipled, amicable., Stylish, preferential, wide-netted, miniature; Break-neck, stealthy, Attila-like, invalid’s; Swindler’s, jail-bird’s, ninny’s, visionary; Posthumous, familial, re-decked, push-pin.
An analysis of all these species of bankruptcy would produce many amusing chapters, particularly since I am a child of the profession, born and raised in the mercantile shops. I have seen the infamies of commerce with my own eyes, and I will not describe them from hear-say as do our moralists who know nothing more about commerce than what they hear in the salons of the speculators and who know only the respectable side of bankruptcy proceedings. According to them any bankruptcy (especially that of a broker or banker) becomes a sentimental incident in which the creditors themselves are beholden to the bankrupt party for having palmed off his noble speculations on them. The notary brings them the news as if it were an accident of fate, an unforeseen catastrophe caused by the misfortunes of the times, critical circumstances, a deplorable turn of events, etc. This is the way one usually begins a letter announcing a bankruptcy.
According to the notary and his accomplices, who secretly derive ample remuneration from the loss, these bankrupt individuals are so honourable, so worthy of esteem!!! A tender mother who is sacrificing herself for her children; a virtuous father who is teaching them to love their constitution;[23] a tearful family which is worthy of a better fate and inspired by the most sincere love for every one of its creditors! Truly it would be a crime not to aid this family to recover. it is the duty of every honest man to help them.
At this point a few moral shysters appear on the scene, their palms well greased, to talk of lofty sentiments and the pity which misfortune must inspire. They are helped out by pretty female petitioners who are very useful in calming down the more recalcitrant creditors. Shaken by all these intrigues, three-quarters of the creditors arrive at the judgment session unsettled and disoriented. In advising the creditors to take a loss of 70%, the notary depicts the 30% rebate as the effort of a virtuous family which is impoverishing itself and making every sacrifice to satisfy the sacred duties imposed by a sense of honour. The creditors are told that in all conscience they ought to accept a loss of 80% in order to pay homage to the noble qualities of a family so worthy of esteem and so zealous in defence of the interests of its creditors.
A few barbarians may wish to object to such terms. But the accomplices who are spread about the room whisper that these recalcitrant individuals are immoral people: that one of them does not go to church regularly; that another keeps a mistress; that another is known to be a Harpagon, a usurer; that still another has already gone bankrupt himself and is a hard-hearted man with no indulgence for his fellows. Finally most of the creditors give up and sign the contract, whereupon the notary declares that it is “a highly advantageous settlement for the creditors” in that it has saved them the expense of legal fees and provided them with the opportunity to do a good turn to a virtuous family. Everyone (or at least all of the fools who comprise the majority) leaves filled with admiration for the virtue and the lofty sentiments of which this worthy family is the model.
Thus concludes a sentimental bankruptcy in which the creditors are looted for at least two-thirds of their money. For a bankruptcy would only be honest and not sentimental if the settlement was fixed at 50%. Indeed, 50% is so normal a rate that the bankrupt party has no need of utilising artistic refinements if he is willing to settle at this modest rate. Unless he is an imbecile he is sure to make at least a 50% profit on his bankruptcy.
If someone had published a work describing a hundred species of bankruptcy, with more details than I have given here on the sentimental bankruptcy, this book would have made known one of the pretty traits of commerce, one of its true features. Other works dealing with other features, such as speculation and hoarding, would have opened people’s eyes and raised doubts about the commercial mechanism known as free competition, which is the most anarchic and perverse mode of exchange that can exist.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“A Sentimental Bankruptcy”
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Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: 1829 in Le Nouveau monde industrielle et sociétaire.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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Each of the generic features of commerce, such as speculation, bankruptcy, etc., includes a vast array of species and varieties which should have been analyzed and classified... . In discussing the hierarchy of bankruptcy I have made up a list comprising 3 orders, 9 generic types and 36 species of bankruptcy.[21] This list could easily be tripled or quadrupled. For bankruptcy has become such an art that every day someone invents a new species, especially in the realm of governmental bankruptcies where France has just made an innovation: the doubledupe or ampbidupe, which has provided the nation with a new means of despoiling itself.
