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)

It Do Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind

It Do Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

[This is an on-going conversation between several aging males who back in the day were corner boys together growing up in the poor working class Acre section of Riverdale some miles outside of Boston. The theme of the remembrances is related to rock and roll and other musical influences and the exact date, place and scenario where certain seminal experiences occurred-Listen in- Z. J.]

“Jesus, now that you mentioned Mr. Lawrence, our seventh grade music teacher, I am starting to remember some other stuff about the guy, about what a creep he was trying to break us from our unbreakable bond with rock and roll,” Seth Garth said to Jack Callahan as they both hoisted their three, or was it fourth, double scotch with water chaser, an old habit for both of them since the chaser made the drink last longer in the old days when they were short of dough and were sipping their drinks to stretch out the evening. The gist of what Seth had told Jack was in response to Jack’s remembering the very first time that they had heard Woody Guthrie and what song they had learned first. That gist of talk was based on Seth, an old time folk music critic, mainly for The Eye out on the West Coast having recently seen in a folk magazine the announcement that the Smithsonian/Folkway operation was finally putting out a treasure trove in four CDs of some Woody Guthrie songs recorded by Moses Asch during World War II. Seth for the life of him could not remember what song he had heard and when of Guthrie’s and so he had called upon Jack to meet him at their favorite watering hole the Erie Grille in Riverdale where they both were now residing (and after varying absences had grown up in the town). Jack had answered that it had been in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class and the song had been the alternative national anthem-This Land Is Your Land. 

The method to Mr. Lawrence’s madness, to ween the kids off of rock and roll, had gone beyond trying to foist silly folk music off on them but to drown them in any other kind of music he could think to distract, or attempt to distract them with, especially during lunch when they played their transistor radios and drove him crazy with their rock and roll. A few times, if you could believe this he tried to get them interested in jazz, in swing music, what each and every one of them considered the music that their parents listen to and which had driven them to the transistors in the first place. Worse, worse of all he had tried to get his charges interested in the music of Benny Goodman, the so-called “king of swing.” That was all Seth needed to hear as he blurted out in front of the class “My mother and father dance to that pokey stuff on Saturday nights and they are barely moving when they dance. I am not going to listen to that here.” Needless to say Seth stayed after school a number of afternoons for his transgression. But he felt vindicated in what he had uttered and took the punishment like a soldier.

Still it did no good as Mr. Lawrence played something called Blue Skies which was his parents’ “their song.” Something else by a guy named Cole Porter that Benny Goodman made famous. It got no better when Mr. Lawrence played stuff with Peggy Lee because to his mother’s chagrin his father had “crush” on old Peggy and Seth had to secretly admit that she was kind of sexy looking at that.  

But that was then. A few nights after Seth and Jack were cutting up old touches, after drinking themselves to melancholia, Seth went to the library and picked up an old Benny Goodman CD with plenty of American Songbook stuff on it. Guess what old Seth, old rock and roll devotee Seth with an overhang of folk, blues, and a little mountain music started to pop his fingers to the beat, started laughing to himself that he know knew what they meant when they said “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.” And they were right. Just ask Benny,       

As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary Airs- Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Winter Soldier Investigations-1971

As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary Airs- Another Time To Try Men's Souls- The Detroit Winter Soldier Investigations-1971

DVD Review

Winter Soldier, various soldier witnesses, Winterfest Productions, 1972

I am rather fond of invoking, especially in writing of the American Revolution that we have just again celebrated, Tom Paine’s little propaganda piece in defense of that revolution which hails the winter soldiers of 1776 for staying at their posts when others either ran away or became faint-hearted at the prospects of defeating the bloody English. It is those efforts by those long ago winter soldiers that other leftists and I have honored in the past and continue to honor today. We will leave the hollow holiday rhetoric and mindless flag waving to the sunshine patriots. Needless to say, given the title of the film under review, I am not the only one who appreciates that description and the producers here, I believe, have caught the essence of the spirit of those long ago winter soldiers in this documentary about the rank and file soldier-driven investigation in 1971 into the atrocities and horrors produced by the American military in the Vietnam War.

