Friday, February 12, 2016

Freedom For A Class-War Prisoner-After 20 Years-Lori Berenson Finally Home

Workers Vanguard No. 1082
29 January 2016
 
After 20 Years-Lori Berenson Finally Home
 
On December 3, 46-year-old Lori Berenson landed at Kennedy International Airport, having served a 20-year sentence in Peru (the last five years on parole). She was one of the thousands of victims of state terror carried out by paramilitary bands, cops and the military under President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. She arrived back in the U.S. with her six-year-old son, Salvador, who was born in prison. The Partisan Defense Committee and the Spartacist League, with which it is affiliated, congratulate Berenson on her release.
Berenson was grabbed off a Lima bus in November 1995, arrested along with more than 20 others in raids by the feared “anti-terrorist” police (Dincote). Only six weeks later, she was convicted by a frame-up military tribunal of treason and of being a leader of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a Cuban-influenced guerrilla group formed in the early ’80s. Its name derived from a leader of an indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in the late 1700s. The MRTA mainly targeted military installations and foreign-owned businesses, in contrast to the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement, which often launched murderous attacks on workers and peasants unions as well as armed clashes with the MRTA.
Sentenced to life, Berenson was locked up in the notorious Yanamayo prison located in the Andes at over 12,000 feet, her tiny unheated cell open to the elements. The isolation and unbearable conditions drove some of the political prisoners there to attempt suicide. After three years and suffering from illnesses brought on by the relentless cold and the poor food, Berenson was transferred to Socabaya prison near Arequipa a day before her case was to be brought before the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. After an international outcry over her treatment, Peruvian officials in 2000 admitted Berenson was not an MRTA leader and ordered her retried before a special civilian court for those accused of terrorism. A three-judge panel convicted her in 2001 of “collaborating with terrorism” and sentenced her to 20 years.
Berenson had arrived in Peru in 1994 after working in Central America and seeing firsthand the endemic poverty, inequality and injustice. “I realized,” she said in a 2011 interview, “that behind suffering was politics.... There are interests behind that—political, economic—in having a social class be relegated to dying in misery, and being exploited, and being harmed, and suffering repression” (New York Times Magazine, 6 March 2011).
In the 1990s, Peru was in the grips of a brutal “anti-terrorism” campaign waged by President Fujimori. He is now disgraced, and has been imprisoned since 2007 for among other things, corruption, kidnapping and murder—but not, of course, for his myriad crimes against the urban and rural masses of Peru. Throughout the decade of his presidency, Fujimori was backed by both the Bush I and Clinton administrations. Peru received millions in U.S. military aid for the “war on drugs,” which the army and police prosecuted viciously in remote areas known to be guerrilla strongholds. Fujimori set up death squads that massacred indigenous peasants and disappeared leftists. At the behest of the IMF, he imposed austerity and privatized previously nationalized industries, which deepened the already desperate poverty in the cities and countryside. There were forced sterilization campaigns, which largely targeted the indigenous population. Any opposition to the regime was equated with terrorism; in an 18-month period alone, over 500,000 people had been detained.
The SL and PDC defended Berenson and all victims of this onslaught of right-wing repression. In December 1996, the MRTA spectacularly seized the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, demanding freedom for 450 of their comrades (including Berenson) in exchange for the 72 high-ranking government officials, military officers and businessmen they held hostage. The siege lasted 126 days and ended in a bloodbath: government commandos stormed the villa and executed all 14 guerrillas. Understanding that this massacre would strengthen the hand of repressive regimes throughout the hemisphere, the SL and other sections of the International Communist League initiated or joined protests in major U.S. and Canadian cities as well as Mexico City, Tokyo and Berlin.
For her part, Berenson acquitted herself with honor under harsh and dangerous conditions. In 1996, with her conviction by hooded judges a foregone conclusion, she declared to the press: “In the MRTA there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement.” She used the publicity she received as an American to speak for the wounded and tortured prisoners who would never be heard. Over the years, Berenson continued to speak out on behalf of her fellow political prisoners and to denounce the horrific conditions under which they were held. She did not renounce her political views or the MRTA, even during her civil trial when hopes for her release were raised, despite widespread vilification of her in the Peruvian and American press.
The insufferable conditions that moved people like Lori Berenson to action still exist throughout South and Central America and indeed throughout the world. While Marxists understand the attraction of petty-bourgeois guerrillaism to radicalized students and intellectuals, we recognize that only the social power of the proletariat can root out the source of this social misery, the capitalist-imperialist system itself. While the peasantry is an amorphous class ranging from landless day laborers to well-to-do farmers who exploit the labor of others, the working class is concentrated and organized. It powers the capitalist engine and can lead all the oppressed—poor peasants, indigenous peoples, women—to achieve national liberation, agrarian revolution and modernization in countries plundered by imperialism.
Such historic gains can only be achieved through the conquest of power by the proletariat, that is, through socialist revolution—the expropriation of capitalist property and establishment of a planned collectivized economy. Ultimate victory for the toiling masses of Latin America requires international extension of the revolution to the bastion of U.S. imperialism and to other industrialized economies. This task requires a disciplined international organization of revolutionary working-class parties—a reforged Fourth International—that can link the struggles of the workers of the semicolonies to those in the imperialist centers.

