On The 150th Anniversary Of Marx's "Das Capital"(1867)-From The Histologion Website- Karl Marx on Public Debt

On The 150th Anniversary Of Marx's "Das Capital"(1867)-From The Histologion Website- Karl Marx on Public Debt

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Karl Marx on public debt

Karl Marx: Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty-One: 

...The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.

The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state-creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation-as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven-the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of "Das Capital" (1867)-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

On The 150th Anniversary Of  The Publication Of "Das Capital" (1867)-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

Frank Jackman comment:

This is a very good, very nicely pedagogic introduction to basic Marxist economics for today's younger readers not versed in the old time (ouch!)1960s studies of his economic theories that were de riguer for leftists then.
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Workers Vanguard No. 997
2 March 2012

Karl Marx Was Right!

World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below a presentation on Marxist economics given by Tynan Maddalena, editor of Spartacist Canada’s Young Spartacus pages. The presentation was originally given to a 24 September 2011 Trotskyist League of Canada/Spartacus Youth Club day school in Toronto and published in Spartacist Canada No. 171 (Winter 2011/2012).

As the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 continues around the globe, the post-Cold War myth that capitalism is the final stage in human progress and can continue to grow without limit is shattering before our eyes. In the United States, millions of workers have been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed, millions have lost their homes, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and youth are burdened with huge student debt with dwindling prospects of getting a job. For those who see no future under capitalism, Marx’s analysis is an essential tool to understand the world we live in today—and change it.

Since this presentation was given, populist Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality and austerity spread further around the country. The Occupy organizers have argued that they have no clear political agenda, affiliation or even a fixed set of demands, but in fact they do have a program: liberal reform, especially of the financial sector, and “democratization” of capitalism. But capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny number of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits.

In this election year, Occupy protesters and others will be told to swallow the poison pill of “lesser evilism,” as attempts will be made to corral them into support for Obama and the capitalist Democratic Party. Posturing as the “friends” of labor and the oppressed, the Democrats are in reality no less committed than the Republicans to the maintenance of capitalist exploitation and pursuit of bloody imperialist wars.

To students and young workers seeking a revolutionary program for the destruction of capitalism, as opposed to seeking only liberal reform, Young Spartacus offers Marxism. The Spartacus Youth Clubs train the next generation of revolutionary socialists—the future cadre of a multiracial workers party built in opposition to all capitalist parties and their sycophants. Led by such a party and armed with a revolutionary program, the working class can vanquish this system of exploitation and war, laying the basis for a global communist society of abundance and human freedom.

*   *    *

As stock markets crash and the world economy stands on the precipice of a second “Great Recession,” consider that the collapse of 2008-09, the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s, added 130 million people to the ranks of the chronically malnourished and hungry. That brings the total number to over one billion. In so many words, one-seventh of the human race is starving. One-seventh and counting.

Across the European Union, 23 million workers are out of work. In Spain, which was recently rocked by general strikes and enormous protest movements, youth unemployment is over 44 percent. In Greece, hundreds of thousands of jobs are gone, homelessness is through the roof, and many people, especially pensioners, line up at soup kitchens in order to survive.

Every so-called bailout for every financial crisis across the eurozone—from Greece to Ireland to Portugal—brings with it unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the masses, who seethe with discontent. The IMF, the European Central Bank, the governments of Germany, France and the United States all chauvinistically chastise the peoples of these countries in crisis as living beyond their means or lazy. In reality, the financial powers are only bailing out themselves—their own failed banking systems—on the backs of workers and the poor.

Here in North America, we hear a lot of talk about an economic recovery. It is a jobless recovery, a wageless recovery, a fragile recovery, a “still nascent” recovery. At the end of July, the American government revised its statistics: the 2008 recession was deeper than reported, and the “recovery” was even more dubious than reported. As for the Canadian economy, we recently learned that it shrank by 0.4 percent in the second quarter of this year. Scotiabank released a report two weeks ago forecasting another drop in the third quarter which could be as great as 2.5 percent. “Canada could be among the first of the world’s advanced economies to fall into a technical recession,” warned the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. That’s rich. We’ve had a jobless, wageless, fragile, still nascent recovery, but don’t worry, the coming recession is going to be only a “technical” one!

In human terms, one in six Americans is now unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, and that has increased more than 30 percent during the two years of this specious recovery. Since the housing bubble burst in the U.S., there have been over seven million home foreclosures. Enforcing them is a brutal act of state repression: the police come to a home, haul the furniture and other possessions onto the street and lock the family out. The bourgeois media would have you believe that the worst was over by 2008. The truth is that 932,000 of those foreclosures came in the first quarter of 2010, and that was an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. And under racist American capitalism, blacks and Latinos, one-third of whose households have no net worth, always suffer disproportionately. In some largely black and Latino neighbourhoods of South Chicago, as well as across the Detroit metropolitan area, one of every 20 households was in foreclosure.

In Canada, well over a quarter million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2002. This underscores the decades-long deindustrialization of North America, represented in the rusted wreckage of steel mills and the shells of auto plants. As Karl Marx put it: “Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.”

At the same time, corporate profits have reached record levels. Ed Clark, chief executive officer of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, whose profits recently rose to a staggering $1.45 billion, recently joined billionaire capitalist parasites Warren Buffett and George Soros in advocating higher taxes for the rich. Their only concern, of course, is to better preserve the capitalist system, including by giving it a facelift—though that did not prevent right-wing demagogues from labeling Buffett and Soros “socialists.” As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

It should come as no surprise that the Conservatives, now with a majority government, are moving rapidly against the unions. The government ended a lockout by Canada Post [the postal service] this spring by legislating wage levels that were even lower than the employer’s final offer. Recently, two different unions at Air Canada were threatened with strikebreaking legislation.

