Women’s Oppression and the Struggle for Liberation -A Marxist Analysis Workers Vanguard No. 1042	21 March 2014

Women’s Oppression and the Struggle for Liberation

A Marxist Analysis

(Young Spartacus pages)

We publish below a Spartacus Youth Club class given by comrade Laura Zamora in New York City on February 11.

When I was in high school, I drove around in my used 1986 Toyota Camry with a purple bumper sticker that read: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” This now makes me laugh, but at the time it spoke to my moral outrage that women were not on an equal playing field in society. Outrage over the lack of sexual freedom, limited abortion rights, lower wages, and the burden of housework to which women are subject. Disgust over the brutal institutions and cultural reflections of women’s oppression, like female genital mutilation, honor killings and the veil. Such a reality desperately demanded a change.

Little did I know then that feminism did not and could not offer a program for the liberation of women. Feminism aims largely to equalize the position of upper class women within the existing society by means of education and/or legislation. So, one T-shirt I had in high school had the picture of the capitol building and the words: “Send a woman to D.C. for a change.” The fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama have done nothing to advance the interests of women or the oppressed would be a glaring understatement. No bourgeois politicians are allies in the fight for women’s rights because their class interests are primary. That includes preserving the main institution of women’s oppression, the repressive monogamous family under the system of capitalism. Bourgeois feminism has not, and never had, the goal of fundamentally challenging this class-divided, unequal society. In fact, the first challenge to the sexual division of labor in society (the supposed “innate” differentiation between men’s and women’s roles) did not come from liberal feminists, but from socialists.

Understanding the oppression of women through the lens of Marxism requires an examination of the material—economic and institutional—way in which society is organized. Marx said, “‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions.” Society’s mores and culture—on questions of marriage, the family, the roles of men, women and children—are not preordained, but must be studied in their man-made historical context. Emancipation means putting an end to the economic system of capitalism. Thus, for Marxists, the liberation of women cannot be separated from the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed. This means the abolition of private property through a series of socialist revolutions. That in turn would lay the basis for an international collectivized economy based on the highest level of technology and science, enabling the replacement of the social functions of the family.

Utopian Egalitarianism and Women’s Liberation

Before Marx and Engels came on the scene in the latter half of the 19th century, radicals and dissenters had put forward different critiques of sexual oppression. In the mid 1600s during the English Civil War, there was a group called the Ranters, which came from the working lower classes. You could call them part of a “nonconformist” movement of sexual radicals because they critiqued marriage. They were really a religious sect that rejected the established church and state institutions along with the concept of immorality. They preached free love and advocated having multiple sexual partners. (Not exactly the same type of religious sects we see today, which mostly tout fundamentalist, bigoted filth.) The Ranters’ unconventional views on the family led them to be accused of “wife swapping,” but in fact these views reflected the practical way dispossessed peasants—who were mobile and had no property to bind them—lived.

When we move on to the 18th century Enlightenment we see how humanism and the desire for a social order founded on reason cultivated a different view of women’s role. One of the first books I read in Women’s Studies was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), considered to be a classic marking the beginning of modern feminist thought. Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of English radical democrats which included William Blake and Tom Paine. Their political lives were dominated by the French Revolution and their ideas reflected the period where there was a great push for political equality, progress and virtue.

They were also limited by that period. Wollstonecraft’s writings did nothing to challenge domesticity; men should be virtuous according to the laws of God. The idea was to appeal to men for more education for middle-class women, so they could be more loving and efficient housewives, like good June Cleavers. Here’s a quote which I remember made me think, wow this old-style feminism is messed up! “Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens.”

Before we move on to the 19th century, how many of you have seen the famous 1830 painting of “Liberty Leading the People” by the French Romantic artist Delacroix? It’s the one where Liberty is shown as this kind of robust goddess-figure, this woman of the people, striding bare-breasted with the French flag in one hand and a musket in the other. I remember reading an article in a feminist journal that asked if this painting was sexist or revolutionary. It’s outrageous that there were people debating whether this work of art—which commemorates the July 1830 Revolution in France that toppled King Charles X—was “objectifying women” because she was half-naked.

Let’s turn back to the Marx quote: “‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions.” Delacroix’s painting is interesting because the ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” of the French Revolution were incompatible with the reality of the unequal capitalist system. Though “Liberty” was not a symbol for the emancipation of women, during this time the general struggle for an egalitarian society became more intertwined with the struggle for women’s liberation. Let’s look at the material reasons for this.

By the 1840s, there was a change in England and France, as women began entering the world of waged work outside of the household. The family was being transformed due to women’s increased economic independence. The Utopian socialists came on the scene. You can read more about Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Saint-Simon in Engels’ work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Unlike Wollstonecraft, the socialist Charles Fourier was intensely hostile to the patriarchal family, which he viewed as sexually oppressive. Fourier put forward the idea of “socialist communities” and the complete reconstruction of society. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women through the abolition of the nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program which the young Marx and Engels inherited.

Flora Tristan—who is often erroneously called the founder of modern feminism—was really a socialist who fought for women workers and argued that the oppression of women was directly related to the oppression of the working class. She stated: “Almost the entire world is against me, men because I am demanding the emancipation of women, the propertied classes because I am demanding the emancipation of the wage earners.” Not only that, she advocated an international workers organization over 20 years before the foundation of Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association, the First International.

Proletarian Struggle for Women’s Rights

By 1848, Marx and Engels produced the Communist Manifesto. This is the classic text where they laid out the differences between the propertied bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat; they argued that the way to replace old bourgeois society—with its classes and class antagonisms—is through a proletarian revolution, leading eventually to the “free development of all.” They also argued for the abolition of the family—reduced by the bourgeoisie, as they wrote, “to a mere money relation”—and to put an end to “prostitution both private and public.”

Some 40 years later, Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This really provides the historical analysis of the class origins of the patriarchal family and women’s oppression. Engels’ work is subtitled “In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan.” Morgan was an anthropologist who lived with and studied the Iroquois Indians and his seminal work Ancient Society dealt with the stages of primitive man. Most importantly, it represented a breakthrough by proving how the monogamous family emerged with the origin of private property—in other words, the family is a social phenomenon. Other leading socialists like Clara Zetkin and August Bebel were also very influenced by Morgan’s groundbreaking research. In case you’re curious, Morgan also influenced Darwin.

Engels describes how early hunter- gatherer society was arranged in clans. Marxists call this period of human society “primitive communism” because classes did not exist and society was generally egalitarian. In this society, all descent and blood relationships were determined through the mother alone, a matriline, also called “mother right” and members were looked after by the group. There was a division of labor between men and women: men did most of the hunting and women did most of the gathering, because women’s activity had to allow for pregnancy, nursing and childcare. But both sexes worked to produce the goods necessary for livelihood so they were equal. This explodes the myth that the monogamous family is the only one that has ever existed and that society has always been divided into classes. Engels details the evolution of marriage: how societies had group marriage where all members of one age group were married to each other, which was later replaced by pairing marriage and then ultimately by the patriarchal family.

