AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Friday, October 03, 2014

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky On The Anti-War Movement -The First Year Of War (1915)

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.

The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs, were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.

Over the next period as we lead up to the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.

******************************************************************************************************************************************

Leon Trotsky

The First Year of War

(1915)

Written: 1915
First Published: Originally published on 4 August 1915 in Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a Paris-based newspaper for Russian revolutionaries. The original Russian article was published in Nashe Slovo on August 4, 1915 and it appears in Volume IX of Trotsky’s Sochineniia. You can read the original Russian version here.
Source: Socialism Today Issue 180 July/August 2014
Translated: Pete Dickenson for Socialism Today 2014
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters
Copright: Socialism Today. Republished here with their permission.

On the first anniversary of the start of the war, LEON TROTSKY wrote this perceptive assessment of the situation, and the need for a Marxist analysis and programme. Originally published on 4 August 1915 in Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a Paris-based newspaper for Russian revolutionaries, this is the first time it has been translated into English – by Pete Dickenson.

The past year – 365 days and nights of continuous mutual extermination of the peoples – will go down in our history as a staggering testament to how deeply humanity is still imprisoned in shameful blind barbarism by its social roots.
In order to stigmatize the German Mausers, which have a bigger diameter than the Allied guns, and the German shells, which spread their suffocating stench further than those of the Quadruple Entente¹, Allied rhetoric created a special term, ‘barbarie scientifique’ or scientific barbarism. The perfect term! It is only necessary to extend it to the entire war and its socio-historical background – regardless of state and national borders. All those technical forces that created human progress moved to the business of the destruction of the cultural foundations of society and, above all, of the annihilation of mankind: this is the ‘mobilisation of industry’, which is now spoken about in all the languages of European civilization. Educated barbarism is armed with all the conquests of human genius – from Archimedes to Edison – to erase from the surface of the earth everything created by humanity collectively, by Archimedes and Edison. If the Germans stand out in this bloody, insane competition, it is only because they are more widely, systematically and efficiently organised than their mortal enemies.
As if to give the fall of mankind the most humiliating character, the war, using the latest proud technological conquest of aviation, has driven man into trenches, into dirty earthen caves, sewers, where the rulers of nature, eaten away by parasites, lying in their own filth, lie in wait for other troglodytes, covered with lice, and newspapers and politicians in various languages all say that it is precisely this that is now serving civilization. Crawling on all fours from the dark primordial swamp, humanity brought its organised mind to bear in the struggle with nature. By heroic revolutionary upheavals, it brought elements of reason to state structures, displacing blind inertia, ‘by the Grace of God’, with the idea of popular sovereignty and a parliamentary regime. But in the very foundations of its social life, in its economic organisation, humanity remains entirely in the grip of dark forces, beyond rational control, which are always threatening to spontaneously explode with accumulated contradictions and then bring them down onto the head of mankind, in the form of global catastrophes.

Colossal, shameful war

Europe, torn by capitalist development from medieval provincialism and economic inertia, in a series of revolutions and wars, created incomplete ‘national’ states, from both large and small powers, and linked them in a transient and ever-changing scheme of antagonisms, alliances and agreements. Nowhere having achieved national unity, capitalist development came into conflict with the state framework it had created, and for the last half-century sought a way out in continuous colonial plunder, leading, untypical for Europe, to an ‘armed peace’. This system, in which the ruling upper classes economically, politically and psychologically adapted themselves to the monstrous growth of militarism, gave birth to a war for world domination – the most colossal and shameful war that history has known.
The war has already involved seven of the eight great powers and threatens to involve the eighth²; in order to broaden its base, it draws in the minor powers one after the other (all the work of diplomacy now consists of this). It automatically dissolves individual subordinate aims into the mechanics of mutual debilitation, exhaustion and extermination. With the generality, formlessness and multiplicity of its aims, combining and throwing against each other all races and nationalities, all state systems and all stages of capitalist development, this war of usurpation wants to show that it is completely free from any racial or national origins, religious or political principles – it simply expresses the bare fact of the impossibility of the further coexistence of peoples and states on the basis of capitalist imperialism.
The system of alliances, as it developed after the Franco-Prussian war, was generated by a desire to create a guarantee of stability of states through a rough military balance of opposing forces. This equilibrium, demonstrated by the current ‘guerre d’usure’ (war of attrition), precludes the possibility of a fast and decisive victory of one party and makes the outcome of the war dependent on the gradual depletion of the approximately equal material and moral resources of the opponents.
On the western front, the thirteenth month of the war finds the trenches in about the same place they were in the second month. Here they have moved tens of metres in either direction – through the bodies of thousands and tens of thousands of soldiers. On the Gallipoli Peninsula, as well as on the new Austro-Italian front, the lines of trenches immediately signified lines of military hopelessness. On the Russian-Turkish border it is the same picture on a provincial scale. Only on the eastern (Russian) front, giant armies, after a series of movements in both directions, now roll back to the east onto the body of ravaged Poland, which each party promises to ‘liberate’.
In this picture, generated by the blind automatism of capitalist forces and the conscious shame of the ruling classes, there are absolutely no points of reference that, from a military point of view, would allow, in any way whatsoever, any hopes and plans to be linked with a decisive victory for either side. If only the ruling powers of Europe had as much historical good intent as bad, then they would still have been powerless by force of arms to resolve the problems that caused the war. The strategic situation in Europe gives a mechanical expression to the historical impasse, into which the capitalist world has driven itself.

