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Markin comment on this article:
The subject matter of this article details one leftist militant’s evolution from liberalism, the main starting place for virtually all militant leftists, including this writer (I have seen very few such “conversions” from those who started at the right-wing of the political spectrum), to revolutionary political back in the time of the great 1960s radical jail break-out from Cold War, red scare, white picket fence existence. While the particulars of her story may vary from mine, and others who came of political age during those heady times, the main points are very familiar. That is more evident today as, with the recent emergence of the Occupy movement, some old leftists have “risen from the grave” to show up at the various encampments to tell their “tales” of the struggle back in the day. I do note that there is something of a direct correlation between the distance from those long ago struggles and the size of the heroic role of the speaker in his or her “attic” memories. Worst many, while touting their exploits, have failed, and it can only be a conscious failure, to learn anything from our defeats and, in the end, we were defeated, defeated where it counted in the struggle for state power in order to create the “newer world” we were seeking.
A few other points. Certainly, unlike the speaker in this article, not all of us had a leg up as “red diaper babies” and grew up in a household, a Communist Party household, where the class struggle was articulated at a high level. However I have noted elsewhere when discussing my own youthful leftward political trajectory that I came out of a household that paid more than lip service to the tenets of the radical, plebeian, rank and file Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurras. I have further noted that the way that I found out about the very first political demonstration that I participated in, against nuclear weapons proliferation, at the age of 14 at the Boston Common was one called in the fall of 1960 by SANE that I learned about from an announcement in the Catholic Worker newspaper. Someone once said that lapsed Catholics make the best communists. Maybe there is something to that. However the more germane point is that some spark, some distance memory forgotten spark got each of us going. And that unspoken spark has sustained those of us who are still struggling for these many years so it must have been very powerful.
It can be written down as almost a truism that those of us who came of age in what I call the “generation of ’68,” almost to a person, cut our teeth on the black civil rights movement, or some aspect of the black liberations struggle. In my own case it was through a project to get books to black school children in Alabama sponsored by the local NAACP chapter in the very early 1960s. From there we moved on to aid the sit-in movement in the South and some of us, like the speaker, headed south. A key, a key for everyone who moved off dead-center and did not rest self-satisfied on their laurels, or Martin Luther King’s laurels, after various pieces of legislation were enacted granting black voting rights, was the rise of the Black Panthers, black nationalism in its various guises, and also the break from placid, turn the other cheek non-violence in the struggle for black liberation. Even today that divide among older political activists is apparent between those whose political development never advanced beyond fawning over King’s memory and those who went mano y mano with the black revolutionaries.
To a certain extent the division between liberal and radical perspectives over the black question found it’s parallel in the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement. (I feel compelled to name the war rather than use the generic “anti-war” so no reader gets confused about which of the myriad wars of the last half century I am referring to.). Those, including so-called revolutionaries, who opted for a mere attempt (unsuccessful) to stop that war rather than to stand in anti-imperialist solidarity with the Vietnamese can be directly held accountable for the lack of a serious anti-imperialist movement today when the American monster is ranging over the planet. It is almost a mantra among older radicals that “we stopped the war.” But, as on the black liberation question, some people refuse, consciously, refuse to learn the lessons of history. As the speaker correctly points out the way that war was stopped was when (finally and not without hesitation and political misdirection) the North Vietnamese/National Liberation Front forces swooped down Highway One in 1975.
The speaker makes many more germane points and tells some nice anecdotes (especially about that GM auto plant “invasion”) about some of the silly stuff we did and many mistakes we made before we got serious about the central role of the working class in the struggle for that “newer world.” Although I do not know if her talk was timed to take advantage of the ferment of the Occupy movement or not but the “lessons” from back in the day that we learned the hard way are ones that movement faces-if it ever gets off its porous dead-center populist collective butt.
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Workers Vanguard No. 990
11 November 2011
Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant
Part One
We print below the first part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles.
I’ve noticed that there is quite a bit of interest in and nostalgia for the activism and struggle of the 1960s. Well, that’s understandable. In the last few years, the world has plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by the Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama, following in the steps of George W. Bush. The working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable.
Every day you read of some new attack on the unions. Every day the fees go up for a college education. U.S. imperialism rampages around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, leaving death and destruction in its wake. And particularly here in the U.S., there has been precious little class struggle, social struggle, even student struggle, in response—with the notable exception of the longshore union in Longview, Washington. We are now seeing a little action from these “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, who are basically frustrated young liberals. But the bottom line is: capitalism cannot be reformed. What is needed is a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.
What I am going to do today is talk about the 1960s—the last time there was serious social struggle in the U.S.—and why some of us concluded that struggle, even quite militant struggle, is not enough. You need a Marxist working-class perspective and a Leninist vanguard party that can lead the working class forward to seize state power and establish socialized, collectivized property systems around the whole world.
After that long introduction, I’m going to play you an early Phil Ochs song, “I’m Going to Say It Now.” This was probably written not long after the 1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley. It has a lot of the themes of that period—alienation, opposition to “in loco parentis,” etc. It’s a very liberal protest song, but it foreshadows things to come:
“Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name,
To get around this campus why you almost need a plane,
And you’re supporting Chang Kai-Shek, while I’m supporting Mao.
So when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now....
“I’ve read of other countries where the students take a stand,
Maybe even help to overthrow the leaders of the land
Now I wouldn’t go so far to say we’re also learnin’ how,
But when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.”
From the 1960s up to the early ’70s, there developed a distinct generation of American leftists whose experiences were quite different from the preceding generation of leftists, whose main experiences were the Great Depression and the labor struggles of the 1930s. This generation called itself the New Left as opposed to the “old left,” which had been dominated by the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party (CP). This New Left generation, of which I’m a part, makes up a lot of the cadre and leadership of not only the Spartacist League but also our left opponents: the Progressive Labor Party (PL), Revolutionary Communist Party, International Socialist Organization (ISO), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers World Party (WWP).
Let me first say a word about the 1950s. What a nasty period—the intensely anti-Communist climate after the Korean War, blacklisting, reds driven out of the unions, the Smith Act trials of CP members, deadening conformity, women forced back into the home after World War II. My parents were in the CP, and I remember when I was seven years old the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American Communists executed for supposedly betraying the “secret” of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. When I asked my parents why this was happening, they said it was because the Rosenbergs were “progressives” (a code word for CPers) and Jews. Even then I knew that this described my parents, too. Later, my mother told me that if they, my parents, were arrested, my grandparents would take care of my brother and me. Luckily, it never came to that, but this was my first encounter with the U.S. “justice system,” and I never forgot it.
The Left, Old and New
Under the immense pressure of Cold War anti-Communism, the old left—both the reformist CP and the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—suffered major right-wing defections. The SWP lost 20 percent of its membership in the Cochran-Clarke faction fight and the CP lost three-quarters of its membership in 1956-57. These ex-CPers didn’t mostly become right-wingers. Rather they mostly became liberals—they had been voting Democrat for years, anyhow. The hardcore Stalinists later became Maoists and influenced the New Left in the late ’60s, but I’ll get to that later.
These losses were heavily concentrated among the parties’ active trade unionists. This purging and defection of reds from the labor movement in the ’50s was the single most important negative factor shaping the outlook of what would become the New Left. When young political activists, white and black, entered the political scene during the civil rights movement, they encountered a labor movement with no left wing sharing their views on racial oppression or U.S. militarism. The labor bureaucrats were militant anti-Communists who had gotten their posts by working hand in glove with the government in driving the reds out of the unions and were gung ho for all of U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars.
No surprise there, but it was not just the bureaucracy. When I got a union job in the late ’60s after the New Left finally became interested in the working class, there wasn’t anybody older than me in the unions who had ever been a leftist. So what developed among the New Left was a real petty-bourgeois, anti-working-class elitism. For them, “those workers” were all “bought off” with their high wages, good union jobs, fancy pensions. Today that seems like a joke, but that was the view at the time.
Two things really brought the McCarthy period to an end: the civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution. Castro and Che were not seen as hardline Stalinists. Well, originally they weren’t—they were petty-bourgeois nationalists. And, indeed, young would-be leftists often identified with them against the U.S. on a democratic basis of “national liberation” rather than on the basis of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact well-publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly outmoded as industrialization in the South around World War II drew blacks into the working class and the Southern cities. By the late 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society. It’s not as well known, but by the early ’60s there were huge demos in the North, too: boycotts of segregated schools, rent strikes against ghetto slumlords, protests against segregated housing and racist police brutality. These culminated in the late ’60s in a series of massive ghetto rebellions.
Radicalization of Civil Rights Militants
The first group I ever joined was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963-64 in San Francisco. I participated in various mass demos protesting job discrimination against black people—at the Sheraton Palace, at Lucky’s (now Albertsons) and on Auto Row. In retrospect, that last one seems kind of weird—for the right of blacks to be car salesmen? But these demos were huge, drawing thousands. The following summer, I decided to go down South for the second Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Summer. This was the year after civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney had been killed, but being 19 I wasn’t as fearful as I probably should have been.
When they tell the official story of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King was the undisputed leader whom everyone loved and followed. It’s not so! King’s vaunted nonviolence was really a way of trying to keep the movement liberal, respectable, reformist. His whole strategy was to appeal to the liberal Northern establishment to, please, help out black people. Pressuring the Democrats was to remain King’s consistent strategy throughout his life.
Seeking to refurbish its image, the bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal equality in the South. At the same time, the federal government sought to restrain the most militant elements of the civil rights movement and usually did little to prevent the violent suppression of civil rights activists by Southern authorities, often collaborating in that suppression. This could not help but bring the question of the class nature of the capitalist state, as an organ of repression, to the fore. SNCC was formed under the auspices of MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After some hard experiences in the South with the cops, Klan and Democrats (who ran the South, after all), SNCC moved to the left, increasingly frustrated with and eventually hostile to the Northern liberal establishment—and King himself.
When I was there in the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles Watts upheaval broke out. Martin Luther King said that “as powerful a police force as possible” should be brought to L.A. to stop it. SNCC activists on my project cursed King for that. SNCC had broken with mainstream liberalism but had not yet definitely latched onto black nationalism. I could see that SNCC was having a total political identity crisis, but I sure didn’t have the answers. By this time, I hated the Democrats and was convinced that racial oppression was integral to the capitalist system and wasn’t going to go away just because black people could ride at the front of the bus. So I decided I should spend some time in Berkeley checking out the socialist groups.
The early years of the 1960s in the South were a key moment. If the SWP, which had been the Trotskyist party, had remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern civil rights movement, it may well have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those young black militants who eventually became black nationalists. That would have really changed the political scene. But by the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and tailed non-proletarian class forces. Domestically, it abstained from the Southern civil rights movement. Internationally, the SWP was uncritically cheerleading for the petty-bourgeois radical-nationalist leadership of the Cuban Revolution.
Trotskyists should have been calling for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state and, at the same time, calling on the Cuban proletariat to establish a regime of workers democracy by sweeping away the Castroite bureaucracy through a political revolution. But the SWP refused to criticize Castro. These two questions—Cuba and the black question—which had decisively broken open the McCarthy period, were exactly the two questions the SWP couldn’t deal with. In the process, they abandoned the centrality of the working class and the necessity of building Trotskyist parties in every country.
It is during this period that the Spartacist League originated as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the SWP, fighting on these two questions. In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” the RT wrote: “We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” After being expelled from the SWP, the small Spartacist forces intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North. Look at Spartacist Bound Volume No. 1—the SL, founded in 1966, was intervening on the black question all the time and calling on militants to break with the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans a capitalist party. The call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. In the mid ’60s, Spartacists were arguing the right line but lacked the numbers and, more importantly, the acquired political authority to decisively influence the internal factional struggles in SNCC. So the crucial moment was lost.
The Rise of Students for a Democratic Society
I could say a lot more about the civil rights movement, but I want to talk about how this massive ferment influenced the student movement. The most organized expression of the New Left was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Of course, that sentence is sort of a contradiction in terms given how deliberately disorganized SDS was: participatory democracy, every chapter going its own way, etc. Restarted in 2006, the new SDS is a liberal campus group that combines parochial campus activism with Democratic Party lesser-evilism. We have an excellent article about SDS headlined “From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again” (WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The original SDS went from liberalism to radicalism; the new group is running the film in reverse.
In well-publicized interviews, leaders of the new SDS push the myth that Communism destroyed the first SDS and call for such leftists to stay out of SDS. WWP and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” and more about these reformists’ toothless politics and their own lesser-evilism. Here in L.A., during the 2008 election we saw FRSO as part of SDS busily holding a “no to McCain” campaign rally at UCLA, which in plain English meant “yes to Obama.” The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from.
The original SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and labor movement. Populated by “State Department socialists,” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members Victor and Walter Reuther—the labor traitors who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s—and Sidney Hook. Once close to the CP, Hook turned repentant and became a staunch supporter of American “democracy.” Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union. These types are the ones for whom the term “CIA socialist” or “State Department socialist” was invented.
