A Simple Spark

Review

2008-08-20T11:29:00.000-04:00

McCarthy, Lloyd D. “In-Dependence” From Bondage: Claude McKay and Michael Manley: Defying the Ideological Clash and Policy Gaps in African Diaspora Relations” Africa World Press, 2007

Claude McKay and Michael Manley may seem like strange bedfellows for a study in 20th century politics. Though both born in Jamaica, a generation apart, they could hardly have pursued more divergent paths. McKay was a queer, Black communist poet who helped spark the Harlem Renaissance. Manley, of mixed African and European ancestry, was born into a politically aristocratic family and would eventually serve multiple terms as Prime Minister of Jamaica. Manley (1924-1997) was born on the inside track to politics and power, McKay (1889-1948) was the ultimate outsider for all of his days. Yet, in often contrasting ways, they both tried to articulate a politics that speaks for the poor and working class people of the African Diaspora, in the Caribbean and beyond.

Lloyd D. McCarthy’s choice of characters for this analytic dual biography/regional history is ultimately rewarding. McCarthy draws attention to the logical connection between growing up on a colonized, hyper-exploited island and Manley and McKay’s eventual embracing of egalitarian, passionately anti-racist politics. McCarthy makes the case that Manley and McKay represent two archetypal political poles of 20^th century Caribbean radicalism. The two would scarcely have agreed on the question of reform or revolution—but McCarthy weaves his narrative in such a way as to make them brothers.

Manley and the Promise of Democratic Socialism

Born to a former Premiere of Jamaica and a well known artist, Michael Manley was given a life of social and political connections across Jamaica. His debut in politics was as a fiery orator in the labor movement, stumping for the union associated with his father’s party. His charisma and famous name pushed him to the front of Jamaican populist politics, with a cult following amongst Jamaica’s working class. Elected in 1969 and riding a wave of popular mobilization, he sought to be the Prime Minister that stood for the poor, stood for Black people, and would speak out against imperialism. His record, ultimately, is mixed; he could take a righteous stand, but rarely followed through. His model of incremental, reformist socialism was no match for the IMF and the structural adjustments that further tore the economy apart.

Manley’s Democratic Socialist model aimed to “Jamaicanize” foreign businesses (state takeover of 51%), expand local capitalism, and nationalize some key institutions. The goal was to reallocate some economic power and provide basic relief to the poor, without scaring away foreign investors or domestic capital completely. Raised as a Fabian socialist, Manley attempted to rebuild Jamaica’s post-colonial economy along mixed public/private lines, not dissimilar to what other moderate Non-Aligned nations were experimenting with at the time. McCarthy overstates Manley’s commitment to socialist politics, claiming he had completely broken with his belief in the free market. The text suffers from a lack of thoroughgoing criticism of Manley’s time in office, choosing instead to highlight his rhetorical pronouncements and stated aims instead of holding them up to his actual record while in office. For all of his indignation at the IMF’s role in global plunder, he was still willing to “structurally adjust” the Jamaican economy when they demanded it.

There is also no criticism of the extent to which Manley’s years in office were business as usual for Jamaican politics: cronyism, patronage, street violence by rival party gangs. None of this changed under the rule of “socialist” Manley. As Arthur Lewin pointed out in Monthly Review in the aftermath of Manley’s (first) fall from power, the Manley administration focused the anger of the poor at the rival [conservative] Jamaica Labor Party, not actual economic elites. In short, Manley’s rule served to “mute class struggle”, containing the rebellious mood to the confines of mainstream, two-party politics. McCarthy credits Manley with inventing a nonrevolutionary, “morally-based”, Democratic Socialism perfectly suited for the Caribbean reality. McCarthy sites his early years as a Fabian socialist, his affinities with international anti-colonial struggles, and his resolute anti-racism as qualities that made his contribution to the Pan African left so unique. In case you were wondering, the author worked high level jobs in Manley’s state department.

There are also undeniably proud moments in Manley’s time in office. His commitment to the liberation struggles in Southern Africa was steadfast and extensive. He even floated the idea of Jamaica sending troops to fight in Southern Africa, and applauded Cuba for doing just that. On the world’s stage, Manley was a loud and colorful voice against colonialism and white supremacy. Manley believed that the struggle against racism, especially in the Global South, was paramount to the struggle for human survival, even above the struggle between workers and capital. He was a product of an era of world wide anti-imperialist struggle, and his political imagination was shaped by these movements. His commitment to smashing the legacy of racism played a role in domestic policy too, with increased state commitments to fighting illiteracy and the gap in health care for Jamaica’s poor Black majority. His government was brought down by both US interference and its own international contradictions, including his straddling both socialist-inspired and free market approaches.

McKay’s Journey

Claude McKay’s grandparents were born into slavery, and McKay himself was brought up in a rural peasant environment. The language and oral history traditions of rural Jamaica would shape his poetry and prose for decades. It was home in Jamaica that as a young man McKay, seeing plunder and racism everywhere, became curious about radical politics. After immigrating to Harlem, McKay found a growing Caribbean exile community, with quite a few radicals in its ranks. McKay met members of the IWW, the socialist/Black nationalist organization the African Blood Brotherhood, and all manner of agitators and leftist writers.

The year 1919 would change everything for Claude McKay, a year which also carries a morbid legacy for the radical labor movement and especially the Black community. It was the year of the Palmer Raids, when leftists and immigrants were targeted en mass for deportation. It was also know as the Red—with blood—Summer of 1919, when dozens of Black communities were faced with murderous pogroms and ruthless intimidation campaigns. Hundreds were killed in the violence, which also saw Black resistance to the onslaught. Claude McKay, an aspiring poet working as a waiter, grabbed a pen and wrote a poem at work, titled “If We Must Die”. The poem cried out in anguish at the slaughter being carried out against Black people, and insisted that “if we must die” may it be on our feet, not on our knees. The poem was an incendiary call for vigorous self-defense. It struck a nerve with his co-workers and, via publications such as Max Eastman’s The Liberator, found resonance with Black people and their allies across the country. Despite his deepening connections with the Black left, the labor movement, and radical literary circles, McKay prepared to migrate again, this time to London and eventually the Soviet Union.

In the young Soviet Union, it was reported, workers had overthrown bosses and racism was quickly vanishing. Transfixed with such a notion, McKay went to see for himself. As a relatively young, Black communist and intellectual, McKay was greeted warmly by members of the Communist movement across Russia. Indeed he got quite a grand tour of the young USSR: meetings with Leon Trotsky to discuss the National Question, time spent training with the Red Army, speaking engagements at all manner of political events, attending May Day demonstrations, and arguing on behalf of American Blacks at lecterns across the country. He was something of a socialist celebrity, reading his poems to cheering cadres and soldiers. But McKay’s wonderlust (and uneasiness with still persistent racism) pulled him away from the USSR, towards North Africa, and across Europe many times, all the while continuing his work as a poet and novelist.

When McKay returned to Harlem in the mid-1930’s fragments of the Caribbean exile Left had helped give rise to a formidable branch of the Communist Party. Let down by the continuation of bigotry under Soviet rule—particularly anti-Semitism—and the rising authoritarianism of the Stalin era, McKay became burned out on the official Communist movement. By the time the Communist Party had established itself in his old neighborhood, McKay looked at the party as cynically exploiting the political desires of Blacks.

McKay’s vision, as McCarthy spells out quite clearly through pieces of McKay’s prose, poetry, and political writing, was one of Black liberation and socialism. He believed that capitalism and imperialism had robed the Third World—and especially the African Diaspora—of its wealth and dignity. The reclamation of human rights can not come through reform of capitalism, but rather through the emergence of a socialist alternative. He was Afrocentric and a Pan-Africanist long before the ascension of those outlooks, and was an anti-imperialist a generation before those movements would shake the world. For such a slim volume, McCarthy presents the capturing highlights of McKay’s assorted and radical career.

Manley and McKay

Michael Manley, too, believed that capitalism and imperialism had robbed Black people and people of the Global South of their rights and resources. McKay was inspired by the formation of a world revolutionary movement, while Manley had his eye on international possibilities, too. Manley imagined a European Union-style trading block that would help primarily countries of the Global South. McKay believed that only revolutionary action could wrestle power way from the ruling class, while Manley insisted on an inside-the-system approach that sough a middle path between capital and labor. Both identified their Afro-Caribbean roots as being essential early building blocks towards their radical politics. McKay and Manley both saw themselves as voices for the masses of poor and working class people of African ancestry across the globe, and both saw themselves as stemming the tide of generations of cultural genocide and extreme exploitation.

The many simpatico ways these men’s lives and ideas dovetail each others is looked at in great detail and indeed illuminated by Lloyd McCarthy. The unflattering ways they do not line up, however, are glanced past. McCarthy is unable to see the yawning gap between Manley’s socialist-sounding rhetoric and the zig-zag political realities of his administration. It is a bit simpler to analyze McKay’s politics, as he never wielded state power. His vivid mixture of Black Nationalism, anti-colonialism, and radical socialism found a burning expression on the page, but was never tested on the ground. Therefore it is McCarthy’s light, sympathetic treatment of Manley that is the most suspect.

McCarthy’s book is a joy to read; a rich look at the 20^th century Caribbean left as represented by two of it’s most charismatic and brilliant thinkers. The author, it would seem, is simply a little too close to the Manley’s legacy to give it a fair, honest appraisal.

Utah Philips 1935-2008

2008-07-03T08:39:00.000-04:00

Bruce “Utah” Philips, who died in May, was a living, singing museum of radical working class culture. Through his songs and stories he connected three generations to the living memory of class struggle martyrs, hobo lore and life, and the radical pacifists and anarchists of the early 20^th century. In addition to being a world beloved folksinger and performer Philips spent time as a peace campaigner, a freight train hopper, and a union organizer. Philips will be best remembered for his countless renditions of the songs of Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Wobblies.

Utah Philips was born into a working class Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio at the height of the Depression. His mother was a CIO organizer and a passion for social justice ran deep in their household. Philips three year stint in the US Army had an equally profound effect on his thinking. He was stationed in post-war Korea, a devastated country swarming with US troops and living under a dubious regime. Deeply jarred by the aggression of occupation and churning with anger, Philips returned home to his resettled family in Salt Lake City, Utah with a drinking problem and an anger problem.