International’s bloody crime

Even if the socialist parties were powerless to prevent the war in its first period, or to hold the rulers to account, if from the outset they had declined to take any responsibility for the global carnage, and the parties had used their close links to warn the people against the rulers and to denounce them, played a waiting game – in the sense of revolutionary action, counting on the inevitable turn in the mass mood – how great would now have been the authority of international socialism to the masses. Deceived by militarism, weighed down by mourning and increasing want, all the more would the masses have turned their eyes to the true shepherd of the peoples!
Look! In a condition of desperation, both groups of military powers are now grasping for every small state: Romania, Bulgaria or Greece, for the l’etat du Destin (the country of destiny), whose weight could finally tip the balance in one direction or another. What really would be a ‘make or break’ weight under these conditions is the International, the great power of international socialism, whose every word would find an ever greater echo in the minds of the masses! The liberation programme, which individual sections of the broken International are now dragging through the bloody filth in the tail of the General Staff baggage train, would become a powerful reality in an international appeal of the socialist proletariat against all the forces of the old society.
But history, even at this time, remained stepmother to the oppressed class. Its national parties incorporated into their organisations not only the initial successes of the proletariat, not only its desire for total liberation, but also all of the indecision of the oppressed class, its lack of self-confidence, its instinct for submission to the state. These parties have been passively dragged into the world catastrophe and, making a cowardly virtue of necessity, took it upon themselves to cover up an unprincipled bloody crime with the lie of liberation mythology. Arising from a half-century of world antagonisms the military catastrophe was a disaster transferred onto the edifice of the fifty year-old International. The anniversary of the war is also the anniversary of the most terrible fall of the strongest parties of the international proletariat.

The only way out

And yet we meet the bloody anniversary without any mental decline or political scepticism. Revolutionary internationalists had the inestimable advantage that they held their position in the face of the world’s greatest catastrophe, with analysis, criticism and revolutionary foresight. We renounced all the ‘national’ point-scoring issuing from the General Staff, not only those with a cheap price tag, but even those with a surcharge. We continued to see things as they are, to call them by their names and anticipate the logic of their further movement. We have seen how, in a mad kaleidoscope in front of bleeding humanity, old illusions were adopted and new programmes hastily adapted to them, they were approved and, in the maelstrom of events, failed, yielding place to new illusions and more new programmes that hurtled to the same fate, all the more exposing the truth. And the social truth is always revolutionary!
Marxism, the method of our orientation to the historical process and the instrument of our intervention in this process, is able to withstand the blows of 75mm guns, as well as the 42cm Mausers. It prevailed when the parties standing, it seemed, under its banner were shattered. Marxism is not a snapshot of working-class consciousness – it gives the laws of historical development of the working class. In its struggle for liberation the working class can be unfaithful to Marxism – by sheer force of circumstances, the analysis of which constitutes Marxism – but in betraying Marxism, the working class betrays itself. Through downfall and disappointment, through tragic disasters, arriving at new, higher forms of self-knowledge, the working class again comes to Marxism, consolidating and deepening in its consciousness its latest revolutionary conclusions.
This is the process that we have seen over the last year. The logic of the situation of the working class powerfully drives it out everywhere from under the yoke of the national bloc and – an even greater miracle! – clears out from many socialist brains the mould of possibilism. Despite their apparent success, how pathetic and contemptible seem the hasty efforts of the official parties once again to proclaim at their meetings, the revolutionary role of the states’ melinite³ and to inculcate, through multiple repetition, the slavish illusion of ‘the defence of the fatherland’, not leaving the great imperialist road!
The hopeless military situation, the parasitic greed of the ruling capitalist cliques feeding on this hopelessness, the widespread growth of armed reaction, the impoverishment of the masses and, as a result of this, a slow but steady sobering of the working class – this is a genuine reality, the further development of which will not be held back by any force in the world! In the bowels of all the parties of the International is a process, as yet only an ideological revolt, against militarism and chauvinist ideology – a process that not only saves the honour of socialism, but also indicates to the nations the only way out of the war, with its slogan ‘to the end’, this finished formulation coming up against the blind alley of ‘scientific barbarism’.
To serve this process is the highest task which now exists on our bloody and dishonoured planet!