But the youth were getting a little restive. In 1960, the Student League for Industrial Democracy changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society and began to grow. In 1962, in response to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—a failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution—SDSers posed the question: “Whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways?” Obviously not! The SDS 1962 Port Huron Statement took tiny steps away from anti-Communism, opining that “the American Military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.”
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. I recommend Kirkpatrick Sale’s book SDS (1973) if you want to know all the details. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ” (a reference to Lyndon Johnson) instead of the official Democratic Party slogan: “All the way with LBJ.”
But the times they were a-changin’, as the song by Bob Dylan said. In 1964 at UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement broke out in response to the administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. What happened was that a young activist from CORE, Jack Weinberg, had set up an unauthorized literature table in Sproul Plaza. For this terrible crime, he was arrested. I will just comment here that considering all the trouble and hassle the SL has these days in setting up literature tables on campuses for our sub drive, one has to conclude that not too much has changed!
In this case, 3,000 students converged on Sproul Plaza and blocked in the police car. For the next 32 hours, the police car served as an impromptu podium for those defending the right of students to “free speech.” Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown—the father of the current governor—FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
A funny addendum here: Jack Weinberg, the guy in the police car, was the one who said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I don’t know if right then, but certainly within a few years, he was in the International Socialists (the predecessor to the thoroughly reformist ISO). And by 1984 on the 20th anniversary of the FSM, the SF Chronicle reported that Weinberg and Mario Savio, the best-known leader of the FSM, were both registered Democrats. So they sure weren’t trustworthy when they got older.
The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Left
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest to the moral outrage felt by student activists opposing American imperialist aims. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from LID entirely.
Now, I didn’t go to Berkeley from ’64 to ’68. Maybe I should have, but when I had to make my choice in ’62, Berkeley was politically dead as a doornail. I viewed Berkeley as huge and soulless, so I went to a small liberal arts school in New Mexico instead. But this did give me a sense of how quickly things can change, especially among the petty bourgeoisie. One minute Berkeley was all bouffant hairdos and “frat rats.” The next time I went there on summer vacation, it was a hotbed of student activism and everybody looked like a hippie. And the people were all the same, I could see that.
That first SDS-organized national antiwar march took place in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1965. It got 20-25,000 people, which totally amazed SDS. At the invitation of the SDS leaders, the rally was addressed by two liberal U.S. Senators. One of them denounced the “expansionist” policies of Communist China and called for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. A few years later, it would be inconceivable for SDS to invite Democratic Senators to their antiwar protests, and anyone who spoke of Chinese expansionism would have been booed off the stage.
Let me comment first that many leftists and liberals claim that the Vietnam antiwar movement ended the war in Vietnam. No way! The Vietnamese won on the battlefield—that’s what ended the war. But this kind of liberal-pacifist antiwar movement has nevertheless become the model for all of the reformist left’s subsequent antiwar demos. If you don’t believe me, go to any PSL/ANSWER demo, where you will find exactly these same reformist politics.
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, there was another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend it to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans such as “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution! No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
The Split in the Antiwar Movement
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” After all, the liberal establishment, including the Democratic president Johnson, backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam. This drove the radical student movement to the left and opened it to revolutionary politics. Soon those who had been calling for “part of the way with LBJ” were chanting: “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Here is a description of SDS circa 1967 from the novel Vida by Marge Piercy, who had been in SDS and is a bourgeois feminist. She refers to the group SAW, but I believe what she is describing is SDS:
“Every person in SAW had their own politics—anarchist, liberal, communist, democratic-socialist, syndicalist, Catholic-worker, Maoist, Schactmanite [sic], Spartacist—but what mattered was the politics of the act.… Everyone was accommodated in the vast lumbering movement. Vida was content to be of the New Left, without a fancier label. All that hairsplitting—that was what the poor Old Lefties had sat around doing in dreary meetings in the fifties nobody else attended while the resident FBI agent took notes. Now they knew that everything must be done and they must speak to everyone, through the poetry of the act, through the theatre of the streets,… SAW was a fiercely, totally democratic organization, open to anyone with or without the low dues, with an elected leadership usually galloping in one direction while the members marched in another. Chapters did as they pleased and projects happened because enough people did them. Program was hotly debated and then often coldly ignored, unless it really was up from the grass roots. SAW was uncontrollable and lush as a vacant-lot jungle.”
Spartacists sporadically intervened into SDS in the mid ’60s, and all I can say is I don’t envy the comrade trying to do an intervention into that “lush jungle.”
Now, there was a left-right split in the antiwar movement just as there had been in the civil rights movement, where MLK had been the right wing. SDS was the left here, and the right wing was the CP and the once-Trotskyist SWP. While the CP continued to preach its class-collaborationist program of electoral support to lesser-evil Democrats, the SWP became the main organizer of peace crawls designed to cater to liberal bourgeois spokesmen—that is, popular-frontist, class-collaborationist formations based on a liberal bourgeois program. One thing that the SWP was adamant on was that these rallies and demos absolutely could not call for the Vietnamese’s military victory. Oh no, that would upset the Democrats—so the slogans had to be kept to “Out now” or “Bring our boys home!”
As the war dragged on, there were some Democrats who thought the U.S. was spending too much on napalm and Agent Orange for Vietnam when it should be building its nuclear arsenal to fight the real danger, the Soviet Union. So Democrats became a regular feature of these antiwar rallies. Often these now-antiwar Democrats (bourgeois defeatists) were viciously anti-labor. You can easily imagine how violently anti-Spartacist the SWP would get when the SL called for “Bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement” and “Labor strikes against the war!”
This came to a head at a 1971 conference in New York City. SL comrades attempted to put forward a motion to exclude ruling-class politicians from the conference. They said, this is an antiwar conference—how can you have representatives of the ruling class that’s prosecuting the war? When the SWP would not entertain the motion, our comrades together with supporters of PL and SDS heckled Democratic Senator Vance Hartke during his speech. Comrades chanted, “Labor strikes against the war” when Victor Reuther began his speech. The SL didn’t attempt to drive them off the stage or anything like that. In response, the SWP went ballistic and sent their goon squad on a vicious assault against the protesters, some of whom were beaten, with one PL member reportedly thrown through a glass door. Assisting the SWP thugs were the minions of Tim Wohlforth’s Workers League, now the Socialist Equality Party.
But it wasn’t just the SL versus the SWP. Literally thousands of radicalized students were repelled by the SWP’s reformism and pacifism. I came back to the Bay Area in late 1968, and for one of those Spring Mobilizations (in ’69 or ’70) I heard that New Leftists in Berkeley were setting up an “anti-imperialist coalition” to march in the SWP-initiated peace demo. This sounded great to me. Like many others, I hated the “give peace a chance,” liberal, pro-American quality of these demos. I had decided that “our boys” were the ones fighting on the other side, and I was rooting for them. When this anti-imperialist contingent marched up, it looked like the SWP marshals were going to physically exclude us. But I guess that they decided that the contingent was too large and doing so would create too much of a scene.
The SWP sure gave Trotskyism a bad name. I identified Trotskyism with the worst kind of liberal reformism. They were always chanting to keep it “peaceful, legal.” My friends and I were chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” This was a two-edged development, though, because let’s be clear that we were calling not only for military but also political support to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Vietnam.
By 1968, SDS had hundreds of campus chapters around the country. There was massive ferment on the campuses, particularly after the student strike, building occupation and massive arrests at Columbia University protesting racism and the Vietnam War in the spring of 1968. In his book, Sale gives a quote from the bourgeois press of this time on SDS:
“These youngsters, organized in the Students for a Democratic Society, (S.D.S.), are acting out a revolution—not a protest, and not a rebellion, but an honest-to-God revolution. They see themselves as the Che Guevaras of our society, and their intention is to seize control of the university, destroy its present structure, and establish the ‘liberated’ university as the redoubt from which to storm and overthrow ‘bourgeois’ America. This is what they say they are doing—they are the least conspiratorial and most candid of revolutionists—and this is what in fact they are doing.”
Noting that this gave SDS a whole lot of credit, Sale goes on to say: “The most ardently resistant SDSer couldn’t have put it better—and even he wouldn’t have been so convinced.”
Then there was the Democratic National Convention in fall 1968. Most of the protesters opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Sale describes, SDS activists rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDS members propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine. It had a huge impact nationally.
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Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant
Part Two
We print below the second part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles. Part One appeared in WV No. 990 (11 November).
At the same time that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was growing, the ghettos were exploding. With the civil rights movement unable to change the hellish conditions of black life in the North, there was a rising level of frustrated expectations. There were a whole series of ghetto upheavals in the mid to late ’60s that were repressed with extreme police/National Guard violence. Young militants were breaking from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism of MLK. The Black Panthers (BPP) were the best of a generation of young black activists who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. Unfortunately, the Panthers, along with most of the New Left, rejected the organized working class as the agent of black freedom and socialist revolution. The Panthers looked to black ghetto youth as the vanguard of black struggle.
The underlying ideology of the Panthers was that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary. But in fact the lumpenproletariat in the ghetto, removed from the means of production, has no real social power. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them more vulnerable to state repression. They faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Panther and talented journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” has been on death row on frame-up charges for decades now. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party (CP), its lawyers and concomitantly the Democratic Party.
But let me give some quotes from Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s speech to an antiwar demo in San Francisco in the fall of 1969. It says something that by ’69 and ’70 the speakers at these mass marches included a Black Panther and the Democratic mayor of SF. Hilliard says he had been warned by the BPP leadership not to curse and not to get mad because that would alienate the white liberals, but as you can see he did both. Like Hilliard, I usually try not to curse in speeches, but I will read this quote as it appeared in Phil Foner’s The Black Panthers Speak (1995):
“There’s too many American flags out here and our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, says that the American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism.…
“So then, we would like to ask the American people do they want peace in Vietnam. Well, do you? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Do you want peace in the Black communities? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Well you goddamned sure can’t get it with no guitars, you sure can’t get it demonstrating. The only way you’re going to get peace in Vietnam is to withdraw the oppressive forces from the Black communities right here in Babylon.”
As the crowd became restive and some started to boo, Hilliard got mad:
“We say down with the American fascist society. Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the m-----f----r. Later for all the pigs of the power structure. Later for all the people out here that don’t want to hear me curse.… Because Richard Nixon is an evil man. This is the m-----f----r that unleashed the counter-insurgent teams upon the BPP.… This is the man that sends his vicious murderous dogs out into the Black community.… We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any m-----f----r that stands in the way of our freedom. We ain’t here for no goddamned peace, because we know that we can’t have no peace because this country was built on war. And if you want peace you got to fight for it.”
While the liberals were booing, my friends and I were cheering his opposition to pacifism. The Panthers had become broadly popular. There was a real convergence between the white left and the black left. Black people are not a separate nation but an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom as a race-color caste. Hilliard was subsequently brought up on charges for threatening the life of the president. Later the charges were dropped—perhaps because it was obvious that no one plans an assassination attempt in a speech in front of upward of 150,000 people in Golden Gate Park!
The Limits of Student Radicalism
Just as the Panthers came up against the dead end of their lumpen vanguard strategy, SDS came up against the dead end of student vanguardism. As I said earlier, the New Left had been very anti-working-class. Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, who considered himself a classical Marxist, toured the U.S. in 1966, speaking at Vietnam antiwar protests. He was appalled by the intellectual elitism he found among young radicals who considered themselves anti-capitalist. Deutscher said:
“Do you really take such a contemptuous view of your working classes that you think that you alone are so sensitive or so noble as to be dissatisfied with this degrading society and that they cannot find it in themselves to be dissatisfied? Do you really believe that they are so much more prone, and by nature conditioned, to be corrupted by the meretricious advantages of this war-flourishing capitalism than you are?”
Well, that is pretty much what many did think. Deutscher also said something to the effect that he would exchange all the peace marches for one good dockworkers strike. Most of the New Left didn’t understand that, either.
What happened was that the very success of the student strikes demonstrated their impotence. In the spring of 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops in South Vietnam into neighboring Cambodia. In the ensuing campus protests, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State. Ten days later, cops killed two black students at Jackson State. Of course, the second murderous assault didn’t get as much coverage, black life being cheap for the bourgeoisie, then as now. These events triggered protests involving four and a half million students—half the U.S. student population—and many colleges remained shut through the rest of the semester. But this did not stop the Vietnam War.
If this protest demonstrated the impotence of “student power,” the May-June 1968 events in France demonstrated the actual power of the working class. Leftist student protest there triggered a workers general strike that shook the de Gaulle regime to its core. France was engulfed in a pre-revolutionary crisis that the French CP barely managed to stabilize and sell out. The incipient workers revolution in France reaffirmed in real life the revolutionary potential of the working class. This made a lot of us think twice, especially since there was a strike wave in the U.S. in ’69 and ’70—a General Electric strike, a nationwide postal wildcat strike (the first major strike against the federal government), a Midwest Teamsters wildcat and a General Motors strike.