A View From The Left-Student Protests Shake South Africa-Workers Must Mobilize in Fight for Free Education!

Workers Vanguard No. 1082
29 January 2016
 
Student Protests Shake South Africa-Workers Must Mobilize in Fight for Free Education!
 
The following article was written by our comrades of Spartacist/South Africa, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
 
Under the call “Fees Must Fall,” hundreds of thousands of university students protested against the exorbitant cost of higher education last year, shutting down campuses across South Africa and marching on the seats of government. While proposed fee hikes of up to 11.5 percent were the initial spark for the protests, they continued even after President Jacob Zuma’s announcement on 23 October 2015 that there would be no fee increases in 2016. As many students have pointed out, the cost of tertiary education was already prohibitively expensive for students from poor and working-class families. They want free education now. Zuma’s announcement this January of (yet) another commission of inquiry was rightly denounced by many as an attempt to stall and defuse the situation with bogus talk shops.
This year, protests broke out at universities in Johannesburg and Pretoria before classes even began. Protesters blocked registration, demanding that no one be excluded from registering by having to pay either up-front fees or outstanding debt, and many have linked the students’ demands to the fight against outsourcing and the slave wages of campus workers.
From Johannesburg and Cape Town to Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, protesting students and campus workers have faced brutal attacks by the cops and private security guards, who have fired stun grenades, tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets at the protesters. In Cape Town, 23 protesters were arrested and initially charged with “treason” for attempting to enter parliament as the finance minister gave his budget report in October. In November, the University of the Western Cape (UWC) campus was practically turned into a war zone, with police and heavily armed security guards chasing down students, dozens of whom were arrested and thrown in jail. At the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the year-end exams were moved off campus to the nearby military base—something that was done in the 1980s amid mass protests against the white-supremacist apartheid regime. Spartacist/South Africa demands: Drop all charges against the anti-fees and anti-outsourcing protesters! Police and security guards off the campus!
The working class has every interest in taking up the cause of the students. It is the sons and daughters of working people and the poor who are being excluded from university education by high fees. And it is the overwhelmingly black proletariat that has borne the brunt of outsourcing—the increasing use of temporary and contract workers, including through parasitic labour brokers. Unless there is an effective fightback, the conditions of the black masses will only worsen, especially as the economy continues its downward spiral. It is critical that the power of the organised working class and its unions be mobilised to support the protesters, including to defend them against state repression.
The police violence faced by the students is but a taste of what protesting township poor and striking workers routinely confront. In a massacre reminiscent of the apartheid era, 34 striking Marikana miners were shot dead in 2012 by the police. The Marikana massacre showed the true face of racist, neo-apartheid South Africa. The Tripartite Alliance—made up of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and the COSATU trade-union federation—rules on behalf of the white capitalist class, which now includes a few black faces, as well as their imperialist overlords in Washington and London. The South African capitalists continue to derive their massive profits from the superexploitation of the mainly black working class.
The current protests have tapped into the profound discontent of the oppressed over the betrayed promises of liberation from white minority rule. As one sign read: “Our parents were sold a dream in 1994; We’re here for a refund.” The extreme racial and class divide in the education system is but one measure of how the legacy of apartheid—from “Bantu education” to the Land Acts to the migrant labour system—continues to stamp every aspect of life in South Africa. The “Fees Must Fall” demonstrations were preceded by the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests, which denounced the glorification of Cecil Rhodes and other colonial pigs in monuments throughout the country, as well as the endemic racism in universities.
The skyrocketing cost of university fees falls most heavily on the small percentage of black youth who manage to make it into university despite the atrocious state of primary and secondary education for the black masses. It is significant that protesting black, coloured [mixed-race] and Indian students have been joined by white students, who have often placed themselves in the front line of the protests in an attempt to shield black classmates from police attack.
Comrades of Spartacist/South Africa participated in the anti-fees protests, calling for free education and a living stipend for all! Quality education, from preschool to the doctorate level, should be the right of all in society, not a privilege for the few who can afford it. We call to nationalise universities like Wits in Johannesburg, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes in Eastern Cape, and to open them to all who want to study there. The resources and facilities at these elite universities stand in contrast to the decaying, underfunded universities—such as Tshwane University of Technology and UWC—that the majority of poor and working-class students are consigned to. Government ministers have lauded themselves for increasing the budget for National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) loans by billions. In reality, many working-class families that can’t afford the tuition fees don’t qualify for NSFAS. Those who do are condemned to debt bondage to repay the loans—even though many can’t find jobs. Abolish the student debt!