This dark spiral was intercepted by the Ammon Hennacy, a left-pacifist and organizer with the Catholic Worker movement in Utah. Hennacy was quite frank with Philips. He told him he must become a pacifist to save his own life, rejecting violence and hated as a first step. Hennacy brought Philips deeper into the radical milieu around the Catholic Workers’ “hospitality house”, the Joe Hill House. He connected with a network of war resisters, left Christians, and former Wobblies. He took on Hennacy’s teaching of Christian pacifist anarchism, a philosophy that would guide his work throughout his life.

His biding love of folk and country music, particularily of the US West, started early in life. The early 1960’s saw a blossoming of interested in folk music, and Philips increasingly found work playing his guitar and singing at festivals and in coffeehouses. This was in many cases facilitated by his dear friend and fellow folksinger Rosalie Sorells. Also an activist, their collaboration last until Philips final years. Often performing together, Sorrels and Philips made their names in the West Coast folk circuit of the late 1960’s, alongside the late Kate Wolf. Both Wolf and Philips popularized Philips’ songs, including the classic “Rock, Salt, and Nails”, which was also performed by Bob Dylan. Philips let other people interpret his material just as he interpreted the songs of others, an approach common in the folk community. His songs were recorded by American roots music artists from Emmylou Harris to Joan Baez to Waylon Jennings. Legend has it that Johnny Cash wanted to do an entire record of Philips material but Utah turned him down, not trusting the for-profit music industry. His own, independent record label was called “No Guff”.

In 1968, perhaps no longer feeling like the only leftist in Utah, Philips ran for Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. But his connection to the emerging radical perspectives remained tenuous, with Utah preferring 1910’s era class politics to ‘identity politics’. However, Utah would be the first to mention how profoundly he was effected by the women’s movement, a transformation he retold on stage repeatedly. Radicals, Philips maintained, must remain works in progress. In this same period Philips participated in the farmworkers movement and was tremendously inspired by the nonviolent class politics put forward by Ceasar Chavez and others.

Philips felt spiritually and historically connected the labor struggles in the Western US that spanned the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Too often our labor history has focused on the great strikes in the East, such as Passaic, New Jersey (1912) and Lawrence, Massachussets (1912). Philips was committed to keeping alive the memories of martyrs like Frank Little and Wesley Everest. Frank Little, Philips recounted on stage and on record, was an IWW militant who organized lumber workers in the Northwest. He was killed in a predawn raid by a death squad owned by the lumber barrons. Everest met a similar fate in Centralia, Washington in 1919, lynched by company thugs in an organized attack on an IWW hall. In Philips’ songs towns like Butte, Montana and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho come alive as battlegrounds in a pitched struggle between our class and theirs.

Philips songs and stories—and stories were as central to a performance as the songs—envisioned the old West of the IWW with vivid intimacy. He understood this to be part of his role in the struggle, the living tribune of the old IWW struggles to organize lumber workers and miners in the 1910’s. Also connected to his relationship with the Western IWW was his love affair with US hobo life and culture. Hobos are essentially homeless, migratory workers who illegally use freight trains to travel and look for work. In the early 20^th century this subculture was closely connected to the IWW and labor radicalism. IWW organizers would use freight trains in much the same way and often navigated their travels organizing through the West using the hobo network. There is a rich body of songs, jokes, and folk wisdom associated with hobo culture, which served as a goldmine for Philips. His 1973 LP “Moose Turd Pie” was steeped in hobo humor and stories. It is had to imagine the dissemination of hobo culture over the last three generations without Philips, nurturing hobo culture just as he revived the legacy of the Western IWW.

               One of Philips most widely performed and recorded songs was “Used Up”, which tells the story of a worker at the end of his life.

I spent my whole life making somebody rich

I busted my ass for that son of a bitch

He left me to die like a dog in a ditch

And told me I'm all used up

He used up my labor, he used up my time

He plundered my body and squandered my mind

Then he gave me a pension, some handouts and wine

And told me I'm all used up

They use up the oil, they use up the trees

They use up the air and they use up the seas

But how about you, friend, and how about me

What's left, when we're all used up

      Philips heart was with the poorest layers of the working class, those that had fallen through the cracks or were discarded by capitalism.  He and his wife created a soup kitchen just three years ago, and Philips maintained close relationship with homelessness activist projects.  Philips had carried with him more than political opposition to the capitalist system, he was emotionally connected to the most devastated.

In 1997 I drove from Western Massachussetts to Detroit, Michigan with a group of friends to take part in a mass mobilization in solidarity with the Detroit Newspaper Strike. The entire drive we listened to dubbed cassettes of Philips live in concert, holding court and rhapsodizing about Joe Hill and Mother Jones. We arrived at the demonstration imbibed with the memory of the great textile strikes, the IWW’s fight for free speech, and the militancy of the world Philips created and currated. That day (which saw 30,000 march on Detroit) put me in touch with a radical working class subculture, with values and visions not unlike those rendered by Philips. His songs were food for struggle, fueling the spirit just as Joe Hill’s songs first did on picket like 80 years before.

A Utah Philips concert was a political event, to be sure. Young fans, punks and activists, sung out loud alongside senior labor veterans and old folkies. His collaborations with contemporary folk icon Ani DiFranco earned him a larger following over the last ten years. Young people radicalized in the era of the anti-globalization protests also took a shine to Philips, eating up his anti-capitalist humor and connection to the past. Utah Philips lived long enough to be a legend in his own time.

One of the performances I saw was at a coffeehouse in Upstate New York in the late 1990’s. Once again, he was performing alongside Rosalie Sorrels. My comrades and I spoke to him at length before the show, totally pulled in by his warmth and irreverent humor. I told him I was from Detroit and he recounted a howling good time he had their once. He had been performing at the Trumbull Plex, a long-standing anarchist cooperative house. Dozens of young anarchists and Wobblies kept him up all night, demanding song after song. He felt a special bond with rebellious people of all ages and was always honored to sing about his heroes and his beliefs, even at 3 am.

Conscious revolutionaries, it is sometimes said, help maintain the living memory of the working class. In Philips life we saw the hobo world meet the anti-globalization scene, the IWW meet the world of folk music, and the folk music community met the radical working class subculture.

Review: The Art and Ideas of the Black Panther Party

2008-01-04T18:24:00.000-05:00

“The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1967-1980”

by David Hilliard Atria Books, 2007

“Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas”

Rizzoli, 2007

By Brad Duncan

It has now been 40 years since the ‘year of the heroic guerrilla’ when the militant spirit of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s found its most daring expression. Everywhere—it seemed—the revolution had come, and it was time to pick up the gun. The colonial world was shaken by a ‘tri-continental’ (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) armed independence movement and the inner cities of the major imperialist counties burned with rage and radical hope. Alongside the face of Che Guevarra no single image encapsulates these struggles quite like the stylized black panther, seen on thousands of berets, leather jackets, and movement newspapers. The Black Panther Party brought together serve the people volunteerism with a commitment to armed self defense in the face of extreme state persecution. They were at once an effort to meet the immediate needs of the urban Black communities and an attempt to foster hope for something much more radical.

Although their community ‘survival programs’ delivered clothes and groceries to thousands, the most successful Panther endeavor was their passionate effort to communicate the ideas of the Party and the movement through visual art and Party publications such as The Black Panther newspaper and the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. Two new books, one collecting front pages and articles from the Party paper and one looking specifically at the art of Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, give an unprecedented look in to these facets of the Black Panther experience.

The two books cover much of the same territory, as Douglas’ art filled countless issues of the paper and epitomized its’ politics.

David Hilliard was one of the first Panthers, recruited to the nascent party by his boyhood friend Huey Newton. His new book looks at the Party’s newspaper and specifically hones in on the period between 1969 (dubbed ‘year of the Panther’ by the paper) and 1972, when the movement suffered a debilitating split. With very little in the way of additional commentary, save for a few introductory essays, we are left to read the papers as they appeared. The paper published for thirteen years without missing a weekly issue. The Panthers have no one but themselves to thank for that as they had to build their own press when commercial printers continually caved under state pressure and stopped printing.

From owning their own press the Party grew the paper on an international level, with each weekly issue acting as a line of communication to movements internationally. Leftists and activists of color around the world subscribed or read handed-down copies. Subscriptions were the most essential revenue stream the Party had, especially as the movement begun to ebb in the early 1970’s. Although the paper could readily be found in shops in the Black community or in movement centers by far the easiest way to get a copy back in ’69 was to find one of the thousands of Panthers selling it on the streets of just about every major American city. Lenin would have been proud—the paper truly was the scaffolding of the Party.

Most history books end their look at the Panthers in the early 1970’s, and there is some justification for that. The movement was deathly effected by state harassment and murder as well as internal rifts, rendering the Party halved by 1973. By the mid 1970’s the Black Panther Party was simply no longer able to have a national impact the way they had in 1969-70. It will come as a surprise to some of you that the Party soldiered on until 1980, and so did The Black Panther Newspaper.

The issues of the paper featured in Hilliard’s book reveals in plain view both the incredible promise of the Party and the insidious handicaps the Party faced. The paper demonstrates the powerful solidarity that was being built between the Panthers and other liberation struggles, such as the Asian-American group I Wor Kuen (formerly the Red Guard Party) and the American Indian Movement. Clearly internationalism was infectious as news from the frontlines of Vietnam and Mozambique appeared in nearly every issue. It is also clear from these issues that the Panthers sought to extend their ideas and influence to every aspect of urban, working class Black life. There are of course the reports of the horrors of ghetto life, but in addition the paper ran extensive critiques of ‘Blaxploitation’ films, controversies in Black art, and reportage on health issues such as sickle-cell anemia and nutrition.

The political handicap most on display here is the cult-like appreciation for the central Panther leaders, namely Huey Newton. Not only is Huey’s face on nearly every masthead, but by 1971 the paper is referring to “the invincible thoughts of Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense and Supreme Commander…”. Undoubtedly the Party popularized movement heroes, but they also raised some to a level that no human being can reach. Invincible thoughts? The writing was on the wall and Panthers had a leadership-worship problem. This style of regime wrecked havoc on the movement internally.