The critical change in the position of women occurred as a result of the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture. Improved technology and tools made possible the accumulation of a surplus of grain and meat that meant people could live beyond day-to-day survival. Such new wealth led to the development of the first great class division in society, that between master and slave. In ancient society, slaves were generally obtained as a result of war with other tribes. As the men had traditionally owned the hunting implements, it was now they who owned the new implements of labor and thus the surplus product. Women could share in the enjoyment, but they had no part in the ownership. The domestic labor of the woman, which was previously a social service granting her equality, no longer counted. Engels stated: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”

So alongside the cleavage of society into classes, the separate, private family became the economic unit of society. The new economic surplus needed to be secured, and it could be done through inheritance, the guarantee that wealth would be passed down through the father to a select and privileged group. This marks the start of the patriarchal, monogamous family, created with the explicit purpose of insuring the paternity of the children and dictating strict measures to enforce women’s sexual chastity before marriage and fidelity after. Why else should it matter how many people a woman has slept with or who is the father of her children? With the advent of the patriarchal family, monogamy only applies to women. Adultery and prostitution arise as complementary institutions.

In this society now split between freemen and slaves, exploiting rich and exploited poor, weapons became monopolized by bodies of armed men, what is referred to as the state. While appearing to stand above classes, the state in reality is the prime instrument whereby the dominant economic class protects its property rights and class rule. The ancient state was that of the defense of the slave owners against the slaves; the feudal state was for the nobility to repress the peasant serfs; the modern “democratic” capitalist state with its cops, courts, prisons and laws is the instrument of the capitalist class to exploit and repress the working class.

When you think about how capitalism maintains the oppression of women, it’s useful to consider the tripod, the three major props: First, the state (the armed instrument maintaining the rule of the bourgeoisie); second, the family (the means by which private property is passed on in the case of bourgeois families and where the next generation of workers is raised in the case of proletarian families); and third, organized religion—which thrives on ignorance, enforces backwardness and superstition and inculcates obedience to the established order. The family, together with religion, serves to socially regiment us, to instill a “morality” which forbids anything that deviates one inch from married, heterosexual sex for procreation only. Anti-woman and anti-gay bigotry stem from the strong sexual stereotypes that are required by the traditional division of labor in the family. The repression of youth arises because under capitalism children are considered the legal property of their parents.

We call for full democratic rights for gays, including the right of gay marriage and divorce. We call for the decriminalization of prostitution because the act of performing sex for money is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class, either on the part of the prostitute or of the client. Prostitution is something we regard as a “crime without a victim,” like drug use, gambling, pornography, and gay sex—all activities that are either illegal or heavily regulated under capitalist law. In regards to youth, we call for lowering the legal age of adulthood with free education and a stipend for those who don’t want to stay at home. We are opposed to “squeal rules” that deny minors the right to an abortion without parental consent. We are also opposed to the reactionary age of consent laws that deny minors the right to decide if they want to have sex. The only guideline that ought to exist in sexual relations is that of effective consent. If both parties knowingly consent, there is no crime.

Our positions on sex are mainly in the negative, that is, we want the government to keep its nose (and any other part) out of the bedroom. Sexuality is personal, not political. The capitalist rulers are the ones who politicize sexuality, victimizing those who defy the norms. We defended Michael Jackson against alleged “child molestation” charges. As we wrote at the time: “who better [for the state to target] than a black man who sounds very feminine, wears makeup, looks whiter than many ‘pedigreed’ whites and openly professes a love for sharing his bed with pubescent, mostly white, boys?” (see “Stop Vendetta Against Michael Jackson,” WV No. 818, 23 January 2004). We oppose the persecution of anyone who engages in consensual intergenerational sex; uniquely on the left we defend NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which fights for the rights of youth and opposes age of consent laws.

Marxism vs. Feminism

Our views on special oppression and on sex are radically different from feminists and liberal Democrats as well as those who falsely call themselves socialists or even revolutionaries. The capitalist Democratic Party, despite its pretense to being a defender of gay people, is a staunch promoter of anti-gay “family values” and brutal anti-sex witchhunts. For decades, the Democrats opposed gay marriage. In the last few years, as nearly everyone has jumped onto the gay marriage bandwagon, Obama shifted from staunchly defending DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) to now defending same-sex marriage legislation. He was absurdly labeled the first gay president—which no doubt got him some votes among the petty-bourgeois gay rights milieu.

You may have noticed the Grammys in January had this mass wedding ceremony and rapper Macklemore performed his gay rights anthem. The context behind gay marriage acceptance is contradictory. Of course anyone ought to have the right to marry. We socialists fight for a society in which no one needs to be forced into a legal straitjacket in order to get medical benefits, visitation rights, custody of children, immigration rights, or any of the many privileges this capitalist society grants to those, and only those, who are in “holy matrimony.” At the same time, the gay marriage campaign is not about people being more open to “free love,” but largely about bourgeois respectability, trying to fit same-sex relationships into a “family values” context. In almost all of Obama’s comments on the matter, you will notice that he highlights gays being in “committed” and “monogamous” relationships and praises their good parenting.

Marriage rights or not, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders will continue to face deadly bigotry in this homophobic society. Insofar as the monogamous family remains the central social institution oppressing women, anti-gay bigotry flows from the need to punish any deviations from this patriarchal structure. The history of monogamous marriage in the U.S. reveals its use as a tool of government control, where those deemed “inferior” were denied marriage rights, including of course, black slaves, Native Americans and polygamous Mormons. Still, why anyone not under social pressure or economic duress would voluntarily enter the bonds of matrimony is somewhat of a mystery. I like quoting the ACT UP activist Jim Eigo who had it right on this question: “Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others?... Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?”

In class society, the ruling class which owns the means of production also owns the production of ideas, so mostly what you see on the left is a reflection of this moralistic social climate which, in the U.S., has a “Christian values” bent. The feminists are notorious for lining up with some of the most virulent reactionaries, allying with religious fundamentalists calling to regulate pornography and sexual relations, relying on the repressive state to “protect” women. The anti-porn, anti-sex campaign has been adopted by the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), also known as the “Bob Avakian fan cult.” In its “End Pornography” campaign, the RCP claims that pornographic images are the cause of rape, murder and other violent crimes against women. It also says that U.S. culture has recently been “pornified,” as shown by—what else?—teen sexting and pole-dancing classes. This is nothing other than the age-old nonsense that “women are victims and can’t possibly enjoy sex”—or porn for that matter. Echoing the Pope, the RCP for years raised the slogan for “stable monogamous relationships between men and women,” and until somewhat recently disallowed gays in their organization.

The reformist left’s illusions in the capitalist Democrats as the so-called “friends of the oppressed” are very acute in the case of abortion. Feminists transformed the fight for abortion rights into a sanitized “pro-choice” movement that is completely reliant on the ballot box and mostly concerned with preserving formal abortion rights for white upper- and middle-class women. Meanwhile, attacks against abortion rights in the U.S. have escalated tremendously in the last two decades. From 2010 to 2013, abortion providers were forced to shut down at the fastest rate since the time of Roe v. Wade in 1973. There are fewer than 2,000 physicians who offer abortions, and nearly 90 percent of counties in the U.S. have no abortion provider. The recent film After Tiller shows the heroic struggle of four of the last remaining late-term (third trimester) abortion doctors in this country.

The assault on abortion not only takes the form of the reign of terror and murders of doctors by anti-abortion bigots and the bombing of clinics. A slew of Republican-dominated state legislation, like “fetal rights” bills, aimed at chipping away and eventually overturning all abortion rights has arguably been even more effective. For his part, Obama made clear his opposition to mental health exceptions for late-term abortion bans with the statement that a woman’s rationale for an abortion cannot be just because she feels “blue.”