Needless to say, this was not news to the Spartacist League. As Marxists, the SL understands that the motor force of history is the class struggle—today between the capitalist class and the proletariat. The capitalists own the means of production like the land, mines and factories, while the workers have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Because the working class turns the wheels of production, it has the social power and the organization to overthrow the capitalist rulers. But the working class has to understand its power in order to use it. For that you need a revolutionary vanguard party that can bring communist consciousness to the proletariat.
A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of black people. The SL fights for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism: the working class must fight against all instances of racist oppression and discrimination, while at the same time genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through socialist revolution that smashes capitalism. There will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom.
Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized power and created a workers state based on collectivized property and soviets (workers councils). The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the many nations oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education.
The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations of the time. “Black and Red” is the American bourgeoisie’s greatest fear.
The SL attempted to convey some of this understanding in various leaflets written at the time and in sporadic interventions into SDS. In 1967, as young radicals turned to confrontation with the cops, the SL wrote: “Personal sacrifice can never substitute for a mass movement…this does not mean reverting to the simple pacifist humanitarianism of the official peace movement in order to get middle-class liberals on the picket line. What it does mean is tapping the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American society; the black ghetto uprisings and rash of militant strikes indicate the depth and explosiveness of this discontent.”
The SL fought for a one-day general strike and raised the slogan: “Labor strikes against the war!” The SL also controversially opposed the draft resistance campaign and insisted that if drafted, young radicals should go. In a position paper put forward in SDS, we argued that the voluntary purging of radicals from the army would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. We said that young militants should go with working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation in the army.
Stalinism Versus Trotskyism
Another question that the SL took up in this period was the question of Maoism-Stalinism. The New Left didn’t want to deal with these old, musty debates, but these questions come after you. Stalinism versus Trotskyism, the nature of the workers states—these questions cannot be avoided. SDS liberals of the mid 1960s were poring over Mao’s “Little Red Book” of quotations by 1968.
One thing that caused this change was the tremendous authority of the Vietnamese Stalinists. They looked like they were going to and then did beat U.S. imperialism, and they made no bones about being old-line Stalinists. Since Ho Chi Minh didn’t claim to have his own ideology, it was Maoism that was the beneficiary of New Leftists looking for some kind of “new” Marxism that would be more radical than old-line Soviet Stalinism and its practice of “peaceful coexistence” with U.S. imperialism, which meant betraying social and class struggles internationally. China was under the gun of U.S. imperialism, so the Chinese Communist Party leadership was talking more left at that moment.
On a sociological level, some of the Stalinists in the American Communist Party who hadn’t simply quit to become liberals became Maoists—for example, Progressive Labor (PL)—and influenced the New Left. Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration but rather was what we called “Khrushchevism under the gun.” (Khrushchev was the Soviet premier at the time.) Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, the SL exposed the repeated attempts by the Chinese Maoists to form a reactionary anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes were raining death and destruction on Vietnam.
In the article “NLF Program: Fetter on Victory” (Spartacist supplement, May 1968) about the National Liberation Front (NLF) the SL wrote:
“There has been an understandable but nevertheless unfortunate tendency on the part of the American left to idealize Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the NLF, and for radicals to turn their correct demands for military victory against imperialism and its puppets into uncritical political support for these leaders and their politics. This is a grave error, for not only do these would-be revolutionaries not understand the deformities of those they support—and are extremely likely to feel personally betrayed when the inevitable occurs—but are likely to carry over the Stalinist hallmarks of class-collaboration and murderous opportunism into the American revolutionary movement. It is vitally necessary to keep in mind that Ho Chi Minh and his co-thinkers have already sold out the Vietnamese revolution twice before.”
This article also presciently predicted that in the best of circumstances the “NLF will simply bypass its program and will then set out to make a limited, distorted and bureaucratic revolution from the top.” That is exactly what they did. And this is also why the SL began to raise my favorite slogan of all time: “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” This slogan cut not only against liberal pacifism at home but also against the limits of Vietnamese Stalinism. Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos.
And that point from the Spartacist article, about the carrying over of class collaborationism and opportunism into the American movement, was so true. One of my old friends went to a conference in Vancouver in ’67 or ’68 and met with Vietnamese women, not only women in the CP of Vietnam but also women combatants in the NLF of South Vietnam. Of course, she was very impressed by the presence of these women who were actually fighting U.S. imperialism with gun in hand. And, of course, the Americans wanted advice on how to build an American revolutionary movement.
But the Vietnamese kept steering the conversation away from that subject. Instead, all the Americans got were reformist clichés about building the biggest possible movement on the broadest possible basis—watch out when people start telling you that, it’s code for class collaboration—and helping elect whomever would help end the war, i.e., the Democrats, who else. My friend was very disappointed by this, as were the people like myself whom she told this to. We couldn’t figure it out and filed it away as one of those things that you better not think about too hard.
The New Left Turns to the Working Class
I do want to give one example of the New Left meets the working class from my own history. In 1969, I was in a women’s liberation group, and we were so impressed by the working-class struggle in France and so frustrated by student struggles and peace marches that we decided that we had to get out of Berkeley and organize the workers. We got together a group of men and women, husbands, boyfriends, friends in the movement (as it was called). We were planning on organizing white workers because we were very much imbued with the black nationalist idea of polyvanguardism—that blacks should organize blacks, whites should organize whites, and so on.
We did a demographic study of the Bay Area and decided that the place where we could find the most young white workers was Hayward. What a boring suburb, but we all moved there, 20 or 30 of us. Later, one of our people got a job at the General Motors auto plant in Fremont, and we decided that we would start a radical caucus there. We thought you had to do something flashy to get working people’s attention, start off with a bang. So we printed up a leaflet about the birthday of BPP leader Huey Newton, which we thought was very appropriate to jolt white people out of their racism. And there were a lot of blacks working there, too, who probably did know who Huey Newton was.
We took the plant’s tour train with the leaflets stuffed under our coats. At a pre-arranged moment, we leapt off and ran around like maniacs, handing out leaflets and throwing them in the cars. Whether the workers were convinced by our politics, I don’t know, but they thought it was wild. The bosses stopped every assembly line in the plant and proceeded to chase us around. Workers hid us and showed us where to go. They figured that as long as we were there the lines would stay down. Assembly line work is hard and boring, and we were an interesting diversion that had never been seen before. It took a long time before management could round us up. They didn’t even think to stop us when we announced that we were leaving and walked out and got in our cars.
Meanwhile, during this exact period in ’69, SDS was splitting due to the real inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late 1960s. In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of PL’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When this didn’t work, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference.
The SL remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS due to its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. The SL referred to PL, more leftist at this time than now, as “Trotskyists with a prefrontal lobotomy.” The SL issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (reprinted in “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008). PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice.
The SL’s Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the 1917 Russian Revolution and Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of its bureaucratic degeneration.
The Futile Strategy of the Weathermen
Even in Hayward, we felt the effects of the SDS split. We had been organizing the working class for at least six months and had put out a ton of leaflets. Actually, there was more interest in our politics than you might imagine, the working class being very restive. We did some high school organizing at a working-class high school in Hayward. After passing out some leaflets protesting the war in Vietnam, we stood outside the school with a bullhorn and shouted: “Come out of your prisons!” The most surprising part was that several hundred did, and we led a march all over Hayward.
But some of the people in the Hayward Collective began to feel that the working class just wasn’t responding sufficiently. So they got ahold of the Weathermen, who were part of the anti-PL side of the split in SDS. The Weathermen—named, I believe, after a Bob Dylan song which includes the line: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—had a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state. They practiced terrorism in the name of Third World nationalism.
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, the Weather Underground would conduct acts of individual terrorism that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism but a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to government crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile. At the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. While politically opposing the Weathermen, the SL fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” The rest of the left turned its back on them.
The Weathermen came to visit the Hayward Collective to win us to their variety of Third World nationalism, arguing that the American working class was totally bought off and could never make a socialist revolution. They presented their views, and then they sang us some songs. You think I’m kidding. Believe me, I’m not. First they sang, “We all live in a Weatherman machine” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.” Then they sang “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather” sort of captured their perspective. Those of us who believed in the revolutionary potential of the American working class decided maybe our theme song should be the Creedence song “Lodi” about the small, remote California town, as in “stuck in Lodi again” boring. This forum seems to include a lot of discussion about music—maybe it should have a soundtrack to go with it.
Since there was a minority of us who were not convinced, several others from our collective and I went to meet Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen who was on the “Ten Most Wanted” list in the U.S. I had seen her “Wanted” picture up in the local post office. We were supposed to meet on Telegraph Avenue in front of Cody’s Bookstore. Dohrn was late, and everyone was worried. She claimed that she had been up the street stealing a pair of earrings. Meeting in such a public place as Telegraph Avenue was dumb enough, but even I thought that was crazy when you were underground. But it was all a part of the “outlaw” image.
Finally, we sat down to meet, and she asked me what I was going to do when the North Koreans sailed in to Puget Sound, presumably to take over since the American working class was supposed to be so bought off. Perhaps not answering this on a very deep level—and I was kind of intimidated since she was a big shot—I just said that I didn’t think that was going to happen. She said that just showed what an American-chauvinist racist I was. So I didn’t join the Weathermen, and Dohrn and her hubby Bill Ayers eventually went back to Chicago, where they hang out in liberal circles and know such unsavory people as Barack Obama.
Breaking with Feminism
The women, two others and myself, who didn’t join the Weathermen then began a sort of feminist working-class organizing collective in East Oakland together with women we had known from the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group and others. Why we became more feminist, since the Hayward Collective certainly did not split along gender lines, I’m not quite sure. In any case, we had our East Oakland Women’s Collective, and we worked with other women to set up a citywide Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, which probably included a couple hundred women over the years. I was among those who went to work in a glass-bottle-blowing factory in East Oakland, and others went to work as operators at the phone company. There are a million more ridiculous stories from this period—“socialist feminists meet the working class”—but you don’t want to be here until midnight.
At the phone company, we saw in living color where feminism led—that is, right across the class line. We were radical feminists with a working-class bent, but the bottom line is that Marxism and feminism are counterposed. Feminism is a bourgeois ideology that asserts that the main division in society is between men and women rather than class versus class. Its logic is that all women have more in common with each other than they do with men, regardless of class. Feminism is politically incapable of resolving the most basic aspects of women’s oppression because it functions entirely within the framework of bourgeois rule. In contrast, Marxism looks to the power of the working class as the motor force for social progress. The private property system, backed by the capitalist state, and the family are the most basic and deeply intertwined aspects of class society. They cannot be “reformed” away. The inescapable conclusion is that the entire capitalist system must go.
Our collective was working through the Operators Defense Committee, which featured an eclectic combination of New Left, Maoist and workerist politics, with a heavy overlay of feminism and male exclusionism. But we were quite shaken up when there was a strike of electrical workers, who were mostly men, at the phone company. We saw that many of the women whom we had helped to recruit to women’s consciousness were recruiting others to cross the picket lines, using all the feminist arguments we had told them. “Well, we’re more oppressed, what have they ever done to fight for women’s rights? So, therefore, it’s OK to cross the picket line.” We were horrified. We were somewhat ambiguous on unions, but we knew one thing: you never cross a picket line. We had been following a feminist strategy of organizing women around their own oppression, and it didn’t lead them to a broader understanding or socialist consciousness. It led to strikebreaking.
There was a Spartacist-supported caucus in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) called the Militant Action Caucus (MAC). The MAC was based on class-struggle politics and a series of transitional demands, which are designed to link current consciousness to the necessity of the conquest of power by the proletariat. Over a period of a couple of years, culminating in the 1971 national CWA strike, we were able to test out in action our feminist strategy versus the revolutionary strategy of the SL and the class-struggle politics of the MAC. Having had some negative experiences with other groups like PL and the Revolutionary Union (predecessor of the Revolutionary Communist Party), I came grudgingly to the conclusion that only the Trotskyists of the SL seemed to know how to do working-class organizing.
Finally, even in the feminist Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, the dreaded question of Maoism versus Trotskyism came up when we helped set up what was essentially a Marxist study group. With some push from women around the SL, Trotskyist works like The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs were included as readings. What an eye-opener! Stalinism led to the bloody defeat of the Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s and betrayed many other revolutionary opportunities, as did Maoism. All that Maoist class collaborationism, the belief that in the underdeveloped countries you should work with your own bourgeoisie—whether called the “bloc of four classes” or the “united front against imperialism”—could no longer be ignored. Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution really is the only alternative to placing confidence in the backward, imperialist- dependent bourgeoisie of an oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.