1. Quadruple Entente referred to the alliance of Britain, France, Russia and Japan.
2. The seven powers were Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Japan and Italy. The eighth referred to was the USA.
3. A chemical used to make explosives.

Abolish the Student Debt! Free Quality Education for All!-Wall Street’s For-Profit University Rip-Off Workers Vanguard No. 1052	19 September 2014

Abolish the Student Debt! Free Quality Education for All!

Wall Street’s For-Profit University Rip-Off

(Young Spartacus pages)

Years of education-funding cutbacks, skyrocketing tuition and the shredding of affirmative action programs have forced most working-class, poor and minority students out of access to community colleges and universities. For-profit universities have jumped into the breach, promising pie in the sky while delivering substandard education and debt bondage. With their tuition fees a whopping five to six times higher than those at community colleges and at least double those of four-year state universities, the for-profits have been big money makers on Wall Street. They particularly cashed in on the devastation following the 2008-09 financial crisis, preying on the growing millions desperate to find a job, for whom a college education is seen as the only way out.

Television, billboard and other extensive advertising for Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Technical and a plethora of other for-profit universities is aimed at the most vulnerable layers of society. Promising education and training for well-paying jobs, they particularly target those who have no options other than federal student loans, from which the for-profits rake in $30 billion a year revenue.

A suit filed against Corinthian Colleges by California’s attorney general, charging that the college lied about the success of its former students, uncovered internal documents describing its prime audience as “isolated,” “impatient” individuals with “low self esteem” who have “few people in their lives who care about them.” Geared particularly to single-parent families with incomes at or near the official poverty level, Corinthian—which includes Everest, Heald and WyoTech colleges—ran ads on the Jerry Springer and Maury Povich shows combined with high-pressure recruitment tactics.

Testifying before a Senate education committee, a former recruiter for ITT said she used and taught a process called the “pain funnel,” where admissions officers would ask students increasingly probing questions about where their lives were going wrong. Another onetime for-profit recruiter reported that she was ordered to make 300 to 450 calls a day with instructions to “get to their pain” and “convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.” Once lured in with the promise of career courses (some of which were not even taught), the for-profits have students sign federal loan applications, leaving them mostly in the dark as to the amount of debt they are taking on. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to get out of student loan debt.

As a policy analyst on federal student loans, interviewed on a 2010 PBS Frontline documentary on for-profit universities, explained:

“It is the most collectible kind of debt there is. It is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. They will garnish your wages. They will intercept your tax refunds. They will sue you in court…you become ineligible for federal employment. You become ineligible for any other kind of federal benefit. Increasingly, many states piggy-back those prohibitions.”

In short, as he concluded, “it ruins you.”