Some popular Democrats like Wendy Davis have opposed new anti-abortion legislation like the law in Texas. But really, the Democratic Party does not pretend to fight for anything beyond preserving Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion but did not make it generally available. The 1977 Hyde Amendment, supported by Democrats, denied federal funds for abortions for poor women. While rich women can always get an abortion, for black, Hispanic, working class poor women—who are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies—it means risking your life.

Why is abortion such an explosive issue in this society? This safe and simple medical procedure provides women control over whether or not to have children; it is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family and raises the question of the equality of women pointblank. What is needed is mass class and social struggle to ensure that poor and working women have unrestricted access to abortion. For the rights to abortion and contraception to mean anything, the services must be free. Democratic rights are always limited and temporary under capitalism and can only be wrested through determined class struggle. Ultimately, only the destruction of capitalism can put an end to anti-woman reaction.

Women and Revolution

Let’s look at the woman question in countries where capitalism has been overturned. After World War II, following the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany in 1945, the state machinery and economic power of the German bourgeoisie were smashed in the East and a state was founded based on socialized property forms—in Marxist terms, a workers state. This workers state was deformed from the beginning because political power did not rest with the working class but with a Stalinist bureaucracy. Nonetheless, East German women had the best status in the world, and even feminists have had to admit that. While women in capitalist West Germany were learning how to be good homemakers and mothers, in East Germany women were employed, highly skilled, highly educated. This reflects the fact that the driving force in a collectivized economy is not the generation of profit. Therefore, the workers state was able to generate full employment of both men and women. Under capitalism, where the goal is to make profit, the capitalists found it useful to train women for skilled industry during wartime, only to relegate them once more to the home as the troops returned.

I watched a documentary on YouTube the other day called, “Do Communists Have Better Sex?” which is about the differences regarding sexual education and the situation for women between West and East Germany. Women in East Germany, known as the DDR, had free contraception, accessible abortion and the best maternity benefits. In the film, you see clips showing how East German women would go to the factories, drop off their laundry and their children with—get this—free childcare! This superior social and economic position was reflected in sexuality. One commentator in the film notes that East German women “ruled in bed” while the church and prudery continued to define the norm for women in the West. In the 1960s on state television in the DDR, masturbation was talked about openly. Compare that to sexual education in the U.S. today, which preaches abstinence, instills fear and guilt and reinforces stereotyping.

That’s not to say that conditions in East Germany were picture perfect. The idea that you can build “socialism in one country” is a Stalinist myth: there is no way to have an egalitarian social order on the basis of material scarcity in an isolated country—or in this case, half a country. The parasitic bureaucracy was hideously politically repressive; moreover it undermined and disorganized the collectivized economy. Women in the DDR were still responsible for a lot of the housework (the “second shift”) and the Stalinists resurrected the family as a norm, called the “socialist family,” a contradiction in terms. Still, the reintroduction of capitalism in 1990 was devastating: it stripped East German women of their economic and social independence, pulling them out of the workforce, bulldozing the health system, dismantling social programs and attacking abortion rights. In a country where women had such high status, capitalist counterrevolution produced widespread immiseration, as it has throughout the ex-Soviet bloc.

I focused on this example because I wanted to drive home another point that was relevant to me personally. To put an end to women’s oppression, you have to see things through the lens of class. When I was in college and started to get frustrated with my Women’s Studies classes because of their non-challenge to the status quo, I desperately wanted to merge my passion for the struggle of all layers of the downtrodden with my passion for women’s rights. I flirted with the idea of pursuing socialist feminism, thinking that these were both for the liberation of women as “two paths of the same struggle.”

But in reality, feminism and Marxism are counterposed—they are based on different classes. Feminism is a species of bourgeois ideology; individuals or groups who try to push “proletarian feminism” are providing a revolutionary cover to a fundamentally liberal program. They either think that after socialist revolution men will still be violent, anti-woman creatures; in other words, all men (not the ruling classes) are the main enemy. Or they think Marxist theory is not sufficient to champion women’s rights and fight against special oppression. I hope I have proven here how, as Marxists, we are inherently women’s liberationists.

Alexandra Kollontai, an early Bolshevik revolutionary, stated in her 1909 work, The Social Basis of the Woman Question:

“For what reason, then, should the woman worker seek a union with the bourgeois feminists? Who, in actual fact, would stand to gain in the event of such an alliance? Certainly not the woman worker. She is her own saviour; her future is in her own hands. The working woman guards her class interests and is not deceived by great speeches about the ‘world all women share.’ The working woman must not and does not forget that while the aim of bourgeois women is to secure their own welfare in the framework of a society antagonistic to us, our aim is to build, in the place of the old, outdated world, a bright temple of universal labour, comradely solidarity and joyful freedom....”

Kollontai wrote this one year after the first celebration of International Women’s Day. Though bourgeois feminists may celebrate the holiday, it is, in fact, a workers’ holiday. It started in Manhattan on 8 March 1908 when women workers marched for an eight-hour day, an end to child labor and for women’s suffrage. On International Women’s Day in Russia, 1917, women textile workers took to the streets of Petrograd and led a strike of over 90,000 workers. Women were demanding bread for their starving families and peace due to the devastating effects of World War I. This strike opened the doors to the victory of the first successful proletarian revolution in history under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.

Now to conclude on the lessons of history. Prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, the largely peasant country under the Tsar treated women like beasts of burden; ignorance and illiteracy were the norm and superstition was endemic. When the repressive Tsar was toppled, and the landlords and capitalists swept aside, the working class took state power and ruled in its own interests, expropriating the bourgeoisie as a class. The Bolsheviks put into practice a number of crucial measures moving toward the liberation of women. Women won full political and legal rights, getting voting rights before women in the U.S. Marriage and divorce were made simple and easy matters of civil registration; discrimination against children born out of wedlock and laws against homosexuality were abolished; abortion was legalized; equal pay for equal work was established and women were trained as skilled workers.

The Bolsheviks created the department of the Central Committee for work among women, known as Zhenotdel, and established communal kitchens, laundries and childcare centers, laying the basis for the replacement of the family. The Zhenotdel developed a system of “delegate meetings” of women workers elected by their factory co-workers, designed as a school in politics and liberation. In addition to the journal Kommunistka, the Zhenotdel published women’s pages in many national and local party newspapers, encouraging working-class women to become correspondents and reporters.

The Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky knew that the only way forward to raising the material conditions of the masses was by extending the revolution internationally, especially to countries of advanced industrial development. The young workers state faced grim poverty following the ravages of World War I and a civil war against counterrevolutionary forces which were backed by imperialist armies intent on crushing the revolution. The lack of successful revolutions elsewhere and the ensuing isolation paved the way for the rise of a conservative bureaucracy headed by Stalin, which reversed many of the liberating advances the revolution had gained for women. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ fight for the emancipation of women, despite the later Stalinist degeneration which began in the 1920s, is a testimony to what a world socialized economy could give to the exploited and oppressed worldwide.