The bailouts of the banks—in some cases to the tune of trillions of dollars—were enacted uniformly by every government in the imperialist West and Japan at the expense of the working class. These measures point to an elementary truth of Marxism-Leninism: that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for deciding the common affairs of the ruling class as a whole. Or look at Export Development Canada’s agreement to lend $1 billion to the Vale mining conglomerate. This came after a year-long strike at Vale’s Sudbury nickel mines, during which the company claimed that funds simply weren’t available to meet the union’s modest demands.

Various reformists and even self-professed Marxists claim that the way forward is to look for “concrete” solutions “in the here and now,” i.e., liberal palliatives. The problem is that any reform wrested from the capitalists today will only be taken away tomorrow—and today the rulers aren’t even offering the pretense of reform. The reformists especially drag out their cant about “real world” solutions when they want to express disdain for the theory and program of revolutionary Marxism, which they dismiss as “abstract.”

In fact, the reformists’ perspective is counterposed to the only road that can end the hunger, poverty and social degradation that are intrinsic to capitalism. Vladimir Lenin, who along with Leon Trotsky led the October Revolution of 1917, warned: “Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes” (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913). Lenin stressed that “there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.” As scientific socialists, we fight for workers revolution to establish an international, centrally planned economy based on satisfying human want.

Marxist Theory and the Class Struggle

Lenin called Marxist theory the “granite foundation” of the Bolshevik Party. Without revolutionary theory, he explained, there can be no revolutionary movement. The core of Marxism is the labour theory of value, elaborated by Marx in the first volume of Capital. Not a breeze to read. But when it comes to the theory that all value in a capitalist economy derives solely from, or is indeed synonymous with, labour, whether or not someone wants to learn this hinges to a great extent on their sympathies for the working class. It was Marx’s commitment to the modern industrial proletariat that allowed him to unlock the secret of value that underlies commodity circulation. As we Spartacists say, program generates theory.

Capitalist production developed from commodity circulation. People have always had to come together to produce for their needs. However, as the techniques of production developed and diversified, people no longer produced goods solely for their own groups, but for trade with others through the medium of exchange. Thus Marx called commodities a relationship between people expressed as a relationship between things.

Obviously, there would be no need for someone to trade their product for something they already had. In order to be exchanged, two commodities must have different uses to satisfy different wants. At the same time, they must on some level be equivalent: they must possess equal value, otherwise there would be no basis for each person to voluntarily give up their product for someone else’s. The great discovery of Karl Marx was that the basis for this equivalence is that all commodities are the product of labour, labour in the most abstract and general sense.

Go to an economics lecture at a university and you may learn that people exchange things solely because they have different uses. But why not just get it yourself? The answer is that it has to be produced: it takes work to acquire it. A slightly more sophisticated version of the same bourgeois argument is that you can’t get it yourself because it is scarce. That reflects a certain truth. However, it is a rigid, static view of the truth that is conditioned by the values of the bourgeoisie, which is an idle class. Anyone who works readily understands that all commodities are scarce until they are brought into existence by labour.

It has never been the case that people have produced commodities on a level playing field. Capitalism did not begin with a clean slate, but was built up on the previously existing systems of feudalism and slavery. Large sections of the ruling classes of these societies capitalized their wealth, whereas the slaves remained dispossessed and the peasants were often brutally robbed of what little they had. Through market competition, the larger, more efficient producers drove the smaller, weaker ones out of business, bought out their capital and conquered their share of the market. Those who were amassing the wealth became capitalists—the bourgeoisie. Those who had nothing left to sell but their own sweat and blood were the workers—the proletariat.

It’s often said that workers sell their labour. In fact, they are not permitted to do even that. The prerequisites for labour in an industrial society—machines and factories, the core of which can be scientifically termed the means of production—belong to the capitalist. The worker cannot work without first receiving permission from the capitalist. What the worker actually sells is therefore not his labour, but rather his potential to labour. That is what Marxists call labour power.

Labour power is bought, sold and consumed. It is a commodity, but there is something peculiar about it. The price of any commodity is based roughly on its value, or the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction. What is the value of labour power? The cost of reproducing the ability of the worker to perform his labour. That consists of food, shelter, clothing, some means of relaxation and of acquiring the skills necessary for doing the job. And finally, enough to support a family so that the working class can continue to exist from one generation to the next.

Taken together, the labour required for these measures constitutes the value of labour power. The gist of capitalist exploitation is that the proletariat generates far more value than is required for the production and reproduction of its labour power. In other words, the peculiarity of the commodity of labour power, its unique attribute, is that it is a source of value. The difference between the total value the worker adds to the product and the value of labour power is called surplus value. Exactly how much of the total value goes to the capitalist and how much goes back to the labourer? This is determined by living factors, by a contest of forces—in other words, by the class struggle.

Take Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Their operation in Indonesia faced a strike last July. Reuters news agency, which is anything but Marxist, made the following calculation: the workers’ wages were $1.50 an hour, the price of gold, $1,500 an ounce; therefore, the gold output lost during the eight-day strike could have covered three times the workers’ annual wages.

To begin to determine the rate of exploitation of these miners—otherwise known as the rate of surplus value—you would need to know the value of the machinery and fuel used up during production and subtract it from the total product. Otherwise, you could not verify the total amount of value the workers add to the product through their labour. However, the fact stands that these gold mines yield 137 times the workers’ annual wages each year, and Indonesian mines are not famous for being high-tech. Since based on our present knowledge we are confined to being somewhat less than scientific, let’s just say that someone is being taken advantage of here, and it’s not the capitalist.