The apartheid divisions in primary and secondary education, along with fees, lead to university drop-out rates of up to 60 percent for black students. In order to overcome this, full remedial education programmes must be implemented at the universities, linked to a programme of public works, not least to expand the existing infrastructure for higher education. We also call to abolish the campus administrations as personified by the hated Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib. For student-teacher-worker control of the universities!
Many students wrongly believe that the main obstacle to free education is government corruption. The ANC-led government is plenty corrupt, as are all capitalist governments. But the reason the neo-apartheid capitalist rulers have no interest in the education of the mass of black people is because they have little to offer them for a future other than poverty, unemployment or brutal superexploitation. The “anti-corruption” campaigns being led by various forces are actually intended to deflect the anger of workers and the oppressed away from the capitalist class and into the dead end of “cleaning up” capitalism. This was clearly seen with the protests called by Unite Against Corruption in September and October, which were supported by the NUMSA metal workers union bureaucracy, various NGOs, religious organisations and bourgeois parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). These campaigns serve to tie NUMSA and other unions to anyone who is “anti-ANC,” including very right-wing forces—for example, the white-dominated Democratic Alliance, while not participating in the marches, made clear its support to the “anti-corruption” campaign.
The forces behind these campaigns seek to manipulate popular revulsion at the Tripartite Alliance’s betrayals in order to promote their own reactionary ends, including anti-black racism. The “Zuma Must Fall” protests this December were largely white and filled with barely concealed racist venom. Spartacist/South Africa opposes these campaigns. They are counterposed to the necessary struggle to sweep away the system of production for profit through proletarian revolution and to replace it with a social system where production will be for human need. This is the only way to root out the evils of neo-apartheid capitalism.
Break with the Tripartite Alliance!
The anti-fees protests have starkly exposed the role of the ANC/SACP/COSATU Alliance and its junior version, the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), in containing social discontent on behalf of the Randlords. The PYA largely sought to ride the wave of the student protests at the beginning, including by (reluctantly) leading a march of tens of thousands to the ANC’s Luthuli House in Johannesburg in October. But as soon as Zuma announced that there would be no fee increment, the PYA began working overtime to stop further protest, openly acting as the lackeys of the university administrators. During a PYA press conference in January, the senior leaders of the ANC Youth League, the South Africa Students Congress and the Young Communist League spewed vile slanders against those who continued to protest. They denounced them as “counter-revolutionaries” seeking to “hijack” the students’ grievances in the interest of “regime change,” even implying that they are trained by the CIA. The PYA made clear what lies behind this demagogy in a January 14 joint statement: “There is no reason for strikes to continue when the people’s government has addressed all relevant immediate concerns of students.”
The January PYA press conference was too hard to stomach even for many of the PYA-affiliated Student Representative Councils (SRC) leaders. On the same day, representatives from the SRCs of Wits, University of Johannesburg, UCT and other universities walked out of a meeting with Blade Nzimande, the minister for higher education and general secretary of the SACP. One of those who walked out, the president of the Wits SRC, bitterly complained, “It is a talk shop, and we are tired of that.” But while the PYA’s SRC leaders are more directly exposed to the pressure of the angry students, this does not fundamentally change their sellout politics. Just a few days after walking out of the meeting with Blade, the Wits SRC reached an agreement with the campus administration to assist with getting student registration back on track and discouraging protest. This agreement was reached even as the university was essentially put on lockdown, with riot gear-clad security guards and a court interdict in place to prevent further “disruptions.” In opposition to such treachery, we seek to win student militants to a revolutionary programme based on the struggle for working-class power. During the protests at Wits, we raised a placard reading: “Blade, Habib, Ramaphosa & Co.: Frontmen for Racist Neo-Apartheid! For a Black-Centred Workers Government!”
Many of the “Fees Must Fall” protesters have rightly linked their demand for free education to the demands that campus workers, who are hired through outsourcing, be made permanent university employees, paid living wages and receive the same benefits as academic staff, such as free enrolment for family members. While several university administrations have agreed “in principle” to some measures against outsourcing, protests have continued to ensure implementation and to extract further concessions.