We unconditionally militarily defended the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution precisely because of the gains of their planned economies. At the same time, we called for proletarian political revolutions to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies, to return to the Leninist program of workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

Today, the Bolshevik program for the emancipation of women is carried forward by the International Communist League, of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section. The full liberation of women and the rest of the oppressed can only come about in a classless society in which the enormous productive social and economic forces are put in the service of humanity, rather than in the pockets of the capitalist class. After socialist revolution, we know that organized religion, the bourgeois family and the state pass into the museums of ancient history. But what will this new society look like? I’ll leave that for another class. But I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Keep in mind that this was written over 100 years ago, but it encapsulates a key element of what could be desired for the future:

“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it.”

From The Archives Of  Women And Revolution

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

********

***Important  Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Commentary

The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.

The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.

Leninism and National Self-Determination

Workers Vanguard No. 1042 21 March 2014 TROTSKY LENIN Leninism and National Self-Determination (Quote of the Week) Writing amid World War I, V.I. Lenin argued against the claim of Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov (Kievsky) that the right of national self-determination did not apply in the imperialist epoch. Lenin insisted that Pyatakov’s methodology, carried to its logical conclusion, meant rejection of the struggle to fulfill all immediate political and democratic tasks. Recalling the late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian Economists, who restricted their political activity to economic struggles by the workers, Lenin dubbed this approach “imperialist Economism.” The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory. Such utilisation is no easy task. To the Economists, Tolstoyans, etc., it often seems an unpardonable concession to “bourgeois” and opportunist views, just as to Kievsky defence of national self-determination “in the epoch of finance capital” seems an unpardonable concession to bourgeois views. Marxism teaches us that to “fight opportunism” by renouncing utilisation of the democratic institutions created and distorted by the bourgeoisie of the given, capitalist, society is to completely surrender to opportunism! The slogan of civil war for socialism indicates the quickest way out of the imperialist war and links our struggle against the war with our struggle against opportunism.... In our civil war against the bourgeoisie, we shall unite and merge the nations not by the force of the ruble, not by the force of the truncheon, not by violence, but by voluntary agreement and solidarity of the working people against the exploiters. For the bourgeoisie the proclamation of equal rights for all nations has become a deception. For us it will be the truth that will facilitate and accelerate the winning over of all nations. Without effectively organised democratic relations between nations—and, consequently, without freedom of secession—civil war of the workers and working people generally of all nations against the bourgeoisie is impossible. —V.I. Lenin, “Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)” (August-September 1916)   V. I.   Lenin Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)[1] Written: Written August-September 1916 Published: First published in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 7 (90), 1929. Published according to the manuscript. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, pages 22-27. Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Other Formats:   Text • README Like every crisis in the life of individuals or in the history of nations, war oppresses and breaks some, steels and enlightens others. The truth of that is making itself felt in Social-Democratic thinking on the war and in connection with the war. It is one thing to give serious thought to the causes and significance of an imperialist war that grows out of highly developed capitalism, Social-Democratic tactics in connection with such a war, the causes of the crisis within the Social-Democratic movement, and so on. But it is quite another to allow the war to oppress your thinking, to stop thinking and analysing under the weight of the terrible impressions and tormenting consequences or features of the war. One such form of oppression or repression of human thinking caused by the war is the contemptuous attitude of imperialist Economism towards democracy. P. Kievsky does not notice that running like a red thread through all his arguments is this war-inspired oppression, this fear, this refusal to analyse. What point is there in discussing defence of the fatherland when we are in the midst of such a terrible holocaust? What point is there in discussing nations’ rights when outright strangulation is everywhere the rule? Self-determination and “independence” of nations—but look what they have done to “independent” Greece! What is the use of talking and thinking of “rights”, when rights are every where being trampled upon in the interests of the militarists! What sense is there in talking and thinking of a republic, when there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between the most democratic republics and the most reactionary monarchies, when the war has obliterated every trace of difference! Kievsky is very angry when told that he has given way to fear, to the extent of rejecting democracy in general. He is angry and objects: I am not against democracy, only against one democratic demand, which I consider “bad”. But though Kievsky is offended, and though he “assures” us (and himself as well, perhaps) that he is not at all “against” democracy, his arguments—or, more correctly, the endless errors in his arguments—prove the very opposite. Defence of the fatherland is a lie in an imperialist war, but not in a democratic and revolutionary war. All talk of “rights” seems absurd during a war, because every war replaces rights by direct and outright violence. But that should not lead us to forget that history has known in the past (and very likely will know, must know, in the future) wars (democratic and revolutionary wars) which, while replacing every kind of “right”, every kind of democracy, by violence during the war, nevertheless, in their social content and implications, served the cause of democracy, and consequently socialism. The example of Greece, it would seem, “refutes” all national self-determination. But if you stop to think, analyse and weigh matters, and do not allow yourself to be deafened by the sound of words or frightened and oppressed by the nightmarish impressions of the war, then this example is no more serious or convincing than ridiculing the republican system because the “democratic” republics, the most democratic—not only France, but also the United States, Portugal and Switzerland—have already introduced or are introducing, in the course of this war, exactly the same kind of militarist arbitrariness that exists in Russia. That imperialist war obliterates the difference between republic and monarchy is a fact. But to therefore reject the republic, or even be contemptuous towards it, is to allow oneself to be frightened by the war, and one’s thinking to be oppressed by its horrors. That is the mentality of many supporters of the “disarmament” slogan (Roland-Hoist, the younger element in Switzerland, the Scandinavian “Lefts”[2] and others). What, they imply, is the use of discussing revolutionary utilisation of the army or a militia when there is no difference in this war between a republican militia and a monarchist standing army, and when militarism is every where doing its horrible work? That is all one trend of thought, one and the same theoretical and practical political error Kievsky unwittingly makes at every step. He thinks he is arguing only against self-determination, he wants to argue only against self-determination, [sic] but the result—against his will and conscience, and that is the curious thing!