Another key Panther misstep was the emphasis put on armed struggle. Although armed self defense against the police was a central feature of early Party life, changing gun laws and state violence meant that the Panthers used their weapons less and less as the Party matured and changed. But a glance at one of Emory Douglas’ posters or newspaper covers would suggest otherwise. There are machine guns in nearly every image, generally held high defiantly. This guerrilla pose did not match reality—not only was the American radical scene not ready for a guerrilla army the Panthers’ didn’t have one anyway. The posters and art work make it seem as if the Panthers were a mass paramilitary force with the power to win demands with physical force. It is very easy to understand why weapons were a powerful visual image for oppressed people in a time of repression and resistance. It is quite another for a political movement to make boasts it can’t follow through on. The Panthers had some shotguns, but they were never a real armed force. Emory Douglas’ beautiful guerrilla art could not change this. Nor could his powerful images of armed rebellion alone create the kind of conditions and popular consciousness it would take to lead a successful armed revolutionary movement in the US.

The front pages Hilliard chose to include give us a look at the Party’s rapid political development from a general ‘Black power’ standpoint, through a Maoist phase and guerrilla phase, and eventually to Huey Newton’s idea of ‘intercommunalism’. Each phase has its own contradictions, to be sure. This is illustrated by support for Soviet-allied African liberation struggles in one issue and a cartoon depicting the USSR as an equal imperialist power alongside the US in the next issue. This eclectic mix of radicalisms was not specific to the Panthers but rather ran through much of the New Left and subsequent New Communist Movement.

There are a dozen of more new books out about the Black Panther Party, including the excelled Black Panther Party Reconsidered published by Black Classics Press. But these two books say the most by presenting the Panthers as they presented themselves to the world--through their Party press and newspapers.

(below: issues of The Black Panther from 1969)

(below: fold out posters from The Black Panther by Emory Douglas)

Review: A dull romp with The Chairman

2007-12-29T12:58:00.000-05:00

From Ike to Mao to Chairman Bob

Review

"From Ike to Mao: My Journey from Mainstream America

to Revolutionary Communist"

Insight Press, 2006

Around 400 pages into his painfully self-absorbed and unfunny autobiography Chairman Bob Avakian briefly considers the issue of personality cults. Funny, that—as his Revolutionary Communist Party focuses almost solely on the “ideas” of this one man. He spells it out pretty simply: workers accept that some people are special. Some basketball players are simply the best, some scientists are simply brilliant, and some Maoists are bigger than others.

Ostensibly, this tome tells the story of a wholesome American boy. A young, cherubic sport-enthusiast who loved mom and the President. The New Left intervened and before long he was shrill, ambitious leader of the Maoist “new communist movement” collective based in the Bay Area called Revolutionary Union. At this point the story could belong to many left-swerving baby boomers. Like thousands of others, as SDS collapsed “Marxism-Leninism” beckoned. It was now time to build a ‘party of a new type’ which—it was hoped—would successfully replicate the parties of the old type.

Avakian, like Forest Gump with a little red book, paints himself in to the middle of the action. According to From Ike to Mao Avakian was even asked to join the Black Panther Party’s “secret national leadership” by none other than Eldrige Cleaver. The Panthers weren’t ready for him, Avakian intones, because his revolutionary vision chaffed against the Panthers conservatism. At one point Avakian concocts an unverified story about taking the ‘two line struggle’ right into a Panther meeting. He barbequed their pork-chop nationalism with his white-hot MLMTT.

One particularly telling anecdote comes from unity meetings held between Avakian’s RU and a number of majority Black and Latino groups. In a debate over who should represent RU, Avakian insists it should be him—because he’s white. These Black and Latino comrades needed more white people in their lives, due to their head-in-the-sand nationalism. They needed to “get comfortable” with white leadership. But then again the RCP aligned itself with Boston’s anti-busing movement, so let’s not be too surprised. Did I mention they opposed homosexuality and extramarital cohabitation, too?

Eventually, after a couple years attempting to pull other collectives into its orbit, the RU decided to go it alone and declared itself the official revolutionary vanguard of the US proletariat. Or at the very least the vanguard of the lumpenproletariat.

Of course Avakian’s RCP—and eventually it was solely Avakian’s—was not alone. From possibly hundreds of Maoist-influenced collectives, nearly a dozen made similar declarations. By the dawn of the 1980’s the “new communist movement” consisted of a handful of self-declared vanguards.

But don’t read this book to learn that history. Read Max Elbaum’s excellent Revolution in the Air. All you’ll get here is an infantilizing, hand-holding walk through why the RCP triumphed.

(above) American Maoism for beginners

A lot of people will claim the RCP went through a long ultra left period in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t think so, I always mention the Shinning Path at City Council meetings. And where did the black motorcycle jackets and red kafeiyas go? And why is there basically only one photograph of Chairman Bob made available? Are we to believe he’s anti-revisionism’s Dorian Gray?

This book does not give you any of the inside scoop you were hoping for. No peeks inside rigorous criticism/self-criticism sessions, no believable snapshots of life with Bob the Exile in Paris, and definitely no hints as to what keeps the Avakian cult crawling along. All we see here is that one highly eccentric individual runs the show over at the RCP, and boy are his ideas important.

What I want to know is why is a split from the mid-1970’s given so much ink? After Mao died the RCP was divided over the new leadership in Beijing. Avakian, true to his Cultural Revolution roots, supported the ousted Gang of Four while the other 40% of the group still supported China’s government. It’s not that interesting, but it takes up a quarter of the book. Is Dengist Menshivism really a hot topic inside today’s RCP? I thought surely the RCP’s 1978 book “Revolution and Counter-Revolution: the Revisionist Coup in China and the Struggle in the RCP” cleared up any lingering questions about the dreaded “Jarvis-Bergman clique”.

Not surprisingly, this book does nothing to explain what the RCP is today and why, over the last two years, Avakian has gone from being undeniable leader to positively cultish Godhead. Avakian was always one to plaster his face around town, but there now exists a climate of total worship inside the RCP. It’s cultivated, clumsy, and curious.

Word on the street is it’s a cushion against a bombshell.

Let me explain.

If there is a successful Maoist movement in the world right now it is clearly the Nepalese movement. Of course in the true tradition of neo-Stalinism they ended up joining the capitalist government right when victory seemed certain, but that’s for another article. Anyway, everyone loves the Nepalese—they keep Maoism relevant. The RCP passionately promoted the Nepalese movement for years, selling their publication, covering their every utterance in their press, and otherwise publicly associating themselves with this broadly supported Maoist movement.

But here’s the problem: the Nepalese are on to Avakian. They may share an international—the Revolutionary International Movement—but they no longer feel the love. The Nepalese charge that Avakian is a cult leader whose ideological contributions amount to smoke and mirrors. Sensible, right? For the last couple years the Nepalese have been preparing to call Avakian out on the carpet, which would shatter the RIM. By the time the criticism/self-criticism hits the fan, Avakian hopes, he’ll be properly insulated from the criticism, thus saving his fiefdom.

Neither does this bland, creepy autobiography address the RCP’s transition from confrontationalist pose in the 1980’s to the celebrity loving “world can’t wait” fear mongerers they are today. It’s a long way from hailing peoples’ war to handing Sean Penn an orange jumpsuit.

(above) The paranoid liberalism of today's RCP, celebrities sold separately

Remember these are the folks whose newspaper masthead featured weapons well into the 2000’s, and here they are with pro-Democratic Party, lowest common denominator pandering. How does this happen? Well, how did it happen to the Nepalese Maoist movement?

Radical gay activist Bob Kohler dead at 81

2007-12-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

“Out of the closets and on to the streets”
The Many Lives of Bob Kohler
By Brad Duncan

Liberation movements in the United States lost a brave and vibrant participant in the death of Bob Kohler, a leading figure of the American Gay Liberation Movement.
Bob lived dozens of lives in his 81 years on the planet. Although Bob was best known as an early leader of the Gay Liberation Front he was also a talent representative for mostly Black artists in the early 1960’s, a vintage clothing store owner, World War II veteran, a talented and empathetic listener, bath house proprietor, peoples’ historian, Stonewall uprising participant, and a link between the gay struggle and other liberation struggles. .
Much like the late New York activist and fellow Irish-American George Harrison, Kohler was a figure whose work touched on a wide range of social movements. His movement work stretched from CORE in the early 1960’s to ACT-UP in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Perhaps more than anything he want gay people who wanted freedom to link their struggle with all other people who want freedom. Beyond his extensive involvement with CORE and later the Black Panthers, Bob championed the struggles of New York’s Puerto Rican community, fought for immigrant rights, animal rights, and was last arrested at a demonstration against the police murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999.
He was the first to build a bridge between the GLF and the Black Panthers, and he also led a demonstration against sexism inside a Panther meeting. He was determined to both challenge the left and radicalize it. The GLF pushed the issue with the left by refusing to be sidelined in the movement. In the late 1960’s Bob organized pickets against the Village Voice and won his demand for the right to use the word ‘gay’ in an advertisement.
An oral history from the early 1990’s speaks vividly to the era:

“Basically, we went where angels feared to tread… We organized marches and participated in other people’s marches. We had fistfights with the Communist Party at a demonstration once because they said that we were embarrassing them by being there.” (1)

One of Bob’s many lives was as an oral historian of the gay community in New York. He was connected to the street kids; he listened to them and understood them, just as he connected with activists and all types of social outsiders. He stood with his feet stretching across multiple generations of gay New York, and was an important community elder.
In the same oral history, Bob explains why dance parties were nessesarry fund raisers in the early days of the gay liberation movement:

“We would sometimes make as much as a thousand dollars, which was big money in 1970. Usually the money during the dance was kept in Sylvia’s panty hose or in my back pocket. We used the money as bail. We’d get a call that two Black Panthers had been arrested. One of us would take the money, go down, and bail them out. Or women were striking at the telephone company and one was arrested and beaten up. Or someone wanted to start a youth organization. We’d throw a dance and give them the proceeds. What little money we had we’d keep under my bathtub because we were afraid of banks”. (2)

Fighters for human liberation everywhere morn his passing, although no one could accuse him of leading a short or unproductive life.
Bob Kohler, Presente!

