“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938
Sunday, September 14, 2014
One Year After Her Trial-Free Chelsea Manning!
Workers Vanguard No. 1051 | 5 September 2014 |
Free Chelsea Manning!
Prosecuted under the Espionage Act, Manning was nobody’s spy. She revealed information she had access to as a military analyst in Iraq so that the whole world could see the horror covered up by the capitalist media’s embedded reporters. Her motive was to force a public debate on U.S. policy based on the facts. She continues this fight today from her prison cell. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times (14 June), Manning wrote: “As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.”
We hail Manning’s courageous acts. Her disclosures document the truth: beneath the cloak of “democracy,” the U.S. government is the biggest terrorist force on the planet.
Financial contributions are urgently needed to sustain a legal appeal of Manning’s conviction and also challenge the inhumane conditions of her imprisonment. Jailed in the all-male Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Manning is being denied the hormone treatments she has requested, which even the military’s own doctors deem medically necessary. While a new legal team prepares the appeal of Manning’s conviction, her original trial attorney and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed official notice of their intent to sue the military for cruel and unusual punishment if Manning is not given proper medical treatment.
The Partisan Defense Committee has donated to Manning’s legal defense and urges readers of Workers Vanguard to do likewise. To donate by check or money order, please make payable to: Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland, CA 94610. Note “Manning Defense” on the memo line. Write to Manning at: Chelsea E. Manning 89289, 1300 North Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304.
Veterans Group in Response to President Obama’s Plan to Confront ISIL Says They are Disappointed But Not Surprised.
76 51 8 Google +3 1 0 13
Veterans For Peace has released a response to President Obama’s strategy to confront ISIL calling on the president to use diplomacy and to follow his own advice that there is not a military solution to the problems in Iraq. The organization of veterans, spanning from WWII to the current string of U.S. wars,warns that the president’s plan continues to make the U.S. the “greatest purveyor of violence” on earth and places service members in harm’s way when there are other solutions. They call on the president to take six non-military actions to avoid the slippery slope of sending troops to Iraq as well as to stop sending weapons that fuel all sides of the conflict. The group calls for diplomacy to be the number one priority and to include Iran as a partner to help pressure the Iraqi government to be more inclusive of Sunni leaders. Veterans For Peace points out that there cannot be success in confronting ISIL in Iraq without Sunni help and that bombing these communities, who up to now are supporting ISIL because of bad relations with the central government in Baghdad, will not help mend fences.
Veterans For Peace President Patrick McCann commented, “We are disappointed because President Obama’s so called plan is more of the same. Nothing really different than waging war like the U.S. has done for thirteen years. Never mind that according to a State Department report, global terrorism has increased by 43% in 2014.” He went on to say, “Who really benefits from these failed policies? Clearly not the American people who pay for it in money and blood.”
“We are not surprised by the president’s military solution because for the past thirteen years our political leaders have not put forward any other kind of solution. It seems all they know is war and have no concept of how to work for peace,” states Michael McPhearson, Interim Executive Director. “Just as meeting violence with violence in our communities here at home does not solve economic and social problems, more violence in Syria and Iraq will not solve the conflicts or diminish the political challenges there.”
Veterans For Peace response to the president’s plan states, in part: President Obama outlined a strategy no different from what the U.S. has done for the past thirteen years. It is not a plan for success, it is a gamble that war will work this time when it has spectacularly failed thus far. We at Veterans For Peace challenge the American people to ask whose interests does endless war serve? Who is paying for these wars, whose children are dying in these wars and who is getting paid to finance and provide weapons for these wars? We the people are being driven by manipulated fear to support polices that are not in our interest. Peace is harder than war, but it is cheaper in blood and treasure. After thirteen years it is time to take another path, the path of peace. | Download VFP Handout: Six Ways to Confront ISIL Short of War Handout by clicking image below  |
From The Labor History Archives -In
The 80th Anniversary Year Of The Great San Francisco, Minneapolis
And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The History Of Class Struggle
From The Archives Of The Socialist
Workers Party (America)- Some Lessons of the Toledo Strike
Frank Jackman comment:
Marxism, no less than other
political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on
roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations.
Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in
the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A
recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space
that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely
the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second
International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist
International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International
before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class
organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the
Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots
are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist
Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism
for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the
early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made
up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers
Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive.
Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of
revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked,
and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should
start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that
premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this
headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the
Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper
socialists (descendants of those socialism for dentist-types) just now,
screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his
henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations
starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party
in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the
Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want
to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my
sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his
career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can
hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from
the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest
my case.
********************
During the Toledo auto strike of 1934, Communists and Musteites (members of A.J. Muste's American Workers Party1 played a major part in turning a rout of the workers into a partial victory. The conflict began on April 11, when Federal Local Union 183842began a strike that within several days involved workers in three interlocked auto parts companies, the Electric Auto Lite Company, Bingham Stamping and Tool Company and Logan Gear Company. The walkout occurred after the three firms failed to fulfill a promise to reach an agreement with the local by April 1. Among other demands, the union sought a 20 percent wage increase and a promise of union security. Only a small minority of the workers in the three plants joined the walkout, and the companies continued to run production in spite of the strike. William Green, president of the AFL, believed that the strike was ill-advised and offered no assistance. Within a couple of weeks the strike looked helpless. These circumstances probably accounted for the local's reliance on radical assistance, and for the radicals ability to achieve the influence they did.3
From the beginning of the walkout Communists and Musteites offered their support and joined strikers on the picket lines. But Communist denunciations of the Musteites as "'left' social fascists" and Musteite suspicions of the Communists prevented effective cooperation between the two. Of the two groups, the Musteites had the larger following in Toledo and exercised greater influence during the walkout. The Communists had only a small following in Cleveland. According to Ohio district organizer, John Williamson, only three or four party members worked in the Auto Lite plant, and they were old, foreign-born workers. The party suffered from a "complete isolation from organized contact with the strikers prior to the strike." Similarly, the "very small and inactive" Auto Workers Union4 "played no role during the strike". The Communists did, however, have an active Unemployed Council in Toledo, and through its activity the party carried on considerable agitation and supplied volunteers for the picket line.5
The radicals aided the strikers by helping organize the walkout and by generating strike support. Early in the walkout, after Thomas Ramsey, the local AFL organizer, had warned the strikers to have nothing to do with Communists and had failed to establish picket lines, about 30 workers from the Bingham and Auto Lite plants sought advice at the Communist Party office. Williamson and the local party organizer, Kenneth Eggert, gave the workers "some idea on how to take the situation into their own hands". Bob Travis, a leftist in the Toledo Chevrolet plant, helped the Auto Lite strikers arrange picketing, and party women established a soup kitchen. To build support for the walkout, the Communists also issued 16 different leaflets (a total of 105,000 copies) and held seven shop gate meetings as well as perhaps a dozen other strike support rallies at which Earl Browder, William Patterson, William Weinstone and other party leaders spoke.6