—is that he has adduced not a single argument which could not be just as well applied to democracy in general! The real source of all his curious logical errors and confusion—and this applies to not only self-determination, but also to defence of the fatherland, divorce, “rights” in general—lies in the oppression of his thinking by the war, which makes him completely distort the Marxist position on democracy. Imperialism is highly developed capitalism; imperialism is progressive; imperialism is the negation of democracy—“hence”, democracy is “unattainable” under capitalism. Imperialist war is a flagrant violation of all democracy, whether in backward monarchies or progressive republics—“hence”, there is no point in talking of “rights” (i. e., democracy!). The “only” thing that can be “opposed” to imperialist war is socialism; socialism alone is “the way out”; “hence”, to advance democratic slogans in our minimum programme, i.e., under capitalism, is a deception or an illusion, befuddlement or postponement, etc., of the slogan of socialist revolution. Though Kievsky does not realise it, that is the real source of all his mishaps. That is his basic logical error which, precisely because it is basic and is not realised by the author, “explodes” at every step like a punctured bicycle tire. It “bursts out” now on the question of defending the fatherland, now on the question of divorce, now in the phrase about “rights”, in this remarkable phrase (remarkable for its utter contempt for “rights” and its utter failure to understand the issue): we shall discuss not rights, but the destruction of age-old slavery! To say that is to show a lack of understanding of the relationship between capitalism and democracy, between socialism and democracy. Capitalism in general, and imperialism in particular, turn democracy into an illusion—though at the same time capitalism   engenders democratic aspirations in the masses, creates democratic institutions, aggravates the antagonism between imperialism’s denial of democracy and the mass striving for democracy. Capitalism and imperialism can be over thrown only by economic revolution. They cannot be over thrown by democratic transformations, even the most “ideal”. But a proletariat not schooled in the struggle for democracy is incapable of performing an economic revolution. Capitalism cannot be vanquished without taking over the banks, without repealing private ownership of the means of production. These revolutionary measures, however, cannot be implemented without organising the entire people for democratic administration of the means of production captured from the bourgeoisie, without enlisting the entire mass of the working people, the proletarians, semi-proletarians and small peasants, for the democratic organisation of their ranks, their forces, their participation in state affairs. Imperialist war may be said to be a triple negation of democracy (a. every war replaces “rights” by violence; b. imperialism as such is the negation of democracy; c. imperialist war fully equates the republic with the monarchy), but the awakening and growth of socialist revolt against imperialism are indissolubly linked with the growth of democratic resistance and unrest. Socialism leads to the withering away of every state, consequently also of every democracy, but socialism can be implemented only through the dictator ship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all state affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism. It is in these “contradictions” that Kievsky, having for gotten the Marxist teaching on democracy, got himself con fused. Figuratively speaking, the war has so oppressed his thinking that he uses the agitational slogan “break out of imperialism” to replace all thinking, just as the cry “get out of the colonies” is used to replace analysis of what, properly speaking, is the meaning—economically and politically—of the civilised nations “getting out of the colonies”. The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory. Such utilisation is no easy task. To the Economists, Tolstoyans, etc., it often seems an unpardonable concession to “bourgeois” and opportunist views, just as to Kievsky defence of national self-determination “in the epoch of finance capital” seems an unpardonable concession to bourgeois views. Marxism teaches us that to “fight opportunism” by renouncing utilisation of the democratic institutions created and distorted by the bourgeoisie of the given, capitalist, society is to completely surrender to opportunism! The slogan of civil war for socialism indicates the quickest way out of the imperialist war and links our struggle against the war with our struggle against opportunism. It is the only slogan that correctly takes into account both war-time peculiarities—the war is dragging out and threatening to grow into a whole “epoch” of war—and the general character of our activities as distinct from opportunism with its pacifism, legalism and adaptation to one’s “own” bourgeoisie. In addition, civil war against the bourgeoisie is a democratically organised and democratically conducted war of the propertyless mass against the propertied minority. But civil war, like every other, must inevitably replace rights by violence. However, violence in the name of the interests and rights of the majority is of a different nature: it tramples on the “rights” of the exploiters, the bourgeoisie, it is unachievable without democratic organisation of the army and the “rear”. Civil war forcibly expropriates, immediately and first of all, the banks, factories, railways, the big estates, etc. But in order to expropriate all this, we shall have to introduce election of all officials and officers by the people, completely merge the army conducting the war against the bourgeoisie with the mass of the population, completely democratise administration of the food supply, the production and distribution of food, etc. The object of civil war is to seize the banks, factories, etc., destroy all possibility of resistance by the bourgeoisie, destroy its armed forces. But that aim cannot be achieved either in its purely military, or economic, or political aspects, unless we, during the   war, simultaneously introduce and extend democracy among our armed forces and in our “rear”. We tell the masses now (and they instinctively feel that we are right): “They are deceiving you in making you fight for imperialist capitalism in a war disguised by the great slogans of democracy. You must, you shall wage a genuinely democratic war against the bourgeoisie for the achievement of genuine democracy and socialism.” The present war unites and “merges” nations into coalitions by means of violence and financial dependence. In our civil war against the bourgeoisie, we shall unite and merge the nations not by the force of the ruble, not by the force of the truncheon, not by violence, but by voluntary agreement and solidarity of the working people against the exploiters. For the bourgeoisie the proclamation of equal rights for all nations has become a deception. For us it will be the truth that will facilitate and accelerate the winning over of all nations. Without effectively organised democratic relations between nations—and, consequently, without freedom of secession—civil war of the workers and working people generally of all nations against the bourgeoisie is impossible. Through utilisation of bourgeois democracy to socialist and consistently democratic organisation of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and against opportunism. There is no other path. There is no other way out. Marxism, just as life itself, knows no other way out. We must direct free secession and free merging of nations along that path, not fight shy of them, not fear that this will “defile” the “purity” of our economic aims. Notes [1] This article was written in reply to one by Y. L. Pyatakov (P. Kievsky), “The Proletariat and the ‘Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in the Era of Finance Capital” (August 1916). The manuscript bears Lenin’s marginal note: “Kievsky’s article on self-determination and Lenin’s reply.” Both articles were meant for No. 3 of Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata. Somewhat later, Lenin wrote another article in reply to Kievsky, “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism” (see pp. 28–76 of this volume). Due to financial difficulties, No. 3 was not published and the articles did not appear in print. Lenin’s article, however, was widely known in manuscript to Bolsheviks living abroad and to a number of Left Social-Democrats. [2] Lenin is alluding to the article “Miliz oder Abrüstung?" (“Militia or Disarmament?”) by Henriette Roland-Holst, a Left-wing Dutch Social-Democrat, in the Swiss Social-Democratic journal Neues Leben (New Life) No. 10–11 (October-November) and No. 12 (December) 1915. In referring to the Swiss young Social-Democrats, Lenin had in view chiefly the magazine Jugend-Internationale (The Youth Inter national), organ of the International League of Socialist Youth Organisations,   published in Switzerland; it spoke for the Left forces in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party. Issue No. 3 of the magazine carried an editorial “Volksheer oder Entwaffnung?” (“A People’s Army or Disarmament?”). The attitude of the Scandinavian (Swedish and Norwegian) Left Social-Democrats on this issue was set out in articles by Karl Kilbom, “Swedish Social-Democracy and the World War”, and Arvid Hansen, “Certain Aspects of the Present-Day Norwegian Labour Movement”, both of which appeared in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 2. Lenin discusses the “disarmament” slogan in “The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution” and “The ‘Disarmament’ Slogan” (see pp. 77–87, 94–104 of this volume).

Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man-Cops, Congress Ax Nominee Over Mumia’s Case Workers Vanguard No. 1042	21 March 2014

Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man-Cops, Congress Ax Nominee Over Mumia’s Case

 

On March 5, the Senate sank Barack Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. What was supposed to be a done deal ran aground when seven Democrats joined the Republicans in opposing the selection. The kiss of death for Adegbile, the current senior counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, was his tenuous connection to black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Adegbile had a leadership role in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), which represented Mumia at the time that his death sentence was overturned in late 2011.

Our concern is not who fills what post under the attorney general, the top cop overseeing the apparatus of racist repression. Rather it is the renewed outpouring of the lies that have condemned Mumia, an innocent man, to three decades on death row and now life in prison. A former Black Panther, MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist, Mumia was framed up for the killing of a Philly cop and railroaded to death row in 1982 on the basis of his radical political views. The prosecution’s case against him rested on phony ballistics, a concocted “confession,” police intimidation of witnesses and racist jury rigging. The confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, that he was hired by the mob and cops to assassinate Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, whom Mumia was falsely accused of killing, has never been allowed into state or federal court.

In the article “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted” (WV No. 993, 6 January 2012), we observed: “The state forces that have tried for decades to silence this powerful voice for the oppressed are certainly not going to forget him.” Indeed, the campaign against Adegbile was spearheaded by the Fraternal Order of Police; Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the Philadelphia cop; and Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams. Together with Pat Toomey, a Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, the Democrat Williams penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (24 February) that not only slandered Mumia as a “cop killer” but condemned anybody challenging the racist bias inherent in the capitalist courts. Other Democrats, such as Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware, piled on to the smears of Mumia, attributing his vote to the issue of “respecting” law officers.

The Democratic Party machine in Philadelphia, of which Williams is a part, engineered the frame-up of Mumia from the start. Central to this effort was Ed Rendell, who was the local district attorney at the time Mumia was arrested and was later elected mayor and then Pennsylvania’s governor. On the national stage, Rendell went from being a prominent operative in Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination to playing a key role in Obama’s electoral victory.

When Mumia was set to be executed in August 1995, protests of tens of thousands internationally helped stay the executioner’s hand. By the time Adegbile got involved in Mumia’s case, those mass mobilizations were a thing of the past. Contrary to the hallucinations of Toomey, Williams and others, Adegbile was no activist proclaiming Mumia’s innocence and fighting for his freedom. In fact, one response of liberal civil rights groups like the NAACP to the attack on Adegbile was to plead Mumia guilty: “The Senate failed to see through a shameful disinformation campaign that intentionally tries to hold Mr. Adegbile responsible for a terrible crime committed by a defendant when Mr. Adegbile was only 8 years old” (naacp.org, March 5).

As a lawyer, Adegbile simply contributed to an LDF appeal citing racial discrimination in Mumia’s jury selection and to a brief challenging jury instructions given at the hearing that sentenced Mumia to death. The federal court of appeals ruled twice that the sentencing instructions were unconstitutional, a decision that the Supreme Court under the conservative John Roberts refused to overturn. As Mumia noted in his March 6 broadcast, Adegbile came under attack “because he dared to do what defense lawyers are legally and constitutionally required to do: defend their clients.”

With consummate hypocrisy, Obama protested that the defeat of Adegbile’s nomination “solely based on his legal representation of a defendant runs contrary to a fundamental principle of our system of justice.” Quite the opposite, as Obama should know. Leftist attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing “material support to terrorism” in 2005 on the basis of her outspoken defense of a client imprisoned on terrorism charges. At the urging of Obama’s Justice Department in 2010, the original sentence for Stewart was quadrupled to ten years. While now standing by Adegbile, in 2009 Obama gave the boot to “green jobs” adviser Van Jones when a media campaign unearthed his past advocacy for Mumia.

What gores the ox of the forces of racist reaction is that Mumia was and remains a powerful voice for the voiceless. As a 15-year-old spokesman for the Philadelphia Black Panther Party, Mumia exemplified those the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover had in mind when he declared: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Mumia survives and continues to speak out from prison hell on behalf of all the oppressed. While some may wring their hands over the defeat of Obama’s nominee, those fighting for Mumia’s freedom should seize this opportunity to expose the racist vendetta that has kept this innocent man under the shadow of the gallows and behind bars for over 32 years.

Florida: The Killing of Jordan Davis-The Dunn Verdict and Racist America Workers Vanguard No. 1042	21 March 2014

Florida: The Killing of Jordan Davis-The Dunn Verdict and Racist America

 

On February 15, a Florida jury reaffirmed that black life in America is cheap. Michael Dunn, a white racist thug, had come to trial for firing repeatedly into a car with four black youths inside and killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. The jury found Dunn guilty of the attempted murder of the three who survived his rampage. But it deadlocked over whether the killing of Davis was murder, as three jurors embraced Dunn’s pretense that this coldblooded shooting was self-defense. The message was unmistakable: If Dunn had killed everyone in the car, he likely would not have been convicted on a single count. His sentencing is now postponed until after his retrial, which is slated to begin in May.

There was no ambiguity about what happened. Davis and his friends were listening to hip-hop in an SUV outside a convenience store in Jacksonville, Florida. Dunn drove up and parked beside them. After his fiancée went to buy chips and wine, Dunn demanded that Davis and his friends turn down the music. When they refused, Dunn took a 9mm pistol from his glove compartment and fired three shots that hit Davis in the SUV. As Davis’s friend Tommie Storns drove the SUV away, Dunn again fired on it. Business accomplished, Dunn went to his hotel room, where he ordered a pizza and chilled with a rum and coke. Jordan Davis’s anguished father declared after the trial that killing his son “was not just another day at the office.”

Dunn claimed that Davis threatened him and that he fired his pistol only after seeing Davis brandish a shotgun. No shotgun was found. Dunn’s fiancée testified that he never mentioned a weapon being pulled on him. In fact, Dunn’s defense was unsupported by any evidence other than his white skin. If the shooter had been black and the car filled with white teens blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd’s segregationist anthem “Sweet Home Alabama,” the outcome would not have been a hung jury but rather the gallows. Florida has been second only to Texas in carrying out racist legal lynchings in the last three years.

Dunn clearly was looking for an opportunity to mete out KKK-style “justice” to black youth who “dissed” him. He murdered Davis and nearly killed three others for crossing a line dating back to slavery, punishable by the lash and later the lynch rope. In so doing, Dunn was following in the footsteps of the greatest perpetrators of violence against the black population—the capitalist state and its killer cops for whom terrorizing black youth is just another day at the office. One witness reported hearing Dunn tell the teens, “You are not going to talk to me like that.” From his jail cell, Dunn wrote his family: “If more people would arm themselves and kill these fucking idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”

Davis’s shooting recalls the racist vigilante killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Dunn was even prosecuted by the same team that let Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, walk free. As we noted in a leaflet issued after Zimmerman was acquitted last July: “It wasn’t that the prosecution didn’t have a case. The truth is that this wasn’t their field of expertise, which is railroading black people to prison” (WV No. 1028, 9 August 2013).

What the prosecutors are pursuing with a passion is the relentless persecution of Marissa Alexander, a black mother in her 30s. Alexander was sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot into a wall when threatened by her husband, who had previously beaten her so badly she had to be hospitalized. An appeals court ordered a new trial. Now prosecutor Angela Corey—who was in charge of both Zimmerman and Dunn’s prosecutions—is seeking to increase Alexander’s sentence from 20 to 60 years!

“Stand Your Ground”: Open Season on Blacks

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which set the backdrop for the killings of Martin and Davis, provides a license for vigilante murder. Passed in 2005 amid a campaign to “get tough on crime”—code for targeting black people—the Florida law became the model for similar laws in 22 other states, including all of the former Confederacy except Arkansas and Virginia. It supplanted an earlier Florida statute that required a person under attack to try to remove himself from immediate danger before using deadly force in self-defense.

Instead, Stand Your Ground allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a “reasonable belief” that such force is necessary, without any attempt to disengage. And in this country, a young black man playing loud music or wearing a hoodie is enough for someone to claim “reasonable belief.” A 2013 study by the Urban Institute documented that in states with Stand Your Ground laws, shootings of black victims by whites are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than if the victims are white.

Democratic Party liberals and black politicians have attempted to steer outrage over Stand Your Ground into various gun control schemes. Such measures are a means of enforcing a monopoly of violence for the capitalist state, leaving guns in the hands of cops, criminals and racist vigilantes while the rest of the population is defenseless. The result is to make attacks like those on Martin and Davis more likely. Indeed, if Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis had been armed, they might still be alive today—although they would most likely be in prison.