One of the few regulations curbing the for-profit colleges is a law mandating that no more than 90 percent (!) of college revenue can come from federal student loans. This has made military veterans, whose GI benefits are exempt from this regulation, a hot commodity for the for-profit universities. For many who enlisted to pay for an otherwise unobtainable education and then served as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars and occupations abroad, the meager veterans’ benefits are seen as a cash cow for Wall Street vultures at home. ITT came up with another “innovation” to make up its 10 percent shortfall in funding. That was to offer private loans at zero interest rates to new students. If not repaid within a year, the students were made to take on a new loan at up to 14.75 percent interest. A student missing any monthly payment would be pulled out of class and threatened with being kicked out if they didn’t make a payment on the spot. All of this has created huge wealth for the corporations running these colleges. According to a Mother Jones article “Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off” (31 January), ITT’s revenue has “nearly doubled over the past seven years, closing in on $1.3 billion last year.”

As we wrote in “Students in Capitalist America: Huge Debt, No Jobs, No Future” (WV No. 989, 28 October 2011): “It is a measure of the decay in society that the only way for the majority of working class and poor to get a college education is to take on tens of thousands of dollars in loans, only to find themselves reduced to indentured servitude to pay back their financial usurers.” Even those who do graduate from the for-profit colleges often find that their degree is worth little more than the paper it is written on. One group of students studying nursing at Everest College was told they would get jobs paying $25-$35 an hour. Paying nearly $30,000 for a 12-month program, the training these students received would be laughable if it wasn’t so devastating for the students.

As one woman graduate told PBS: “I got my license in December of ’09, and I’ve been on countless interviews. And they all ask if I’ve ever been in a hospital, and I would have to tell them we never set foot in a hospital, ever. We went to a museum of Scientology for our psychiatric rotation.” A fellow graduate of the program added that they went to a day care for their pediatric rotation. Other students have completed their degrees only to find that they were invalid because the college was not accredited.

Capitalist Democrats Weep Crocodile Tears

Amidst the devastation of the 2008-09 economic crash, Obama declared that “every American will need to get more than a high school diploma,” and “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” In the intervening years, Obama’s Democratic Party administration has continued the decades-long assault on K through 12 public education coupled with a union-busting offensive against teachers across the country. At the same time, states have continued to cut funds for higher education to make up budget deficits. With public universities and community colleges stretched to the breaking point, the door was opened for the for-profit universities to step in, promising to fill the gap while in fact filling their pockets.

While imposing token fines and regulations aimed at curbing the “excesses” of the for-profits, the government has allowed them to continue more or less unmolested. Most recently, much has been made of Obama’s proposal to impose a regulation to limit federal student aid for for-profit universities if more than 30 percent of their students default on their loans. In short, the yardstick is not providing education but limiting the costs to the government. Accepting that nearly a third of the students will spend their lives in debt peonage, the regulation allows for 8 percent of the wages and 20 percent of the disposable income of the lucky few who do graduate and find a job to go to repaying their “debt to society.”

The former president of the for-profit college association cynically proclaimed that “we educate the students that traditional higher education has given up on.” But he scored a point by observing that if the government wanted to help it could easily wipe out the student debt! Secretary of Education Arne Duncan shot back that this was the “wrong answer.” While Obama laments with hypocritical concern the plight of students with massive debts and no job, the truth is the Democrats are complicit with keeping afloat the giant corporations that run the for-profits.

Quality education should be the right of all society, not a privilege for the few who can afford to pay for it. But under capitalism, the ruling class only invests in education for the working class and poor to the extent that they can expect returns on that investment in the form of profit. This was baldly explained by a former director of Phoenix University, the granddaddy of the for-profit colleges, who declared: “Listen, I’m happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that’s very expensive, and not everybody can do that. And so for the vast majority of folks, who don’t get that privilege, then I think it’s a business.”

We fight for free, quality, integrated education for all—from pre-K to a doctorate. To provide real access to higher education, we call for open admissions, free tuition and state-paid living stipends for all students as well as the nationalization of both the for-profit colleges and the old private universities. These measures must be made retroactive by canceling all student loan debt, both private and federal. We demand full remedial programs at the universities and an end to the “tracking” system in high schools. A country as wealthy as the United States could easily meet such demands. The problem is that the wealth and the power in this society lie in the hands of the capitalist class whose profits derive from the exploitation and immiseration of the many.