In Tshwane, Pretoria, a campaign under the slogan “Outsourcing Must Fall” was launched in January, leading to the shutdown of University of Pretoria and UNISA campuses for over a week. The campaign, mobilising not only campus workers but also municipal cleaners, has been largely led by the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP), which is affiliated with the pseudo-Trotskyist Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). The “Outsourcing Must Fall” manifesto raises supportable demands, including permanent employment for outsourced workers and a wage increase to R10,000 [$600]. But it undermines the important and necessary fight against outsourcing by embracing security guards as part of the working class. The CWI has long had a record of championing security guards, police and prison guards as “workers in uniform.” Security guards—like cops and prison guards—are not workers, but are hired to protect the property of the bosses. It is particularly grotesque to campaign for “better working conditions” for security guards at the same time that the university administrations are hiring whole armies of them to clamp down on student protest.
Many South African trade unions—including COSATU affiliates as well as “independent” unions—organise cops and security guards. The fact that the state, including the police forces, now contains many more black faces than under apartheid does not mean that it is any less an institution for capitalist oppression. As under the old apartheid system, in the “new” South Africa the cops are agents of capitalist organised violence against the working class and the whole of the oppressed population. We say: Cops, security and prison guards out of the unions!
For a Leninist Workers Party!
The protesting students must be backed by the kind of social power displayed by the Marikana miners. In the face of the government’s brutal crackdown, the miners remained defiant, keeping the mines shut until they finally won their demands. South Africa has plenty of social tinder. What is sorely lacking is a revolutionary leadership that can unite the many just grievances in the society behind the working class, which uniquely has the power to bring the capitalist system to its knees. What is essential is the forging of a Leninist vanguard workers party that acts as the tribune of the people, fighting every manifestation of oppression with the goal of workers rule. The struggle to build such a party is intrinsically linked to the fight for a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions, independent of the capitalist state and all capitalist parties.
The way forward in the fight for free education, decent healthcare, jobs and housing lies through mobilising the power of the working class in opposition to all parties committed to capitalist rule. This includes not only the bourgeois-nationalist ANC but also the bourgeois-populist Economic Freedom Fighters of Julius Malema, which despite its more radical posturing also represents capitalist class interests. This was recently highlighted by Malema’s trip to London in November, where he spoke at Chatham House, a top think tank of the British bourgeoisie. His efforts to reassure the investors of the EFF’s potential usefulness for stabilising neo-apartheid for the capitalists were well received by many. According to the director of the SA-UK Chamber of Commerce, one senior South African executive who attended said, “I think we actually agree on many things. If you could just calm down the rhetoric and adopt a softer approach, I think we could stop to talk about partnerships.”
As we in Spartacist/South Africa and our comrades in the International Communist League have always stressed:
“This capitalist regime, based on the superexploitation of the black proletariat, must frustrate the aspirations of every section of the oppressed. Widespread expectations for better housing and jobs cannot be met; even simple democratic demands such as the right to an education for all children or the right of women to birth control and abortion are denied to the overwhelming majority by social inequality and lack of facilities. If the masses’ frustration does not find expression along class lines it will fuel and embitter every other kind of division.”
The Fight For a Revolutionary Vanguard Party: Polemics on the South African Left (April 1997)
We fight for a black-centred workers government as part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa. It will take a workers government centred on the black majority to break the power of the Randlords, expropriate capitalist property and begin the socialist reconstruction of society, finally opening the road to the liberation of the black masses. Such a government would not be racially exclusive, but would unite the many black tribal- and language-based groups along with the coloured and Indian populations, while providing ample room and full democratic rights for those whites who would accept a government based on the black working class.
Only by extending socialist revolution internationally, especially to the imperialist centres, and building a world planned economy can the material conditions of life for the masses of Southern Africa and the rest of the neocolonial world be lifted to a level of abundance for all. Radical-minded students who aspire to a socialist future must join the fight to build a revolutionary workers party like the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Spartacist/South Africa is committed to the construction of such a party, which will represent the necessary instrument for leading the fight for socialist revolution as part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International.