There can be no fair division of the social product between the worker and the capitalist. As Trotsky explained: “The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product. He who owns surplus-product is master of the situation—owns wealth, owns the state, has the key to the church, to the courts, to the sciences and to the arts” (“Marxism in Our Time,” 1939). There can be no such thing as equality, fairness, freedom or democracy between the slaves and the slave masters.

Exploitation and Capitalist Crisis

So what are social classes? Lenin defined them as “large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently”—only consequently—“by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it” (“A Great Beginning,” 1919).

Social class does not derive from a state of mind, nor is it even fundamentally a question of the rich and the poor. For example, a skilled unionized worker in a modern factory in an imperialist country may under exceptional cases make over $100,000 per year. Yet because labour productivity is so high, his or her rate of exploitation is likely much higher than that of far more oppressed and impoverished labourers in a semicolonial country. Moreover, a unionized worker in the trades may make as much as or more than a yuppie supervisor in an office. Nevertheless, the worker still has an economic interest in overthrowing his capitalist exploiter, while the supervisor is an accessory to capitalist production and thus bound to it materially and, you could say, spiritually.

Just about anyone can criticize capitalism from the standpoint of reason or morality. Yet Marx criticized capitalism from the standpoint of maximizing labour productivity, which is generally promoted by capitalism’s ideological defenders as its strong point. Marx proved that capitalist production increasingly puts the brakes on historical development, at the same time as it creates its own gravedigger, the proletariat.

Day in and day out, the proletariat continues to produce. It cannot use its own labour to get ahead as a class, because it is only paid what is necessary to allow it to continue producing. Everything necessary to get ahead goes to the capitalists. As Marx put it: “If the silk worm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker.”

As capitalism develops, the bourgeoisie amasses more and more capital. Technology advances. Machinery becomes more and more sophisticated and extensive and labour productivity rises. The capitalist devotes an increasingly large ratio of his wealth toward acquiring machinery, and a correspondingly declining ratio toward employing workers. In Marx’s words, the organic composition of capital increases. The effect of this is contradictory. On one hand, the rate of exploitation increases. On the other hand, the rate of profit decreases. That’s the dilemma the capitalist faces. Even if he ratchets up the rate of exploitation, the rate of profit still tends to go down. That is why the capitalist has no future. Let’s take a closer look.

Say you’ve got your engineering degree and you’re looking for a job in your field. Off you go to the Celestica factory at Don Mills and Eglinton to pave the information superhighway, one transistor at a time, for $11.75 an hour on six-month contracts with no benefits. (And your boss can call you a few hours before your shift starts to tell you to stay home without pay.)

So there you are with your co-workers paving the information superhighway with these transistors; array enough together in the right way and you get a flip-flop, an edifice of the binary logic used on a grand scale in computers. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds in Wired magazine or those trendy post-Marxist academic seminars. Away you work. Eventually, the company replaces the soldering irons that each of you uses with a wave solder machine. A chunk of your co-workers gets laid off. You’re producing way more circuit boards than before, only your wage is the same. Since most of your friends were laid off, the company’s spending on wages has gone way down. The rate of exploitation overall has increased astronomically. Good times for the capitalist, right? Not so fast.

At first, the company will have an advantage over its competitors. Soon, however, that new machinery will become the standard across the industry. Even though the rate of exploitation has gone up, the rate of profit will go down. It all comes back to labour being the sole source of value. One capitalist can sell another capitalist a machine, but that exchange does not increase the total amount of value in the economy. The value just changes hands. It’s only once the capitalist purchases labour power, and consumes it by having the worker do his job, that any new value is added to the economy. The lower the ratio of the capitalist’s wealth that is spent on wage labour, the lower is the ratio of surplus value to his total expenses. More and more of his wealth gets tied up in replacing and maintaining machinery—what Marx evocatively termed “dead labour.”

As I said, the rate of exploitation is going up, but the rate of profit is going down. The capitalist does not resign himself to that fate peacefully, however. He panics and slashes wages like a madman, doing whatever he can to transfer the burden of his decaying system onto the backs of the people he exploits. When that capitalist can no longer produce at a competitive rate of profit, he simply ceases to produce. He throws his workers onto the street. Like Malcolm X said of the slave master, he worked them like dogs and dropped them in the mud. Production is in chaos. The empty factories rust.

Once the slave escapes his master, he is no longer a slave; once the serf gets his plot of land, he is no longer a serf. But even after the proletarian punches his time card for the final time and quits (or loses) his job, he remains a proletarian. The modern slave, the wage slave, is slave to the entire capitalist class. The proletariat cannot escape this exploiting class but must overthrow it in its entirety, worldwide, and in so doing liberate everyone who is oppressed by capitalism.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

What has been placed on the agenda is proletarian revolution, even if this seems far off today. We look above all to the legacy of the Russian Revolution. As Trotsky noted about the early years of the Soviet Union:

“Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

We Trotskyists fought against the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR, and against its final counterrevolutionary collapse in 1991-92. Nevertheless, that collapse did occur, and the ideologues of the bourgeoisie have done everything they can to bury the lessons of the October Revolution, which remains our model.

The key political instrument for victory is the revolutionary vanguard party as developed by Lenin. Trotsky explained: “The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious” (“What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat,” 1932). We seek to win the working class, starting with its most advanced layers, to understand the necessity of sweeping away capitalist rule and establishing what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the only road to communism, a global high-tech society of material abundance where classes, the state and family no longer exist, and where thereby social inequality based on sex is eradicated and the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity abolished.