The Spartacist League and the Spartacus Youth Clubs are dedicated to building the revolutionary party that can lead the working class in the fight to wrest the wealth created by its labor out of the hands of the greedy capitalist rulers and use it to meeting the needs of the many. In a socialist America, education will not only be the right of all but will also be dedicated to benefiting all of humanity.

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s Fight To Be Seated At The Democratic National Convention

Frank Jackman:

If one event should curse and destroy the National Democratic Party’s meager reputation as “friends” of black liberation fighters that was the shabby (I am being polite here) treatment of the Fanny Lou Hamer-led Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention where they were not seated. Although the official all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation, publicly committed to Republican Barry Goldwater, was seated. Yeah, I know, politics, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his ilk politics. What else is new.

Added Frank Jackman comment:

No mention of Mississippi 50 years ago (and maybe today too) can be complete without Nina Simone’s pithy, searing indictment of hell-hole Mississippi, Mississippi Goddam. (Maybe today she would need to add places like Ferguson, Missouri to her list-damn.) Thanks Nina

And yet another Frank Jackman comment concerning what was happening in the streets and back forty down in Mississippi:

I initially made the following small remarks honoring the 50^th anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Riders and the remarks then apply here as well. I noted then that I was in high school at the time of the freedom rides and was part of a support group sponsored by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA, then an anti-Soviet Cold War left-liberal organization but very pro-civil rights in the South) that was raising money in order to send more civil rights workers "heading south." By the time of the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign I had just graduated from high school and I was working with the Boston NAACP raising funds and awareness of the struggle down in hell-hole Mississippi. All honor to those who went south and those already there heading toward the danger not away from it. All Honor to those black liberation fighters.

*********

NINA SIMONE LYRICS

"Mississippi Goddam"

The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Washing the windows
"do it slow"
Picking the cotton
"do it slow"
You're just plain rotten
"do it slow"
You're too damn lazy
"do it slow"
The thinking's crazy
"do it slow"
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin'

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

That's it!

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

THE CHOICE

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT SPEAKS:

To the Judge of Right and Wrong
With Whom fulfillment lies
Our purpose and our power belong,
Our faith and sacrifice.

Let Freedom's land rejoice!
Our ancient bonds are riven;
Once more to us the eternal choice
Of good or ill is given.

Not at a little cost,
Hardly by prayer or tears,
Shall we recover the road we lost
In the drugged and doubting years,

But after the fires and the wrath,
But after searching and pain,
His Mercy opens us a path
To live with ourselves again.

In the Gates of Death rejoice!
We see and hold the good--
Bear witness, Earth, we have made our choice
For Freedom's brotherhood.

Then praise the Lord Most High
Whose Strength hath saved us whole,
Who bade us choose that the Flesh should die
And not the living Soul!

_Rudyard Kipling_

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. If the capitalist won’t do it then we have to in order to let our unemployed and under-employed sisters and brothers survive to fight for our common socialist future. Organize the unorganized-Organize the low-wage South- Organize Wal-Mart a victory there would help all labor- Defend the fast food workers and support the Fight For 15 campaign-Defend all protesters arrested at civil disobedience actions. Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized, on Wal-Mart organizing and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings! Hands Off Syria! U.S. Hands Off Ukraine! Hands Off The World! Down With The War Budgets-Not A Single Penny, Not A Single Person For Their Endless Wars!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Quality Free Healthcare For All! Defend The Inadequate Obamacare Program Against Those Who Want To Shut It Down! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Defend Women’s Reproductive Rights! Defend Gay Marriage! Government Out Of The Bedrooms And Off Our Backs!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. There are three great tragedies in life, death, sex and hunger we can do something about the latter that will make the other two easier to deal with. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

*********
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

********Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Preacher man, don't tell me,

Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!

Stand up for your rights. come on!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Most people think,

Great god will come from the skies,

Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.

But if you know what life is worth,

You will look for yours on earth:

And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!

Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )

Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )

Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )

Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )

Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )

Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -

Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.

We know when we understand:

Almighty god is a living man.

You can fool some people sometimes,

But you can't fool all the people all the time.

So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),

We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better:

Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )

Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )

Get up, stand up!

Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )

Get up, stand up! (... )

Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )

*********

The Latest From The Cindy Sheehan Blog

http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/

A link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.

Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. And of late (2014) a fetish for running for office whatever seems to be worth looking at. This year it was the Governor's race in California. Other years it has been for President and for Congress. That Congressional race made sense because it was against Congresswoman and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who at one time was a darling of the liberals and maybe still is. But electioneering while necessary and maybe useful is not enough. So while her politics and strategy are not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times they do provide enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing.

One though should always remember, despite our political differences, Ms. Sheehan's heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush in 2005 when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2002-2003 after we had million in the streets for a few minutes. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
*************

Additional Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.

Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.

The Latest From The Cindy Sheehan Blog

Additional Markin comment:

In Honor Of The 65th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) – Comrade Lui’s Problem

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinese Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm

Markin comment (repost from 2012 just change the year date as noted in the title above):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the early 1970s to put a time frame on the period I am talking about, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here long now although I should point out that he, Ludwig, to use his old time party name which he insisted that I call him for memory’s sake (I never did get his real first name although after he died somebody mentioned the name Peter), had started his political career right around World War I in Poland at the time of great revolutionary ferment in Europe after the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in the wake of the slaughter in World War I.

In those days before they were murdered by the reaction in Germany where they were exiled (abetted by the old time German Social-Democratic leadership) that party was run by Rosa Luxemburg and her paramour Leo Jogiches. There was an old saying in the Communist movement of the 1920s and 1930s (before Stalin in the late 1930s virtually liquated the whole operation to placate his temporary partner, Hitler, in his/their designs on Poland) that the German party might have been the biggest (after the Soviet Union’s) in the Communist International but the Polish party was the best. So Ludwig came to his credentials with an impressive pedigree. Naturally he was a stalwart Communist rank and filer under the Pilsudski dictatorship from the mid-1920s forward, was torn apart by the failure of the German Communist Party to stop Hitler in his tracks when there was still time to do so in the early 1930s, and drifted (after flirting with the exiled Bukarinites, the rights in the Russian party and CI) toward the small but energetic Trotskyist group in the mid-1930s when to do meant to be hounded like a dog by both the Stalinist and Hitler-ite police apparatuses. So when you saw a guy like Ludwig, whether you agreed with his politics or not (and many times I did not), you knew you were in the presence of a real revolutionary and not some armchair dilettante.

So you, young and wet behind the ears with very slim revolutionary credentials if rather more élan, you listened and thought through many of his comments. The one I think is germane today and which continues to drive me some forty years later was the importance of the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution (in his case that of the second revolution in the mid-1920s) and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had barely escaped ahead of Hitler’s police that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck Ludwig from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth of that day (so we of the generation of ’68 had forbears whether we acknowledged them or not), on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism. (The confessional literature of American ex-Stalinists, Trotskyists, and even-left Social Democrats is replete with “errand child gone wrong but now wiser” language most of it barely readable for any useful political purpose, or polemic).

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position that China is today still hanging by a thread as a workers’ state (deformed in our language, deformed from its inception since the Chinese working-class decimated and cowered by the reaction in the second revolution in the 1920s) have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states in the late 1980s and early 1990s, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day.

In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution as tenaciously as in his time old Ludwig defended the gains of the Soviet Union in the interests of the world’s working classes and oppressed.

*******

Comrade Liu’s Problem

(Nobody in the Chinese Communist Party, the party that he was finally to come to see represented his political perspectives ever knew him as anybody other than Comrade Lui and so we will stick with that name, although later investigation found that he was the first son of a rich Shang-hai merchant family whose name was Ki Zhou but Comrade Lui will do for our purposes here.)

(I will use the old time Chinese language usages here in the interest of some kind of historical accuracy although everybody by now should be aware that for the past several decades there have been almost universal spelling and phonetic changes when Chinese turns to English.)

In the fall of 1918, the year Comrade Liu entered Peking University held many portents for the brash young man who refused to discuss his family origins other than that he had come like virtually every young student in the post- revolutionary period (the first revolution of 1911-12 which dispose of the dynasty like some much dirty linen and with about as much effort as throwing such material in the laundry) from some wealth and that he was seriously attracted to the anarchists and bookish intellectuals who held sway there in the wake of World War I.

