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

Saturday, March 25, 2017

A View From The Left - You Can’t Fight Trump with Capitalist Parties! No to the Democrats, Greens! For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

A View From The Left - You Can’t Fight Trump with Capitalist Parties! No to the Democrats, Greens! For a Revolutionary Workers Party! Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

You Can’t Fight Trump with Capitalist Parties! No to the Democrats, Greens!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The inauguration of Donald Trump as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism rightly scares the daylights out of millions of people here and worldwide. He and his entourage of virulently racist, women-hating, immigrant-bashing, union-busting, science-denying, anti-gay billionaires proposed for cabinet posts are truly a gallery of ghouls. Thousands are pouring out in protests, but their justified fear and anger are being cynically manipulated by the Democratic Party and its leftist chambermaids to tamp down militancy and entrap protest in an electoral framework that offers workers and the oppressed nothing but the right to be exploited and kicked around by the capitalists under Democratic Party rule instead.

Historically, the Democrats offer the solace of lies and murmur that they feel the pain of working people and minorities. But this time around Hillary Clinton was particularly blatant in her courtship of Wall Street and indifference to workers and black people. Obama was lifted to power on the votes of people who heard him promise “hope and change.” Eight years later, the only “change” under Obama came from the ka-ching of the cash register as the Democrats bailed out Wall Street and the auto barons while screwing the workers. Income inequality has soared, and job precarity, hunger and homelessness are rampant. Meanwhile, the fabulously rich get fabulously richer. In a country founded on the bedrock of black chattel slavery, there is a distinct complexion to inequality that not even a black president could mask. Misplaced hope that Obama’s presidency would alleviate grinding racial oppression has withered as unarmed black men, women and children have continued to be gunned down by the police in cities and suburbs across the country.

It is necessary to categorically reject the lie that American “democracy,” which is nothing but a ruthless dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class, can be reformed in the interests of the oppressed. It is high time to express America’s only hope by mobilizing class hatred against capitalist rule in militant, racially integrated class struggle. The liberation of women, equality for immigrants, and freedom of the entire working class from exploitation under capitalism are inextricably tied to a struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution. There is no other way out for the oppressed in this country. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a class-struggle, multiracial, revolutionary workers party to lead this necessary fight.

Today, our struggle is mainly ideological—to motivate Marxism against the purveyors of false perspectives that bind the labor movement and the oppressed to their exploiters and oppressors through the Democratic Party. The heaviest shackle on the workers movement is the bureaucratic trade-union misleadership, which serves as an agent of the bourgeoisie within the working class. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka whines that Trump should see him and the unions he lords it over as “partners” in American capitalism, just as the Democrats did. It is precisely this policy of class collaboration, of renouncing the road of politically independent class struggle that has sapped the strength and numbers of the unions and helped ratchet up the rate of exploitation for the bosses. Even the most basic and immediate demands and rights of labor today can be won only through the methods of militant class struggle.

In the arena of electoral politics and protests, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have emerged to corral disillusioned Bernie Sanders supporters and others scared shitless by Trump into the dead end of revitalizing the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is the other party of the capitalist ruling class. It more successfully mobilizes the population behind U.S. imperialism’s depredations abroad and successfully subordinates labor and minorities at home by tying them to the bourgeois state through the myth of classless “democracy.” The DSA may present a youthful mien in publications like Jacobin, but its political message is a timeworn program of anti-working class betrayal. Caveat emptor: committed members of the Democratic Party and entrenched in the union bureaucracy, the DSA is a proven and dangerous opponent of everyone fighting for revolutionary social change.

Historically, there is a blood line between social-democratic defenders of capitalist class rule and authentic communists who fight to bring the working class to power through a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. When the working class contended to extend the 1917 Russian proletarian socialist revolution to Germany in 1918-19, the DSA’s political forebears in the German Social Democracy were responsible for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and thus beheaded the revolutionary leadership of the workers movement. Closer to home, the right wing of the American social democracy supported the Vietnam War after even Richard Nixon had given it up. The “Left Wing of the Possible,” the DSA’s Michael Harrington, threw out the leftist youth who forged Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) because they had the audacity to trash their elders’ Cold War ban on communists.