It is an old hoary truism, if not now something of a cliché, that war does not bring out humankind’s nobler instincts. For a very recent example one need look no further back than at the newspaper headlines of the past few years concerning various atrocities and acts of torture committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly the first time that the American military has been exposed acting in less than its self-proclaimed ‘agent of liberation’ role in its various imperial adventures. If one rolls the film of history back to the last generation, for those who have forgotten or were not around, Vietnam presents that same story. As against prior wars two things made awareness that something had gone horribly wrong possible in Vietnam. First, Vietnam was the first televised war and at some point it became impossible for the military to hide everything that it was doing. Secondly, a small critical mass of American military personnel, mainly those rank and file personnel who actually carried out military policy, wanted to clear the air of their complicity in that policy.

Needless to say, an investigation into atrocities and torture is not something that the American military establishment wished to have aired in public (and as the fate of this film indicates raised hell to successfully keep it out of the major media markets of the time). That establishment was much more comfortable with internal governmental investigations or whitewashes of their actions as occurred, ultimately, in the case of My Lai. However the traumatic reaction of a significant element of the rank and file soldiery in Vietnam caused this 'unofficial' investigation to take place. For those who grew up, like this reviewer, believing something of Lincoln’s expression that the American democratic experience was the ‘last, best hope for mankind’ this was not pretty viewing. For one, also like the reviewer, who was a soldier during the Vietnam War period and who had friends and ‘buddies’ just like those that populate this documentary AND DID SOME OF THE SAME THINGS it was doubly hard. But, dear reader, for the most part what the citizen-soldiers- our brothers, sons and other relatives- have to say here needed to be said.

Naturally in a documentary that films an investigation into atrocities, torture and military standard operating procedure (SOP) during the Vietnam War the interviewees are going to be a little more articulate, a little more remorseful and a lot more angry than the average soldier who went through Vietnam came home and tried to forget the experience. These soldiers had an agenda- and that agenda was to get their buddies- the troops still in Vietnam- home. Nevertheless one must be impressed by the way they expressed themselves –sometimes haltingly, sometimes inarticulately, sometimes from some depth that we have no understanding of. Moreover, their testimony has the ring of truth. Not the SOP military truth but this truth- humankind has a long way to go before it can, without embarrassment, use the word civilized to describe itself. No, my friends, these were not our soldiers but, they were our people-these were the winter soldiers of the Vietnam War.

In Boston- Vigil & Rally, US Out of Afghanistan, Park St., Oct. 4, 5:15-6:15-16 Years Is More Than Enough

12:04 PM

Marliyn Levin

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PEACE VIGIL AND RALLY

Wednesday, October 4, 5:15-6:15 pm

Park St. Station

End the Endless Wars!

NO TROOP ESCALATION; U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN!

The U.S. began the "War on Terror" by attacking Afghanistan on October 6,
2001. Rather than ending terror, a War OF Terror was unleashed. It has
cost thousands of US troops, tens of thousands of Afghan lives and 2.4
Trillion dollars!

President Trump is continuing the wars of the past decades and making
unhinged threats towards Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and many other
nations.

This has to stop!

What can you do?

Join us at a monthly vigil and rally on the most urgent issues of the
endless wars.

Park St., Oct. 4, Nov. 8 and Dec. 6 from 5:15-6:15 pm.

UNITED FOR JUSTICE WITH PEACE (617 383-4857, info@justicewithpeace.org
<info@justicewithpeace.org> )

Co-Sponsors (in formation): Mass. Peace Action, United National Antiwar
Coalition

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From The Committee For International Labor Defense-Israel Free Salah Hamouri!

From The Committee For International Labor Defense-Israel Free Salah Hamouri!    