Where to get started? We come full circle to the question of what to do concretely in the here and now. We can now approach that question scientifically, from the standpoint of the historic interest of the proletariat as a class. We can avoid the pitfall of do-gooder moralism, of becoming, as Lenin warned, “the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics,” whether in the form of right-wing religious demagogy or social-democratic opportunism.

The class consciousness of the proletariat and its will to struggle have been greatly undermined by the social-democratic misleadership of the labour movement, exemplified by the New Democratic Party. Three years ago, the now-deceased NDP leader Jack Layton—who, unlike the reformist left, we do not eulogize—called on workers to have the “courage” to “take a pay cut so your friends at the plant can keep their job.” This is one of many reasons why we said “No vote to the NDP” in the May federal election, and we say so again for the upcoming Ontario election.

The NDP is based not merely on a bad set of ideas. It is rooted materially in the trade-union bureaucracy of English Canada. That bureaucracy expresses the interests of a stratum of the working class that Marxists term the labour aristocracy. Where does the labour aristocracy come from? It lives off scraps from the superprofits the capitalists in imperialist countries tear out of the semicolonial countries. Thus, to Marxists, it was no surprise that the NDP voted with both hands for NATO’s war on Libya. The NDP is what Marx’s close collaborator Friedrich Engels called a bourgeois workers party: it may be linked to the organizations of the working class, but it is thoroughly pro-capitalist in its leadership and outlook.

What is needed is something completely different: a class-struggle workers party that understands that the interests of the capitalists and the workers have nothing in common. Such a party would be, in Lenin’s words, a tribune of the people, which understands that the working class can only emancipate itself by ultimately abolishing all forms of oppression.

A revolutionary workers party would intervene into the class struggle as the most historically conscious and advanced element of the proletariat. It would advocate Quebec independence to oppose the dominant Anglo chauvinism and get the stifling national question off the agenda, making way for a higher level of class struggle. It would champion free abortion on demand and fight for the perspective of women’s liberation through socialist revolution, including among the more backward layers of the proletariat. To combat mass unemployment, it would demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works.

To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the capitalist owners and the swindles of the banks, a class-struggle workers party would demand that the capitalists open their books. Raising the call for the expropriation of branches of industry vital for national existence, it would explain that this must be linked to the fight for the seizure of power by the working class, as against the reformist misleaders for whom the call for nationalization is merely a prescription for bailing out bankrupt capitalist enterprises. As Trotsky argued in opposition to the capitalists and their reformist agents in the Transitional Program (1938):

“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

That is the task to which we of the Trotskyist League and the Spartacus Youth Clubs are dedicated. In the trough of the reactionary political period following the destruction of the Soviet Union, it’s a task with few immediate rewards. But let’s be sober and scientific about this—there is an overhead to historical progress. And on the grounds of that necessity, we urge you to join us in that struggle.

In Boston (Everywhere)-Build (and Nourish) The Resistance!-Introducing The Organization "Food For Activists"

In Boston (Everywhere)-Build (and Nourish) The Resistance!-Introducing The Organization "Food For Activists" 

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

The Unholy Four (released in England as A Stanger Came Home), starring Paulette Goddard , Hammer Productions, 1954

In my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if fated Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and an English supporting cast with a thin storyline.     

I had done a bunch of these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my five review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various contracts for work over the years but not that one. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not fame any blow-back.

Here is the “skinny” on the film under review The Unholy Four (released in England and on the continent as A Stranger Came Home which as usual in this series is closer to the nub since in fact a stranger does come home to face all kinds of hell) in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four guys, four rich guys not of the nobility in England anyway, took a trip not shown trip to Portugal and only three came back. One guy vanished for four years and as the film opens up he shows up unannounced one party night. The guy, a guy named Phil, had this dishy wife, Angie, played by fading American screen star Paulette Goddard the first female fading star in the series which as mentioned before jacks up the film more than if there were only English nobodies playing the roles, who the other three guys on that fateful trip were in varying degrees interested in. Our man Phil, kind of a chain-smoking cuckoo, was waylaid by one of the three guys and he is well enough now to go the distance to find out who fucked him up enough that he lost his memory and is now seeking revenge-or at least answers to what happened to him and to his wife.

Problem, big problem, or really two problems one of the three guys winds up very dead the night Phil comes back home and guess what he is built to specifications to be the fall guy, to take the big-step off since everybody in their set knew that dead guy was crazy for Angie. Still the peelers don’t have enough evidence to throw him in the slammer and throw away the key. That second problem is that Phil is not altogether sure that good-looking if faded whorish Angie wasn’t playing footsie with one or more of the guys while Phil was lost in the rain out in Lisbon waiting with Victor Lazlo for some airfare to the States. She has a hell of a time trying to persuade Phil and the coppers for a bit that she did rub the dead man out. With only two guys left though Phil honed in on the killer and his lamester reasons for bopping Phil and killing the other dude. Phil lays the dude down and he and Angie head off into the sunset or something like that. For a while the film took turns like a real thriller but the dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Paulette too) make this thing a holy goof. Despite the come hither title and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one fades away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way.                       

**I Hear That Whistle When She Blows-Creation Of A Unitary Continental United States-State- The Building Of The Transcontinental Railroad

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the (First) Transcontinental Railroad discussed below.