(1) and (2) from Over the Rainbow: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America Since Stonewall Boxtree, London 1993

A Chapter From Radical History

2007-12-21T10:03:00.000-05:00

“Red Flag, Black Nation: Communists, African Americans, And Self-Determination
1919-1939”

By Brad Duncan

Two Connected Themes

There are two story lines writ large across the world in the twentieth century: race and communism.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s white supremacy was the law of the land across the planet. From the French colonies of Southeast Asia, to the rubber fields of Angola, to the tin mines of Bolivia, to the tenant farms and meatpacking houses of the United States, Europeans and their decedents controlled the wealth and made the decisions. That people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America had no fixed rights was a common assumption to European colonial rulers, despite any democratic pretense. Through out the world, organized, state-sponsored racism was intimately related to economic exploitation. No where was this more clear than in the United States where the descendants of Africans slaves faced white supremacist violence, legal persecution, and ruthless economic exploitation.

The emergence of an American Communist movement in 1919 signaled the beginning of a new challenge to industrial capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The vision of the world offered by the new Communist movement was fierce in its racial egalitarianism. Not only did the Communist movement preach the common class bond between white workers and workers of color but Communists championed the right of national self-determination for all oppressed nations. The imperialists had mad noises to honor this democratic right in the wake of World War One, but it amounted to little. The Communist movement demanded freedom for colonies by any means, up to and including revolution.

By the end of the 1920’s the Party classified African Americans as an oppressed nation yearning to be free. This meant that any revolution against oppression in the United States would see African Americans and their unique struggle for freedom at the center. In the 1920’s and 1930’s the Communist Party, USA was a majority non-Black political party that dedicated itself in historically unprecedented ways to the liberation of Black people. This research paper aims to investigate the relationship between the CPUSA, African Americans, and the issue of National Self-Determination in the United States in the first two decades of the party’s history.

Labor, Socialists, and Black Workers before the CPUSA

By the time American Communism emerged in 1919 the Socialist Party had been the political party most associated with socialism and anti-capitalism for over twenty years. While the Socialist Party identified racism as a destructive force that helped divide the working class and should be done away with, they never developed a systematic program for fighting racist oppression. When it came to organizing unions and wining strikes and opposing the war, the Socialist Party had a program, platform, and strategy. When it came to organizing to combat lynching, analyzing the roots of white supremacy, and consistently fighting Jim Crow in the unions, the Socialist Party did not have much to offer.

Some early trade union such as the Knights of Labor had made limited efforts to specifically organize workers of color, as did the more radical IWW. The IWW had a handful of prolific and important Black organizers and the Socialist Party likewise had small amount of Black cadres and leaders such as A. Philip Randolph. But by and large, the workers’ movement and even the organized left of that generation was segregated and almost totally ignored workers of color, Black workers included. These unions, from the AFL to smaller craft and even industrial unions, helped reinforce—not challenge—the American color line that was so important to employers and the state. Unions that did seek to organize Black workers either independently or with white fellow workers were met with incredible repression and often shunned within the larger labor movement. Capitalists wanted to make white workers feel that segregation and Black oppression created material benefits for them, and most mainstream trade union leaders were happy to play along. Many unions made guaranteeing white privilege a central demand. A movement that held tremendous potential to attack white supremacy was in many ways another racist arm of the law for workers of color.

The Socialist Party was very proud of the fact that in an era of extreme racism they were a color blind political party. But that was just the problem. The “color blindness” of the Socialist Party meant they were unable to prioritize fighting Jim Crow, incapable understanding Black struggle, and willfully ignorant of the special oppression that Black people face in the United States. For the SP, Blacks were simply an oppressed group within the working class because of shallow white racism. The SP intentionally never developed a program to specifically combat white supremacy or a plan to further solidarize with existing Black struggles. They were, after all, color blind. Black labor legend A. Phillip Randolph felt that the socialist message of the SP was the answer for working class African Americans and he spoke out widely on the Party’s behalf. But time and again Black militants noticed plainly what was missing from the SP’s radical politics. Randolph recruited some already radicalized Black socialists to the Party, but it was generally a tough sell for many Black workers in the ranks of the labor movement where Randolph carried out his work as organizer. For all its militancy, the Socialist movement had a Black liberation problem.

African Blood Brotherhood

The African Blood Brotherhood was a secretive organization in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s that was primarily dedicated to propagating socialist and Black nationalist ideas to an increasingly politicized African American audience. They also aspired to be an armed force that could protect Blacks from lynching and racist violence. Although nominally an underground movement the ABB used it’s widely circulated newspaper The Crusader to build support for Black pride, Pan-Africanism, and class struggle against capitalists. The ideology of the ABB barrowed from nationalists like Martin Delany and socialists such as Eugene Debs, making them the first party ever in the United States to fuse the ideas of Black Nationalism with those of revolutionary socialism. Although the ABB would eventually established cells across the country the group was based in New York City. New York was a center for Black immigrants from the British Caribbean, many of whom had been radicalized by the anti-colonial movements and had already been exposed to socialist ideas. Many central ABB leaders were from this left wing immigrant Caribbean community in New York. Some had been involved with the Socialist Party but not surprisingly many found the Party’s lack of movement on the Black question off-putting. This milieu would increasingly come to the Communist Party as it emerged in Harlem later in the decade.

More than anything else the ABB came to be associated in the public mind with armed self defense to white supremacist violence. In 1921 white racist mobs attempted to entirely destroy the Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although initially the pogrom was quite successful, militant defense was organized and white mobs were repelled. Because they preached armed self defense and because they had a cell in Tulsa it was widely reported in the newspapers that the ABB had been the force behind the brave resistance. The ABB was also quite famous for its public arguments with the much larger movement led by Marcus Garvey. The ABB, although largely sympathetic to Garvey’s militancy and posture, thought that ‘back to Africa’ were naïve, escapist, and essentially giving in to American racism. They also accused Garvey’s followers of having false middle class pretensions and essentially being aspiring shop keepers who had no sense of class struggle. Despite a grudging respect for his Black pride message, Garvey was a pro-capitalist reactionary who was misleading the Black masses in the eyes of the African Blood Brotherhood.

For the African Blood Brotherhood Black people in the United States needed more than formal equality or a ticket to Africa—they required liberation right here and now. That here and now seemed to flash before their eyes as Lenin and the Russian Communist Party seize state power in 1917. The ranks of the ABB were electrified by this daring achievement, just as they had been roused by news of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland the year before. Increasingly the ABB sought out leftist forces who orientated towards national liberation and internationalism. They sent representatives around the radical Black movement, but it was their nascent relationship with the Communist Party that established the deepest collaborative relationship. By 1922 the ABB—an exclusively Black organization—voted to join the Communist Party, USA, a predominately white organization. The Communists needed Black cadres to become the party they so desperately wanted to be. The ABB, feeling that most of their Black Nationalist brethren had little need for class struggle, needed a broader, more radical movement to build. As the CPUSA was shifting to the left on the issue of Black liberation, the ABB and the CPUSA seemed like a perfect fit.

Communist Party, USA is born

“…our experiences lately in the mass struggle show, first of all, how everything that touches upon the Negro question is for out Party a question of fundamental principle importance, a matter of life and death” (Communist Position on the Negro Question, page 8)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first time in human history that working class people seized control of a state apparatus and kept it. The Paris Commune of 1871 showed that workers could take power, the Russian Revolution showed they could take it and wield it. The Communist movement in Russia, know as the Bolsheviks, was led by V.I. Lenin, a central thinker and activist in the world socialist movement. Lenin’s ideas about how to organize for social change were different that those associated with the American Socialist Party of the era. Lenin had no faith in working within the system and believed only revolution could deliver the goods for the working class and oppressed peoples. The mainstream Socialist movement in the United States was much more likely to embrace legislative and legal tactics, alongside labor action. But when Lenin and the Bolsheviks successfully overthrew the government and declared that a socialist transformation had begun, American socialists took notice. The left wing of the Socialist Party, along with militants of the IWW and other radical working class forces, were now convinced that the SP did not have what it took to win for workers. What was needed was the kind of disciplined, explicitly revolutionary party like the won led by Lenin. By 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution, hundreds of American socialists, wobblies, and assorted radicals decided to form a new political party. Although it would operate somewhat clandestinely and used various names, this party would eventual debut to the world as the Communist Party, USA.

In its first decade the Communist Party carved out quite a niche as a political party that aligned itself with organizing unorganized workers, defending class war prisoners, and propagating the idea that workers could and must overthrow the government. They were more radical that the Socialist Party, more political that the IWW, and more ambitious that both combined. Defending political prisoners was a key area of work if for no other reason than sedition laws had hit communists and immigrant unionists so hard. They initiated the Trade Union Education League which help spread militant trade unionism and radical class politics throughout the nation, including regions previously void of unions. The TUEL and the Negro Labor Congress attempted to popularize industrial unionism—as opposed to narrow craft unionism—a decade before the CIO was born. Both preached strict anti-racism and opposed the collaborationist relationship unions like the AFL had with employers.

From the outset the Communist Party, USA stove to uphold a more radical position on the Black question than did the Socialist Party. In its earliest years the party put forward what was essentially a more strident version of the SP position. This evolved with the emergence of the United Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey. The spirit of militancy, pride, and self-determination that Garvey brought to the Black struggle was infectious. As much as the early Communist movement admired Garvey they were also sharply critical of his work, calling it bourgeois nationalism and escapist. In the wake of the collapse of the Garvey movement in the early 1920’s, the Communist Party focused on setting up Black pro-labor organizations. They sought to build national organizations that could organize Black workers where other unions had refused to do so, engage non-Black members in Black labor struggles, and most importantly popularize the concept of class struggle amongst the layer of radical Blacks that had been attracted to Garvey. For Communists, a central goal of early work amongst Black workers was to channel the pride and rage of Garvey into militant Black trade unionism. While Garvey offered escapist solutions, the Communists sought to lead a movement for Black liberation here in the US.