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

URL: internationallabordefense.org 

Email: cforild@gmail.com

Date: August 30, 2017

The Committee for International Labor Defense joins with the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the French Communist Party, and the European United Left / Nordic Green Left of the European Parliament, in calling on Israeli authorities to release field researcher and human rights defender Salah Hamouri, 32, who has received a six month administrative detention order.

Hamouri, a Palestinian-French dual citizen was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on his home last Wednesday, August 16, 2017, by the Israeli army. 

The Israeli practice of arbitrary detention is a grave violation of international laws and human rights standards, particularly articles 78 and 72 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which state that an accused individual has the right to defend himself or herself. Hamouri’s administrative detention also violates article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the basic standards of fair trial.

This case is not simply the arrest of an individual. It is part of a systematic policy of oppression and exploitation on the part of the Israeli government against the Palestinian people, and as such, it should not be tolerated by the working people of either country who are the basis of their societies and economies.

We join with organizations, activists, and parliamentarians across Europe and the Middle East who are mobilizing to demand Hamouri's freedom and to pressure the French government to take action on this case. 

The Committee for International Labor Defense urges French president Emanuel Macron and European officials to act now to demand Hamouri’s release. 

The Committee for International Labor Defense entrusts the safety and good health of Salah Hamouri, and the hundreds of other Palestinian political prisoners held at Al-Moskobyeh and other detention centers, in the hands of Israeli government. 

Finally, we call on organized labor in Palestine, Israel and other countries to rise up and defend the human rights of those detained by the Israeli authorities, and especially Salah Hamouri and his comrades.

Signed,

THE COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE

From The Partisan Defense Committee-Stop Prison Torture of Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman!-The Last Of The Ohio Must Not Die In Jail

From The Partisan Defense Committee-Stop Prison Torture of Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman!-The Last Of The Ohio Must Not Die In Jail Workers Vanguard No. 1116	25 August 2017

Stop Prison Torture of Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman!

Over the past several months, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been intensifying its decades-long vendetta against class-war prisoners Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman. As punishment for their unwavering support for the struggles of the poor and oppressed and their opposition to U.S. imperialism, Laaman and Manning, the last two members of the Ohio 7 still in prison, were deprived of necessary medical attention, isolated in solitary and threatened with transfer to draconian “supermax control” units. For the racist capitalist rulers, this is an attempt to silence forever these courageous individuals who continue their political activism from behind the walls of America’s dungeons.

Prison officials marked Laaman’s birthday on March 21 by throwing him into the Secure Housing Unit of USP Tucson—i.e., solitary, where he still remains locked up in a six-by-nine-foot box 23 hours a day. Laaman’s “offense” was to issue two statements: his eulogy for radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who died on March 7 (which was broadcast on Prison Radio as “Farewell Thoughts to My Friend, Lynne Stewart”), and a statement of support for the March 8 International Women’s Day protests, “Day Without a Woman Strike” (which was printed in NYC Anarchist Black Cross).

The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—recently learned that a letter Laaman wrote in May to notify the PDC of the repression he was facing never made it through the prison censors. That month, prison officials cited him for “misuse of phone” and rescinded his phone “privileges” for six months. They are now pushing for his transfer to a Communications Management Unit—lockdown units that severely restrict all communication with those outside. As Laaman noted in a recent letter to the PDC, “As you are aware, I have been observing and speaking on world and national events for decades—so this is a new and unprecedented attack on me and my First Amendment rights.”

In June, Tom Manning wrote a letter notifying the PDC that he had suffered a grand mal seizure in March. The first prison “medical” personnel on the scene declared it a drug overdose. The seizure left Manning unconscious for four days. When he was able to request that prison officials perform a forensic trail test to prove it was not an OD, and, more significantly, to find out and treat what caused the seizure, they scoffed, “Do you know how expensive that would be?” Manning was finally given an MRI, which shocked him with the news that he had a second brain tumor. Prison officials never told him that a 2012 MRI had revealed an earlier tumor. Manning also learned that he had two vertebrae compressing his spinal cord.