The radicals' major contribution was their defiance of court injunctions. On April17, in response to an application by Auto Lite and Bingham, Common Pleas Judge Roy Staurt issued a restraining order that limited picketing to 25 persons at the two Auto Lite gates and at the Bingham gate and that prohibited picketing by the Lucas County Unemployed League, the Lucas County Unemployed Council, and all other nonunion people. Judge Stuart followed this act with a similarly worded temporary injunction on May 14 and a permanent injunction on May 15. To enforce the injunction, Lucas County Sheriff David Krieger appointed 150 special deputies, paid by Auto Lite and Bingham. On May 5, in a letter to Judge Stuart, Sam Pollock of the Unemployed League condemned the initial restraining order as a curtailment of "the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket peacefully" and promised that the league would "deliberately and specifically" violate the order. The Musteites and Communists then mobilized their followers among the unemployed to bolster the picket lines. Roy W. Howard of the Scripps-Howard newspapers noted with amazement that the unemployed "appeared on the picket lines to help striking employees win a strike, though you would expect their interest would lie the other way - that is, in going in and getting their jobs the other men had laid down".7
Defiance of the restraining order rescued the walkout from certain defeat. On May 15, deputies arrested 107 strikers for violating the May 14 injunction. The next day 46 were arrested. On May 17, over 200 strikers and sympathizers stormed the jail; the following day a similar crowd demonstrated in the corridors of the courthouse as Judge Stuart opened hearings on the contempt charges. After this, the picket lines grew. On Monday, May 21, 1,000 picketers demonstrated at Auto Lite. They stoned several carloads of scabs leaving the plant and scuffled with strike breakers. On Tuesday, 4,000 picketers and spectators appeared, and on Wednesday, 6,000. That day tensions rose. A bolt thrown from a window in the Auto Lite plant struck a young girl on the head. Deputies "unmercifully" beat up an old man. Then, after strikebreakers turned a hose on the picketers, a major riot broke out between the strikers and the scabs, police, and deputies caught inside the plant. A Toledo Communist described the scene: "The police and Deputy Sheriffs were helpless. The entire neighborhood was seized by the workers. The Communist Party and the Young Communist League members played an active part in organizing squads in different streets around the plant and charged the police and the plant and when necessary retreated in an organized way. Hand to hand fighting with police took place, with the workers getting the upper hand. The economic struggle developed into a political struggle, into class war".8
The siege of the plant continued through the night until the next day, May 24, when Ohio Governor George White sent in the National Guard. The National Guard used bayonets, tear gas, vomiting gas, and bullets to disperse the crowd. Guardsmen's bullets killed two strike sympathizers. Fighting between the guard and demonstrators raged all that day. The next afternoon fighting again erupted between the guardsmen, who then numbered 1,350 (the largest peacetime mobilization in the state's history), and an estimated crowd of 20,000. On May 26, yet more fighting occurred. Strikers and their supporters pitted bottles and bricks against tear gas and bayonets. When the violence finally ebbed, radical condemnation of the "murderers" and calls for a general strike flowed. At a Communist-sponsored rally on Sunday, May 27, William Weinstone, who had recently replaced John Schmies as district organizer for Detroit, declared: "Only by establishing a rule of workers in place of a rule of the capitalists can prosperity and freedom for everybody be won." The rally raised two slogans: "You Can't Make Auto Parts With Soldiers" and "A General Strike to Support Auto-Lite Workers".9
By May 28, 95 of the 103 unions affiliated with the Toledo Central Labor Union had expressed a readiness to support a general strike. On that day, however, William Green informed Otto Brach, head of the Central Labor Union, that he did not believe it "necessary for the organized workers in Toledo to engage in a sympathetic strike". Though Green and local federation leaders ended the threat of a general strike, the picket line violence effectively closed the Auto Lite plant, provoked the intervention of Department of Labor mediators, and hastened a strike settlement. The written settlement on June 4 yielded a company promise not to discriminate against union members, a 5 percent wage increase in all three plants, as well as a unique preamble to the agreement repudiating "the tactics of Communists". While Brach called the agreement "a splendid victory", the Daily Worker stated: "The strikers victorious on the mass picket lines, were defeated by the maneuverings of the AFL leaders who succeeded in their strategy of splitting them up and blocking a general strike for their demands." Both appraisals contained some truth. Clear to all, however, was that in the most dramatic confrontation of the NIRA10 period, Auto Lite workers, defied the AFL no-strike policy, relied on outside radicals and won one of the few signed agreements in the industry and established one of the strongest auto locals in the AFL.11
From The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions by Roger Keeran, Indiana University Press,1980
Slightly edited with added footnotes to be a stand-alone article
A passage about radicals involvement in the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, from The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions by Roger Keeran.