A bunch of us East Oakland women, after hard, sometimes bruising, political discussions with the SL, decided in the summer of 1972 that we needed to join an internationalist Leninist vanguard party, embodied, at least in its nucleus, in the SL. Our eclectic wanderings on the path to Leninism are mainly important in the context of the SL’s call in 1969 for revolutionary regroupment. Here the Spartacist League called for “political and theoretical polarization of the ostensibly revolutionary groupings, leading ultimately to a left-communist regroupment of all organizations, factions, tendencies and individuals who stand on an anti-revisionist Marxist program, toward the formation of a Leninist vanguard party.”
What was proposed was not a non-aggression pact but, if anything, an intensification of political struggle. This perspective embodied the Leninist conception that a party is built through a series of splits and fusions. It worked. The SL tripled in size between 1971 and 1974, regrouping with subjectively revolutionary elements breaking from Maoism, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) reformism and New Leftism: for example, the Communist Working Collective of L.A., the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, elements of the Leninist Faction of the SWP and the Mass Strike group in Boston, as well as assorted feminists and former black nationalists, among others.
Today is not 1972, and there aren’t many subjectively revolutionary organizations or groupings around. I don’t think we are going to regroup with “Occupy Wall Street,” and there don’t seem to be any inchoate revolutionary tendencies in the International Socialist Organization or Workers World Party. Recruitment of thoughtful, unusual individuals is the order of the day, and it is hard mental work. But things change, capitalism breeds class struggle. However, the precondition for a socialist revolution is a party. As Trotsky said in Lessons of October (1924): “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” We urge you to join us in the struggle to build the party necessary to lead international proletarian revolution.
Showing posts with label workers government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label workers government. Show all posts
Monday, December 5, 2011
From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.
Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Democrats Unleash Cop Crackdown
Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
For Socialist Revolution!
NOVEMBER 21—Over the last two weeks, a wave of brutal police attacks has descended on Occupy protesters and encampments across the nation, including surprise nighttime raids, unrelenting pepper spray and baton beatings and hundreds of arrests. Two days after riot police dismantled the Zuccotti Park encampment, during a November 17 “Day of Action” the NYPD left protesters bloodied and beaten and detained over 200, among them leaders of the large Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a city councilman and at least 26 journalists. Billionaire New York mayor Bloomberg unleashed the cops en masse and then praised them for their “restraint.” We demand all the charges against Occupy protesters be dropped immediately!
Crackdowns on encampments in Oakland, Portland, Denver and other cities—launched under the pretext of supposed health and safety hazards—were carried out overwhelmingly by Democratic mayors in a coordinated effort to shut down these popular protests. So-called “progressive” Democrat Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, admitted to participating in a conference call with officials from other cities nationwide to discuss how to disperse the encampments. Providing a grotesque justification for the Oakland sweep, Quan singled out “anarchist groups who have been looking for a confrontation with the police.”
Amid skyrocketing tuition costs and school budget cuts, Occupy protests have also spread to the universities and come up against the administration and its campus cop thugs. When students at UC Berkeley were attempting to set up an encampment on November 9, police moved in with nightsticks, brutally clubbing protesters who were chanting “Stop beating students!” Graphic video taken on November 18, after cops dismantled the encampment at UC Davis, shows students seated with linked arms being pepper-sprayed directly in the face by police, resulting in several hospitalizations. In an open letter that same day to the chancellor, one faculty member noted: “When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats.”
The FBI and Homeland Security are reported to have assisted the local cops, with the Feds spotted staking out Occupy sites. Last week, federal immigration agents took custody of one protester who had been arrested by local police (while meditating!) during the November 14 raid on Occupy Oakland. A native of Mexico, Francisco Ramos Stierle faces the threat of being deported, as hundreds of thousands already have been, under Obama’s “Secure Communities” program. No deportation of Francisco Ramos Stierle!
Demonstrators across the country have been hit with charges ranging from disorderly conduct and resisting arrest to inciting a riot and assaulting police officers. Such charges are meant to intimidate anyone who would oppose the violence, poverty and exploitation that are endemic to the rule of capital. Despite the brutality against Occupy protesters, many still hold to the illusion that the cops are allies. In fact, it is the job description of the police to protect the profit system through organized violence.
These recurrent, naked displays of capitalist state repression against liberal but defiant protesters, students and veterans have generated widespread anger with the “powers that be.” Suffering the unmitigated effects of the economic crisis—i.e., the closure of schools, high unemployment and the slashing of social programs—many are expressing solidarity with a movement that at least appears to be doing something to protest such ravages. However, the Occupy protests do not in any way fundamentally challenge the workings of the capitalist order, which is the root cause of misery and inequality. Notwithstanding the movement’s insistence on having no demands at all, the program embodied in the protests is simple liberal reform.
The Centrality of the Working Class
As Marxists, we struggle to impart the understanding that the barbaric capitalist profit system cannot be reformed to benefit working people and the oppressed, but must be overthrown. The only way to assure jobs and decent living standards, including free quality medical care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting it in the hands of those whose labor makes society run, i.e., the working class.
The ubiquitous slogan of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—is based on a populist notion of the “people,” which ludicrously lumps together everyone besides a small, rich elite, the so-called “one percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with the managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people and religious leaders who preach obedience to authority.
The real, fundamental class division in capitalist society is that between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which owns the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines. The bourgeoisie, the group of fat cats that actually is a very small fraction of the “one percent,” makes the real decisions and reaps the profits by exploiting labor. The interests of these two main classes are entirely irreconcilable.
Uniquely, the international working class possesses the social power—derived from its ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding its labor—and collective interest to expropriate the bourgeoisie and reorganize society globally on a socialist basis. The heterogeneous intermediate social layers in the petty bourgeoisie—encompassing students, professionals and shopkeepers among others —has no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, will align either with the workers or against them. If the working-class leadership shows that it has the resolve and program to lead society out of its crisis, it can pull much of the petty bourgeoisie behind the workers in struggle.
There is a sense of solidarity with the working class among Occupy activists, but mainly the workers are seen as simply another victimized sector of the “99 percent.” On November 15, Occupy Los Angeles approved a proposal for a “port action” on December 12 that would include the occupation of “at least one facility owned by SSA Marine, a shipping company belonging to Goldman Sachs.” The motion said that this action “could be coordinated with a possible port shutdown by port truck drivers.” Twenty-six of these largely immigrant, and unorganized, workers were recently fired by the Australian-owned Toll Group transportation company for trying to organize with the Teamsters. Three days later, a November 18 Occupy Oakland General Assembly voted to expand the L.A. proposal. It called on “each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port” on December 12, emphasizing solidarity with the ongoing fight by longshoremen in Longview, Washington, against the union-busting attacks of the giant EGT grain conglomerate (see “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat,” WV No. 986, 16 September).
That these activists want to solidarize with labor is welcome. At the same time, thanks in large part to the betrayals of the trade-union bureaucrats, few if any in the Occupy movement have much sense of working-class struggle. Instead, protesters have been led to believe that solidarity with workers means activists setting up community pickets to shut down port operations. However well-intentioned, such actions do little to advance the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class not only to defend their own interests but to champion the cause of all the oppressed against the capitalist ruling class and its state. As was the case when thousands of demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland the night of November 2, the workers are relegated to the sidelines. Seeing the opportunity to allow the ranks to blow off some steam, the labor tops are happy to subsume the workers under the populist politics of the Occupy movement, politics that the bureaucrats themselves amply share.
An article in Socialist Worker (10 November), newspaper of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), argues that: “Many labor leaders have correctly seen Occupy as a key to a revival of the union movement.” On the contrary, the labor tops embrace the Occupy movement not to revive workers struggle but to divert workers’ discontent once again into advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. This was put baldly in a video statement by SEIU president Mary Kay Henry: “We agree, all across SEIU, that we need to stand for a 99 percent agenda and re-elect our president, Barack Obama, and that those two steps are on the same path…so that we can make the 2012 election about the agenda for the 99 percent.” For the unions to become instruments of militant struggle against the exploiters requires a leadership that will advance to the battle from the perspective of class war, not acceptance of capitalist exploitation and reliance on bourgeois politicians.
Democratic Party, Enemy of Workers and the Oppressed
The populism of the “99 percent” slogan boils down to the defense and extension of American capitalist “democracy.” A posting on the official Occupy Wall Street Web site following the police raid on Zuccotti Park proclaimed, “Facing the most brutal assault on our Democracy since 9-11, New Yorkers must once again stand as one!” This statement echoes the outlook of the American ruling class, which seized upon the September 11 attacks to push “national unity” jingoism. In calling on the population to “stand as one,” the goal of the capitalist rulers was to line up support for their imperialist wars of depredation abroad, while they launched anti-immigrant witchhunts and shredded civil liberties at home. This is the true face of American “democracy.” With the protests awash in such patriotism, it is no surprise that the ongoing imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be off the radar of the Occupy movement.
Always glomming on to anything calling itself a movement, the fake socialists have fully embraced the Occupy protests. Workers World Party honcho Larry Holmes absurdly hailed Occupy as a “fledgling revolution” (workers.org, 12 October), while the ISO has enthused over it for supposedly “transforming the political landscape in the United States” (socialistworker.org, 8 November). For the reformist left, Occupy is the latest vehicle for peddling their “fight the right” opportunism, which amounts to nothing other than promoting illusions in the other party of capitalist rule, the Democrats.
The U.S. ruling class has two primary ways of dealing with protest—state repression and political co-optation. Describing how the Occupy movement receives funding and support from key Democratic Party foundations and outfits, including MoveOn.org, Patrick Henningsen commented in an article in the London Guardian (15 November): “When the dust settles and it’s all said and done, millions of Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of ‘controlled opposition.’ In the end, the Occupy movement could easily end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were demonstrating against to begin with.”
Militant youth and workers seeking a solution to capitalism’s ills must draw the lessons of past struggles to avoid being caught in a revolving door of Democratic Party pressure politics. Mobilizing the power of the working class, independently from the parties of capital, is crucial to every struggle against imperialism, exploitation and the myriad forms of oppression under capitalism. A revolutionary workers party is the necessary instrument to weld together these struggles into the fight for proletarian power. Our task, as a small internationalist Marxist organization, is to fight for the understanding that the road to human freedom lies through socialist revolution.
Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Democrats Unleash Cop Crackdown
Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
For Socialist Revolution!
NOVEMBER 21—Over the last two weeks, a wave of brutal police attacks has descended on Occupy protesters and encampments across the nation, including surprise nighttime raids, unrelenting pepper spray and baton beatings and hundreds of arrests. Two days after riot police dismantled the Zuccotti Park encampment, during a November 17 “Day of Action” the NYPD left protesters bloodied and beaten and detained over 200, among them leaders of the large Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a city councilman and at least 26 journalists. Billionaire New York mayor Bloomberg unleashed the cops en masse and then praised them for their “restraint.” We demand all the charges against Occupy protesters be dropped immediately!
Crackdowns on encampments in Oakland, Portland, Denver and other cities—launched under the pretext of supposed health and safety hazards—were carried out overwhelmingly by Democratic mayors in a coordinated effort to shut down these popular protests. So-called “progressive” Democrat Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, admitted to participating in a conference call with officials from other cities nationwide to discuss how to disperse the encampments. Providing a grotesque justification for the Oakland sweep, Quan singled out “anarchist groups who have been looking for a confrontation with the police.”
Amid skyrocketing tuition costs and school budget cuts, Occupy protests have also spread to the universities and come up against the administration and its campus cop thugs. When students at UC Berkeley were attempting to set up an encampment on November 9, police moved in with nightsticks, brutally clubbing protesters who were chanting “Stop beating students!” Graphic video taken on November 18, after cops dismantled the encampment at UC Davis, shows students seated with linked arms being pepper-sprayed directly in the face by police, resulting in several hospitalizations. In an open letter that same day to the chancellor, one faculty member noted: “When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats.”
The FBI and Homeland Security are reported to have assisted the local cops, with the Feds spotted staking out Occupy sites. Last week, federal immigration agents took custody of one protester who had been arrested by local police (while meditating!) during the November 14 raid on Occupy Oakland. A native of Mexico, Francisco Ramos Stierle faces the threat of being deported, as hundreds of thousands already have been, under Obama’s “Secure Communities” program. No deportation of Francisco Ramos Stierle!
Demonstrators across the country have been hit with charges ranging from disorderly conduct and resisting arrest to inciting a riot and assaulting police officers. Such charges are meant to intimidate anyone who would oppose the violence, poverty and exploitation that are endemic to the rule of capital. Despite the brutality against Occupy protesters, many still hold to the illusion that the cops are allies. In fact, it is the job description of the police to protect the profit system through organized violence.
These recurrent, naked displays of capitalist state repression against liberal but defiant protesters, students and veterans have generated widespread anger with the “powers that be.” Suffering the unmitigated effects of the economic crisis—i.e., the closure of schools, high unemployment and the slashing of social programs—many are expressing solidarity with a movement that at least appears to be doing something to protest such ravages. However, the Occupy protests do not in any way fundamentally challenge the workings of the capitalist order, which is the root cause of misery and inequality. Notwithstanding the movement’s insistence on having no demands at all, the program embodied in the protests is simple liberal reform.