Book Review

Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, Stephen E. Ambrose, Touchstone Books, New York, 2000

I have spend a great amount of time, and I believe rightly so, in drawing out the lessons of the struggle against slavery as they were played out as the great task of the American Civil War of the mid-19th century. I have mentioned, generally in passing, that the other great task of that fight was the preservation (and extension) of a continental nation-state by the victory of the Union forces. As Karl Marx did, steeped as he was in the traditions of historical materialism, I too saw the creation of a unitary capitalist state at that time as a historically progressive outcome. That said, it is one thing to be in favor of such an outcome, another to see how, in the specific circumstances of the vast North American land mass, that state was to be unified. The subject of this book, the struggle to create a transcontinental railroad, goes a long way to understanding how that task was accomplished, not only as a marvelous engineering feat but as a spur to a more systematic capitalist mode of mass production.

As the author the late Stephen Ambrose, previously known more for his historical works chronicling the war leaders and dog soldiers of his generation, the generation of my parents, the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, has noted this Herculean task was done using the most basic pre-capitalist methods, simple tools and man power, lots of man power. When completed in a few years time , as he also noted, the United States looked, or rather would look shortly thereafter light years different that the simple agrarian society projected by the founders of the country. Today, in our digital age, we are probably closer to those who created the transcontinental railroad society that they were to the hundred of generations before them who walked or used horses to do their traveling.

Of course, this railroad story is a rather good cautionary tale about the virtues and vices of capitalism, capitalists and the onset of the “Gilded Age” that the railroads, their financing and their political clout would speed up. This then is not a laconic tale of hoboes jungled up along some railroad right of way or “riding the blinds” or taking to the road in search of adventure as Kerouac's “beat” generation did. This is a tale of dreams, plans, power, greed, more greed, hard work, hard living, hard drinking and hard dying. Ambrose lays it out in a very compelling and easy to read way, although a minor fault is a too frequent repetition of the facts in one chapter being used again in another in order to bulk up a narrative with a pretty straightforward theme.

As to the dreams, that was the easy part and affected everyone in pre-Civil War America from the old railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln to such well-known speculators and Gilded Age figures as Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Coliss Huntington. As to the plan- private enterprise (backed by the government) was the order of the day and the route, finally established after much political dickering, through the center of the country with two competing lines-the Central Pacific (now part of today’s Southern Pacific –the sight of which when I travel in the West still makes me nostalgic) and the aptly-named Union Pacific.

As to the massive engineering task forgotten names like Ted Judah and the Civil War general, Grenville Dodge. drove the thing forward, through thick and thin. As to the hard work, mainly done by my Irish forbears on the UP side and the Chinese (with important help from the Mormons in Utah) on the CP side, as detailed by Ambrose represents the first inkling of what industrial mass production would look like later. Needless to say the heroes of this story who left no diaries or other writings are those workers who toiled endlessly and effectively to completion. I do have one question, just to be contrary as usual. Why was this project not done as a national task by the central government? As we know the later tales of railroad finacing after 1869, like the Credit Mobilier scandal, not covered in the book, made some of today’s financial shenanigans look tame by comparison. Why were the rails only nationalized, if at all, after those private railroads went belly-up with the advent of mass production automobiles and super highways ( of which one, I-80, follows the basic CP-UP route from Omaha) in the late 20th century?

Th e100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution-Honor Of John Reed-Harvard Class Of 1910- Warren Beatty's "Reds"

The important contribution of John Reed to the revolutionary movement here in America before World War I and later during the Russian revolution and its aftermath has never been fully appreciated. Thus, Warren Beatty, whatever his personal motives, has done a great service in filming the life of this “traitor to his class” (and his Harvard Class of 1910) and partisan of the international working class.

As usual with such commercial enterprises the order of things gets switched in the wrong direction. The love affair between Reed (played by Beatty) and budding writer and early feminist Louise Bryant (and a little third party intervention by playwright Eugene O’Neill, played by Jack Nicholson) is set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution not the other way around, but such is cinematic license. More than most film depictions this one mainly gets the story straight; the early free-lance journalism tied to the Mexican Revolution; the bohemian life of pre-World War I Greenwich Village in New York City including their patrons; the socialist fight against American participation in World War I; the fight among socialist (and anarchists) over support to the Russian Revolution; and, an interesting segment on the in-fighting in the early communist movement between the foreign language federations and the Reed-led “Natives” which was ‘resolved’ in at Communist International headquarters. Those ‘natives’  who in the course of events would form the leadership of the party through most of the twenties when the cadre still wanted to make a revolution here and not just cheer on the Russian Revolution from afar. A nice touch in the film is the interplaying of commentaries by those, friend and foe, who knew or knew of Reed or were around during this time. See this movie.    

In Boston –The Latest Bash Back Boston-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18th on Boston Common

In Boston –The Latest Bash Back Boston-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18^th on Boston Common   

Frank Jackman comment:

I have mentioned on more than one occasion that we have been for a while in a state of cold civil war in America that has only had fuel to the fire added to it, make it tend toward a hot civil war, by the massive frauds, midnight rip-off actions, and general ignorance promoted by the Trump Administration. This rightly, and I think most thankfully, has gotten the previously moribund left, the bewildered and the oppressed up in arms enough to slowly begin a counter-attack against the night-takers from corrupt and venal right-wing bourgeois politicians like Trump and his ilk to the more dangerous extra-parliamentary forces-call them alt-right, fascist, KKK, etc. that have been unleashed-have been given fresh wind in their sails.