From the beginning of the walkout Communists and Musteites offered their support and joined strikers on the picket lines. But Communist denunciations of the Musteites as "'left' social fascists" and Musteite suspicions of the Communists prevented effective cooperation between the two. Of the two groups, the Musteites had the larger following in Toledo and exercised greater influence during the walkout. The Communists had only a small following in Cleveland. According to Ohio district organizer, John Williamson, only three or four party members worked in the Auto Lite plant, and they were old, foreign-born workers. The party suffered from a "complete isolation from organized contact with the strikers prior to the strike." Similarly, the "very small and inactive" Auto Workers Union4 "played no role during the strike". The Communists did, however, have an active Unemployed Council in Toledo, and through its activity the party carried on considerable agitation and supplied volunteers for the picket line.5
The radicals aided the strikers by helping organize the walkout and by generating strike support. Early in the walkout, after Thomas Ramsey, the local AFL organizer, had warned the strikers to have nothing to do with Communists and had failed to establish picket lines, about 30 workers from the Bingham and Auto Lite plants sought advice at the Communist Party office. Williamson and the local party organizer, Kenneth Eggert, gave the workers "some idea on how to take the situation into their own hands". Bob Travis, a leftist in the Toledo Chevrolet plant, helped the Auto Lite strikers arrange picketing, and party women established a soup kitchen. To build support for the walkout, the Communists also issued 16 different leaflets (a total of 105,000 copies) and held seven shop gate meetings as well as perhaps a dozen other strike support rallies at which Earl Browder, William Patterson, William Weinstone and other party leaders spoke.6
The radicals' major contribution was their defiance of court injunctions. On April17, in response to an application by Auto Lite and Bingham, Common Pleas Judge Roy Staurt issued a restraining order that limited picketing to 25 persons at the two Auto Lite gates and at the Bingham gate and that prohibited picketing by the Lucas County Unemployed League, the Lucas County Unemployed Council, and all other nonunion people. Judge Stuart followed this act with a similarly worded temporary injunction on May 14 and a permanent injunction on May 15. To enforce the injunction, Lucas County Sheriff David Krieger appointed 150 special deputies, paid by Auto Lite and Bingham. On May 5, in a letter to Judge Stuart, Sam Pollock of the Unemployed League condemned the initial restraining order as a curtailment of "the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket peacefully" and promised that the league would "deliberately and specifically" violate the order. The Musteites and Communists then mobilized their followers among the unemployed to bolster the picket lines. Roy W. Howard of the Scripps-Howard newspapers noted with amazement that the unemployed "appeared on the picket lines to help striking employees win a strike, though you would expect their interest would lie the other way - that is, in going in and getting their jobs the other men had laid down".7
Defiance of the restraining order rescued the walkout from certain defeat. On May 15, deputies arrested 107 strikers for violating the May 14 injunction. The next day 46 were arrested. On May 17, over 200 strikers and sympathizers stormed the jail; the following day a similar crowd demonstrated in the corridors of the courthouse as Judge Stuart opened hearings on the contempt charges. After this, the picket lines grew. On Monday, May 21, 1,000 picketers demonstrated at Auto Lite. They stoned several carloads of scabs leaving the plant and scuffled with strike breakers. On Tuesday, 4,000 picketers and spectators appeared, and on Wednesday, 6,000. That day tensions rose. A bolt thrown from a window in the Auto Lite plant struck a young girl on the head. Deputies "unmercifully" beat up an old man. Then, after strikebreakers turned a hose on the picketers, a major riot broke out between the strikers and the scabs, police, and deputies caught inside the plant. A Toledo Communist described the scene: "The police and Deputy Sheriffs were helpless. The entire neighborhood was seized by the workers. The Communist Party and the Young Communist League members played an active part in organizing squads in different streets around the plant and charged the police and the plant and when necessary retreated in an organized way. Hand to hand fighting with police took place, with the workers getting the upper hand. The economic struggle developed into a political struggle, into class war".8
The siege of the plant continued through the night until the next day, May 24, when Ohio Governor George White sent in the National Guard. The National Guard used bayonets, tear gas, vomiting gas, and bullets to disperse the crowd. Guardsmen's bullets killed two strike sympathizers. Fighting between the guard and demonstrators raged all that day. The next afternoon fighting again erupted between the guardsmen, who then numbered 1,350 (the largest peacetime mobilization in the state's history), and an estimated crowd of 20,000. On May 26, yet more fighting occurred. Strikers and their supporters pitted bottles and bricks against tear gas and bayonets. When the violence finally ebbed, radical condemnation of the "murderers" and calls for a general strike flowed. At a Communist-sponsored rally on Sunday, May 27, William Weinstone, who had recently replaced John Schmies as district organizer for Detroit, declared: "Only by establishing a rule of workers in place of a rule of the capitalists can prosperity and freedom for everybody be won." The rally raised two slogans: "You Can't Make Auto Parts With Soldiers" and "A General Strike to Support Auto-Lite Workers".9