The Centrality of the Working Class
As Marxists, we struggle to impart the understanding that the barbaric capitalist profit system cannot be reformed to benefit working people and the oppressed, but must be overthrown. The only way to assure jobs and decent living standards, including free quality medical care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting it in the hands of those whose labor makes society run, i.e., the working class.
The ubiquitous slogan of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—is based on a populist notion of the “people,” which ludicrously lumps together everyone besides a small, rich elite, the so-called “one percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with the managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people and religious leaders who preach obedience to authority.
The real, fundamental class division in capitalist society is that between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which owns the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines. The bourgeoisie, the group of fat cats that actually is a very small fraction of the “one percent,” makes the real decisions and reaps the profits by exploiting labor. The interests of these two main classes are entirely irreconcilable.
Uniquely, the international working class possesses the social power—derived from its ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding its labor—and collective interest to expropriate the bourgeoisie and reorganize society globally on a socialist basis. The heterogeneous intermediate social layers in the petty bourgeoisie—encompassing students, professionals and shopkeepers among others —has no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, will align either with the workers or against them. If the working-class leadership shows that it has the resolve and program to lead society out of its crisis, it can pull much of the petty bourgeoisie behind the workers in struggle.
There is a sense of solidarity with the working class among Occupy activists, but mainly the workers are seen as simply another victimized sector of the “99 percent.” On November 15, Occupy Los Angeles approved a proposal for a “port action” on December 12 that would include the occupation of “at least one facility owned by SSA Marine, a shipping company belonging to Goldman Sachs.” The motion said that this action “could be coordinated with a possible port shutdown by port truck drivers.” Twenty-six of these largely immigrant, and unorganized, workers were recently fired by the Australian-owned Toll Group transportation company for trying to organize with the Teamsters. Three days later, a November 18 Occupy Oakland General Assembly voted to expand the L.A. proposal. It called on “each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port” on December 12, emphasizing solidarity with the ongoing fight by longshoremen in Longview, Washington, against the union-busting attacks of the giant EGT grain conglomerate (see “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat,” WV No. 986, 16 September).
That these activists want to solidarize with labor is welcome. At the same time, thanks in large part to the betrayals of the trade-union bureaucrats, few if any in the Occupy movement have much sense of working-class struggle. Instead, protesters have been led to believe that solidarity with workers means activists setting up community pickets to shut down port operations. However well-intentioned, such actions do little to advance the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class not only to defend their own interests but to champion the cause of all the oppressed against the capitalist ruling class and its state. As was the case when thousands of demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland the night of November 2, the workers are relegated to the sidelines. Seeing the opportunity to allow the ranks to blow off some steam, the labor tops are happy to subsume the workers under the populist politics of the Occupy movement, politics that the bureaucrats themselves amply share.
An article in Socialist Worker (10 November), newspaper of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), argues that: “Many labor leaders have correctly seen Occupy as a key to a revival of the union movement.” On the contrary, the labor tops embrace the Occupy movement not to revive workers struggle but to divert workers’ discontent once again into advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. This was put baldly in a video statement by SEIU president Mary Kay Henry: “We agree, all across SEIU, that we need to stand for a 99 percent agenda and re-elect our president, Barack Obama, and that those two steps are on the same path…so that we can make the 2012 election about the agenda for the 99 percent.” For the unions to become instruments of militant struggle against the exploiters requires a leadership that will advance to the battle from the perspective of class war, not acceptance of capitalist exploitation and reliance on bourgeois politicians.
Democratic Party, Enemy of Workers and the Oppressed
The populism of the “99 percent” slogan boils down to the defense and extension of American capitalist “democracy.” A posting on the official Occupy Wall Street Web site following the police raid on Zuccotti Park proclaimed, “Facing the most brutal assault on our Democracy since 9-11, New Yorkers must once again stand as one!” This statement echoes the outlook of the American ruling class, which seized upon the September 11 attacks to push “national unity” jingoism. In calling on the population to “stand as one,” the goal of the capitalist rulers was to line up support for their imperialist wars of depredation abroad, while they launched anti-immigrant witchhunts and shredded civil liberties at home. This is the true face of American “democracy.” With the protests awash in such patriotism, it is no surprise that the ongoing imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be off the radar of the Occupy movement.
Always glomming on to anything calling itself a movement, the fake socialists have fully embraced the Occupy protests. Workers World Party honcho Larry Holmes absurdly hailed Occupy as a “fledgling revolution” (workers.org, 12 October), while the ISO has enthused over it for supposedly “transforming the political landscape in the United States” (socialistworker.org, 8 November). For the reformist left, Occupy is the latest vehicle for peddling their “fight the right” opportunism, which amounts to nothing other than promoting illusions in the other party of capitalist rule, the Democrats.
The U.S. ruling class has two primary ways of dealing with protest—state repression and political co-optation. Describing how the Occupy movement receives funding and support from key Democratic Party foundations and outfits, including MoveOn.org, Patrick Henningsen commented in an article in the London Guardian (15 November): “When the dust settles and it’s all said and done, millions of Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of ‘controlled opposition.’ In the end, the Occupy movement could easily end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were demonstrating against to begin with.”
Militant youth and workers seeking a solution to capitalism’s ills must draw the lessons of past struggles to avoid being caught in a revolving door of Democratic Party pressure politics. Mobilizing the power of the working class, independently from the parties of capital, is crucial to every struggle against imperialism, exploitation and the myriad forms of oppression under capitalism. A revolutionary workers party is the necessary instrument to weld together these struggles into the fight for proletarian power. Our task, as a small internationalist Marxist organization, is to fight for the understanding that the road to human freedom lies through socialist revolution.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Latest From The "Jobs Not Cuts" Website-National Week Of Actions-November 16-23 -In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square) 12PM-3PM
NATIONAL WEEK OF ACTIONS November 16-23
JOIN THE RALLY AND PROTEST:
JOBS NOT CUTS
In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square)12PM-3PM And Then We'll March on Kerry's Office
WE DEMAND:
Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid! No cuts to education and social services!
We need jobs, not cuts! Fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs for the millions unemployed.
Make Big Business Pay! For major tax hikes on the super-rich and corporations!
End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Slash Pentagon spending!
For the impressive growing list of endorsers check out
www.jobsnotcutsprotest.org
End the Dictatorship of Wall Street!
A Socialist Strategy to Build the Movement
All around the world attention has been drawn to the occupation of Wall Street. The protests have captured the imagination of thousands and inspired new occupations which are spreading across the U.S.
The police crackdown in New York, intended to intimidate this movement, completely failed to break our spirit. Now we are more determined than ever to fight. Inspired by the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and across North Africa, as well as the mass youth occupations in Spain and Greece, protesters have taken to the streets of New York and cities across the U.S. to stand up to the domination of Wall Street and Big Business over our lives.
Below the surface there is deep anger in U.S. society which only seemed to be getting a twisted expression in the right-wing lunacies of the Tea Party. But the mass movement in Wisconsin this spring, and now the occupation of Wall Street provide a glimpse of the enormous potential to turn that anger into a progressive social movement.
How can we take the struggle forward?
Many are occupying to "liberate space" in order to build a new, more equal and just community, hoping it will inspire others to follow. While the Wall Street occupation is an example of a community based on democracy, cooperation and solidarity, unfortunately the occupation alone will not be enough to build a mass movement capable of changing society.
Many have alluded to Egypt saying that a growing occupation with one basic de¬mand is how the dictator was overthrown. But in fact, the situation was more complicated than that. In the week before Egypt's dictator Mubarak was ousted, the working class entered the scene with decisive strike action paralyzing key parts of the economy.
The occupations in Spain and Greece have been much bigger than Wall Street, but they too need the more powerful forces of the working class to move into action in order to win. In Wisconsin, a huge occupation of the Capitol lasted for over 3 weeks and was at the center of mass demonstrations of the workers and youth. They could have won if that movement had moved toward a general strike of public sector workers to shut the state economy down.
Instead the Wisconsin battle was consciously derailed by the Democratic Party and the top union leadership by diverting the mass movement into a campaign to recall the Republicans from power in order to elect Democrats in their place. However, the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of Wall Street and Big Business, and they offer no solutions. We need an independent struggle which seeks to draw in the widest layers of workers and youth. United we have the power to withdraw our labor, stop "business as usual," and hit the banks, corporations and ruling elite where it counts.
We need to build up the confidence to take such bold measures. That's why Occupy Wall Street needs to call for mass demonstrations around key demands that address the burning issues that working people and youth face like jobs, education, healthcare and so on.
System Change
Not only the economy but society as a whole is in a deep crisis. Global capitalism is a failed system that cannot overcome the problems of growing inequality, poverty, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, and war which it creates. The movement has to challenge Wall Street and both parties of big business. We must stand up to their policies where they try to solve their economic crisis on our backs in order to maintain a system which only benefits the elite in the first place.
But we must also provide a clear alternative. We need to fundamentally trans¬form society to one not based on profit but instead on meeting everyone's basic human needs. The only real alternative to corporate greed and capitalism is democratic socialism where the economy, workplaces, and society as a whole are democratically run by and for the vast majority of people.
Join Socialist Alternative! We say:
Spread the occupations across the U.S. and into schools and communities. For systematic, mass campaigning to mobilize the widest layer of workers, young people and labor unions into struggle.
•Organize weekend mass demonstrations that call for: No cuts
to social services, A massive jobs creation program, Major tax
hikes on the super-rich and big business, End the wars, Slash
the military budget, and Defend union and democratic rights.
•Build up to the November 16-23 National Week of Action to combat the
Congressional Super Committee plan for $1.5 trillion in cuts to social
services. We demand jobs not cuts!
•Prepare to run independent anti-corporate, working-class candidates in
2012 to challenge the policies of the two parties of Wall Street as a first
step towards forming a new party of the 99%, a mass workers' party.
End the dictatorship of Wall Street! Bring the big banks that dominate the U.S. economy into public ownership and run them under the democratic management of elected representatives of their workers and the public. Compensation to be paid on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.
Build the movement to replace the rotten system of capitalism with democratic socialism and create a new society based on human need.
*****
Markin comment:
Some of the demands stated are supportable although the method of achieving them seems unclear since the march is on Congressional Committee of 12 member Senator John "War" (Iraq and Afghanistan support) Kerry's office. Do the sponsors really still expect that parliamentary action (nudging the Congress to do the right thing, or else) is the way forward after last summer's debacle? Christ, let's learn something right now. You only get what you fight for-and are ready to take. We created the wealth-let's take it back! Labor and the oppressed must rule!
JOIN THE RALLY AND PROTEST:
JOBS NOT CUTS
In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square)12PM-3PM And Then We'll March on Kerry's Office
WE DEMAND:
Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid! No cuts to education and social services!
We need jobs, not cuts! Fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs for the millions unemployed.
Make Big Business Pay! For major tax hikes on the super-rich and corporations!
End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Slash Pentagon spending!
For the impressive growing list of endorsers check out
www.jobsnotcutsprotest.org
End the Dictatorship of Wall Street!
A Socialist Strategy to Build the Movement
All around the world attention has been drawn to the occupation of Wall Street. The protests have captured the imagination of thousands and inspired new occupations which are spreading across the U.S.
The police crackdown in New York, intended to intimidate this movement, completely failed to break our spirit. Now we are more determined than ever to fight. Inspired by the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and across North Africa, as well as the mass youth occupations in Spain and Greece, protesters have taken to the streets of New York and cities across the U.S. to stand up to the domination of Wall Street and Big Business over our lives.
Below the surface there is deep anger in U.S. society which only seemed to be getting a twisted expression in the right-wing lunacies of the Tea Party. But the mass movement in Wisconsin this spring, and now the occupation of Wall Street provide a glimpse of the enormous potential to turn that anger into a progressive social movement.
How can we take the struggle forward?
Many are occupying to "liberate space" in order to build a new, more equal and just community, hoping it will inspire others to follow. While the Wall Street occupation is an example of a community based on democracy, cooperation and solidarity, unfortunately the occupation alone will not be enough to build a mass movement capable of changing society.
Many have alluded to Egypt saying that a growing occupation with one basic de¬mand is how the dictator was overthrown. But in fact, the situation was more complicated than that. In the week before Egypt's dictator Mubarak was ousted, the working class entered the scene with decisive strike action paralyzing key parts of the economy.
The occupations in Spain and Greece have been much bigger than Wall Street, but they too need the more powerful forces of the working class to move into action in order to win. In Wisconsin, a huge occupation of the Capitol lasted for over 3 weeks and was at the center of mass demonstrations of the workers and youth. They could have won if that movement had moved toward a general strike of public sector workers to shut the state economy down.