Not everything the left and its allies argue for in counter-attack either makes senses or provides a road forward in the anti-fascist struggle for example RefuseFascism has identified the Trump-Pence regime as fascist and to call for a parliamentary impeachment process to get rid of the bums. This Bash Back Boston seems to be more militant but not quite sure that confrontation in itself without more gets us anyplace. I leave it an open question today. But for now as we sort things out, or as they get sorted for us which is as likely and has actually been the case over the past several months, let’s keep to the united front idea going until further notice. In short Saturday November 18^th in Boston be on the Boston Common to stop the Nazis, fascists and their ilk in their tracks whatever anti-fascist ideas you march under.  

           

In Boston –The Latest From RefuseFascism-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18th on Boston Common

In Boston –The Latest From RefuseFascism-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18^th on Boston Common   

Frank Jackman comment:

I have mentioned on more than one occasion that we have been for a while in a state of cold civil war in America that has only had fuel to the fire added to it, make it tend toward a hot civil war, by the massive frauds, midnight rip-off actions, and general ignorance promoted by the Trump Administration. This rightly, and I think most thankfully, has gotten the previously moribund left, the bewildered and the oppressed up in arms enough to slowly begin a counter-attack against the night-takers from corrupt and venal right-wing bourgeois politicians like Trump and his ilk to the more dangerous extra-parliamentary forces-call them alt-right, fascist, KKK, etc. that have been unleashed-have been given fresh wind in their sails.

Not everything the left and its allies argue for in counter-attack either makes senses or provides a road forward in the anti-fascist struggle for example this call by RefuseFascism to identify the Trump-Pence regime as fascist and to call for a parliamentary impeachment process to get rid of the bums. But for now as we sort things out, or as they get sorted for us which is as likely and has actually been the case over the past several months, let’s keep to the united front idea going until further notice. In short Saturday November 18^th in Boston be on the Boston Common to stop the Nazis, fascists and their ilk in their tracks whatever anti-fascist ideas you march under.  

           

Films To Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail

Films To Class Struggle By-"Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story"- Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Incident At Ogala: The Leonard Peltier Story, Leonard Peltier, various leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), defense attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and by-standers, directed by Michael Apted, 1991

Let’s start this review of this documentary of the incidents surrounding the case of Leonard Peltier at the end. Or at least the end of this documentary, 1991. Leonard Peltier, a well-known leader of the Native American movement, convicted of the 1975 murder, execution-style, of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota after he had been extradited from Canada in the wake of the acquittal of two other Pine Ridge residents. In an interview from federal prison in that period the then still relatively young Peltier related that after receiving his life sentences and being told by prison officials that that meant his release date would be in 2035 he stated that he hoped not, for he would then be an old, old man. Here is what should make everyone interested in the case, and everyone interested in the least sense of justice, even just bourgeois justice, blood boil, he is now an old sick man and he is still in jail for a crime that he did not commit, and certainly one that was not proven beyond that cherished “reasonable doubt”

This documentary, narrated by Robert Redford in his younger days as well, goes step by step through the case from the pre-murder period when Native Americans, catching the political consciousness crest begun in the 1960s by the black civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, started organizing, mainly through the American Indian Movement (AIM), on the Indian reservations of the West, some of the most impoverished areas in all the Americas. The focal point of this militant organizing effort came in the war zone-showdown, the siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. The tension that hovered in the air in the aftermath of that war between the American government and its Indian agent supporters on one side, and the AIM-led “warrior nation” on the other is the setting for this incident at Ogala.

Through reenactment of the crime scene; eye witnesses, interested and disinterested, voluntary or coerced; defense strategies at both trials from self-defense to lack of physical evidence, and on appeal; the prosecution's case, its insufficient evidence, and it various maneuvers to inflame white juries against unpopular or misunderstood Native Americans in order to get someone convicted for the murders of one of their own; the devastating, but expected effect of the trials on the political organizing by AIM; and the stalwart and defiant demeanor of one Leonard Peltier all come though in this presentation. As a long time supporter of organizations that defend class-war prisoners, like Leonard Peltier, this film only makes that commitment even firmer. With that in mind- Free Leonard Peltier-He Must Not Die In Jail!

Independence for Catalonia! Down With the EU! Spain Strangles Catalonia For Workers Republics!

Workers Vanguard No. 1121	3 November 2017

Independence for Catalonia! Down With the EU!

Spain Strangles Catalonia

For Workers Republics!

OCTOBER 30—Three days ago, the parliament of Catalonia voted to secede from Spain and establish an independent Catalan republic. Minutes later, the Spanish senate, dominated by the Castilian chauvinists of the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and of the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), voted to dissolve the Catalan parliament and depose the regional government.

Madrid is officially seizing control of Catalonia, including its finances, police force and major TV and radio stations under Article 155 of the Spanish constitution, which enables the rulers of the Spanish prison house of oppressed peoples to strip autonomous communities of their powers. It has also ordered new regional elections on December 21. Catalan pro-independence deputies, including President Carles Puigdemont (of the Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català, PDeCAT) and his vice president Oriol Junqueras (of the Esquerra Republicana, ERC) have been threatened with arrest for “rebellion,” for which they could spend as long as 30 years in prison. Two prominent leaders of independentiste groups, Jordi Sànchez of the Catalan National Assembly and Jordi Cuixart of Òmnium Cultural, were imprisoned on October 16 and face trial for sedition.

The Spanish state unleashed a wave of repression in late September in an attempt to suppress the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. Over two million people cast ballots, courageously defying the thousands of vicious Guardia Civil and Policía Nacional sent by Madrid. Ninety percent voted in favor of independence. Since then, Catalonia and its largest city, Barcelona, have been rocked by huge protests demanding an end to the repression and freedom for the imprisoned independence leaders. Several chauvinist protests have also taken place, led by the neo-Francoist PP, the right-wing Ciutadans and the social-democratic Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC), in defense of the unity of monarchical, Castile-ruled capitalist Spain. It is in the interests of the working class throughout Spain and France to defend the oppressed Catalan people, whose nation straddles the Franco-Spanish border. Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil out of Catalonia! Free Cuixart, Sànchez and all pro-independence activists! Down with the monarchy! Defend Catalan independence!