The prison officials’ response to his dire medical condition was to throw him into solitary. The specious reason was that he received a political journal, Flood Gate, calling for prisoners to revolt. As Manning told the PDC, such unsolicited journals are sent to him all the time. On May 24, he was transferred from Butner Medical Center to solitary at Butner Correctional Center. In recent interviews, former Ohio 7 prisoner Ray Levasseur, who was released on parole in 2004, pointed out that Manning is wheelchair-bound and in need of physical therapy, which he is unlikely to get in solitary. Levasseur emphasized the horrific condition facing his comrades: “Solitary is hell in a very small place.” Last week, Manning was finally released from solitary and transferred to a federal prison in Hazelton, West Virginia.

The PDC has written protest letters denouncing the cruel and vindictive treatment of Laaman and Manning. The Ohio 7 are committed radicals with a long history of opposition to racism and imperialism. They were involved in civil rights work in the South, defense of prisoners’ rights and solidarity actions against the South African apartheid government. In the early 1970s, they joined neighborhood defense efforts in Boston against rampaging anti-busing racists. They became members of the United Freedom Front, a radical group that in the late 1970s and ’80s took credit for bombings targeting symbols of U.S. imperialism, including military and corporate offices (see “Ohio 7: Fighters Against Imperialism, Racism,” WV No. 741, 8 September 2000).

The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of young New Left radicals. Despairing of organizing the proletariat in struggle, these radicals decided that the road to fighting this racist, exploitative system was “clandestine armed resistance” by a handful of dedicated leftists. Like the Weathermen a decade before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. As Levasseur bitterly observed in a 1992 statement, “Much of the North American Left suffers from myopia on this issue of political prisoners. It affects their value judgments. They place our value at nil.”

In contrast to the New Leftists, we recognize it is the multiracial proletariat, organized behind a Leninist vanguard party, that has the interest and social power to sweep away the bloodthirsty imperialist rulers. Despite our political differences with them, the SL and PDC have long defended the Ohio 7, including during a 1989 trial on trumped-up “seditious conspiracy” charges. In successfully beating back that thought-crime prosecution, the Ohio 7 won a significant victory against government efforts to criminalize leftist politics. One of their defense lawyers was Lynne Stewart. No doubt throwing Laaman into solitary for his tribute to Stewart was payback on the part of his jailers.

We have always insisted that from a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. These courageous fighters should not have served a day in prison and should be freed immediately.

Laaman and Manning must not be forgotten. We urge WV readers to send letters of solidarity to the following addresses:

Jaan Laaman #10372-016
USP Tucson, U.S. Penitentiary
P.O. Box 24550, Tucson, AZ 85734

Thomas Manning #10373-016
USP Hazelton, U.S. Penitentiary
P.O. Box 2000, Bruceton Mills, WV 26525

Durham, North Carolina Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue Drop All Charges!-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front

Durham, North Carolina Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue Drop All Charges!-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front  Workers Vanguard No. 1116	25 August 2017

Durham, North Carolina

Leftists Tear Down Confederate Statue

Drop All Charges!

Eight leftists, many of them members of Workers World Party (WWP), were arrested in Durham, North Carolina, last week and slapped with outrageous felony charges—including incitement to riot—for pulling down a statue of a Confederate soldier. Erected at the instigation of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1924 and paid for with public funds, the statue was a vile celebration of the Jim Crow segregation enforced by the Democrats and the lynch-rope terror of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Until it was brought down, it stood for nearly a century in front of the old Durham County Courthouse. North Carolina’s liberal Research Triangle, which includes Durham, and its many universities are littered with monuments to the slavocracy. Those arrested for ridding this majority-black city of the statue have done black people, immigrants and the working class a real service. We demand: Drop all the charges now!

The Confederate Soldiers Monument was toppled during a protest rally called by WWP on August 14. Outraged by the deadly fascist rampage in Charlottesville two days earlier, which ended in the murder of Heather Heyer, more than 100 people turned out in solidarity with the anti-fascists who confronted the stormtroopers in Virginia. Urged on by the crowd’s chants of “No Trump, No KKK, no fascist USA,” Takiyah Thompson, a 22-year-old black student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and WWP member, climbed a ladder and slipped a long strap around the statue, while other protesters pulled it off its pedestal. Video of the protest went viral, as Democratic governor Roy Cooper chastised the activists, tweeting, “The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments.”