Founded and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, the American capitalist system paints targets on the backs of young black men and women. Zimmerman’s acquittal last July was followed by a rapid succession of racist atrocities. On September 14, Jonathan Farrell, a 24-year-old former college football star, was gunned down by a North Carolina cop while seeking assistance after a car wreck. On September 17, an appeals court tossed out the murder convictions of five New Orleans cops who killed two unarmed black men on Danziger Bridge during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Following an accident on November 2, 19-year-old Renisha McBride found herself on the porch of a white man in Dearborn, Michigan, who shot her dead.

The vilification of black youth seen every day in the press, on TV and on the Internet provides fertile soil for scum like Dunn. In the lead-up to the last Super Bowl, Seattle Seahawks’ black defensive back Richard Sherman was denounced as a “thug” for being brash and outspoken. A Stanford graduate, Sherman perceptively observed that “thug” is “the accepted way of calling someone the N-word nowadays.” Dunn himself ranted against “thug music,” according to his fiancée.

The omnipresent targeting of black youth through both legal repression and extralegal terror is endemic to American capitalism. In New York City, newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio rode into office vowing to rein in the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” racial profiling program that ensnared hundreds of thousands in its web over the past decade. Although the number of stops has dropped sharply, arrests for so-called crimes such as public drinking and begging in the subways have skyrocketed.

The multiracial working class is the only force with the social power and class interests to get rid of the system of capitalist exploitation in which the mass of the black population is forcibly segregated at the bottom. As our leaflet on Zimmerman’s acquittal stated:

“It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, with 200,000 black troops, guns in hand, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. But the promise of black freedom was soon betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, which allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. It will take a third American Revolution—a proletarian socialist revolution that breaks the chains of capitalist wage slavery—to finish the Civil War.”

Then, and only then, will there be a measure of justice for Davis, Martin and the countless other victims of racist terror.

UAW Tops’ Class Collaboration Paved the Way-Defeat for Labor at Tennessee VW Plant-For a Class-Struggle Fight to Organize the “Open Shop” South! Workers Vanguard No. 1042	21 March 2014

UAW Tops’ Class Collaboration Paved the Way-Defeat for Labor at Tennessee VW Plant-For a Class-Struggle Fight to Organize the “Open Shop” South!

 

The United Auto Workers (UAW) narrowly lost a key representation election at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in February by a vote of 712-626. The stakes were high: if the UAW had won, it would have marked a victory for workers not just in Chattanooga but more broadly, creating a breach for the labor movement in the open shop South. There is no question that the UAW was up against a determined opposition that wanted to keep the plant non-union. But the UAW bureaucrats hamstrung the organizing effort by pledging the union to maintain company profitability, as codified in the “neutrality” agreement that supposedly committed VW to not interfere with the unionization campaign. UAW officials forswore not only “conflict” with the automaker but even the necessary legwork to bolster union support, such as door-to-door and barstool organizing.

Much stock was put in VW’s supposed tacit endorsement of the union. Nothing could be further from the truth. By September 2013, a majority of Chattanooga VW workers had signed cards authorizing the UAW to represent them in collective bargaining. Volkswagen could have accepted the results of the card checks and recognized the union. But the bosses were hardly going to allow the UAW free rein in the plant. Company officials made clear that the union would get through the door only if it ceded many of its duties and functions to a German-style works council, a body that would have been under the thumb of management while giving the appearance that workers have a say in running the company.

While UAW president Bob King lauded the planned works council as a marker of the union’s partnership with VW, his “partners” were not about to roll out the welcome mat. Even under their current class-collaborationist leaderships, unions are the basic organizations of the workers to fight for their economic needs against the bosses. Keeping unions out means massively greater profits for the corporations. In Chattanooga, supervisors roamed the plant, spreading the anti-union gospel. Meanwhile, the unionization campaign drew heavy fire from zealous anti-labor forces financed by the likes of the Koch brothers and spearheaded by right-wing hatchet man Grover Norquist and such Republican politicians as Tennessee governor Bill Haslam and U.S. Senator Bob Corker. Threats from state GOP politicians to cut off tax subsidies to VW if the union won the vote are now the subject of a UAW complaint begging the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order a new election on the grounds of “outside interference.”

The anti-union campaign featured a heavy dose of racist divide-and-rule. Norquist’s “Center for Worker Freedom” erected billboards around Chattanooga showing the UAW’s name defaced to read “United Obama Workers” and the tagline: “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicans [sic], including BARACK OBAMA.” Particularly in states of the former Confederacy like Tennessee, such use of the “O” word is unmistakably racist code for the “N” word.

The intertwining of racist reaction and hostility toward unions was made explicit by one Matt Patterson, now executive director of Norquist’s center. According to the Nation (14 November 2013), Patterson ranted in an op-ed piece last May: “One hundred and fifty years ago an invading Union army was halted at Chattanooga by the Confederate Army of Tennessee.... Today Southeastern Tennessee faces invasion from another union—an actual labor union, the United Auto Workers.” One of the Confederate “heroes” of the Chattanooga battle was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader before the war and subsequently a founder of the Ku Klux Klan race-terrorists, an organization that has also served as shock troops for the bourgeoisie in spiking countless unionization drives.

All of this underscores that any attempt to organize the South must tackle head-on the anti-black racism that has long served the capitalists in dividing workers and weakening their struggles. And with the large number of Latino immigrants in the working class, union organizing cannot go forward without a fight against anti-immigrant bigotry. The labor movement must champion the struggle for black rights and demand full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it to the U.S.

Whether or not the UAW had won the vote at Chattanooga, the class collaboration of the union leadership is an obstacle to organizing more broadly. The fundamental starting point for a serious union organizing drive must be the understanding that this capitalist society is divided between two hostile classes whose interests are irreconcilably counterposed: the workers who have to sell their labor power and the capitalists who own the means of production and rake in massive profits by exploiting labor. Sowing illusions in a commonality of interests between the workers and their exploiters, the labor bureaucrats push reliance on the government agencies and political parties of the enemy class, from the NLRB to the Democrats. This strategy has led to one defeat after another for the labor movement.

As we wrote in “The Fight to Unionize the ‘Open Shop’ South” (WV No. 720, 1 October 1999):

“The last, feeble attempt by the CIO to organize the South following World War II, grotesquely called ‘Operation Dixie,’ was quickly shipwrecked on the shoals of the Cold War red purges, racism and the bureaucrats’ ties to the Democratic Party…. The union tops’ loyalty to the Democrats made them incapable of waging a fight against the Jim Crow white power structure, which was run by the Dixiecrats and their KKK auxiliaries.”

To transform the unions into bastions of class struggle requires a fight for a new leadership based on the political independence of the working class.

For Class Struggle, Not Class Collaboration

In the Chattanooga organizing drive, the UAW tops thought they could sneak into the South by presenting the union as dedicated to “labor-management cooperation.” The neutrality agreement committed the UAW to “maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other competitive advantages” of Volkswagen. Thus, the union bureaucrats agreed in advance to shackle Chattanooga auto workers with the lower wages and substandard working conditions that are hallmarks of non-union plants. This was hardly going to inspire confidence in workers that joining the union would better their lot. But it did provide grist for the mill of the anti-union forces around the group “No 2 UAW,” which made an impact on some workers who had signed UAW cards last year but later voted against the union.