Like Catalonia, the oppressed Basque nation in Euskal Herria (the Basque Country) stretches from Spain into France. For decades, the Basques have suffered deadly repression at the hands of both the Spanish and French governments. As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we fight for the independence of the Basque Country and Catalonia, North and South—that is, against the capitalist rulers of both France and Spain. We seek to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties that support the just struggles of oppressed nations, which can be a lever to advance the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist rulers. Our program is for proletarian revolution, the seizure of power by the working class. For workers republics in Catalonia and the Basque Country as parts of a voluntary Socialist United States of Europe!

For the Catalan workers and poor, the struggle for national liberation is a component part of their struggle against exploitation. The potential power of the working class was demonstrated in a small but important way by the port workers in Barcelona and Tarragona, who refused to service the ships being used to house the Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil at the time of the referendum. But Catalan workers have not been mobilized as an independent force due to their wretched reformist misleaders, who, on the whole, refuse to fight for Catalan independence. For this reason, Catalan workers are dissolved into the mass movement, and pro-independence working-class militants have nowhere to look for their liberation except to the bourgeois nationalists. It is necessary to forge a revolutionary proletarian leadership that champions the struggle for national liberation.

No Illusions in the Catalan Bourgeoisie!

Amid fears that an independent Catalonia would be kicked out of the European Union (EU), a host of Catalan companies, including two large banks, CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell, promptly seized on Madrid’s offerings and opted to register their headquarters outside Catalonia. The Catalan bourgeoisie (represented prominently by the PDeCAT and its predecessors, as well as by the ERC) has sometimes used separatism as a bargaining chip in its dealings with Madrid. But the chauvinist, vindictive humiliations inflicted by the central government, as well as pressure from the Catalan masses, have pushed the political representatives of a section of the Catalan bourgeoisie into open defiance. Puigdemont postponed declaring independence after the October 1 referendum, and even offered to hold early regional elections if PP prime minister Mariano Rajoy would guarantee that Catalonia would retain its autonomous status. But the Castilian-chauvinist Rajoy and his cohorts would have nothing less than total capitulation. Thus, the Catalan government declared independence.

Madrid has made clear that it will go to any lengths to maintain the territorial integrity of Spain, while Catalonia lacks anything resembling a state of its own—centrally, armed forces—that could resist the Spanish state. The Catalan working class, meanwhile, has given no sign of significant independent motion. Under these circumstances, there is no hope of realizing Catalan independence now. Yet Catalonia remains in turmoil. With the immediate prospect of further repression and humiliation at the hands of the Castilian overlords, combined with the impotence of the Catalan bourgeoisie, further struggles are likely to erupt—the Catalan masses are in dire need of allies.

Such allies are to be found primarily in the proletariat of Spain and France. The Spanish and French bourgeoisies are both oppressing the Catalans and Basques and exploiting the working class as a whole. The breakup of the reactionary Spanish state would open the road for workers struggle against the capitalist rulers in Madrid. A relentless struggle must be waged against the chauvinism promoted by social democrats and the labor lieutenants of capital in the trade-union bureaucracies in order to win workers in the region to the fight for self-determination of the oppressed nations.

The struggle of the Catalan people has resonated across the border with Basques and Catalans living in France. Protests in support of Catalan independence have taken place in both the north and south of Euskal Herria. In an act of solidarity by Catalans in France, the ballots for the October 1 referendum were printed in Catalunya Nord and transported across the border.

Despite the Catalan government’s constant appeals, the rulers of the reactionary, imperialist EU have backed Madrid’s repression to the hilt, precisely because they know that a breakup of Spain portends a breakup of the EU. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned that “we need to avoid splits, because we already have enough splits and fractures,” and that the EU could not be made up of “95 different states.” The president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, made it clear on October 22 that “no one is going to recognise Catalonia in Europe as an independent country.” The EU is an instrument for the imperialist powers of Europe, centrally Germany, to ratchet up the exploitation of the working people throughout Europe and to further impoverish weaker countries such as Greece and Portugal.

For Proletarian Political Independence!

The Rajoy government’s repression, supported by its lapdogs in the PSOE, has evoked memories of the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and its savage suppression of Basque, Catalan and Galician national rights. PP spokesman Pablo Casado didn’t hesitate to invoke this bloody history when he warned Puigdemont not to declare independence “because perhaps the person who makes the declaration will end up like the person who made the declaration 83 years ago.” This is a reference to Lluís Companys, the bourgeois-nationalist president of the Catalan Generalitat who was executed by a Francoist firing squad after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. (See “Trotskyism vs. Popular Frontism in the Spanish Civil War,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009.)

The reality is that the repression being meted out today is fully in keeping with the legal framework of Spanish bourgeois democracy. The oppression of the Basque, Catalan and Galician nations was enshrined in the 1978 post-Franco constitution, which maintains that Spain cannot be divided. The two historic parties of the Spanish working class, the PSOE and the Communist Party (PCE), supported the formation of a monarchical state based on the denial of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations of Spain and voted for the 1978 constitution.