By May 28, 95 of the 103 unions affiliated with the Toledo Central Labor Union had expressed a readiness to support a general strike. On that day, however, William Green informed Otto Brach, head of the Central Labor Union, that he did not believe it "necessary for the organized workers in Toledo to engage in a sympathetic strike". Though Green and local federation leaders ended the threat of a general strike, the picket line violence effectively closed the Auto Lite plant, provoked the intervention of Department of Labor mediators, and hastened a strike settlement. The written settlement on June 4 yielded a company promise not to discriminate against union members, a 5 percent wage increase in all three plants, as well as a unique preamble to the agreement repudiating "the tactics of Communists". While Brach called the agreement "a splendid victory", the Daily Worker stated: "The strikers victorious on the mass picket lines, were defeated by the maneuverings of the AFL leaders who succeeded in their strategy of splitting them up and blocking a general strike for their demands." Both appraisals contained some truth. Clear to all, however, was that in the most dramatic confrontation of the NIRA10 period, Auto Lite workers, defied the AFL no-strike policy, relied on outside radicals and won one of the few signed agreements in the industry and established one of the strongest auto locals in the AFL.11
From The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions by Roger Keeran, Indiana University Press,1980
Slightly edited with added footnotes to be a stand-alone article
- 1. The AWP was a socialist organization that hoped to find an 'American approach' to Marxism. Headed by A.J. Muste, a former minister, the AWP only had a membership in the hundreds, but had significant influence through its Unemployed Leagues, whose membership dwarfed the party's. 9 months after the Toledo strike, the AWP merged with the Communist League of America, a Trotskyist group that played a role in that summer's Teamster strike in Minneapolis, to form the Workers Party of the United States. The WPUS eventually dissolved itself into the Socialist Party of America in 1936, later splitting to form the Socialist Workers Party, which still exists today. -juan
- 2. 'Federal' unions were an AFL compromise on industrial unionism. They were preliminary locals that were supposed to eventually be separated by craft. - juan
- 3. Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963) pp. 274-277
- 4. Communist Party-organized industrial union - juan
- 5. Fine, p. 276; Oral History of A.J. Muste (Columbia); Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 173-174; John Williamson, Dangerous Scot: the Life and Work of an American 'Undesirable' (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 104; Daily Worker (June 18, 1934)
- 6. Williamson, pp. 104-105; John Burns, "The Lessons of the Auto-Parts Strike in Toledo," Daily Worker (June 18, 1934)
- 7. Fine, pp. 277-278; Burns, 8-9; Pollock quoted by Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1964), pp. 21-22; Howard quoted by Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 221
- 8. Fine, pp. 275-278; A.J. Muste, "The Battle of Toledo", Nation (June 6, 1934), 639-640; Louis F. Budenz, "Strikes Under the New Deal", in Alfred M. Bingham and Seldon Rodman, ed., Challenge to the New Deal (New York, Falcon, 1934), pp. 102-103; Daily Worker (May 24, 25, 26, 1934); Burns, 10-15.
- 9. Fine, pp. 279-280; Daily Worker (May 28, 1934); Williamson, Dangerous Scot, p. 105
- 10. National Industrial Recovery Act, a law passed in 1933, which aimed to regulate industry. It also established union organizing rights.
- 11. Fine, pp. 280-283; William Green to Otto Brach (May 28, 1934) in AFL Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin); Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 226-229; Otto Brach to William Green (June 5, 1934) in AFL Papers; Daily Worker (June 6, 1934)
Tags
Share
Related
Attached files
Tell Elizabeth Warren ...It's not "Progressive" to Justify Israel's War Crimes in Gaza
Last month, when questioned by a constituent about civilian casualties from Israel's attack on Gaza, this is what Senator Warren had tosay:
“When Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to
hospitals, next to schools, they're using their civilian population to protect
their military assets. And I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to
defend itself."
|
We will be on hand when ELIZABETH WARREN speaks at Tufts University on
Monday, September 15 Meet at 11am to hold signs and distribute flyers to people entering the event
Cohen Auditorium, 40 Talbot Ave, Medford (location
here)
(Public Transportation: Red Line to Davis Square and Bus numbers 94 or 96 to Talbot Ave)
Event 12:00 pm (entry by ticket-holders
only)
Sign-making Saturday 3pm at MAPA office – 11 Garden St. near Harvard Sq.