Sheriff Mike Andrews, also a Democrat, swore a vendetta against the protesters, telling the press, “No one is getting away with what happened.” Deputies quickly made good on the threat, arresting Thompson after a press conference at NCCU on August 15. Two other WWP members, Dante Strobino and Ngoc Loan Tran, were pulled out of a courtroom hearing for Thompson the next morning and arrested. A fourth protester, Peter Gilbert, was arrested that afternoon after deputies searched his address. The homes of several other WWP members were also raided. On August 17, up to 300 supporters lined up in front of the sheriff’s office to “confess” to having pulled down the statue. They were refused entry, but deputies executed warrants against Aaron Caldwell, Raul Jimenez and Elena Everett, arresting them on the spot. An eighth activist with an open warrant, Taylor Jun Cook, turned himself in later that day. Meanwhile, the fascist scum, taking their cue from the state’s persecution, have ominously been targeting WWP on social media.

In an interview with Democracy Now! (16 August), Thompson explained she helped take down the statue because it is a symbol of “white nationalism” and noted that she has received death threats on Facebook from fascists. She went on to say, “Anything that emboldens those people and anything that gives those people pride needs to be crushed in the same way that they want to crush black people and the other groups that they target.” Four days after the statue was toppled, rumors circulated of a KKK march in downtown Durham. In response, hundreds came out to counter them, and the Klan didn’t show.

As we wrote in “Confederate Monuments: Tear ’Em All Down!” (WV No. 1113, 2 June), monuments to the Confederate slaveowners who were defeated in the Civil War “represent a racist affront to black people and serve as rallying points for resurgent racist terror.” We have many programmatic differences with the reformist, pro-Democratic Party politics of Workers World Party, which earlier this year pointed to Cooper’s gubernatorial victory as an example of “the power” of the oppressed “to influence the political landscape” (workers.org, 28 March). But we vigorously defend WWP and all those who participated in this act of basic public sanitation in Durham.

Black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism. It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to destroy black chattel slavery. It will take a third, workers, revolution to put an end to wage slavery and achieve the promise of black equality. The Spartacist League is committed to building the revolutionary workers party—one that is 70 percent black and minority—necessary to sweep away the racist capitalist order. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986

During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.    

One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.    

Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving. 

What had gotten to Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the mist with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a black liberation  struggle fighter in his own right had no apology to give to Africa.     

Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigle Sisters

Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigle Sisters   

By Zack James

“Jesus, Seth did you hear that Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle Sisters had passed away,” lamented Jack Callahan to his old-time high school friend and fellow folk music aficionado Seth Garth. Seth replied that since he no longer wrote music reviews for anybody, hadn’t since The Eye the newspaper that he had written for had gone out of business that he did not always keep up with the back stories of those who were still left standing in the ever decreasing old-time folk performer world. Jack’s sad information though got Seth to thinking about the times back in the early 1970s when he and Jack had gone out to Saratoga Springs to visit a cousin of Sam Lowell, also an old time friend and part-time folk aficionado, who lived in nearby Ballston Spa and had invited them to go to the Caffe Lena to listen to a couple of young gals from Canada who would make the angels weep for their inadequate singing voices by comparison. In those days Seth was free-lancing for The Eye so he had called Oakland, California where the newspaper then had its offices to see if they would spring for a review, a paid review of the performance. They agreed although there was the usual haggling over money and whether they would actually use the sketch.            