Our century obliges people to adopt a facetious tone in criticising vice: castigat ridendo.[22] We are supposed to avoid the grim tone of the moralists of the last century. This would have been easy for me since in my hierarchy of bankruptcy I have described each of the 9 types and 36 species in amusing terms. Take for example the fifth type, the tactical bankruptcy. This includes 5 species: 17) the bankruptcy by squadrons; 18) the firing line bankruptcy; 19) the close column bankruptcy; 20) the wide formation bankruptcy. 21) the sharp-shooter’s bankruptcy. These five species comprise one of the types in the center of the series. They correspond exactly to military manoeuvres. Thus I have called this type the “tactical” and the one that precedes it the “manoeuvring” bankruptcy.
It would be very easy, then, to satisfy the oratorical insistence on amusing criticism — castigat ridendo — while providing a frank and truthful analysis of the vice. I could, according to the method of the journalists, present a list of the species of bankruptcy to make the reader desire a chapter on each one of them. Everyone would be interested to see how I define such species as these.
Sentimental, infantile, well-to-do, cosmopolitan; Gallant, sanctimonious, unprincipled, amicable., Stylish, preferential, wide-netted, miniature; Break-neck, stealthy, Attila-like, invalid’s; Swindler’s, jail-bird’s, ninny’s, visionary; Posthumous, familial, re-decked, push-pin.
An analysis of all these species of bankruptcy would produce many amusing chapters, particularly since I am a child of the profession, born and raised in the mercantile shops. I have seen the infamies of commerce with my own eyes, and I will not describe them from hear-say as do our moralists who know nothing more about commerce than what they hear in the salons of the speculators and who know only the respectable side of bankruptcy proceedings. According to them any bankruptcy (especially that of a broker or banker) becomes a sentimental incident in which the creditors themselves are beholden to the bankrupt party for having palmed off his noble speculations on them. The notary brings them the news as if it were an accident of fate, an unforeseen catastrophe caused by the misfortunes of the times, critical circumstances, a deplorable turn of events, etc. This is the way one usually begins a letter announcing a bankruptcy.
According to the notary and his accomplices, who secretly derive ample remuneration from the loss, these bankrupt individuals are so honourable, so worthy of esteem!!! A tender mother who is sacrificing herself for her children; a virtuous father who is teaching them to love their constitution;[23] a tearful family which is worthy of a better fate and inspired by the most sincere love for every one of its creditors! Truly it would be a crime not to aid this family to recover. it is the duty of every honest man to help them.
At this point a few moral shysters appear on the scene, their palms well greased, to talk of lofty sentiments and the pity which misfortune must inspire. They are helped out by pretty female petitioners who are very useful in calming down the more recalcitrant creditors. Shaken by all these intrigues, three-quarters of the creditors arrive at the judgment session unsettled and disoriented. In advising the creditors to take a loss of 70%, the notary depicts the 30% rebate as the effort of a virtuous family which is impoverishing itself and making every sacrifice to satisfy the sacred duties imposed by a sense of honour. The creditors are told that in all conscience they ought to accept a loss of 80% in order to pay homage to the noble qualities of a family so worthy of esteem and so zealous in defence of the interests of its creditors.
A few barbarians may wish to object to such terms. But the accomplices who are spread about the room whisper that these recalcitrant individuals are immoral people: that one of them does not go to church regularly; that another keeps a mistress; that another is known to be a Harpagon, a usurer; that still another has already gone bankrupt himself and is a hard-hearted man with no indulgence for his fellows. Finally most of the creditors give up and sign the contract, whereupon the notary declares that it is “a highly advantageous settlement for the creditors” in that it has saved them the expense of legal fees and provided them with the opportunity to do a good turn to a virtuous family. Everyone (or at least all of the fools who comprise the majority) leaves filled with admiration for the virtue and the lofty sentiments of which this worthy family is the model.
Thus concludes a sentimental bankruptcy in which the creditors are looted for at least two-thirds of their money. For a bankruptcy would only be honest and not sentimental if the settlement was fixed at 50%. Indeed, 50% is so normal a rate that the bankrupt party has no need of utilising artistic refinements if he is willing to settle at this modest rate. Unless he is an imbecile he is sure to make at least a 50% profit on his bankruptcy.
If someone had published a work describing a hundred species of bankruptcy, with more details than I have given here on the sentimental bankruptcy, this book would have made known one of the pretty traits of commerce, one of its true features. Other works dealing with other features, such as speculation and hoarding, would have opened people’s eyes and raised doubts about the commercial mechanism known as free competition, which is the most anarchic and perverse mode of exchange that can exist.
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