The centerpiece of the neutrality agreement was the formation of a class-collaborationist works council modeled on the German Betriebsräte. This body, which the German union IG Metall urged the UAW to accept, would exercise jurisdiction over various shopfloor issues, from safety to scheduling of overtime, and oversee at least the first stage of the grievance process. The effect would have been to undercut the union, whose purpose is supposed to be to defend workers against the company. This is a far cry from the UAW in its heyday, when union committeemen faced with shopfloor attacks would stop the assembly line until management relented.

The UAW also explicitly abandoned the many temporary contract workers in Chattanooga by agreeing to exclude them from any future bargaining unit. Organizing these workers, bringing them into the union and demanding full pay and benefits, is crucial to any serious attempt at unionization. Management at other Southern (and also some Northern) factories like the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, has been replacing many full-time positions with temporary jobs. Pointing to the impact of the Chattanooga defeat on workers at the Smyrna Nissan plant, a 15 February Washington Post article observed: “The UAW lost a vote there in 2001, and while it still has organizers on the ground in Smyrna, workers will look to Chattanooga and wonder why so many thought the union was a bad idea.”

The anti-union forces in Chattanooga blamed the union for the devastated condition of Detroit, the former Motor City. But it was the auto bosses, with the complicity of the pro-capitalist union tops, who turned Detroit—an overwhelmingly black city that was once a UAW stronghold—into a bankrupt industrial wasteland at the cost of tens of thousands of decent-paying union jobs. The standard of living that auto workers in Detroit and elsewhere were able to enjoy for a couple of decades after World War II—when U.S. imperialism was economically dominant relative to its Japanese and German rivals—was made possible by the fierce class struggles that built the UAW and made it a powerhouse of organized labor. The seminal event was the 1936-37 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, a watershed in the class battles that gave rise to the CIO industrial unions. The Flint sitdown was preceded by a courageous strike at the Fisher Body plant in Atlanta, in which workers occupied the plant in November 1936 and maintained impassable picket lines for three months. In 1937, the UAW won national recognition.

Today, the union tops point to the panoply of the capitalists’ anti-union laws to justify diverting workers into futile lobbying of the Democrats instead of waging hard class struggle. But there were anti-union laws in the 1930s, too. Union militants were arrested and physically attacked by cops, National Guard and private strikebreakers. But these were the kind of battles out of which the industrial unions were forged. To revive the labor movement today will take nothing less than a return to the same militant methods that built the unions in the first place.

Break with the Democrats!

The Chattanooga VW plant is one of the newest of the so-called transplants: foreign-owned auto factories in the U.S., mostly non-union shops in the South. This trend took off after production started at the Marysville, Ohio, Honda factory in 1982 and the Smyrna Nissan plant a year later. Helping spur the growth of the transplants was the “buy American” protectionism of the UAW bureaucracy during the 1970s and 1980s. To avoid trade restrictions, Japanese and later German automakers relocated some production to the U.S. In turn, the UAW officialdom, whose protectionist tirades tied the union to the interests of the American exploiters, was incapable of waging the necessary struggle to unionize the transplants. Instead, Solidarity House agreed to concession after concession at the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) so that the bosses could “stay competitive” with the foreign-owned factories.

Decades of class collaboration culminated in the UAW leadership’s support to the 2009 bailout of the auto bosses by the Obama administration. The UAW tops accepted plant closures and massive wage and benefit cuts along with a six-year no-strike pledge in the name of saving some jobs. Between 2005 and 2013 foreign automakers opened seven plants, while the Big Three closed 21! From a peak in the 1960s of 1.6 million members, the UAW has been reduced to well under 500,000, and that includes tens of thousands who work in casinos and higher education. A measure of these setbacks is that starting pay at UAW-organized plants is as low as $15 per hour. And now even Michigan, long a center of union power, has become a “right to work” state.

Current UAW president Bob King played a key role alongside his predecessor Ron Gettelfinger in foisting the bailout on union members. King had hoped to burnish his legacy by organizing at least one foreign-owned assembly line in the South before retiring in June. UAW officials were already applying the same losing strategy they used in Chattanooga to a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, where they hoped the parent company Daimler might accept a union if it came with a works council. Daimler now has little reason to play ball with King & Co.

A few years ago, the union officialdom placed great hopes on pressuring the Democrats to pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have provided for union recognition when a majority of employees at a workplace signed union authorization cards. While the union bureaucrats saw the EFCA as another substitute for labor struggle, we supported this measure because it would ease the road to union recognition. Had it been enacted, the UAW would have been recognized at the Chattanooga plant last September. When he was U.S. Senator and the EFCA had no chance of passage, Barack Obama backed the bill. Once in the Oval Office, where he landed in no small part due to the huge financial and organizational support of the labor bureaucracy, Obama and the Democrats let the EFCA die. In this, Obama was simply doing his job as CEO of American capitalism.

The trade-union bureaucracy’s fealty to the Democratic Party, which no less than the openly labor-hating Republicans is a party of capital, is the political corollary of its “partnership” with the corporations. The working class can follow one of two paths. There is the bureaucracy’s acquiescence to what is possible under capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the revolutionary strategy proposed by us Marxists. In the course of sharp class struggles and through patient education on the nature of capitalist society, the working class will become imbued with the consciousness of its own historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means breaking labor’s chains to the Democrats and forging a class-struggle workers party, whose purpose is not only to improve the present conditions of the working class but to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.

***The Fixer Man Cometh- George Clooney’s Ocean’s 13

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Ocean’s 13, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitts, Al Pacino, Eliot Gould, 2007

Everybody likes to see a bad guy get his comeuppance. Nobody likes to see a guy screw his partner (not in the old days anyway maybe now things are different in the raw dog-eat-dog world). Everybody likes to see a bad guy from Vegas get his comeuppance in duplicate and that is the premise behind Danny Ocean’s action in this third of the modern Ocean series (the old Frank Sinatra-led pack in the 1960s or so being the “classic”). Danny (played by George Clooney) and Rusty (played by Brad Pitts) are once again called to right some Vegas wrongs in the film under review, Ocean’s 13.           

The plot line is simple-A friend, an old time casino owing friend and father figure for Danny and the boys (played by Eliot Gould) has been kicked the teeth by an up and coming Vegas hotel mogul (played by Al Pacino), and his partner, who wants to make Vegas a more upscale place where Mom and Pop might not feel so comfortable but where the international jet set might want to land for a few days. So out goes the old bargain basement casino-hotel and in comes the new. And that is the kick in the teeth that Danny and friends try to avenge. That bad act and old Eliot taking a heart attack over the notion that he was out of the business.

And avenge Danny and the guys (no women on this caper) do using all the high tech skills available to the motley crew of expert do-gooders. See, what they do is draw all the resources from the new hotel by hook or by crook, the money, naturally as the old master burglary Willie Sutton made us aware when asked about his thing for robbing banks. So between the individual hi-jinx necessary to pull the plot off and Danny’s thoughtful plan to gain revenge Brother Pacino has egg on his face, no question. Danny though juts keeps trucking on in the sultry Vegas night.