Like many of the young of most modern generations who came up in some measure of privilege, came up in Comrade Lui’s case in the stifling atmosphere of old China the breath of fresh air provided by the university was both exhilarating and filled with many doubts about the old ways, about the way that he grew up. And so like more than a few young first generation intellectuals he gravitated to those ideas which were farthest away from his home life, from his strident worker bee youth studying to make university life. That over he breathed in the new ideas, and no ideas hit newly liberated students harder than the ideas of anarchism, at least as understood by those so liberated.

Comrade Liu like many others was first influenced by that old Russian dog, Prince Kropotkin, and his eclectic communal ideas, his idea of oneness of the whole universe which had a certain Zen-like attraction to those born into the stratified old Chinese ways (including, as has been noted, the tremendous efforts to make sure the first son succeeded at the expense of younger brothers. Daughters did not even enter the picture), and his basically moralistic way to transform society. That held many attentions for a while but if anything universal came out the First World War it was that the younger generations were looking to break-out of the old ways and so they were looking for more activist ways to change society. Comrade Liu with others formed a semi-secret group of like-minded individuals bent on action to make a new anarchist-derived world. They called themselves the Black Flag Front. That is the state of affairs as the May Fourth Movement hit all Chinese students, from anarchists to extreme nationalists, like a storm.

Comrade Liu and his comrades in the Black Flag Front while then not in the leadership of the student movement having just started to finish their first year’s studies participated fully when that big day came. This was the action they were looking for, the chance to create that more equalitarian society they were discussing in their rooms. Here is a little of what the movement itself was attempting to do which forms the background for most of what Comrade did until that time in the mid-1920s when he moved away from the Black Flag Front and began to toy a little with Communism.

On the morning of May 4, 1919, student representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Beijing and drafted five resolutions:

1. to oppose the granting of Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.

2. to draw awareness of China's precarious position to the masses in China.

3. to recommend a large-scale gathering in Beijing.

4. to promote the creation of a Beijing student union.

5. to hold a demonstration that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

On the afternoon of May 4 over 3,000 students of Peking University and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'", and "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They voiced their anger at the Allied betrayal of China, denounced the government's spineless inability to protect Chinese interests, and called for a boycott of Japanese products. Demonstrators insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials they accused of being collaborators with the Japanese. After burning the residence of one of these officials and beating his servants, student protesters were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten.^[4]

The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China, students, patriotic merchants, and workers joined protests. The demonstrators skillfully appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. From early June, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike as the center of the movement shifted from Beijing to Shanghai. Chancellors from thirteen universities arranged for the release of student prisoners, and Peking University's Cai Yuanpei resigned in protest. Newspapers, magazines, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered support for the students. Merchants threatened to withhold tax payments if China's government remained obstinate.^[5] In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers nearly devastated the entire Chinese economy.^[4] Under intense public pressure, the Beiyang government released the arrested students and dismissed Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu. Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the May Fourth Movement won an initial victory which was primarily symbolic: Japan for the moment retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in the Pacific. Even the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of China's social classes across the country to successfully collaborate given proper motivation and leadership.

Certainly the efforts here by the students and the actions of the members of Black Flag did not point directly to a new society but the thrill of political activity, mixing with other groups and programs and also recruiting a small number of the most militant students (especially from those arrested and jailed by the government) gave rise to great expectations of things to come. It was during this period that Comrade Liu decided to devote his life to the struggle, a decision that he held to until the end of his life.

One of the great mistakes students have made once they have led a movement, a radical or revolutionary movement in the struggle for power is that they fail to see the ebbs and flows of all social movements thinking that there is only one direction once the masses are in motion. The Chinese students and the now Comrade Liu-led Black Flag in particular composed mainly of students (although recruitment had brought a smattering of professionals and young workers from the textile mills in Shanghai just of the farms) fell prey to just that phenomenon. (They will not be alone in that failure as the French students in May 1968 and American students throughout the 1960s attest to.) So some formerly very militant young anarchists ready to man the barricades in a flash dropped away from the Front, got professional careers going , started families and the million and one other things people do when there is an ebb tide. This is the period when Comrade Liu, determined as ever, came to the fore, came to be recognized as the leader (although being anarchists they shied away from any official designation). And this is the period when Comrade Lui learned about the necessity of patience waiting for another opportunity to present itself to bring the masses into the struggle, to build those communes and local collectives that would create the new society.