Instead the Wisconsin battle was consciously derailed by the Democratic Party and the top union leadership by diverting the mass movement into a campaign to recall the Republicans from power in order to elect Democrats in their place. However, the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of Wall Street and Big Business, and they offer no solutions. We need an independent struggle which seeks to draw in the widest layers of workers and youth. United we have the power to withdraw our labor, stop "business as usual," and hit the banks, corporations and ruling elite where it counts.
We need to build up the confidence to take such bold measures. That's why Occupy Wall Street needs to call for mass demonstrations around key demands that address the burning issues that working people and youth face like jobs, education, healthcare and so on.
System Change
Not only the economy but society as a whole is in a deep crisis. Global capitalism is a failed system that cannot overcome the problems of growing inequality, poverty, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, and war which it creates. The movement has to challenge Wall Street and both parties of big business. We must stand up to their policies where they try to solve their economic crisis on our backs in order to maintain a system which only benefits the elite in the first place.
But we must also provide a clear alternative. We need to fundamentally trans¬form society to one not based on profit but instead on meeting everyone's basic human needs. The only real alternative to corporate greed and capitalism is democratic socialism where the economy, workplaces, and society as a whole are democratically run by and for the vast majority of people.
Join Socialist Alternative! We say:
Spread the occupations across the U.S. and into schools and communities. For systematic, mass campaigning to mobilize the widest layer of workers, young people and labor unions into struggle.
•Organize weekend mass demonstrations that call for: No cuts
to social services, A massive jobs creation program, Major tax
hikes on the super-rich and big business, End the wars, Slash
the military budget, and Defend union and democratic rights.
•Build up to the November 16-23 National Week of Action to combat the
Congressional Super Committee plan for $1.5 trillion in cuts to social
services. We demand jobs not cuts!
•Prepare to run independent anti-corporate, working-class candidates in
2012 to challenge the policies of the two parties of Wall Street as a first
step towards forming a new party of the 99%, a mass workers' party.
End the dictatorship of Wall Street! Bring the big banks that dominate the U.S. economy into public ownership and run them under the democratic management of elected representatives of their workers and the public. Compensation to be paid on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.
Build the movement to replace the rotten system of capitalism with democratic socialism and create a new society based on human need.
*****
Markin comment:
Some of the demands stated are supportable although the method of achieving them seems unclear since the march is on Congressional Committee of 12 member Senator John "War" (Iraq and Afghanistan support) Kerry's office. Do the sponsors really still expect that parliamentary action (nudging the Congress to do the right thing, or else) is the way forward after last summer's debacle? Christ, let's learn something right now. You only get what you fight for-and are ready to take. We created the wealth-let's take it back! Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Friday, November 18, 2011
The Latest From The "Jobs Not Cuts" Website-National Week Of Actions-November 16-23 -In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square) 12PM-3PM
NATIONAL WEEK OF ACTIONS November 16-23
JOIN THE RALLY AND PROTEST:
JOBS NOT CUTS
In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square)12PM-3PM And Then We'll March on Kerry's Office
WE DEMAND:
Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid! No cuts to education and social services!
We need jobs, not cuts! Fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs for the millions unemployed.
Make Big Business Pay! For major tax hikes on the super-rich and corporations!
End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Slash Pentagon spending!
For the impressive growing list of endorsers check out
www.jobsnotcutsprotest.org
End the Dictatorship of Wall Street!
A Socialist Strategy to Build the Movement
All around the world attention has been drawn to the occupation of Wall Street. The protests have captured the imagination of thousands and inspired new occupations which are spreading across the U.S.
The police crackdown in New York, intended to intimidate this movement, completely failed to break our spirit. Now we are more determined than ever to fight. Inspired by the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and across North Africa, as well as the mass youth occupations in Spain and Greece, protesters have taken to the streets of New York and cities across the U.S. to stand up to the domination of Wall Street and Big Business over our lives.
Below the surface there is deep anger in U.S. society which only seemed to be getting a twisted expression in the right-wing lunacies of the Tea Party. But the mass movement in Wisconsin this spring, and now the occupation of Wall Street provide a glimpse of the enormous potential to turn that anger into a progressive social movement.
How can we take the struggle forward?
Many are occupying to "liberate space" in order to build a new, more equal and just community, hoping it will inspire others to follow. While the Wall Street occupation is an example of a community based on democracy, cooperation and solidarity, unfortunately the occupation alone will not be enough to build a mass movement capable of changing society.
Many have alluded to Egypt saying that a growing occupation with one basic de¬mand is how the dictator was overthrown. But in fact, the situation was more complicated than that. In the week before Egypt's dictator Mubarak was ousted, the working class entered the scene with decisive strike action paralyzing key parts of the economy.
The occupations in Spain and Greece have been much bigger than Wall Street, but they too need the more powerful forces of the working class to move into action in order to win. In Wisconsin, a huge occupation of the Capitol lasted for over 3 weeks and was at the center of mass demonstrations of the workers and youth. They could have won if that movement had moved toward a general strike of public sector workers to shut the state economy down.
Instead the Wisconsin battle was consciously derailed by the Democratic Party and the top union leadership by diverting the mass movement into a campaign to recall the Republicans from power in order to elect Democrats in their place. However, the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of Wall Street and Big Business, and they offer no solutions. We need an independent struggle which seeks to draw in the widest layers of workers and youth. United we have the power to withdraw our labor, stop "business as usual," and hit the banks, corporations and ruling elite where it counts.
We need to build up the confidence to take such bold measures. That's why Occupy Wall Street needs to call for mass demonstrations around key demands that address the burning issues that working people and youth face like jobs, education, healthcare and so on.
System Change
Not only the economy but society as a whole is in a deep crisis. Global capitalism is a failed system that cannot overcome the problems of growing inequality, poverty, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, and war which it creates. The movement has to challenge Wall Street and both parties of big business. We must stand up to their policies where they try to solve their economic crisis on our backs in order to maintain a system which only benefits the elite in the first place.
But we must also provide a clear alternative. We need to fundamentally trans¬form society to one not based on profit but instead on meeting everyone's basic human needs. The only real alternative to corporate greed and capitalism is democratic socialism where the economy, workplaces, and society as a whole are democratically run by and for the vast majority of people.
Join Socialist Alternative! We say:
Spread the occupations across the U.S. and into schools and communities. For systematic, mass campaigning to mobilize the widest layer of workers, young people and labor unions into struggle.
•Organize weekend mass demonstrations that call for: No cuts
to social services, A massive jobs creation program, Major tax
hikes on the super-rich and big business, End the wars, Slash
the military budget, and Defend union and democratic rights.
•Build up to the November 16-23 National Week of Action to combat the
Congressional Super Committee plan for $1.5 trillion in cuts to social
services. We demand jobs not cuts!
•Prepare to run independent anti-corporate, working-class candidates in
2012 to challenge the policies of the two parties of Wall Street as a first
step towards forming a new party of the 99%, a mass workers' party.
End the dictatorship of Wall Street! Bring the big banks that dominate the U.S. economy into public ownership and run them under the democratic management of elected representatives of their workers and the public. Compensation to be paid on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.
Build the movement to replace the rotten system of capitalism with democratic socialism and create a new society based on human need.
*****
Markin comment:
Some of the demands stated are supportable although the method of achieving them seems unclear since the march is on Congressional Committee of 12 member Senator John "War" (Iraq and Afghanistan support) Kerry's office. Do the sponsors really still expect that parliamentary action (nudging the Congress to do the right thing, or else) is the way forward after last summer's debacle? Christ, let's learn something right now. You only get what you fight for-and are ready to take. We created the wealth-let's take it back! Labor and the oppressed must rule!
JOIN THE RALLY AND PROTEST:
JOBS NOT CUTS
In Boston November 19th At The Occupy Boston Site (Dewey Square)12PM-3PM And Then We'll March on Kerry's Office
WE DEMAND:
Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid! No cuts to education and social services!
We need jobs, not cuts! Fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs for the millions unemployed.
Make Big Business Pay! For major tax hikes on the super-rich and corporations!
End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Slash Pentagon spending!
For the impressive growing list of endorsers check out
www.jobsnotcutsprotest.org
End the Dictatorship of Wall Street!
A Socialist Strategy to Build the Movement
All around the world attention has been drawn to the occupation of Wall Street. The protests have captured the imagination of thousands and inspired new occupations which are spreading across the U.S.
The police crackdown in New York, intended to intimidate this movement, completely failed to break our spirit. Now we are more determined than ever to fight. Inspired by the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and across North Africa, as well as the mass youth occupations in Spain and Greece, protesters have taken to the streets of New York and cities across the U.S. to stand up to the domination of Wall Street and Big Business over our lives.
Below the surface there is deep anger in U.S. society which only seemed to be getting a twisted expression in the right-wing lunacies of the Tea Party. But the mass movement in Wisconsin this spring, and now the occupation of Wall Street provide a glimpse of the enormous potential to turn that anger into a progressive social movement.
How can we take the struggle forward?
Many are occupying to "liberate space" in order to build a new, more equal and just community, hoping it will inspire others to follow. While the Wall Street occupation is an example of a community based on democracy, cooperation and solidarity, unfortunately the occupation alone will not be enough to build a mass movement capable of changing society.
Many have alluded to Egypt saying that a growing occupation with one basic de¬mand is how the dictator was overthrown. But in fact, the situation was more complicated than that. In the week before Egypt's dictator Mubarak was ousted, the working class entered the scene with decisive strike action paralyzing key parts of the economy.
The occupations in Spain and Greece have been much bigger than Wall Street, but they too need the more powerful forces of the working class to move into action in order to win. In Wisconsin, a huge occupation of the Capitol lasted for over 3 weeks and was at the center of mass demonstrations of the workers and youth. They could have won if that movement had moved toward a general strike of public sector workers to shut the state economy down.
Instead the Wisconsin battle was consciously derailed by the Democratic Party and the top union leadership by diverting the mass movement into a campaign to recall the Republicans from power in order to elect Democrats in their place. However, the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of Wall Street and Big Business, and they offer no solutions. We need an independent struggle which seeks to draw in the widest layers of workers and youth. United we have the power to withdraw our labor, stop "business as usual," and hit the banks, corporations and ruling elite where it counts.
We need to build up the confidence to take such bold measures. That's why Occupy Wall Street needs to call for mass demonstrations around key demands that address the burning issues that working people and youth face like jobs, education, healthcare and so on.
System Change
Not only the economy but society as a whole is in a deep crisis. Global capitalism is a failed system that cannot overcome the problems of growing inequality, poverty, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, and war which it creates. The movement has to challenge Wall Street and both parties of big business. We must stand up to their policies where they try to solve their economic crisis on our backs in order to maintain a system which only benefits the elite in the first place.
But we must also provide a clear alternative. We need to fundamentally trans¬form society to one not based on profit but instead on meeting everyone's basic human needs. The only real alternative to corporate greed and capitalism is democratic socialism where the economy, workplaces, and society as a whole are democratically run by and for the vast majority of people.
Join Socialist Alternative! We say:
Spread the occupations across the U.S. and into schools and communities. For systematic, mass campaigning to mobilize the widest layer of workers, young people and labor unions into struggle.
•Organize weekend mass demonstrations that call for: No cuts
to social services, A massive jobs creation program, Major tax
hikes on the super-rich and big business, End the wars, Slash
the military budget, and Defend union and democratic rights.
•Build up to the November 16-23 National Week of Action to combat the
Congressional Super Committee plan for $1.5 trillion in cuts to social
services. We demand jobs not cuts!
•Prepare to run independent anti-corporate, working-class candidates in
2012 to challenge the policies of the two parties of Wall Street as a first
step towards forming a new party of the 99%, a mass workers' party.
End the dictatorship of Wall Street! Bring the big banks that dominate the U.S. economy into public ownership and run them under the democratic management of elected representatives of their workers and the public. Compensation to be paid on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.
Build the movement to replace the rotten system of capitalism with democratic socialism and create a new society based on human need.
*****
Markin comment:
Some of the demands stated are supportable although the method of achieving them seems unclear since the march is on Congressional Committee of 12 member Senator John "War" (Iraq and Afghanistan support) Kerry's office. Do the sponsors really still expect that parliamentary action (nudging the Congress to do the right thing, or else) is the way forward after last summer's debacle? Christ, let's learn something right now. You only get what you fight for-and are ready to take. We created the wealth-let's take it back! Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Sunday, November 6, 2011
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Young Spartacus" -"Mobilize British Labor To Fight The National Front (December1978/January 1979)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
Markin comment on this article:
This is good advise on how to think about fighting the fascists when they rear their heads. Frankly, a lot of it could have been written today, just as well as back in 1978.
*******
From Young Spartacus -Mobilize British Labor To Fight The National Front (December1978/January 1979)
"When 1 first came into politics...the common term of opprobrium or abuse for your political opponents was, of course, to call them a fascist... What is most interesting in Britain in the last four or five years is that there has been an evaporation of that use of the term 'fascist' as a general term of abuse and a greater precision-in what people understand to be fascism. One of the reasons for that is quite simply, social being determines consciousness. When you see two thousand thugs march down a street chanting 'The reds, the reds, we've got to get rid of the reds,' or 'The National Front is a White Man's Front,' then you begin to understand what fascism is and how it differs and how importantly it differs from just ordinary run-of-the-mill right-wing yobs which abound in any class society."