That night after Lena’s introduction (Lena the legendary, now legendary owner and operator of the coffeehouse) the McGarrigle Sisters did two sparking sets, a few songs in French, since they were steeped in the increasing bilingual Quebec culture which was demanding French language equality in the heated nationalist period when many Frecnh-speakers were looking for independence. They also did a wonderful cover of their  Heart Like A Wheel, a song that Linda Rhonstadt had had a hit with. But the song that Seth found his hook on, the one that he would center on to insure that his piece was published (and paid for) was Talk To Me Of Mendocino, their homage to Lena who desired to go out and see the place along the rocky ledges of Northern California, land’s end. (Whether Lena ever went out there subsequently Seth was not sure but he rather thought not since she was totally committed to the club in those days, was something of a homebody and perhaps wanted the memory more than the actual experience.)    

Seth mentioned to Jack that night that the sisters had evoked just the right mournful tone in presenting the song, and recalled how majestic they had thought they place was when they and their wives (Seth’s first  wife, first of three, all failed, Martha, and Jack’s one and only Kathy) had gone from San Francisco up the Pacific Coast Highway and basically stumbled on the place with its sheer rock formations, fierce ocean waves beating against the rocks and the then quaint and unadorned town that sat just off the rocks then. So Seth was able to close his eyes and envision travelling from the overheated, over-crowded over-wrought East and pinpoint a map to head out West “where the rocks remain.” The rocks, the ocean, our mother and some solitude in world gone mad with having to run away from what it had built. Seth was sorry that he had not been back there in many years. Hoped that Lena did get to go out to the rocks and glad that Kate and Anna McGarrigle spoke of the place, made it immortal in song.    

In Boston-Resist DACA Deportations-And Every Other Trump "Cold Civil War" Action

In Boston-Resist DACA Deportations-And Every Other Trump "Cold Civil War" Action   

Resist Deportations!

Defend DACA! Extend TPS! Jail Joe Arpaio! No Ban! No Wall! Defend Transgender Rights! Resist Fascism!

Mobilize Saturday, September 16

1:00 PM Park Street T

followed by a March to the JFK Federal Building

The government in Washington has stepped up attacks on migrants to levels not seen in years. Trump's attacks on Muslim migrants were only the beginning. Deportations are accelerating. Trump is  terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and has pardoned the racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. He also threatens to shut down the government if a Mexican border wall is not built. He threatens the Temporary Protected Status program. This comes on top of his recent bigoted executive order against transgender troops in the US armed forces and his defense of Fascists in Charlottesville, NC. Millions of youth and decent hard working people are under attack! Trump and his cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress are leading a generalized assault on our lives, rights, and living conditions. The leading edge of this assault today is the stepped up attacks against migrants. An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize September 16!

Planning meeting:

Sunday, September 10, 12:00 noon

Encuentro 5

9A Hamilton Place, Boston, MA

Park Street T stop

All are invited

facebook.com/events/284164215401645/

The 60th Anniversary Of The Struggle To Desegregate Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School-Honor The “Little Rock Nine”

The 60^th Anniversary Of The Struggle To Desegregate Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School-Honor The “Little Rock Nine”

By Frank Jackman  

The 1950s in America, in the American South especially, were a time, like today it seems, when black people and their allies were amping up the struggle for black civil rights. First more publically and graphically in the South and then in the North as a result of the landmark United States Supreme Court  decision in 1954 in Brown v. Topeka Board Of Education (Kansas). (A legal decision that very well may have not been decided the same way by today’s court given its current composition) One of the first big tests of that decision concerning public school desegregation was the attempt to desegregate Little Rock’s Central High School. That as it turned out was no easy task between then Governor Faubus’ attempts via the Arkansas National Guard to prohibit that attempt to the vicious violent reactions of whites, including a large majority of their fellow students, to President Eisenhower’s federalizing of the National Guard and sending in the 101^st Airborne to insure their safety. Yes, no question we today should continue to honor the bravery and tenacity of the Little Rock Nine (eight of whom are still alive to commemorate their brave actions).        

Of course everybody recognizes, to some degree, that race relations in America are not the same as back in the 1950s (although the bar is pretty low if that is the benchmark) but here is a cause for pause. Increasingly public school in the cities, including in Little Rock, are becoming “re-segregated. The struggle continues but thanks Little Rock Nine you led the way.   