That the DSA is a pole of attraction for anti-Trump protesters is an indication of the low level of political consciousness in this period. Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia, observed that reactionary periods give rise to “monstrous ideological relapses. Senile thought seems to have become infantile. In search of all-saving formulas the prophets in the epoch of decline discover anew doctrines long since buried by scientific socialism” (“Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto,” 1937).

Other anti-communist social-democratic outfits, such as Socialist Alternative (SAlt), have put the old garbage of so-called “progressive” municipalism in new pails. SAlt’s idea of fighting for socialism was getting Kshama Sawant elected to the city council in Seattle. In office, she espouses a common interest between landlords and tenants, urges cooperation with the chief of police and promotes the illusory economic justice of a paltry $15.00 per hour minimum wage s-l-o-w-l-y phased in over many years!

This chimera of social-democratic oases at the local level is a 21st-century rerun of “sewer socialism.” At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, reformists sought to give socialism a “respectable” veneer through local electoral campaigns, epitomized by Victor Berger’s Milwaukee section within the right wing of the Socialist Party. The rabidly white-supremacist Berger promoted a program of piecemeal reforms at the local level (from sewers to clean government) that in no way challenged capitalist rule.

There’s much talk among liberals and social democrats now about creating “sanctuary cities” against Trump’s threatened deportations of immigrants. One must ask: Where was their fervor when President Obama acted as Deporter-in-Chief and unleashed la migra to round up more immigrant workers and their families than his Republican predecessor? New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a darling of the social democrats, promises his municipality as a sanctuary, yet presides over the “broken windows” law-and-order reign of terror that criminalizes and destroys the lives of black and Latino youth!

While the DSA openly rides (and hopes to steer) the Democratic Party bus, SAlt and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) serve as its spare tires. The ISO goes so far as to pay lip service to the need for an independent workers party, but in practice it builds support for bourgeois third parties like the Greens, whom they called to vote for in the recent election. The ISO prattles endlessly about fighting for “democracy.” But for genuine Marxists, it is ABC to understand that democracy under capitalism is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. SAlt still proffers Bernie Sanders as a socialist alternative, a capitalist politician whose “revolution” consisted of delivering all the votes he could muster to the imperialist hawk Hillary Clinton. (For a fuller analysis of the Sanders campaign, see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February 2016.) By propagating the myth of classless democracy, these leftists themselves become obstacles to revolutionary social change because they inculcate bourgeois ideology among youth, workers and the oppressed.

Often, leftists who seek to promote or pressure the Democratic Party do so in acts that dare not speak their name. They might not even mention the word “Democrat,” but you’ll hear a lot about “fight the right.” The understanding by implication is that you should support the Democratic Party because no explicit argument is made against it. This is business as usual for the Revolutionary Communist Party. In the guise of “RefuseFascism.org” it has run expensive, hysterically urgent full-page ads and launched a campaign to “refuse to accept a fascist America.” But Trump was elected to office through the routine workings of bourgeois democracy. And in a period characterized by very little class struggle and a rollback of workers rights, the capitalist class has little need to organize and unleash extraparliamentary fascist bands. Racist law and order by the police is sufficient deadly terror in America today.

To be sure, bonafide KKK and Nazi fascists are emboldened by Trump’s win, but reformists peddle the lie that Trump in the White House equals fascism in order to prettify the Democrats. Try promoting the Democrats as a kinder, gentler option to the peoples across the Near East dying under Obama’s drone strikes and who were threatened with a whole lot more by Hillary Clinton. Black people across the U.S.A. are gunned down by cops in cities ruled by Democrats. Families are incarcerated in immigration detention centers and then torn apart through deportations under Democratic Party rule. The welfare benefits of mothers were “ended as we know it” by Bill Clinton. Abortion rights and access to birth control were further restricted under Barack Obama’s watch.

Hillary Clinton supporters spout, “I’m still with her!” as their slogan for a women’s march on Washington, but Clinton and Obama effectively say “I’m with him.” The women’s march is explicitly not anti-Trump. Stressing the continuity of the imperial presidency, Obama said of Trump, “we’re on the same team.”

At the root of every opportunist appetite and impulse expressed by our political opponents is hostility to working-class rule and a steadfast conviction that the capitalist profit system can be reformed to work in the interests of the oppressed. Time is running out on this planet for reruns of this proven lie. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the stark choice is “socialism or barbarism.”