The influence of the African Blood Brotherhood, the Garvey movement, and a shifting focus in world politics meant that the Communist Party was increasingly viewing the Black liberation struggle as a National liberation struggle in the classic Marxist sense.

Birth of “National Self Determination for the Black Belt” Theory

The shift towards viewing African Americans as a nation and not ‘simply’ a racially oppressed sector of the working class was part and parcel with a shift in the international Communist movement. In an era when anti-colonial movement were beginning to make themselves known the Marxist right to national self determination was pushed to center stage in Communist thought and practice. Part of this hardening on what is called The National Question was linked to the rise of Joseph Stalin. Stalin, who was never a party intellectual or a prolific writer, had in fact been assigned to write an essay regarding Communist Party policy on the National Question years before 1917. This essay lays out the basics of what Communists think constitutes a nation and why such a entity has a democratic right to chart its own course and be independent if it so chooses. This idea was not created by Stalin—in fact he relied most centrally on Lenin’s notebooks—but as Stalin and the emerging beaurucratic clique around him rose to power in the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1920’s the idea and the essay became holy writ.

This period of the Communist movement was fraught with division over what course the first ever Communist country should take. It was in the climate that a young Harry Haywood ventured to Moscow to further study Marxism and Communist politics. Haywood had joined the Communist movement after first participating in the African Blood Brotherhood and had been an accomplished, autodidactic political student since the Red Summer of 1919 had opened the doors to his radicalization. For Haywood the language and scheme of national self determination sounded a lot like what the ABB had been advocating: Black self-rule and socialist revolution more broadly. Haywood was sent to Moscow to be a student of the Communist movement, but he ended up shaping Communist International (“Third International”) policy towards the Black question at least as much as he learned from it. Haywood felt that the Communist movement—and Lenin’s concept of revolutionary self-determination—was directly applicable to his life experiences as a Black farmer in the Black Belt. Haywood quickly became an authority on the topic in the halls of the Kremlin, but he also became a hatchet man for Stalin, whose rise to power Haywood defended vociferously. With all the approval Stalin’s Third International had to offer, Haywood returned to the US in the late 1920’s with a vision of Self-Determination for the Black Belt. In 1928, the Black Belt Nation Theory became official Communist International policy. Just as the Communist movement favored a free Ireland, India, Kenya, and Vietnam, so too did they now openly favor a free African American government in the United States South.

The Communist Position On the Negro Question

Published in 1932 The Communist Position on the Negro Question is a deep, detailed look at Communist policy towards and involvement in Black struggles of the period. Contained inside the eighty-page pamphlet are three lengthy essays, a campaign speech, and two Communist International resolutions on the Black question from 1928 and 1930. The essays and the speech seek primarily to accomplish three things. Firstly it makes the point that the liberation of Black people is directly connected to the liberation of all working class people, thus making strident anti-racism the duty of all workers everywhere. Secondly the pamphlet seeks to show that “white chauvinism”—or a white supremacist attitude—pervaded the labor movement and the Left. Every essay, speech, and resolution contained in the pamphlet makes note of this cancer that is eating away any future possibility of class struggle, much less potential revolutionary victory. Political forces from trade unions, mainstream parties, and even the Socialists are given a firm whacking on the Black issue throughout the pamphlet. Finally, the pamphlet enthusiastically and immodestly makes the point that the Communist Party, USA is the only political and social movement with the correct position on Black liberation. The CPUSA is presented as the only movement that brings together labor and the Black struggle, and is correspondingly both the only party workers can trust and the only party that could potentially lead a future revolution. The pamphlet states quite clearly that the Party has the politics, the passion, and commitment it takes to lead the working class to victory over capitalism, imperialism, and racism forever.

This collection was designed to prove the CPUSA’s credentials on the Black question to those already in the movement but also to bring new converts into the movement and demonstrate to them the centrality of the issue. But it was also designed to attack the CPUSA’s competitors on the left and in the labor movement. One audience was the radical worker who was unsure which radical party to pick, another audience was African Americans who were unsure of the Party’s sincerity, and a final audience was Party members who needed to know the correct and contemporary party line after years of theoretic changes and development. The CPUSA hoped to get a lot of mileage from this rather small publication.

Story of the Nation

Any nation conscious enough of itself to exert its right to self-determination has to have a creation story, a national narrative. The Communist Position on the Negro Question lays out the story of the Black Nation in the US South, know henceforth as the Black Belt Nation. The stories beginnings of course lay in the removal of millions of Africans to work as slaves in the US South. As the slave-owning ruling class of the South grew more ambitious Northern industrialists grew more concerned about the existence of competion in the form of slave labor. Fearing the future of slavery under Lincoln, most slave-holding states attempted to leave the United States in 1861. In Lincoln’s view at the outset of the crisis the most preferable outcome of the war was the unity of the United States and continuity of chattel slavery in the South. As the war dragged on it became clear to Lincoln and others on the Union side that smashing slavery was the only sure way to defeat the pro-slavery secessionists. Also important to the eventual Union victory was the mobilization of Black soldiers, including thousands of former slaves. Mobilized, armed, and ready to fight for freedom, African Americans were a determining factor in the war and its aftermath.

Reconstruction offered the promise of Black land-ownership and some degree of political enfranchisement. Rumors swirled of land redistribution and Black Congressmen and Senators—some former slaves—took office across the South. But the political, social, and economic egalitarianism promised by Radical Republicans and some Union Generals never materialized. In little over a decade the entire Reconstruction project—the first real experiment in multiracial democracy in the US—was scrapped. The Communist Position on the Negro Question argues that left the Southern Black agrarian population out of US society and therefore they congealed as a Nation. Pushed out of their one chance to become American, Africans in American are therefore still Africans and should be free to control their own land. Haywood strenuously argues in his fiery contribution to the pamphlet entitled “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement” against fellow leftists that Black people in the South have all the characteristics of a nation as laid out in Communist theory. They share land, language, customs, an economy, a common history, and a “psychological makeup” that was bonded through the experience of slavery. But because of their overwhelming proletarian and peasant composition, they are a nation explicitly allied with working class struggle more generally.

The Black Belt with its majority Negro population constitutes the objective prerequisite for the realization of the struggles of the Negro masses for national liberation. The Negro toilers, once the allies of the Northern bourgeoisie but betrayed by the during the reconstruction period, have now become the allies of the proletariat. [emphasis in the original]

Harry Haywood, “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement”, The Communist Position on the Negro Question

Who Are the Friends of the Negro People?

The campaign speech included in the pamphlet titled Who Are the Friends of the Negro People? was written to set the party apart from the other political parties of the day. The speech was delivered by party activist C.A. Hathaway as a public nomination of the party’s Vice Presidential candidate, Black comrade James W. Ford. An African American had never been on a presidential ballot before in the 20^th century, much less a radical Black labor leader running as an open revolutionary Communist. The speech lays out how both main political parties as well as the Socialist betray Black workers and help prop up white supremacy and Jim Crow., thus continuing the rule of capitalists over workers.

Firstly, Hathaway points out that the Communists are not running a Black candidate as a gimmick or a vote getter. Especially not since millions of Black workers can not even vote, as Hathaway points out. He says a Black worker and leader was chosen for the ticket because Black social, political, and economic equality is an absolute party principle. Hathaway wants the party’s motive to be plainly known:

That motive is the desire to clearly and forcefully bring forward the fundamental position of the Communist Party, and of those workers who support the Communist Party, on the Negro question. The Communist Party stands squarely for the complete and unconditional equality in some narrow and limited sense. We do not say that the Negro is all right “in his place”. We say that any place open to the whites must be opened for the Negroes. We stand unequivocally for the full political, economic, and especially—we emphasize—social equality (Applause) page 22

C.A. Hathaway, Who Are the Friends of the Negro People?

Hathaway also makes the case that running a Black candidate is a challenge to all of the Party’s white members and sympathizers. It pushes the envelope in the entire left and labor milieu and acts as a vehicle for making the Party’s position on racism known more widely. Throughout the pamphlet there are admitions that white chauvinist additudes still existing within the Party. There should be no doubt, the Party assures us, that such elements are being put on trial and forced to choose sides. The Ford campaign was a part of this effort to change the internal life of the Party.

Sectarianism

Although the Socialists may have formally been for Black suffrage, none of the parties actually fought for Black political rights. The reasons seemed simple to the Communists; the Republicans were run by the northern industrialists and bankers who profited from Black labor and the Democrats were run by former slave owners and lynchers. Democrats are presented as the front line defenders of Jim Crow segregation in the South. Republicans are considered the cynical exploiters who claim to be more civilized but profit off white supremacy nonetheless. Both tell Black workers to stay in their place, simply except occasional violence, and not to rock the boat (page 25).

“No Party lies more brazenly on the Negro question than the Socialist Party”

(page 24)

Seeing as the Socialist Party was the Party most likely to be competing for members and votes with the Communist Party they were singled out for a particularly harsh treatment. In fact, the Socialist Party—which was dramatically smaller than the Republicans and Democrats and was ostensibly a leftwing party—gets a rough, sectarian treatment throughout the pamphlet. One wonders what everyday workers who were new to radical politics would have thought about this bitter inter-left criticism. The Communist went so far as to say that the Socialists were the most serious enemies of Black workers because they claimed to be a friend of Black workers, yet were not. This meant that Socialists were the ultimate liars and therefore poisonous to the Black struggle. The Socialists said that Black freedom could be won with a Constitutional context (page 24). For Communists, only revolution could free Black people, therefore the Socialist were intentially trying to destroy the Black and labor movements by spreading lies that the system could be reformed (page 24). As shown above, the CP believed that the Socialist Party lied more than others to Blacks. Even more than the openly racist Republicans and Democrats. It may be hard to believe, but this was the Communist position in 1932.