What’s The Matter With Kansas-1950s Style?-With Kim Novak And William Holden’s “Picnic” (1955) In Mind

What’s The Matter With Kansas-1950s Style?-With Kim Novak

And William Holden’s “Picnic” (1955) In Mind

DVD Review

By Guest Writer Bartlett Webber

Picnic, starring Kim Novak, William Holden, Rosalind Russell, Susan Strasberg, from the play by William Inge, 1955

Maybe it was the first scene where Hal, played by William Holden, jumps off the hobo freight train that set me up to like this film under review, the film adaptation of William Inge’s play Picnic. Ever since my old time growing up days in North Adamsville whenever the trains came by and some dusty local hoboes, tramps or bum (and there are distinctions between them recognized by the whole wandering nation) or passers-through hopped the skids I have been entranced by this whole scene. Spent back in Summer of Love days when I (and an assortment of guys who I hung around with in high school) headed west to see what was up in San Francisco many a night myself on the rattlers (well-named when the hours passed and all you heard out in the prairie was that freaking rattling). So I saw Hal as a wild-eyed spirited forbear.     

I set the headline up the way I did, asking rhetorically what the matter of Kansas was, for a purpose. No, not today’s more political purpose when many are asking what happened to convert one of the reddest states in the nation back in the day (“red” then meaning socialist red) to today’ Republican conservative red but why is everybody in this film ready to heave-ho the old time prairie small town values to get the hell to somewhere else (even if only the next town or next state over).       

  

Here’s the play and you figure out why, okay? That first scene Hal, the muscular brawny hobo saint who shows plenty of 1950s “beefsteak” to an appreciative 1950s female audience), when he lands in this small Podunk town was no accident. He, long weary and without current prospects, expects an old rich father college buddy, Alan, to help him out, get him a fresh start. (Hal obviously had been on hard times since the days when he flunked out of college for lack of study even though he had had it made as the college football hero.) At first it looked his reconnection with that college buddy idea was going to get him back on his feet. But then he spied her. Spied Madge, played by a young and fetching Kim Novak. Moreover Madge spied him and then the dance of dances began. 

All of this taking peeks got its big workout at the town’s annual Labor Day picnic where Madge, know universally for her good looks and apparently not much else, was to under Alan’s guidance be crowned Queen of the May. Hal and Madge are still looking though as they all, Alan, Hal, Madge, Madge’s brainy younger sister Millie, played by a young Susan Strasberg, Madge’s mother and an older neighbor woman head to the picnic and the fun-filled activities that usually go along with such small town festivities, maybe a big town’s too. Then the night falls and the stars seem to be aligned. And for anybody who doesn’t get that idea then you have missed probably the closest thing a 1950s film gets to the act of intimate sexual attraction, of an explicit sexual scene except unlike now with clothes on, when to the strains of Moonglow they dance the dance most of us have all been through.

From there though as can be expected of a guy like Hal who was all fire and motion things go downhill. Alan, as expected, was in a rage that Hal stole his girl and put the rich father-friendly local cops on him for “stealing” his car. Hall gets into a beef with the coppers so we know why he will be on lam (to next state Tulsa). Millie who is eternally humiliated for being a “plain jane” compared to big sister Madge swears she is going to New York and become a great writer once she gets the dust of small town Kansas out of her system. In a side story an “old maid” schoolteacher, played by Rosalind Russell,   desperate to get married and flee her fate gets hitched and blows the burg. And Madge? Well Madge despite those golden prospects with Alan, despite her mother’s admonitions that she can do better than hobo Hal and with little sister’s blessing blows that small town as well (to next state Tulsa as well).           

See this film if only for that “dance” scene which will make you sit up and take notice even in today’s jaded explosive screen sex world. Oh yeah, if you are a guy start practicing those jazzy hip William Holden dance moves. If a gal check out Kim Novak’s “come hither” moves that had even an old guy like me thinking funny thoughts.