With these words comrade James Flanagan of the Spartacist League/ Britain (SL/B) opened the Spartacus Youth League forum "Mobilize British Labor to Fight the National Front" held at Barnard College, New York on November 16. Quoting electoral statistics from the past four years, he outlined the dramatic growth of the fascist National Front (NF) since 1974.
In the British general election of October 1974 the NF took 113,000 votes. By the time of the local government (municipal) elections of spring 1977, that figure had more than doubled to 250,000 votes nationally, in London alone the fascists polled 119,000 votes in 91 constituencies, beating the Liberals—the junior party of British capitalism—in 33 areas, and taking up to 20 percent of the vote in certain parts of the mainly immigrant East End. While those votes do not constitute a hardened base of organized support for the NF, they nonetheless testify to the seriousness of the fascist threat and the urgency of mobilizing Britain's well-organized labor movement against it.
The question most obviously posed by these developments is—why Britain and why now? Recalling Trotsky's capsule analysis of fascism as the last resort of a desperate bourgeoisie faced with the prospect of its own overthrow, comrade Flanagan, a former member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Irish Commission of the Workers Socialist League, sketched the deep social decay and critical condition of capitalism in Britain. With 1.5 million workers unemployed, with wages held down as inflation continues at 8-9 percent, and with social services cut to the bone, leaving the already depressed inner cities even more barren, the social conditions which spawn fascist movements already exist in Britain.
Moreover, the bourgeoisie is faced with a strong, undefeated working class which in the past has fought against and defeated attempts to make them pay for the current crisis—from the 1969 revolt which crushed the Labour government's anti-union Bill ("In Place of Strife"), through the 1974 miners strike which felled the Conservative Heath government, right over to the Ford workers who just recently punched a hole in Labour's wage controls. For the bourgeoisie the situation looks bleak:
"Labour hasn't worked; the Tories haven't worked; a Labour-Liberal coalition hasn't worked. The prospects in store for them are weak, hung parliaments, minority governments supported by minority parties. Ultimately what they have to look for as a way of getting out of this situation is some sort of strong state—take on the unions, beat the unions and resolve it in that way. And that importantly is where the fascists come in."
Clearly, evolution in such a direction would mean a qualitative escalation in the level of class struggle in Britain, and the development of a perilous situation in which the alternatives posed would be socialist revolution or fascist barbarism. Britain is as yet some distance from that, but the recurring clashes between the fascists and the left foreshadow greater battles to come.
The Battle of Cable Street
The willingness of the British bourgeoisie to opt for a fascistic solution is shown by events of the past. During the crisis-wracked 1930's, when the German bourgeoisie turned to Hitler's brown-shirts, there arose in Britain a fascist movement—Sir Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists (BUF)—which won significant support from sections of the bourgeoisie. The Daily Mail (a leading capitalist daily), for example, had as its headline in the issue of 15 January 1934, "Hurrah For the Fascists."
Clad in black shirts, Moseley's bands held a series of meetings throughout England during the 1933-36 period, aimed at terrorizing immigrant groups and crushing the unions. ("We've got to get rid of the Yids" was one of their chants, a slogan emulated by the National Front of today.) In June of 1934 they held a 15,000 strong indoor rally at the Olympia building in London, beating up would-be hecklers in the audience and demonstrating openly their vicious determination to silence all their opponents.
As the real character of Moseley's movement became clear, the working class began to fight back. In June 1936, a BUF meeting in the coal mining town of Tonypandy in South Wales was broken up and the fascists were driven out of the area. But it wasn't until a couple of months later that the decisive blow was struck against Moseley, in what became known as "The Battle of Cable Street"— named after the site in London's East End where the BUF was routed. The events of the day were described by comrade Flanagan:
"So the culmination came on the 4th of October 1936. Moseley had organized for that day a demonstration to march into the East End of London right through a heavily Jewish area. This was a deliberate provocation in much the same way as Hitler's fascists had marched through Altona, a working-class area of Hamburg just four years earlier. The reaction of the Labour Party tops and the trade-union leaders to this decision was that they weren't going to do anything about it— The Communist Party of Great Britain, which today likes to pose as being the champions of the fight against the fascists in 1936, as the leaders of Cable Street, also advocated that people not go there. They said there is a rally to take place in Trafalgar Square the same day and people should go and march there.
"As it was the Communist Party eventually made it over. Under pressure from the local Communist Party, from the Independent Labour Party of Fenner Brockway and the working class of that area, they actually did turn out. The result was that something like a quarter of a million workers—some estimates put it as high as half a million—turned out to prevent Moseley's fascists from marching through the area. The London police had mobilized 6,000 of their foot division and the entire mounted horse division but they weren't able to cut a path through the crowd."
Comrade Flanagan then cited an account of the battle by the man who later became a Communist Party member of Parliament from the East End. In his book, Our Flag Stays Red, Phil Piratin recalls:
"It was obvious that the fascists and the police would now turn their attention to
Cable Street. We were ready. The moment this became apparent the signal was given to put up the barricades. Supplemented by bits of old furniture, mattresses, and every kind of thing you expect to find in box-rooms, it was a barricade which the police did not find easy to penetrate. As they charged they were met with milk bottles, stones and marbles. Some of the housewives began to drop milk bottles from the roof tops. A number of police surrendered. This had never happened before, so the lads didn't know what to do, but they took away their batons, and one took a helmet for his son as a souvenir."
Cable Street and Today
A direct consequence of the Cable Street rout was a marked decline in fascist activity in that period. Since the late 1960's/early 1970's, however, the fascist movement in Britain has re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Grouping together different fascistic sects to form the National Front (NF), NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster have begun building what the latter once referred to as "a well-oiled Nazi machine in this country." Particularly since 1974, the NF has combined electioneering with provocative street marches through largely immigrant areas as a means of winning support. And since 1974 the left has mobilized in attempts to deny the fascists any platform for spewing their race-hate filth.
As comrade Flanagan put it, the spirit which motivated the left,
"and which drew a large number of people into politics at that time was’ No Platform for Fascists'—we must prevent the fascists from meeting wherever they try; a wholly admirable, supportable sentiment. But what they transformed that into was military-style confrontations when the balance of forces wasn't suitable for actually crushing the fascists and what it degenerated into was a series of drawn-out inconclusive brawls, not with the fascists but with the state, the police..."
The high-point of this type of struggle came on August 13, 1977 in the London borough of Lewisham, when 5,000 antifascist demonstrators gathered to stop a 500-strong NF march through this largely West Indian area. Very rapidly, the counter-mobilization became a confrontation with the police who time ever on the British mainland. (Riot gear is of course a familiar sight in Northern Ireland.) The seriousness of this confrontation, which involved a quarter of the entire London metropolitan police force, stung the bourgeoisie, who were quick to go on a red-baiting offensive against the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the main force behind the" demonstration. Labour leaders likewise joined in the witchhunt, denouncing the SWP as "red fascists"(Morning Star, 17 August 1977).
For the most part, however, the left's counter-demonstrations consisted, of adventurist street confrontations with the fascists. Opportunistically ducking out of the difficult task of fighting within Britain's powerful labor movement for leadership prepared to mobilize the unions against the NF, the left tried to substitute itself for the organized working class. And while they were refusing to fight for trade-union defense squads to crush the fascists, they criminally called on the bourgeois state to deal with the Front.
Precisely how stupid and dangerous appeals to the capitalist state are was confirmed in two incidents during this period. In June 1973, the United Secretariat's (USec) French group, then called the Ligue Communiste (LC), engaged in an adventurist confrontation with cops and members of the fascist Ordre Nouveau in Paris, while simultaneously calling on the state to stop the meeting. As a result the LC was banned ("impartially," of course, along with the fascists). In June 1974 the British USec group, the International Marxist Group (IMG), likewise got involved in a brawl with British police in London's Red Lion Square outside an NF meeting the IMG had previously called on the government to stop. In the course of the confrontation the police truncheoned to death a young IMG supporter, Kevin Gately.
Although the SWP at first defended its Lewisham actions, it soon capitulated to the pressure and was instrumental in launching the Anti Nazi League (ANL)—a popular-frontist bloc with liberals, Labour Party "lefts" and other "respectable" figures, which shuns street confrontations with the fascists in favor of social-patriotic appeals to "anti-Nazi" (anti-German) sentiments within the British working class, calls for state bans, and "magic" carnivals to halt the National Front. The creation of this strictly legalist, pacifistic outfit—the right opportunist flip-side of the SWP's previous left adventurism—predictably led to an abdication of any serious struggle against the fascists.
As comrade Flanagan made clear in his talk, the question of a revolutionary strategy to fight the National Front revolves around the question of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy and the Labour Party, the mass reformist party of the British working class. The common thread between adventurist street confrontations and wretched appeals to the state is a refusal to take on the question of defeating Labourism, in both its trade-union and parliamentary forms, through intransigent political battle to win over its proletarian base. When the reformist and centrist left appeal to the state to ban fascism they address themselves to the same Labour Party officials who send out the cops in droves to protect the fascist rallies. The task is to mobilize the masses of British unionists, the Labour Party's rank and file, to deal a death blow to the fascist
scum.
No Support to the ANL!
From the outset, the Spartacist League/Britain refused to tail after the ANL, uniquely denouncing it as a popular-frontist formation which would soon lead to outright betrayal. On September 24 this analysis was confirmed. On that day 2,000 NFers marched through London, while the ANL took some 80,000 would-be antifascists miles off in the opposite direction to a carnival in Brixton (in South London)! Only about 1,500 leftists— including the SL/B, who turned out one of the largest single organized contingents—refused to go carnivaling, and went instead to the East End. As it was their forces were pitifully inadequate to stop the fascists who, protected by the usual ranks of police at their side, marched triumphantly into the area. (For a more detailed account see Spartacist Britain No. 5, October 1978.) Interestingly, after comrade Flanagan had concluded his presentation of the ANL's betrayal, two British defenders of the ANL rose to support its decision to go ahead with the Carnival. The Spartacists were "far too damning" of the ANL, they maintained, and "wrong-headed,"
"in suggesting that the Anti Nazi League should have called off a mass demonstration in order to respond to a small counter-demonstration called in another part of London..."
In his summary, Flanagan took issue with this classic reformist argument, virtually identical to the ones used to try to keep the working class away from Cable Street in 1936:
"So what happened with the Anti Nazi League? They heard a month before¬
hand that the fascists were marching through the east of London. This is not
just an ordinary demonstration. It was a march against communism when the
reds were away, through the most oppressed area of London where the
minorities lived. They said they were going to be there and that night they
were. 'There are no "no-go" areas for us in London,' they said, 'we can march
where we want, and we will terrorize this area.' And that's what they did.
Then later that night they rampaged down nearby Brick Lane.
"So the purpose of our sharpness is to actually say: yes, there was a class line
on that day. The people who went to the Carnival were scabs, and people who
went to Brick Lane were not. There was a class line, and it was very, very
clear.
"You see they marched off in the opposite direction. Now you would think their response to that might be: 'Oh god, we ballsed up,' or something like that. 'We're sorry, you know, but...' But they didn't. Socialist Challenge, the paper of the International Marxist Group, had on its back page: yes, we were right! We were right to go, they said, to the Carnival. We were right to leave the black community of the East End defenseless.
"Tony Cliff, now, was more honest in Socialist Worker. He was more honest—he said: ‘If the Anti Nazi League Carnival had been diverted from Brixton, then the ANL would have disintegrated. And that's why they didn't go to the East End but went to Brixton. Because they didn't want to lose the support of Lord Avery, or Peter Hain, or Jonathan Dimbleby, Panorama reporter for the BBC. They didn't want to lose the support of those people, because they’re respectable, because they want mass influence.
"Mass movements are important things. But there's an interesting thing that Trotsky said years and years ago: mass movements are of different characters. The pilgrimage to Lourdes is a mass movement. So was the imperialist invasion of the Soviet Union a mass movement. The bombing of Hanoi was a mass movement. The Anti Nazi League Carnival was also a mass movement, but so was Cable Street in 1936. And that's the spirit we stand on. That's what we say should have happened. On that day, the Communist Party wanted to go to Trafalgar Square. But they at least made it over to the East End and the fascists were routed. The SWP and the IMG can't even claim that. We said in the issue of Spartacist Britain which appeared after this that September 24 has drawn the line. Make your choice
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
Markin comment on this article:
This is good advise on how to think about fighting the fascists when they rear their heads. Frankly, a lot of it could have been written today, just as well as back in 1978.