But in the era of the “Third Period” it should not be so surprising. From the late 1920’s through the first half of the 1930’s the leadership of the Communist International to which the CPUSA was affiliated struck a disdainful pose towards other forces on the left or in the workers movement which were not Communist. Stalin—who by now had gained control of the USSR and the CI—insisted that the era of workers revolution called for no compromise with less radical socialists, less radical unions, or less radical labor parties. These kinds of political forces—of the working class but not actually Communist—were seen now to be enemies; those that would hold back the insipient revolutionary wave. This policy had disastrous consequences in countries like Germany, where the Communists refusal to cooperate with Socialists and non-radical unions removed a serious obstacle in Hitler’s rise to power. In the US the consequences of the CPUSA hostile policies were not as severe but were politically costly for the Communist cause nonetheless. There are snipes at the “lying” Socialist Party “misleaders” through the pamphlet in nearly every essay. One of the most serious charges brought against the SP by the CPUSA was their refusal to recognize that Black people were a nation and had the right to national self-determination. Not recognizing the Black Nation was an obvious sign of what chauvinism in the movement. In this passage Harry Haywood goes after the “Lovestonites”, followers of conservative Communist Jay Lovestone.

To any class conscious worker, the question is clear. To reject the right of the oppressed Negro majority in the Black Belt to set up their own government, means simply to accept the domination of white slave drivers in this territory, or in other words, to be (together with the imperialists and their allies, the slave-driving landowners) in favor of white supremacy. Truly the Lovenstonite renegades have won their spurs as the theoretical spokesmen of white chauvinism in the labor movement.

Harry Haywood, “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement”, The Communist Position on the Negro Question

The Fight for Equality in the North: Nat Turner Clubs

Throughout the 1930’s the Communist Party, USA involved itself in a dizzying array of causes connected to the Black struggle in the North: organizing auto workers, fighting Jim Crow-style segregation by any means, defending the Scottsboro Boys, breaking the color barrier in unions, organizing Black workers, not to mention politically training thousands of young activists through a whole host of secondary and solidarity organizations. The CPUSA—Black comrades and white--immersed themselves in Black struggles north and south to an extent unsurpassed by previous multiracial political movements.

Like most spheres of Communist activity, there was open and clandestine organizing as well as some projects that feel in between. The Nat Turner Clubs were a classic mid-1930’s Communist Party operation. Based in Detroit, the Nat Turner Clubs were aimed at accomplishing two central tasks. Firstly they sought to bring radical African American activists into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions such as the autoworkers. Secondly they were set up to be an activist core for activities like stopping evicitions, political pickets, and direct action. They also were initially based on study groups. The Nat Turner Clubs could be called quasi-clandestine: not openly Communists, but openly radical.

They study groups would focus on Black history, not surprisingly seeing as the clubs were named after a famous rebel slave from the 1820’s. The study of radical currents within Black history—from slave revolts to African anti-colonialism—had become very popular things to study in the Communist milieu. Party historians like Herbert Aptheker and the Jack and Philip Foner wrote numerous books and pamphlets on these and related topics. Such studies were used in the Nat Turner Study clubs.

Once there was a cohesive group based around the study, further actions could be organized. There is of course the classic Depression-era direct action of stopping evictions physically, which was used. As well as building support for Black workers on strike. The Nat Turner clubs, in the tradition of the ABB, were both pro-Black and pro-labor organizations. They sought to fuse two arenas that did not always overlap: the CIO and the post-Garvey radical Black political scene.

Oral histories from the period show the Nat Turner Clubs as all-pourpose Black front groups for the CPUSA. They could act as an organizing cell for things like eviction actions, but also function as a study group.

The CPUSA tried many different avenues for challenging Black workers into unions, and in Detroit the Nat Turner clubs of the early to mid 1930’s were one of the most successful. The cadre trained through the clubs would go on to organize Black workers at Ford and General Motors. Eventually, as the Party moved deeper into the CIO officialdom and Democratic Party politics, the Nat Turner Clubs were disolved. As the part maneuvered to the political right during the New Deal more militant, direct-action projects such as anti-evictions became signigicantly less prominent.

The CPUSA’s contribution to the study of Black history should not be underestimated. Certainly they were one of very few national organizations putting on radical Black history study groups with a multiracial audience in the 1930’s. The Party, chiefly because of the focus of this period and into the 1940’s, produced a string a highly reguarded historians of slavery, slave revolts, and African history. The kinds of studies—and the kind of direct action—that the Nat Turner Clubs organized in Detroit were replicated across the country from Harlem to Oakland.

The End and a New Beginning

The Communist Party kept up its commitment to challenging racism in the labor movement and in society through the end of the Depression. The Party’s efforts to play a junior role in the New Deal coalition meant much of the revolutionary posturing had to be toned down considerably. It even got to a point where the Communist Party shunned A. Phillip Randolph’s anti-racist march on Washington, claiming it undermined Roosevelt and the war effort. Being a part of the mainstream came with a considerable price tag for the Communist Party and its affiliated groups and organizations. They softened their demands, only to be thanked with the Red Scare and decades of intense Cold War persecution.

The Black Belt Nation Theory was shelved in the 1940’s, with Communist leaders arguing that African Americans had indeed expressed their self-determination by deciding not to form a separate state. The Communist Party, USA never recovered from the Khrushchev revelations and the Red Scare. Despite being associated with hero Angela Davis, the CPUSA was eclipsed by other revolutionary forces during the New Left and Black Power periods of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Where the Communists claimed to be the most radical anti-racists in the 1930’s, by the 1970’s Black Nationalists and Maoists were more likely to claim that role.

The concept of African Americans being a distinct nation and needing to fight for self-determination did not die out entirely, in fact it was revived in the New Left/Black Power era. Black Nationalists like the Republic of New Africa (started in Detroit), Kwame Toure, and Amiri Baraka all argued for an independent Black nation. Revolutionary groups associated with the Maoist-influence “new communist movement” such as the Communist Labor Party (again, started in Detroit) and the Revolutionary Workers League all favored an independent state in the South. Although these forces have in many cases faded from the scene or been forced underground, many activists in the Black community and beyond remain influenced by the merger of Nationalist and Communist thought that was pioneered by the Communist Party, USA in the 1930’s.

Primary Sources

The Communist Position on the Negro Question International Publishers, New York [1932]

Mary Heaton Vorse Papers ReutherArchives Wayne State University

Henry Kraus Papers Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Billups, Joseph Oral History Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Marquart, Frank Oral History Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Haywood, Harry Negro Liberation Liberator Press, Chicago [1939] reprinted 1976

First Tier Sources

Bart, Phillip ed., Highlights of a Fighting History: 6o Years of the Communist Party, USA International Publishers, New York 1979

Cannon, James P. The Early Years of American Communism Prometheus Research Library, New York 2001

Davis, Ben Communist Councilman From Harlem International Publishers,

New York 1969

Georgakis, Dan ed. The Encyclopedia of the American Left New York University Press, New York 1994

Harris, William The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War

Oxford University Press, New York 1982

Hooker, James Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path From Communism to Pan-Africanism Preaeger, New York 1967

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1990

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture Politics, and the Black Working Class

(specifically the essays “Afric’s Sons with Banner Red: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934” and “It Ain’t Ethiopia But It’ll Do: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War”)

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Beacon, Boston 2004

Maxwell, William New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars Columbia University Press, New York 1999

Naison, Mark Communists in Harlem During the Depression

Grove Press, New York 1983

Painter, Nell The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South Harvard, Boston 1979

Record, Wilson The Negro and the Communist Party Atheneum, Chapel Hill 1950

Second Tier Sources

Cruise, Harold The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (specifically the essays “Jews and

Negroes in the Communist Party”, “Richard Wright”) Quill, New York 1967

Deburg, Van ed. Modern Black Nationalism New York University Press, New York 1999

Robinson, Cedric Black Marxism University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997

Sternsher, Bernard The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution 1930-1945 Quadrangle, Chicago 1969

A Chapter from Revolutionary History: The Radical Abolitionist Party

2006-12-21T06:34:00.000-05:00

A Struggle On All Fronts:
The Rise and Radicalism of Political Abolitionism

By Brad Duncan

In the summer of 1855 a couple hundred of the most seditious and radical agitators and

organizers in the United States gathered to form a new organization. These men and women

came together to build a political formation whose central aim was nothing short of the social,

political, and economic reorganization of American society. This new organization was named

the Radical Abolitionist Party and it stood for the immediate liberation of all human beings held

in bondage, the destruction of racial divisions at all levels of society, an end to women’s status as

second-class citizens, an end to the genocidal war against American Indians, and the

redistribution of resources and political power on a democratic basis. But foremost they sought

to contribute to the multifaceted, international movement against slavery.

Although politically groundbreaking, the Radical Abolitionist Party had many forerunners.

The Party’s founding in the summer of 1855 was another bold step in the long march of Radical

Political Abolitionism. They were Radical because they boldly proclaimed the nation’s need to

uproot the slave system and banish racism and social privilege. They were Political because

they believed one of the many ways that the power of slavery should be fought is with ballots

and to that end they attempted to build militant anti-slavery political parties. They were

Abolitionists because all this organizing, and agitating, and educating, and struggling was at the

service of the abolition of slavery.

Radical political abolitionists were boldly opposed to racism and exploitation in a time when

many people simply accepted the permanence of both. Radical political abolitionists parted ways

with their fellow radicals by embracing political parties. As the slave system became

increasingly aggressive in the 1850’s, Radical political abolitionists broke taboos about violence

and openly embraced John Brown and the idea of insurrection.

American Slavery and Its Ideology

Slavery, the brutal system of forced labor that was perpetrated against Africans, was at the

very core of the United States economy. Slaveholders, who accumulated wealth extracted from

the labor of African slaves, held in their hands an enormous amount of political power.

Slaveholders and their apologists held sway in the mainstream political parties, the Supreme

Court, and in the established media outlets. “Slave Power”, as the concentration of political

power in the hands of slaveholders was referred to by it’s critics, seemed to many Americans in

the first half of the 19^th century to be too entrenched to ever be moved.

“The national tolerance of slavery becomes, of necessity, the national protection of slavery. If it is not to be treated as criminal, it is to be treated as innocent. And innocence is to be protected by government, of course. If slaveholding is not a crime to be suppressed, it is a natural right, as it is now claimed to be. And it is the business of government to protect natural rights.”

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1855 page 31

The same social system that fortified slavery in the Southern states, also helped maintain racist

oppression and exploitation of free Black people in the Northern states. The idea that white

people had an exclusive right to land, political franchise, and human dignity in turn fueled and

justified the continuous destruction of the indigenous nations of the Americas. White Supremacy

was a widely held, institutionalized, and state-approved set of beliefs in the early American

republic.