A Mother’s Sorrows- Catherine Deneuve’s In The Name Of My Daughter


A Mother’s Sorrows- Catherine Deneuve’s In The Name Of My Daughter





DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

 

In The Name Of My Daughter, in French English subtitles, Catherine Deneuve, Guillaume Canet, Adèle Haenel, 2015  

Sometimes stories from real life, like the French film under review In The Name Of My Daughter, about the disappearance and apparent murder of a casino heiress in the 1970s are more baffling than some screenwriter’s fantastic noir-ish detective ideas. What starts out as a rather crude power-play for Madame Le Roux’s casino in the casino wars of the 1970s on the French Rivera by Mafia-connected figures leads to the death of her daughter, probably murdered by a feckless lover, or had been done by parties unknown on his orders. There is in the end just enough doubt about whether the lover was involved with the disappearance to keep this reviewer still scratching his head over the matter. The director of the film has been quoted as saying that he stayed rather close to the real story line as it unfolded over a thirty years period to only add to that feeling about the story line.          

Here is how it played out. French Rivera casino-owner Renee Le Roux (played by Catherine Deneuve whose name was last seen by this reviewer on a river cruise boat on the Seine in Paris and while I admired her films when she was young I did not realize then that she was still alive) was being squeezed out by Mafia-connected men who want to consolidate their hold on the lucrative high-end gambling business there. Madame Le Roux was able to hold out for a while with votes of her adult daughter Agnes and her lawyer/advisor Maurice. Then thing start to go awry. Agnes, unhappy over a failed marriage, seeking some independent from overbearing Mom and seeking her inheritance due her from her late father’s estate, and Maurice, squeezed out by Madame from running the casino become hot, passionate lovers, and with that as a factor decided to side with the Mafia-types in their takeover. The prize for Agnes-the equivalent of her expected inheritance-for Maurice-access to serious dough from a joint account set up by Agnes with him which he never had as a struggling lawyer. Needless to say this betrayal by daughter and advisor put a serious strain on that mother-daughter relationship.

But that is where the “in the name of my daughter” of the title (English title) comes in. All was not well in the Agnes-Maurice relationship for he was a philanderer and she rather than being the independent athletic young woman of the earlier part of the film turned out to be extremely needy. Maurice balked, as was to be expected when she started to make plans for their future, and this indifference led Agnes into doing many rash acts-including a suicide attempt. Maurice still balked. Then one day Agnes was gone from her apartment never to be seen again. A few months later Maurice under the financial arrangements they had worked out in sunnier times, has all of Agnes’ assets transferred to his account and he left for Panama.

Something was certainly wrong with turn of events and Madame Le Roux started what would be a determined, a very focused attempt using all her dwindling resources to have Maurice tried for murder. A lot of things didn’t add up in the French justice system, a system different from the English common law traditions we are more familiar with as allowable circumstantial evidence since no body was found, statements made, guilt and such but Renee did get her day in court. Maurice too, although at the end of the film he was found not guilty. As the credits began to roll we find that he was later found guilty (what about double jeopardy) and is now serving a twenty year sentence for the murder of Agnes. Like I said real life has plenty of twists in it, plenty.                   

We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday


We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday 

 
 

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that right to further furrow his brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and abolition).  He, furrowed and pug-ugly, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters, or so it seemed, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, jesus.). He all keep the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out of  Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much  as a lining up of his beliefs with his walk the walk talk.                 

So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution , or some reformed  wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harpers Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.           

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.        

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all. 

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes – On Lincoln’s Birthday Lincoln Memorial: Washington


***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes – On Lincoln’s Birthday Lincoln Memorial: Washington

 


 






From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 

Lincoln Memorial: Washington

 

Let's go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet-

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time-
Old Abe.


 

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no midnight moonless night or early morning darkest hour before the dawn monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of tin-type sepia photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band hunched inside those clothed lightless, airless boxes, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say rough-hewn campsite wise and bloody wounded battle weary Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in lighted stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that action right to further that furrowed brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and slow on the inevitable abolition call that old Frederick Douglass and the ever-hovering ghost of Captain John Brown late of Kansas and Harper’s Ferry fight had urged upon a blood-stained land).

 

He, furrowed in youth and pug-ugly, in youth, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters sitting astride Stephen Foster’s old black Joe, the old darkies are gay, or so it seemed, waiting for Mister Brett Butler to come a-calling, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, Jesus.). He meant to keep all the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not American union place but keep them out of Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much as a lining up of his beliefs with his “walk the walk” talk. Get this reasoning: if he could save the union by NOT freeing slave one he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing some rebel-held slaves he would do so, if he could save the union by freeing every goddam slave in every stinking corner of every stinking cotton plantation he would do. By 1862 the vagaries of war, the skimpy logic of his position, would lead him kicking and screaming to the latter. But despite being a man of his time on the “colored” question he did what he had to and hence that righteous small marble tribute at the river end of the National Mall.    

 

He ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution for that third-fifth of a man error and for Taney’s Dred Scott decision, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution, or some reformed wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, he would not go down with the ship on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather Podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harper’s Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two even if inexpertly by digital standards (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won, was a minority president no question, his writ ran only so far and no further.  And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down, when he found Grant to steel his troops and no quarter (and let hell and brimstone Billy Sherman and his “bummers” light up the Southern sky). So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new words slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried “uncle,” cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.

 

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time
 
 
 
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
 

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes.

The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report he had heard on NPR. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something  fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except to you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-ip market.  

Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge.

Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”
They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.                      

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Free All The Class-War Prisoners- 40 Years Behind Bars-Free Leonard Peltier Now!