Our message to Senator Warren:
IT’S NOT “PROGRESSIVE” TO JUSTIFY ISRAELI WAR CRIMES IN
GAZA!
|
This is not "Self-defense!"
 This is not "Self-defense!" 
|
Major international NGO's, including Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch, have called the disproportionate civilian casualties and
the attacks on essential civilian infrastructure possible "war crimes"; not
legitimate self-defense.
And as Congress reconvenes to consider its own military
"solutions" in the Middle East, please contact
- Senator Warren (202-224-4543),
- Senator Edward Markey (202-224-2742), and your own
- House Representative (Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121)
TELL THEM to speak up for Israeli accountability,
adherence to international law and compliance with existing statutes regarding
the permissible uses of exported US weapons. It’s long overdue to
re-examine our policy of unconditionally supplying billions of dollars of arms
to Israel every year!
The way to peace is not easy or obvious. But occupation,
siege, collective punishment and the mass killing of non-combatants will not
take us there. Please work with us to remind leaders like Elizabeth Warren of
what ought to be obvious.
Thank you (and please feel free to share this message with
your contacts),
The Palestine/Israel Working Group (pi@masspeaceaction.org)
 | ||
|
United for
Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and
community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed
after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic
justice.
Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP
today.
| ||
| 617-383-4857 | www.justicewithpeace.org | |
Saturday, September 13, 2014
To Nadine Gordimer
Homage from the Five to South Africa's Nobel Prize Laureate
July 16, 2014
 She fought against the hateful South African Apartheid together with Cubans, siding with the victims when the complicity of the powerful nations of the time favored their assailants. She supported Cuba when the forecasters bet on our defeat and favored the victory of infamy. She joined the line of good people when a sense of shame brought them to fight for the freedom of the Five. She challenged the cruelty of the empire in times of elated revenge. She accompanied us and was always ready to add her name to the increasing list of those who call to end the torment imposed on us and our families by a corrupt legal system.
She was fair. She was humane. She was great. That is why she has the respect and admiration of the Five, our loved ones and the entire Cuban people.
Nadine Gordimer has passed away. She shall live forever with the peace of these who are just. Immortal and tireless.
Gerardo Hernández Nordelo
Ramón Labañino Salazar Antonio Guerrero RodrÃguez Fernando González llort René González Sehwerert
July 15th, 2014.
|
Para Nadine Gordimer
Homenaje de los Cinco a la Premio Nobel sudafricana
16 de julio de 2014
Tomado de CubaDebate
Junto a los cubanos luchó contra el odioso Apartheid sudafricano, poniéndose al lado de las vÃctimas cuando la complicidad de las potencias de la época se inclinaba hacia los victimarios. Supo estar al lado de Cuba cuando los augures apostaban por nuestro abatimiento y las apuestas se inclinaban por el triunfo de la infamia. Se puso en la fila de los buenos cuando la vergüenza los convocó a luchar por la libertad de los Cinco, retando al imperio cruel en tiempos de exultada venganza. Nos acompañó y estuvo siempre presta a poner su nombre en la lista creciente de los que reclaman fin al calvario impuesto a nosotros y a nuestros familiares por un sistema legal viciado por el oprobio.
Fue justa. Fue humana. Fue grande. Por eso fue digna del respeto y la admiración de los Cinco, de nuestros seres queridos y del pueblo cubano.
Nadine Gordimer ha muerto. Que en la paz de los justos viva para siempre. Inmortal e incansable.
Gerardo Hernández Nordelo
Ramón Labañino Salazar Antonio Guerrero RodrÃguez Fernando González Llort René González Sehwerert
15 de julio de 2014
|
Another Of Duke Ellington's Boys Be-Bop Jazz Man Gerald Wilson Passes-
Be-bop, brother, be-bop
http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-gerald-wilson-20140909-story.html#page=1
UFPJ Urgent UPDATE: Bombing Iraq and Syria – A Delusion, Not A Solution
|
|
President Obama may prefer the
term “counter-terrorism,” but it is clear from last night’s speech that he is
taking the United States into another war.