Early Roots

Opposition to slavery, the slave trade, and racism more generally existed in North America from the earliest days of colonization. Those who believed in racial equality or opposed slavery, including free Blacks and the slaves themselves, more often than not kept their mouths shut under fear of death. This cage started to crack late in the 18^th century. Europe was beginning to shake with popular revolt and ideas like “liberty” and “freedom” were suddenly on a multitude of lips across the continent. This became the era of revolution. The Haitian Revolution began as a slave uprising and ended up collapsing French colonial rule in Haiti and established the first ever Black republic. It was a revolution that brought together the tradition of slave resistance and the republican ideas of the European and American Revolutions. Abolitionists sought to make use of the American Revolution’s leaders public declarations of “the rights of man” to propagate the abolitionist gospel.

One of first national political efforts organized by whites to address the issue of Black people in the United States was the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. The Society believed that the best way to assist free Blacks in the North was to establish a colony in Africa and “encourage” them to move there. The ACS maintained that this scheme sought to address the plight of Blacks by offering them a chance at more freedom, but most Blacks thought it was simply an attempt to remove them from the country where they were born in order to quell anti-slavery sentiment (which was quite clearly strongest amongst Blacks) and hence keep the slave system going. Although the ACS briefly popularized the idea of “African colonization” as an answer to “the Negro question”, abolitionists and free Blacks never lent their support to the cause in large numbers. At it’s core, the ACS supported the idea that whites and Blacks, because of their organic inequality, could never live together without conflict.

Early Anti-Abolitionist Hysteria

Because of racist fear mongering by tabloid newspapers, politicians, and other apologists for slavery, fear of the abolitionist movement came to most communities in the United States long before the actual abolitionist movement did. There were riots against abolitionism even as the movement was in its infancy. Free Blacks in Northern cities often paid the highest price for these sporadic waves of public hysteria. Anti-abolitionist violence also regularly took the form of attacks on the abolitionist press. Mobs attacked printing houses and destroyed presses in the North, and a rumor of abolitionist pamphlets being secretly send by mail could lead to a burning post office in the South.

Central to the “nightmare scenario” fears instilled in white America was the idea that white opponents of slavery were in league with slaves planning revolts. In the minds of many white people, North and South, anti-slavery activists, free Blacks, and rebellious slaves formed a possibly seditious cocktail.

Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society

Organized abolitionism came to prominence with the rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS), founded in 1833. The AAS was formed by veteran reformers, some of who had previously been involved in temperance, feminism, and other social causes associated with the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening (1820’s-1830’s). William Lloyd Garrison helped found the organization at the age of 25 and soon emerged as the group’s leading light, both as a confident propagandist and orator and as its key philosopher.

Garrison and the AAS popularized a handful of key ideas that would become core principles for a generation of anti-slavery activists to come. One was the idea that women are equal to men and therefore should play a role alongside men in the fight against slavery. Abolitionism recruited and maintained women cadres in great numbers and many of the movement’s most effective organizers were women. Another key idea pioneered by Garrison and the AAS was that the slaves should be freed immediately and without compensation; not gradually, not generations now, as was often suggested by whites professing concern for slaves. “Common sense” in the white America dictated that any change to the slave system (if indeed one was even necessary) would have to be a gradual transition, and a task best left to future generations at that. This argument always made sure to mention that slaveholders would somehow be compensated for their loss of property and wealth. Not only did Garrison advocate immediate emancipation but he mocked the idea that slaveholders, who had stolen people and then stolen the wealth of their labor, had any right to compensation. Nearly all of the key activists of the Radical Abolitionist Party from Gerrit Smith to Fredrick Douglas got their start in the AAS, as did thousands of other anti-slavery activists.

A key part of Garrison’s analysis of United States society was his belief that the established churches had been totally corrupted by the influence of slaveholders. As Christian institutions, churches should be a bulwark against the obvious sinfulness against slavery, Garrison argued. But because they consistently apologized for slavery Garrison maintained that churches were not an appropriate venue for abolitionist organizing. This put the AAS in a difficult position because so many of their members were active and devout Christians. Also problematic for many abolitionists was the AAS slogan “No Union With Slaveholders”, which was widely seen as advocating the dismemberment of the United States. Many people of anti-slavery opinion believed this would do nothing to help those in bondage, and moreover would probably extend the lifespan of the institution. For reasons similar to their refusal of work within existing churches, Garrison and the AAS rejected electoral organizing and party politics or indeed any kind of involvement with formal politics. Garrison believed that the US Constitution contained an essential compromise with slavery. In addition, Garrison argued, the main political parties were in bed with slaveholders and would not act to reform the system even if they could. For many of the organization’s formative years, Garrison also rejected violence or physical resistance as a means to fighting slavery.

So how did Garrison imagine ending slavery if not by politics and not by force? The answer

given in the AAS literature and repeated in a thousand speeches is simple: Moral Suasion.

Garrison preached that moral pressure, created by a rising tide of religion-inspired

humanitarian concern, would force slaveholders to give up their slaves. The public’s conscious

would be so stirred that slavery would have no choice but to collapse, Garrison argued.

`The Rise of Political Abolitionism:

The Liberty Party and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society

There can be little doubt that Garrison and the AAS helped build the abolitionist movement’s

confidence and radical vision. His leadership and tactical choices also caused division within the

ranks. Eventually, the growing number of the abolitionists began to long for a political voice.

Although they may not win any elections at first, increasingly abolitionists, Black and white,

wanted to use political parties as vehicles of their fight against slavery. Many abolitionists felt

like simply evangelizing against slavery was not doing enough. Garrison hit back at those who

wondered what the AAS was really accomplishing. Here he attacks those amongst his critics

who argued that abolitionists needed a political voice:

It seems, then, according to this logic, that, until the present year, abolitionists have not acted,
but only talked; that, instead of having done their duty, they have only inculcated it upon
others; that, though it has been repeated declared, in the official publications of the American
and other anti-slavery societies, that our cause was making rapid advances, both morally and
politically, from year to year, it was nothing but ‘talk’, and that the only remedy for slavery is
the organization of a third political party!!
If this is not false –if it be not infatuation—if it be not clear evidence of lack of faith in the power
of the truth to overcome the evil that is in the world—if it is not a revocation and a rejection of
the doctrines of old organized abolitionism—then we are totally blind, and can no longer understand the meaning of language.
--William Lloyd Garrison, in The Liberator October 1840 page 73

In 1840 a large group of dissident AAS members and other activists left the Church of Garrison.

There were frustrations with his overbearing leadership style and his insistence on burning

bridges to the churches, but mostly the split was about political parties. The two organization

produced by the split were the Liberty Party and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery

Society (AFAS). They set out to build a political movement squarely opposed to the mainstream

parties. The quote below, from the founding convention of a later radical political abolitionist

project, neatly sums up the Liberty Party (and later Radical Abolitionist Party) position on their

competitors:

“The Whig and Democratic and Know-Nothing parties are each made up of slaveholders, as well as non-slaveholders; and hence, the condition of their continued existence is, that they shall not attack slavery. Members there are, of each of these parties, who are opposed to slavery. But for any one of these parties to assail slavery would be to dissolve itself.”

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1855 p 3

(The Liberty Party was the direct forerunner of the Radical Abolitionist Party)

The Liberty Party wanted to find the members “of each of these parties” and tell them they should join a real anti-slavery party.

The Liberty Party was the first political party to support immediate emancipation of all slaves and the first party to run Black candidates for office. Starting from their bases in the Midwest and upstate New York the Liberty Party set out to build a viable abolitionist electoral effort that made no compromise with slavery. Candidates would campaign on such issues as slave laws, the rights of free Blacks in the North, the slave trade: every facet of Slave Power could be challenged by grass roots candidates who pulled no punches.

Despite early enthusiasm for the projects by key leaders like Gerrit Smith and some important

Black radicals, the Party had a generation of anti-electoral prejudice to overcome. In the

editorial below, Garrison tries to skewer the move towards party organizing

“Jesus and his apostles had no political power –they sought none—they only ‘talked’ against idolatry, oppression and all iniquity, whether legalized or otherwise—they merely relied upon ‘the foolishness of preaching’—and yet they accomplished something for the world, even though they were not politicians and in despite of the political logic of the Friend of Man”

William Lloyd Garrison, from The Liberator

November 1840, p 175

But those that broke with Garrison imagined developing a movement of preaching and political power.

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Association was the Liberty Party’s sister organization. It was to be the campaigning organization: organizing speaking tours, publishing literature, engaging the public beyond elections, seeding new local efforts, and collaborating with anti-slavery and anti-racist movements and organizations in other countries. The AFAS was designed to develop abolitionist agitation in other spheres in society, including the potentially the churches. The Garrison tradition of not reaching out to organized religion was scrapped. Many activists in the Black community had long favored both political engagement where possible and an end to Garrison’s sectarian posture towards all churches. Eight of the American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society’s founders were free Blacks. Critically, all of these eight Black movement leaders were preachers or clergy.

One of these Black activists was the young preacher Henry Highland Garnet. At an 1843 National Negro Convention in upstate New York he welcomed the birth of the Liberty Party as a new tactic in the struggle. Garnet’s impatience with the pace of the anti-slavery movement was widespread. Garnet was among a section of Black abolitions whose calls for radical action were becoming more radical. His speech at the convention moved far beyond hailing the new party. Garnet told the audience that slaves in the South should organize a general strike against slavery. When the slaveholders moved to crush the strike, the slaves would rebel with full force. If a rebellion could last long enough to spread, it was argued, it would spread faster and authorities would be repelled. The audience cheered his plan. It was put forward as a resolution to the convention floor and lost by one vote.

For generations contact between the white-dominated abolitionist organizations (including the AAS and the Liberty Party/AFAS) and Black political organizations had been cordial but quite limited. In fact there was a whole network of Black political and social organizations across the country that the white-dominated abolitionist groups hardly knew about. These groups defended Black rights, organized protection from slave catchers and white violence, and provided much of the Underground Railroad’s infrastructure. Many prominent Black leaders looked to the Liberty party as a possible vehicle for increased collaboration with white anti-slavery activists.