Leonard Peltier








Workers Vanguard No. 1082
 








29 January 2016
 
40 Years Behind Bars-Free Leonard Peltier Now!
 
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
 
Leonard Peltier is one of the most prominent political prisoners in America. Peltier’s imprisonment for his activism in the American Indian Movement (AIM) symbolizes this country’s racist repression of indigenous people, the survivors of centuries of genocide. February 6 marks 40 years since Peltier was arrested on frame-up charges of killing two FBI agents. This began his long ordeal of incarceration. Peltier’s innocence has always demanded his freedom, but a new health crisis makes it more urgent than ever that he be released now to get quality medical attention for a life-threatening abdominal aortic aneurysm.
In the early 1970s, the government turned its sights on AIM, which was combating the grinding poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands. The Feds and the energy companies were intent on grabbing the rich uranium deposits under land of the Oglala Lakota people in western South Dakota. The Pine Ridge Reservation became a war zone as the hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI trained and armed thugs to terrorize and brutalize AIM activists. Between 1973 and 1976, these killers carried out more than 300 attacks, murdering at least 69 people.
When 250 FBI and BIA agents, SWAT cops and vigilantes launched an assault against Pine Ridge in June 1975 and the FBI came up two agents short, Peltier and three others were charged with their deaths. Peltier sought refuge in Canada, but was caught and held in solitary confinement for ten months. Charges were dropped against one of the others, while AIM supporters Dino Butler and Bob Robideau were acquitted. Jurors at the trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, stated that they did not believe the government witnesses and that it seemed “pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense.”
The government went into overdrive to make sure Peltier would be convicted. Perjured affidavits secured his extradition to the U.S. The trial was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, a town where racism against Native Americans was prevalent, and held before an all-white jury. To preclude another acquittal on grounds of self-defense, the judge excluded evidence of government terror against Pine Ridge activists. Defense witnesses were barred from testifying, and the prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that Peltier’s gun could not have been used in the shooting. In 1977, Peltier was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
The intent of the racist capitalist rulers to see this innocent man die in prison has been clear from the start. Peltier’s legal rights have consistently been trampled: calls for a new trial; requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act; applications for parole; demands for medical treatment—all denied time and again. In a 1985 appeal hearing, the lead government attorney admitted: “We can’t prove who shot those agents.” A 2003 ruling from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated: “Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned.” But the appeals were denied anyway. There is no justice in the bourgeoisie’s courts for fighters against racist and capitalist injustice like Leonard Peltier.
The Feds’ vendetta against Peltier and other AIM leaders was part of the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, disruption, frame-up and murder. Launched in the 1950s, COINTELPRO initially targeted the Communist Party and the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. It was later deployed against other left organizations, antiwar activists and especially against radical black activists in the 1960s. The Black Panther Party bore the brunt of the Feds’ attacks: members were framed up and imprisoned by the hundreds while 38 were killed in cold blood.
AIM was formed in 1968 to fight police harassment in Minneapolis and quickly caught the FBI’s eye. AIM forged ties with Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton who, along with Mark Clark, was gunned down in his apartment by the Chicago cops on 4 December 1969. That same year, AIM started its 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island to demand the return of stolen Native land.
Like Peltier, many former Panthers still languish in prison, among them Mumia Abu-Jamal and Albert Woodfox. The Partisan Defense Committee publicizes their cases and provides support to them and eleven others through our Class-War Prisoner stipend program. Funds for this program are raised during the PDC’s annual Holiday Appeal. While supporting all possible legal proceedings on behalf of the class-war prisoners, we place no faith whatever in the courts, which are part of the apparatus used by the capitalist class to maintain its rule. We look to the social power of the multiracial labor movement to lead the poor and oppressed in struggle against the capitalist exploiters and their system of private property.
The vindictiveness of the Feds toward this unbowed fighter for Native Americans, who is also a gifted writer and artist, knows no bounds. In his four decades behind bars, Peltier has been subjected to supermax hell, punitive prison moves, long stretches in solitary and brutal beatings. Denied transfer to North Dakota to be near his people, he is incarcerated nearly 2,000 miles away in Florida. Peltier has diabetes and high blood pressure, has suffered a stroke and a heart attack, and he is partially blind in one eye. Twenty years ago he underwent surgery in prison to fix a defect in his jaw that had prevented him from eating solid food. The operation was so botched that he almost died and needed six blood transfusions. To avert public awareness of Peltier and the injustice inflicted on him, an association of former FBI agents forced the removal of four of his paintings from a Native art installation in Washington State last November.
In a November 26 statement to his supporters, Peltier spoke of the pain and neglect he was suffering even before his latest diagnosis:
“I wish I could lie to you and tell you I’m doing O.K., but that would not be fair to you.... I cannot walk but very slowly and while hanging on to someone for support. But after a few steps I’m O.K. So I move right along with the crowd. But those first few steps are awfully painful. I asked for a cushion, but was told they don’t have any here—and to make one myself from a blanket. Well, news flash. I did this and every time I did they took it away. Yep, for some reason this is illegal. Then I have to deal with the other medical problems. So, yeah, this is my Sundance.”
The PDC has written to President Obama to demand Peltier’s urgent release. Peltier’s defense committee urges supporters to mention Leonard’s current health crisis when calling the White House to voice support for clemency now, and to also demand that he receive the best possible care by contacting: Federal Bureau of Prisons, 320 First St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20534, (202) 307-3198, info@bop.gov. We urge our readers to do likewise.

You can also write to Leonard Peltier, #89637-132, USP Coleman I, P.O. Box 1033, Coleman, FL 33521.