The PSOE in government loyally served the king and fomented Castilian chauvinism for decades, notoriously setting up death squads to murder Basque independence fighters in the 1980s. For its own part, the PCE has also maintained its disgusting opposition to independence for the oppressed. The chauvinist misleaders of the CCOO and UGT union federations bear responsibility for the fact that workers in Catalonia and Spain have not come out as an organized force in defense of independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The PSOE’s Catalan counterpart, the PSC, joined with Francoists and fascists in a reactionary demonstration in Barcelona on October 8 and October 29, under slogans such as “Catalonia is Spain.” Emboldened by Rajoy’s offensive, on October 27 fascists attacked the headquarters of Catalunya Ràdio as well as a Catalan cultural center and school in Barcelona. The fascists are a deadly danger to all workers, immigrants and oppressed minorities, and the working class must be mobilized to stop them.

With the PSOE heavily discredited among working people for having mercilessly administered EU-dictated austerity, the bourgeois Podemos party—which issued out of the 2011 petty-bourgeois Indignados movement—has taken up the task of refurbishing Spanish bourgeois democracy. Podemos has mobilized protests in opposition to Rajoy’s repression against Catalonia. But Podemos is firmly opposed to Catalan independence and merely provides brutal Castilian chauvinism with a “human face”: an October 23 letter to its membership decried any declaration of Catalan independence as “illegitimate.” Podemos advises the Spanish bourgeoisie to “ensure that Catalonia remains a part of Spain” with the carrot of greater democracy, rather than the stick of repression. Podemos has moved to strip the leadership of its Catalan organization (Podem) of its authority for not being hard enough against independence.

A more left-appearing Catalan bourgeois-nationalist party is the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP). Although the CUP claims to be socialist, in fact it is a party based on the petty bourgeoisie. It propped up the regional capitalist government for more than a year. The affiliate of the British Socialist Workers Party in Catalonia, En Lluita, liquidated completely into the CUP last year. These opportunists had no trouble simultaneously building the pro-independence CUP in Catalonia, while building the anti-independence Podemos in other parts of Spain, i.e., capitulating to one bourgeois nationalism or another.

No such confusion afflicts the fake-Trotskyist Internationalist Group (IG), which capitulates entirely to Castilian chauvinism. In their article “Defend the Right to Self-Determination and Independence for Catalonia” (September 2017) they do anything but defend Catalan independence. The IG denigrates the Catalan people’s just struggle for national liberation, sneering: “This is a nationalist movement led by the richest bourgeoisie in Spain” and “The impulse for independence comes above all from powerful sectors of the well-to-do Catalan bourgeoisie.” You’d think the IG had taken a page from the Francoist newspaper ABC, which wrote that the “Catalanist revolt against the state is a performance of the rich, by the rich and for the rich” (4 June).

These petty-bourgeois professors in the U.S. urged Catalans to battle their way to the polling stations on October 1—defying police truncheons, rubber bullets and tear gas—to “cast a blank ballot”! Dripping with contempt for the oppressed Catalans, the IG rants: “It’s not like some national liberation movement in a semi-colonial country.” The IG’s counterposition between national liberation struggles in the backward and advanced countries reveals their fundamentally Third World nationalist perspective. Further, the IG argues that Catalonia’s separation from Spain “could seriously undercut the potential for united struggle of the working class throughout the peninsula” (“Mass Resistance to Police Repression in Catalonia,” 4 October).

It is Madrid’s national oppression of Catalans, Basques and Galicians that has undercut the unity of the working classes in the artificial Spanish state. This unity can only be achieved by boldly championing the liberation of the oppressed nations—the opposite of the IG’s left-talking chauvinism, which blames the oppressed Catalans for dividing the working class, rather than the Castilian bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys.

Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin emphasized that achieving proletarian unity requires breaking the chains binding an oppressed nation to its oppressor. He used as an example Norway, which gained independence from Sweden following a 1905 referendum:

“The close alliance between the Norwegian and Swedish workers, their complete fraternal class solidarity, gained from the Swedish workers’ recognition of the right of the Norwegians to secede. This convinced the Norwegian workers that the Swedish workers were not infected with Swedish nationalism, and that they placed fraternity with the Norwegian proletarians above the privileges of the Swedish bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The dissolution of the ties imposed upon Norway by the monarchs of Europe and the Swedish aristocracy strengthened the ties between the Norwegian and Swedish workers.”

— “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914)

As explained in the current issue of our international theoretical journal, Spartacist (No. 65, Summer 2017), Lenin’s steadfast defense of the right of self-determination and implacable opposition to Great Russian chauvinism were crucial in forging the Bolshevik Party. It was Lenin’s revolutionary internationalist program that allowed the Bolsheviks to lead the working class to power 100 years ago. Today, the ICL upholds Leninism on the national question as part of our struggle for new October Revolutions.

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan And Iraq! No War With North Korea-No War With Iran!

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan And Iraq! No War With North Korea-No War With Iran! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Trump’s War Machine!

Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

https://unacpeace.org.

Frank Jackman comment:  

A while back, maybe two or three years ago as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least when the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and now the Trumpian war clouds brewing over Iran and North Korea and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the then in power Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.

Over that two or three year ago summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels which expanded into bombing raids over Syria for who knows what side-or for what purpose. Although not nearly enough had occurred then and a similar situation exists now with North Korea although people, many young people which is a good sign are out in the streets for other causes too numerous to mention in escalating Trump Administration’s desire to return this country back to the 8^th or 9^th century maybe earlier-the last time the Moslems got uppity with Western civilization or something like that it changes day to day.

As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Trump’s push to seemingly endless war (we will not forget that they were inherited without a murmur from Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. Including his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he felt needed the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”

As I also mentioned back then and nothing has come up on my radar to deny the continuing reality the UNAC, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.