The inequalities of this society are rooted in the capitalist system based on private property and exploitation of the labor of the many for the profit of the few. To eradicate every form of injustice requires a thoroughgoing socialist revolution to create a society in which those who labor rule through soviets, or workers committees, in an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized, planned economy. In view of U.S. imperialism’s unrivaled military might, and the terror and destruction it wreaks worldwide, our struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party in America is crucial for the future of humanity.

In this centennial year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, it is necessary to reassert the struggle for authentic Marxism. The final undoing of the Russian Revolution after decades of Stalinist misrule and hostile imperialist encirclement has emboldened the U.S. bourgeoisie’s appetite for world domination, while proletarian consciousness internationally has been thrown back. And yet, communism is America’s last, best hope. The Spartacist League is committed to building the revolutionary workers party to achieve this purpose.

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The October Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-Lessons Of The Resistance Then

The 100^th Anniversary Year Of The October Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-Lessons Of The Resistance Then

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

TROTSKY

LENIN

Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, which swept away the capitalist exploiters and landlords and established the working class in power. Key to the success of the Revolution was the Bolshevik Party and its leader V.I. Lenin. January is also the month in which communists honor the “Three Ls”: Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and German Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 at the behest of the German Social Democratic government as part of its suppression of a mass working-class uprising.

What were the advantages of Bolshevism? A clear and thoroughly thought-out revolutionary conception at the beginning of the revolution was held only by Lenin. The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a considerable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin’s political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. These advantages worked wonders in a revolutionary situation, that is, in conditions of bitter class struggle. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond with Lenin’s conception; to correspond, that is, with the actual course of the revolution. Thanks to this, it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution, the party was able to convince the majority of the workers of the correctness of its slogans. This majority, organized into soviets, was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants.

How can this dynamic, dialectical process be exhausted by a formula of the maturity or immaturity of the proletariat? A colossal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses, cadres had to exist, even though numerically small at the beginning; the cadres had to have confidence in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one’s calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the “relationship of forces”; because the development of the revolution precisely consists of the incessant and rapid change in the relationship of forces under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of the backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” August 1940, reprinted in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (Pathfinder, 1973)

From The Partisan Defense Committee- The Latest On Mumia Abu-Jamal-Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment

From The Partisan Defense Committee- The Latest On Mumia Abu-Jamal-Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

On January 3, U.S. federal district judge Robert Mariani ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) to administer life-saving hepatitis C treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal. This ruling is the product of an urgent legal battle by Mumia after his active hepatitis C brought him close to death in March 2015. Pennsylvania’s prisons have refused to pay for the new, effective but expensive, treatments. While we welcome this ruling, we understand that the racist capitalist state has pursued a vendetta against Mumia and wanted to see him dead for over 35 years. Mumia’s lawyer Robert Boyle warned: “The struggle is far from over: The DOC will no doubt appeal this ruling.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving his innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia, but he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

If Mumia is successful in his fight to receive treatment, it will set a precedent for tens of thousands of other prisoners. Medical care is urgent, but what is also necessary is to demand his release from the clutches of the racist capitalist state. Free Mumia now!

We encourage our readers to contribute to his legal expenses. Contributions can be sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, care of the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, 132 Nassau St., Room 922, New York, NY 10038, earmarked “Mumia legal expenses.”

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-How the Bolsheviks Fought for Women's Emancipation

The100^thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday-From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-How the Bolsheviks Fought for Women's Emancipation

Click on the headline to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive' online copy of his 1923 article, "From The Old Family To The New".

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**********

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky

How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation

On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.

Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).

Women in the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.

The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.

The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.

Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom

Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.

In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.

The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:

"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:

'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]

The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia

Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).

Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.

Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!

Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.

Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....

"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."

Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.

Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.

To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.

In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!

Soviet Measures to Liberate Women

Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia

During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.

The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.

The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:

I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.

II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.

III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.

Women's Work in the Economy

Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia

Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets

Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth

Congress of Soviets resolves that:

a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.

b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.

The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.

Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow

The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.

Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.

'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?

Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-How the Bolsheviks Fought for Women's Emancipation

Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls

Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing. Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.

Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.