*******
From Young Spartacus -Mobilize British Labor To Fight The National Front (December1978/January 1979)
"When 1 first came into politics...the common term of opprobrium or abuse for your political opponents was, of course, to call them a fascist... What is most interesting in Britain in the last four or five years is that there has been an evaporation of that use of the term 'fascist' as a general term of abuse and a greater precision-in what people understand to be fascism. One of the reasons for that is quite simply, social being determines consciousness. When you see two thousand thugs march down a street chanting 'The reds, the reds, we've got to get rid of the reds,' or 'The National Front is a White Man's Front,' then you begin to understand what fascism is and how it differs and how importantly it differs from just ordinary run-of-the-mill right-wing yobs which abound in any class society."
With these words comrade James Flanagan of the Spartacist League/ Britain (SL/B) opened the Spartacus Youth League forum "Mobilize British Labor to Fight the National Front" held at Barnard College, New York on November 16. Quoting electoral statistics from the past four years, he outlined the dramatic growth of the fascist National Front (NF) since 1974.
In the British general election of October 1974 the NF took 113,000 votes. By the time of the local government (municipal) elections of spring 1977, that figure had more than doubled to 250,000 votes nationally, in London alone the fascists polled 119,000 votes in 91 constituencies, beating the Liberals—the junior party of British capitalism—in 33 areas, and taking up to 20 percent of the vote in certain parts of the mainly immigrant East End. While those votes do not constitute a hardened base of organized support for the NF, they nonetheless testify to the seriousness of the fascist threat and the urgency of mobilizing Britain's well-organized labor movement against it.
The question most obviously posed by these developments is—why Britain and why now? Recalling Trotsky's capsule analysis of fascism as the last resort of a desperate bourgeoisie faced with the prospect of its own overthrow, comrade Flanagan, a former member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Irish Commission of the Workers Socialist League, sketched the deep social decay and critical condition of capitalism in Britain. With 1.5 million workers unemployed, with wages held down as inflation continues at 8-9 percent, and with social services cut to the bone, leaving the already depressed inner cities even more barren, the social conditions which spawn fascist movements already exist in Britain.
Moreover, the bourgeoisie is faced with a strong, undefeated working class which in the past has fought against and defeated attempts to make them pay for the current crisis—from the 1969 revolt which crushed the Labour government's anti-union Bill ("In Place of Strife"), through the 1974 miners strike which felled the Conservative Heath government, right over to the Ford workers who just recently punched a hole in Labour's wage controls. For the bourgeoisie the situation looks bleak:
"Labour hasn't worked; the Tories haven't worked; a Labour-Liberal coalition hasn't worked. The prospects in store for them are weak, hung parliaments, minority governments supported by minority parties. Ultimately what they have to look for as a way of getting out of this situation is some sort of strong state—take on the unions, beat the unions and resolve it in that way. And that importantly is where the fascists come in."
Clearly, evolution in such a direction would mean a qualitative escalation in the level of class struggle in Britain, and the development of a perilous situation in which the alternatives posed would be socialist revolution or fascist barbarism. Britain is as yet some distance from that, but the recurring clashes between the fascists and the left foreshadow greater battles to come.
The Battle of Cable Street
The willingness of the British bourgeoisie to opt for a fascistic solution is shown by events of the past. During the crisis-wracked 1930's, when the German bourgeoisie turned to Hitler's brown-shirts, there arose in Britain a fascist movement—Sir Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists (BUF)—which won significant support from sections of the bourgeoisie. The Daily Mail (a leading capitalist daily), for example, had as its headline in the issue of 15 January 1934, "Hurrah For the Fascists."
Clad in black shirts, Moseley's bands held a series of meetings throughout England during the 1933-36 period, aimed at terrorizing immigrant groups and crushing the unions. ("We've got to get rid of the Yids" was one of their chants, a slogan emulated by the National Front of today.) In June of 1934 they held a 15,000 strong indoor rally at the Olympia building in London, beating up would-be hecklers in the audience and demonstrating openly their vicious determination to silence all their opponents.
As the real character of Moseley's movement became clear, the working class began to fight back. In June 1936, a BUF meeting in the coal mining town of Tonypandy in South Wales was broken up and the fascists were driven out of the area. But it wasn't until a couple of months later that the decisive blow was struck against Moseley, in what became known as "The Battle of Cable Street"— named after the site in London's East End where the BUF was routed. The events of the day were described by comrade Flanagan:
"So the culmination came on the 4th of October 1936. Moseley had organized for that day a demonstration to march into the East End of London right through a heavily Jewish area. This was a deliberate provocation in much the same way as Hitler's fascists had marched through Altona, a working-class area of Hamburg just four years earlier. The reaction of the Labour Party tops and the trade-union leaders to this decision was that they weren't going to do anything about it— The Communist Party of Great Britain, which today likes to pose as being the champions of the fight against the fascists in 1936, as the leaders of Cable Street, also advocated that people not go there. They said there is a rally to take place in Trafalgar Square the same day and people should go and march there.
"As it was the Communist Party eventually made it over. Under pressure from the local Communist Party, from the Independent Labour Party of Fenner Brockway and the working class of that area, they actually did turn out. The result was that something like a quarter of a million workers—some estimates put it as high as half a million—turned out to prevent Moseley's fascists from marching through the area. The London police had mobilized 6,000 of their foot division and the entire mounted horse division but they weren't able to cut a path through the crowd."
Comrade Flanagan then cited an account of the battle by the man who later became a Communist Party member of Parliament from the East End. In his book, Our Flag Stays Red, Phil Piratin recalls:
"It was obvious that the fascists and the police would now turn their attention to
Cable Street. We were ready. The moment this became apparent the signal was given to put up the barricades. Supplemented by bits of old furniture, mattresses, and every kind of thing you expect to find in box-rooms, it was a barricade which the police did not find easy to penetrate. As they charged they were met with milk bottles, stones and marbles. Some of the housewives began to drop milk bottles from the roof tops. A number of police surrendered. This had never happened before, so the lads didn't know what to do, but they took away their batons, and one took a helmet for his son as a souvenir."
Cable Street and Today
A direct consequence of the Cable Street rout was a marked decline in fascist activity in that period. Since the late 1960's/early 1970's, however, the fascist movement in Britain has re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Grouping together different fascistic sects to form the National Front (NF), NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster have begun building what the latter once referred to as "a well-oiled Nazi machine in this country." Particularly since 1974, the NF has combined electioneering with provocative street marches through largely immigrant areas as a means of winning support. And since 1974 the left has mobilized in attempts to deny the fascists any platform for spewing their race-hate filth.
As comrade Flanagan put it, the spirit which motivated the left,
"and which drew a large number of people into politics at that time was’ No Platform for Fascists'—we must prevent the fascists from meeting wherever they try; a wholly admirable, supportable sentiment. But what they transformed that into was military-style confrontations when the balance of forces wasn't suitable for actually crushing the fascists and what it degenerated into was a series of drawn-out inconclusive brawls, not with the fascists but with the state, the police..."
The high-point of this type of struggle came on August 13, 1977 in the London borough of Lewisham, when 5,000 antifascist demonstrators gathered to stop a 500-strong NF march through this largely West Indian area. Very rapidly, the counter-mobilization became a confrontation with the police who time ever on the British mainland. (Riot gear is of course a familiar sight in Northern Ireland.) The seriousness of this confrontation, which involved a quarter of the entire London metropolitan police force, stung the bourgeoisie, who were quick to go on a red-baiting offensive against the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the main force behind the" demonstration. Labour leaders likewise joined in the witchhunt, denouncing the SWP as "red fascists"(Morning Star, 17 August 1977).
For the most part, however, the left's counter-demonstrations consisted, of adventurist street confrontations with the fascists. Opportunistically ducking out of the difficult task of fighting within Britain's powerful labor movement for leadership prepared to mobilize the unions against the NF, the left tried to substitute itself for the organized working class. And while they were refusing to fight for trade-union defense squads to crush the fascists, they criminally called on the bourgeois state to deal with the Front.
Precisely how stupid and dangerous appeals to the capitalist state are was confirmed in two incidents during this period. In June 1973, the United Secretariat's (USec) French group, then called the Ligue Communiste (LC), engaged in an adventurist confrontation with cops and members of the fascist Ordre Nouveau in Paris, while simultaneously calling on the state to stop the meeting. As a result the LC was banned ("impartially," of course, along with the fascists). In June 1974 the British USec group, the International Marxist Group (IMG), likewise got involved in a brawl with British police in London's Red Lion Square outside an NF meeting the IMG had previously called on the government to stop. In the course of the confrontation the police truncheoned to death a young IMG supporter, Kevin Gately.
Although the SWP at first defended its Lewisham actions, it soon capitulated to the pressure and was instrumental in launching the Anti Nazi League (ANL)—a popular-frontist bloc with liberals, Labour Party "lefts" and other "respectable" figures, which shuns street confrontations with the fascists in favor of social-patriotic appeals to "anti-Nazi" (anti-German) sentiments within the British working class, calls for state bans, and "magic" carnivals to halt the National Front. The creation of this strictly legalist, pacifistic outfit—the right opportunist flip-side of the SWP's previous left adventurism—predictably led to an abdication of any serious struggle against the fascists.
As comrade Flanagan made clear in his talk, the question of a revolutionary strategy to fight the National Front revolves around the question of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy and the Labour Party, the mass reformist party of the British working class. The common thread between adventurist street confrontations and wretched appeals to the state is a refusal to take on the question of defeating Labourism, in both its trade-union and parliamentary forms, through intransigent political battle to win over its proletarian base. When the reformist and centrist left appeal to the state to ban fascism they address themselves to the same Labour Party officials who send out the cops in droves to protect the fascist rallies. The task is to mobilize the masses of British unionists, the Labour Party's rank and file, to deal a death blow to the fascist
scum.
No Support to the ANL!
From the outset, the Spartacist League/Britain refused to tail after the ANL, uniquely denouncing it as a popular-frontist formation which would soon lead to outright betrayal. On September 24 this analysis was confirmed. On that day 2,000 NFers marched through London, while the ANL took some 80,000 would-be antifascists miles off in the opposite direction to a carnival in Brixton (in South London)! Only about 1,500 leftists— including the SL/B, who turned out one of the largest single organized contingents—refused to go carnivaling, and went instead to the East End. As it was their forces were pitifully inadequate to stop the fascists who, protected by the usual ranks of police at their side, marched triumphantly into the area. (For a more detailed account see Spartacist Britain No. 5, October 1978.) Interestingly, after comrade Flanagan had concluded his presentation of the ANL's betrayal, two British defenders of the ANL rose to support its decision to go ahead with the Carnival. The Spartacists were "far too damning" of the ANL, they maintained, and "wrong-headed,"
"in suggesting that the Anti Nazi League should have called off a mass demonstration in order to respond to a small counter-demonstration called in another part of London..."
In his summary, Flanagan took issue with this classic reformist argument, virtually identical to the ones used to try to keep the working class away from Cable Street in 1936:
"So what happened with the Anti Nazi League? They heard a month before¬
hand that the fascists were marching through the east of London. This is not
just an ordinary demonstration. It was a march against communism when the
reds were away, through the most oppressed area of London where the
minorities lived. They said they were going to be there and that night they
were. 'There are no "no-go" areas for us in London,' they said, 'we can march
where we want, and we will terrorize this area.' And that's what they did.
Then later that night they rampaged down nearby Brick Lane.
"So the purpose of our sharpness is to actually say: yes, there was a class line
on that day. The people who went to the Carnival were scabs, and people who
went to Brick Lane were not. There was a class line, and it was very, very
clear.
"You see they marched off in the opposite direction. Now you would think their response to that might be: 'Oh god, we ballsed up,' or something like that. 'We're sorry, you know, but...' But they didn't. Socialist Challenge, the paper of the International Marxist Group, had on its back page: yes, we were right! We were right to go, they said, to the Carnival. We were right to leave the black community of the East End defenseless.
"Tony Cliff, now, was more honest in Socialist Worker. He was more honest—he said: ‘If the Anti Nazi League Carnival had been diverted from Brixton, then the ANL would have disintegrated. And that's why they didn't go to the East End but went to Brixton. Because they didn't want to lose the support of Lord Avery, or Peter Hain, or Jonathan Dimbleby, Panorama reporter for the BBC. They didn't want to lose the support of those people, because they’re respectable, because they want mass influence.
"Mass movements are important things. But there's an interesting thing that Trotsky said years and years ago: mass movements are of different characters. The pilgrimage to Lourdes is a mass movement. So was the imperialist invasion of the Soviet Union a mass movement. The bombing of Hanoi was a mass movement. The Anti Nazi League Carnival was also a mass movement, but so was Cable Street in 1936. And that's the spirit we stand on. That's what we say should have happened. On that day, the Communist Party wanted to go to Trafalgar Square. But they at least made it over to the East End and the fascists were routed. The SWP and the IMG can't even claim that. We said in the issue of Spartacist Britain which appeared after this that September 24 has drawn the line. Make your choice
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