His long-term plan for bombing
Iraq and Syria, for placing U.S. troops on the ground as “trainers,” and for
assistance to allied fighters, is opening another tragic chapter in the failed
“war on terrorism,” initiated by President Bush and rejected by the voters in
2008.
We deplore the brutality and
violence of ISIS, but we do not believe that U.S. air strikes will solve the
problem, even if there are short-term military gains. Despite the President’s
many references to “a coalition,” in reality the United States will be
intervening unilaterally in two civil wars, each of which has multiple factions
and complex roots.
Time to learn from experience:
The U.S. invasion of Iraq tore
the lid off of a Pandora’s box that has wreaked havoc with the lives of millions
of people over the past dozen years. It is that invasion, which gave rise to
ISIS and “terrorism,” in places where it had not existed.
U.S. air-strikes –whether in
Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan or Afghanistan- have never had the precision that is
claimed. Thousands of civilians have been killed, with the result that America’s
enemies multiplied.
The “new strategy” the President
just unveiled isn’t new. It was tried by President George W. Bush in
Afghanistan, where it failed, creating a Washington demand for tens of thousands
of U.S. combat troops. These troops have added to the instability of the
country, while failing to defeat the Taliban.
We believe there are better choices:
*Make diplomacy and humanitarian
assistance the priority
*Seek improved relations with
Iran to end the fighting in the region
*Work through United Nations to
halt the flow of financing and weapons to ISIS
*Re-start UN-directed
negotiations to end the civil war in Syria
*Mobilize to solve the real
problems in the region- poverty, hunger, drought, joblessness
Our Voices are Needed Now…The
White House and Members of Congress are Paying Close Attention to Public
Opinion.
Call the White House
Comments: 202.456.1111; Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Call your Senators and
Congressional Representatives
Let them know, you strongly
oppose perpetual war in the Middle East. Emphasize that U.S. bombing of two
countries will bring more suffering and violence, and that there is no realistic
alternative to diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
Ask your member of Congress to speak out now in
opposition to US military intervention in Iraq and Syria.
Please make a donation to UFPJ so
that we can continue to keep our member groups and dedicated
activists linked together for effective action and impact.
|
|
Help us continue to do this critical
work: Make a donation to UFPJ today.
|
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938
Markin comment (repost from September 2010 slightly edited):
Several years ago, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call issued during the presidency of the late Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must have been something in the air at the time (maybe caused by these global climatic changes that are hazarding our collective future) because I had also seen a spade of then recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looked very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course in the 21st century, after over one hundred and fifty years of attempts to create adequate international working-class organizations, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) was appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
**************
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
On Unification Of The British Section
For a long time the adherents of the Fourth International in Great Britain have been divided into small separate groups. The importance and necessity of organizational unity of all militants standing on a common platform of principle were sadly underestimated. This light minded attitude on the organizational question led not only to ill considered splits over tactical differences but even to splits over purely personal disputes having no discernible political basis (the Lee group). In this latter manifestation the warning signals of political degeneration were clearly to be seen. If the International Secretariat erred in delaying too long before calling a halt to this untenable situation, its decisive intervention on the eve of the world conference became all the more imperatively necessary.
It must be quite obvious to all genuine adherents of the Fourth International in all parts of the world that the present representative world conference, summoned together in spite of the greatest and most unprecedented difficulties and obstacles, and participated in by delegates from many countries and from great distances, must be the occasion for a definite roll call of our forces. This roll call puts an end to all ambiguity of relations between our international organization and those who hitherto have maintained, or professed to maintain, a loyalty to its principles, its methods, and its discipline.
The present conference signifies a conclusive delimitation between those who are really in the Fourth International and fighting every day under its revolutionary banner, and those who are merely ”for” the Fourth International, i. e., the dubious elements who have sought to keep one foot in our camp and one foot in the camp of our enemies.