A View From The Left-Down With Obama’s Deportations!-Central American Refugees: Let Them Stay!

Workers Vanguard No. 1082
29 January 2016
 
Down With Obama’s Deportations!-Central American Refugees: Let Them Stay!
 

Once again, the nativist, anti-immigrant rants spewed by the leading Republican presidential hopefuls all but assure a massive Latino vote in November for the Democrats, the “lesser evil” party of racist U.S. imperialism. Barack Obama first waltzed into the White House with the heavy backing of Latino voters in 2008, having promised a “path” to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. But that path was marked with a giant exit sign.
With a record-breaking 2.5 million deportations already during Obama’s presidency, the administration rang in its last year in office by ordering a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) raids over New Year’s weekend in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. Those targeted had mainly fled extreme violence and poverty in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Scores were deported, dozens were dragged into federal detention centers, and thousands more were left terrified that they would be next.
Obama has, in effect, issued a death warrant for many of the refugees, mainly women and children, being expelled. Since their story first grabbed headlines in 2014, when an estimated 100,000 Central American refugees crossed the border, at least 83 people have been killed after being sent back. The same conditions of desperate poverty and violence—a hell created and reinforced by over a century of U.S. imperialist subjugation—led to a new spike in border crossings by Central Americans in late 2015. The homicide rate in El Salvador swelled by 70 percent last year, surpassing that of Honduras as the world’s highest for a country not in the midst of war. Women are particularly compelled to flee, subject to terror, rape and extortion by gangs and military thugs.
The “choice” for the millions of undocumented immigrants who risk their lives to set foot in this country is either to hide in the shadows or to languish in shoddy, overcrowded I.C.E. dungeons. The immigration detention facilities strewn across the country, including for-profit prisons, are mandated by Congress to fill a daily “bed quota” of 34,000. They are notorious for violence and mistreatment, including insufficient food and water. In late October, dozens of Central American women went on hunger strike in a Texas facility to protest the brutal conditions and to demand their immediate release.
Last summer, a federal judge ordered the swift release of children and their parents from family detention centers, noting their “deplorable conditions.” The government has appealed that order while continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to detain families. With no access to government-provided legal counsel, non-citizens caught in this prison web rely on volunteer attorneys and immigrant advocacy groups for information on appeals and asylum claims. After exposing procedural violations, abuse or inadequate medical care inside detention centers, some lawyers and activists report being prohibited from meeting with their clients.
The current roundups and deportations are the latest anti-immigrant attacks by the capitalist rulers, which have helped feed a general assault on the wages and living conditions of all working people. The bosses fan the flames of anti-immigrant chauvinism and racial hostility to pit workers against each other, the better to divide and weaken the labor movement. It is of vital interest for labor and all fighters against exploitation and oppression to demand: No deportations! Free all the detainees! For full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Everyone who makes it into this country should have all the rights of those born here.
Fleeing U.S.-Made Hellholes
The recent raids struck fear into Latino families from coast to coast. Many of Obama’s fellow Democrats, like Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez, expressed anger about the raids, which the White House defended as a way to deter further waves of refugees. Gutierrez & Co. complained that they were not consulted ahead of time, clearly concerned that the Democrats’ “friend of immigrants” image may be fading. Just hours before Obama’s State of the Union speech, some 140 Congressional Democrats issued a statement criticizing the roundups as “ineffective” and suggesting a more “humane” policy in line with “time-honored American values.”
Those “values” are defined by the capitalist rulers’ drive to further amass profit through their system of exploitation and oppression, turning the screws on workers and the oppressed at home and carrying out imperialist plunder abroad. U.S. subjugation of its Latin American “backyard” is part of a world imperialist order in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries dominate and exploit the more backward ones, in turn spurring mass emigration. In Central America, the miserable poverty of the masses—the backdrop to the murderous gang wars—is the product of imperialist depredation. The corrupt local bourgeoisies preside over this brutal system, viciously suppressing the working class and peasantry. As we spelled out in a fuller article on Central American refugees (WV No. 1050, 8 August 2014), the social fabric of these countries was ripped apart by the dirty wars of the 1980s against leftist insurgents and by the increased militarization that accompanied the “war on drugs.” Added to that toll is the economic ruin brought about by the U.S.-imposed Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Secretary of State John Kerry recently announced a “resettlement” program for Central American asylum seekers that would set up processing centers run by the United Nations in nearby Latin American countries—a way for the U.S. to keep the refugees out. Equally cynical was a December 2014 White House initiative that encouraged Central American children to apply in their home countries for refugee status. Out of the more than 6,000 minors who applied, exactly five arrived in the U.S. last year. The U.S. has bolstered the Mexican government in its own crackdown on Central Americans trying to reach El Norte by giving it tens of millions of dollars. Of the estimated 400,000 Central Americans crossing into Mexico annually, the Mexican state arrested almost 93,000 between October 2014 and April 2015.
Many have set their hopes on Obama’s November 2014 executive order that professes to give over four million undocumented immigrants temporary reprieve from deportation and a chance at work permits. While the prospect of some of the undocumented not being deported would be welcome, the measure would apply only to those in the country at least five years and to parents of U.S. citizens. It would require immigrants to register with the government, pass background checks and pay exorbitant fees for a shot at three years of legal status. Even if they get this, they would have no job protections or government benefits. Nevertheless, the proposal was too much for GOP governors, who got a federal judge to block the plan. The issue will now be decided by the Supreme Court.
Major sections of the bourgeoisie have long demanded that Washington put some order into what they see as a dysfunctional immigration system. Obama’s “reforms” and serial waves of deportations both serve that aim. At the same time, policy differences in the bourgeois parties at bottom reflect the needs of different sectors of the ruling class, some of whom are more dependent on exploiting immigrant labor than others. Nonetheless, both Democratic and Republican administrations have instituted greater border controls and enforced restrictions on immigrants’ rights.
The rulers’ policies are mainly but not solely designed to maintain a pool of low-wage labor, with immigrants kept in constant fear that any challenge to their exploitation will bring I.C.E. agents to their doors. More broadly, anti-immigrant campaigns strengthen the repressive powers of the capitalist state, which are especially used against black people and other minorities as well as to suppress working-class struggle. Repression against immigrants (especially Muslims) in the name of the “war on terror” has served as the leading edge in an assault against the democratic rights of the mass of the population, helping also to inflame national chauvinism and ethnic hatred.
The Lesser-Evil Con
The Democratic Party has for years banked on the fears among black people, women and others of what a victory for the nakedly racist, reactionary Republicans might unleash. Against the likes of the egomaniacal demagogue Donald Trump, even Marco Rubio, a darling of anti-Communist gusanos, has been under fire from his Republican competitors for his “soft” immigration posture because he once supported a “path to citizenship” for some undocumented immigrants. In addition to Trump’s smearing of Mexicans as rapists and murderers and his calling for all Muslims to be barred from entering the U.S., both he and Ted Cruz are pandering to the yahoos by saying they would deport all eleven million undocumented immigrants.
As for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, who established her credentials as a future Commander-in-Chief in her years as Secretary of State, backed Obama’s earlier expulsion of refugees but now claims she won’t be the next “deporter in chief” if elected president. Bernie Sanders, who has a long record of support to U.S. imperialist wars and occupations, clucked his tongue over Obama’s “inhumane” approach to the Central American refugee crisis. Say what they will on the campaign trail, “deporter in chief” will be in the job description of whoever makes it to the White House. Regulating the flow of immigrant labor is one of the tasks of the CEO of U.S. capitalism.
Toward the end of the widely reviled Bush administration, massive demonstrations in 2006 for immigrant rights gained nationwide attention. The bourgeois politicians, church officials and labor officials who led the protests consciously directed them into Democratic Party electoralism, with the common chant, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”
In a January 6 statement, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka criticizes the I.C.E. roundups and offers that union halls might become temporary sanctuaries for refugees, at least until “full and fair legal proceedings” take place. Pious words from a union officialdom that has barely lifted a finger to defend immigrants. The labor movement should be opposing all deportations and launching organizing drives to bring immigrant workers, with or without papers, into the unions. Such a struggle, which is necessary to revitalize the unions in this country, is undermined by the labor tops’ loyalty to the capitalist Democratic Party and their embrace of the “national interests” of U.S. imperialism. Unlocking the social power of the working class—with white, black, Latino and other workers fighting together against their common capitalist enemy—requires a struggle for a new leadership of labor, one based on the political independence of the workers from all capitalist parties and state agencies.
As Marxists, our task is not to advise the bourgeoisie on alternative immigration policy, which would necessarily mean accepting the parameters of a system predicated on exploitation and oppression. Our call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants is part of the struggle to advance the class consciousness and solidarity of the multiracial working class. The workers need their own party, one that will link the defense of immigrants to the cause of black freedom and the fight for labor’s emancipation from wage slavery. Such a party is necessary to prepare the working class for the revolutionary battle to end capitalist-imperialist rule and build a planned economy under a workers government.
Socialist revolution is the necessary precondition to the economic reorganization of human society through freeing the productive forces from the fetter of private ownership. Immigrant workers are slated to play a crucial role in this fight. As we wrote in the 2000 Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S.:
“The vast numbers of immigrant workers now toiling in U.S. factories can be a powerful leaven to the class struggle here, as many of them come from countries with stronger traditions of labor militancy and anti-capitalist struggle. Likewise, these workers are a natural pool for recruitment to the revolutionary party and such recruits can constitute a nucleus for organizing Trotskyist parties in their native lands. For socialist revolution from the Yukon to the Yucatán and throughout the Americas!”