The unification of the British groups (as that of the hitherto divided Greek groups) of the Fourth International on the eve of the world conference coincides with the final departure of such alien elements as Sneevliet and Vereecken. Both these occurrences, each in its own way, are equally symbolic of a great progressive step forward in the reorganization of the revolutionary vanguard on the tested foundations of Bolshevism. They signify at one and the same time the unification of the genuine and sincere adherents of the Fourth International and their organizational separation from pretenders, saboteurs, and hidden enemies.
The British and Greek groups came to the conference with unification programs drawn up with the assistance of the International Secretariat because they had a firm determination to be enrolled under the banner of the Fourth International. Sneevliet and Vereecken, who over too long a period of time utilized their formal membership in the movement of the Fourth International to flout its principles, sabotage its discipline, and give aid and comfort to its enemies, lacked the courage at the last moment even to appear at the International Conference. That is only because they realized that the time had arrived for a showdown. They feared to give an account of their policies and actions before an international tribunal.
The world conference considers the unity agreement entered into between the three previously separated British groups as an adequate basis for the development of the work of the united British organization in the ensuing period. It endorses the unity agreement and recognizes the organization based on it as the only British section of the Fourth International. All Bolshevik-Leninists, all revolutionary workers in Great Britain who desire to be enrolled under the banner of the Fourth International, are invited and urged to join the British section the Revolutionary Socialist League.
The conference notes with great satisfaction that the leaders of a new group of revolutionary workers in Scotland, not previously connected with our international organization the Revolutionary Socialist Party have signed the unification agreement, and the RSP has been represented at the world conference by its own delegate. The approach of this organization to the Fourth International is a matter of great and symptomatic significance. Serious workers who seek the truth and want to fight for socialism cannot and will not find any other way than the way of Bolshevism, nor any other organization than the Fourth International. The world conference extends a hearty welcome to the Revolutionary Socialist Party and expresses the confidence that the recommendation of its leading committee for organizational fusion with the British section of the Fourth International will be adopted in the pending party referendum.
As far as the Lee group is concerned, it is necessary to point out:
(1) This group came into existence some months ago as the result of purely personal grievances which impelled Lee and his friends to an organizational split. There was not then, and there is not now, any justifiable political basis for the separate maintenance of this group.
(2) The leaders of this group resisted all attempts of the delegation of the International Secretariat to include it in the general unification.
(3) The invitation of the IS delegation to this group to be represented and present its point of view at the world conference, either by delegate or letter, was disregarded; all we have is a statement, apparently addressed to the world at large, rejecting in advance any decision of the world conference not in accord with their untenable demands.
Under these circumstances it is necessary to warn the comrades associated with the Lee group that they are being led on a path of unprincipled clique politics which can only land them in the mire. It is possible to maintain and develop a revolutionary political grouping of serious importance only on the basis of great principles. The Fourth International alone embodies and represents these principles. It is possible for a national group to maintain a constant revolutionary course only if it is firmly connected in one organization with co-thinkers throughout the world and maintains a constant political and theoretical collaboration with them. The Fourth International alone is such an organization. All purely national groupings, all those who reject international organization, control, and discipline, are in their essence reactionary.
All adherents of the Fourth International in a single country must be united in a single section of the Fourth International. Those who reject this elementary organizational rule of the Fourth International put themselves in the position of irresponsible splitters and clique fighters.
The members of the Lee group are invited by the world conference to reconsider their decisions, to come into the unified British section and consequently into the Fourth International, and to take their place in the common work, with fair representation in its leading bodies and without reprisals of any kind. The unified British section is assured by the conference of the full support and collaboration of the international organization in its historic revolutionary task.
Free Chelsea Manning Now!
Our new whistle and dogtags logo!
August 28, 2014.
The Chelsea Manning Support Network is pleased to announce our new campaign logo. Supporters submitted over a dozen great designs, and we received great feedback via our Facebook page on the final designs.
Please feel free to download the PDF via our Graphic Resources page and use it to print your own banners, shirts, etc. You can also use the PDF to print one-of-a-kind items via on-demand online printers, such as CafePress and Zazzle (you have our permission).
We are also having union labor silk-screen quality USA-made, sweatshop-free, black shirts (basic and women’s styles) that are now available for pre-order. We have a few stickers in the works as well.
These small vector PDF files scale well from a small sticker up to billboard size!
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Poets
|
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)