The Liberty Party also attempted to popularize ideas like land reform, which was aimed at breaking up land monopolies. In their newspaper they championed the nascent labor movement in the major cities and attempted to connect the struggle against slaveholders with the struggle against ruthless industrialists. Although the Liberty Party ultimately never strayed too far from the issue of slavery, they attempted to articulate a radical egalitarian vision of America. For much of the 1840’s the Liberty Party experienced modest success. It brought up the issue of emancipation and Black rights in local and national elections like no party had before, even managing to win a few seats in New York and elsewhere. Most importantly, perhaps, the Liberty Party gave radical abolitionists confidence they could fight slavery in venues they had not previously fought in.

Although the growing crisis over slavery and expansion in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s was

pushing more and more Americans to be critical of slavery, hard-line abolitionists were still in

the minority. Additionally, there were still thousands of anti-slavery citizens who were, if not

AAS members, sympathetic to Garrison’s rejection of the party politics and therefore did not

vote at all. Most opponents of slavery in the 1840’s were still wedded to either the Whigs or the

Democrats and held out hope that those parties could be made to challenge slavery.

Lesser Evils: Rise of Free Soil Party

and the Challenge to Political Abolitionism

Although they can take credit for pioneering the bold idea of immediate emancipation at the

ballot box, the Liberty Party was soon upstaged by less radical anti-slavery groups. The Free

Soil Party was started at the end of 1847 by disgruntled members of the two mainstream

parties (Democrats and Whigs) along with members of the Liberty Party. After considerable

struggle to keep newly won Texas out of the hands of slaveholders, advocates of “free soil, free

labor” lost the battle and once again Slave Power marched westward. The ‘Wilmot Proviso’ was

an effort to block slavery’s extension into Texas or any land taken from Mexico, and despite

passing the House, it was defeated. This tear would lead to a serious split.

“Free Soil” advocates in both parties were disgusted with their party’s leadership. Anti-slavery Whigs could not believe their party had sunk so low, and anti-slavery Democrats were finally giving up hope of changing the party’s course. Under the banner “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men”, the Free Soil Party was founded in 1848 in New York. Anti-slavery Whigs (called “Conscience Whigs”), anti-slavery Democrats (who were allied with Martin Van Buren and were called “Barnburners”), and members of the Liberty Party were the three main constituencies at the party’s core. These three groups had some serious political differences between them.

Members of the Liberty Party had to compromise to get a place at the table. These former

Liberty Party members left the confines of hard abolitionism to work with people they thought

were way too moderate on the issue of slavery. The people they were now sharing a political

party with were against slavery’s expansion, but not necessarily for it’s immediate end as

Liberty Party veterans were. In fact, some Free Soil Party members wanted to keep slavery

out of the West for purely racist reasons: they wanted no Black people in the West period.

Others saw it less as an issue of racial justice and more an issue of protecting wage earners

against competition from chattel labor. The Free Soil Party was created to block Slave Power’s

geographic expansion, which meant many abolitionists were laboring to build a party that fell

significantly short of their aspirations. But they were hopeful the Free Soil Party could become a

real electoral force, whereas they saw the Liberty Party as just a protest party.

The Liberty Party Hangs On

Gerrit Smith was determined to keep the Liberty Party going regardless of the rise of the Free Soil Party. Those who remained in the Liberty Party saw the conflict over slavery was deepening. What the country needed was not a patched-together compromise, but a clarion call for liberation. The Liberty Party carried the torch for resolute abolitionism, hoping that this deepening national crisis would open up new opportunities for struggle. The Compromise of 1850, specifically the Fugitive Slave Law, proved to the remaining Liberty Party members that militant abolitionists still had a role to play. Anti-slavery sentiment was burning across the North and they hoped to fan the flames.

In the fall of 1851 the Fugitive Slave Law came to the Liberty Party’s upstate New York home turf. When federal marshals arrested an escaped slave name Jerry, local abolitionists stormed the prison, allowing him to escape. When Jerry was recaptured soon after, abolitionists rallied over two thousand people and surrounded the courthouse. Jerry was freed and spirited away to Canada. The federal government was publicly humiliated and Slave Power stung badly, and all at the hands of abolitionists willing to organize direct action against slavery. Gerrit Smith was at the center of the effort and made sure New York voters knew that voting for him at the polls was a show of solidarity with Jerry’s escape. The incident captured the imagination of anti-slavery force across the country.

The Republican Party

The political crisis that produced the Free Soil Party was still unfolding at the turn of the 1850’s. When Slave Power won the battle over Texas, anti-slavery forces from both parties and the Liberty Party initiated the Free Soil Party. When Slave Power imposed the Fugitive Slave Law and seemed poised to claim Kansas as well, the Free Soilers were joined by massive numbers of Northern Democrats and disgruntled Whigs and together they formed the Republican Party.

Political Abolitionists, anti-slavery voters, and free Blacks were thrilled that a new, stronger party—hated by slaveholders—was emerging across the North. But, like the Free Soil Party that preceded it, the Republican Party did not come out publicly for the abolition of slavery. There were certainly leaders of the party that were committed abolitionists. But what Republican founders all agreed on was the containment and regulation of the political and economic power of the slave system, and so that was the line put forward in party literature. Slavery was morally frowned upon in Republican literature, but Garrison-styled denunciations were plainly avoided. Could the Republican Party fight Slave Power and yet maintain an agnostic position on emancipation?

“The new [Republican] party, only a few months old, yet beginning to swallow up the older ones, encounters similar difficulties, becomes rotten before ripe, and declines before half reaching the meridian. A national party without a distinct creed on the slave question is becoming an acknowledged impossibility. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery can no longer live in the same party.”

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1855 Page 48

John Brown in Kansas

In 1854 politicians like Stephen Douglas said that the white male voters of Kansas should

determine whether or not slavery would be allowed in Kansas. Abolitionist saw this as

pandering to Slave Power, a shallow compromise designed to satisfy their expansionist aims.

War broke out in Kansas within a year of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act being signed.

Slaveholders organized and funded hundreds of armed men to invade the state, instruct the

locals how they were to vote, and make Kansas the latest installment in their empire of forced

labor. New York white abolitionist John Brown, his sons, and a small handful of anti-slavery

radicals set out to stop them.

Brown had longed to use violence against Slave Power. By the time he got to Kansas in the fall of 1855 (after receiving aid from his comrades at the Radical Abolitionist convention), Brown had already told Fredrick Douglas and others about his plans for organizing an armed slave insurrection. He had already essentially enlisted his sons into his private army, they had all trained with weapons for years, and they all understood that they were at war with slavery.
Radical Abolitionist Party Founders: James McCune Smith, Fredrick Douglass,Gerrit Smith:

Waging a campaign to repel pro-slavery movement into Kansas would accomplish two important things, Brown figured. Firstly, it would be a victory against the expansion of slavery in very concrete terms. Secondly it could help put abolitionists and anti-racists back on the offensive, and remind the public that struggle was possible. Five dark years after the signing of the hated Fugitive Slave Law, anti-slavery forces were increasingly looking for openings to push back. John Brown and his men wanted to show the world that anti-slavery forces could fight back and win.

The Radical Abolitionist Party Steps Forward

“Our undertaking, as Radical Political Abolitionists, is to remove slavery from the national territories by means of our national political power, and to remove it from the States also, by means of the same power, whenever the States shall themselves refuse to remove it. For the success of this undertaking, we must depend, under God, upon ourselves.”

from the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist

Convention, 1855

The founding convention was held in the anti-slavery heartland of upstate New York in the

summer of 1855. It brought together not just grass roots abolitionist militants, but also some of

the movement’s most respected (and feared) leaders. The convention was called by Gerrit

Smith, who for years had been buying land for free Blacks (many newly freed) to farm in

upstate New York. Smith’s farmlands in Peterboro and North Elba, New York were thriving

experiments in multi-racial communal living. Smith had spent most of his years in the

movement struggling to build the Liberty Party.

Also a leading force behind the party’s launch was Fredrick Douglas, whose position in the

movement was nothing less than the public face of Black protest in the United States. Douglas

was not just one of the movement’s most forceful and eloquent critics and speakers, he was

himself an escaped slave and his best-selling autobiographies had seriously contributed to the

growing public interest in the issue of slavery. But Douglas was also friendly with many in the

Free Soil and later Republican parties and it was not clear that he would stay with the much

smaller Radical Abolitionist Party forever. Douglas came to the movement through Garrison’s

AAS, and he still had long-standing working relationships with many in that group. His heart

was always with Gerrit Smith and the Radicals, but he was also a political personality that was

bigger than one small party with one small newspaper.

Lewis Tappan singed the call to found this new party and was involved in the convention.

Tappan was the anti-slavery veteran who was at the center of the Amistad court case fourteen

years earlier. That case had given anti-slavery activists everywhere a sense of hope that you

could fight slavery, defend rebellion, and win. Years earlier Tappan had been a co-founder of the

American Anti-Slavery Society along with William Goodell, who also lent early and enthusiastic

support to the new Party and was recruited to be Party Secretary. Goodell was a prolific and

uncompromising enemy of slavery, racism, and social caste who, like many of the party’s

founders, spent years trying to build an explicitly anti-slavery political party fully independent

of the mainstream parties. In recent years Tappan, Goodell, Douglas, James McCune Smith and

their comrades had seen many Liberty Party members desert the party in recent favor parties

that were in some way critical of slavery without explicitly condemning slavery. They saw the

founding of the new Radical Abolitionist Party as the alternative for those who sought no

compromise with Slave Power, either in the expanding West or in the heart of the South.

“The day of “compromises” with slavery has gone by, and can never return. Slavery itself abjures and repudiates compromise! The same Divine Providence that watched over the anti-slavery cause from the beginning, that shielded it from violence, that gave it utterance amid the strife of tongues, that pioneered and seconded its agitations and confirmed its testimonies by a series of startling disclosures, that led it out of obscurity into the daylight of national discussion,—that same Divine Providence, still ruling in the midst of its enemies, and confounding their counsels, has wrought out this DELIVERANCE FROM COMPROMISE, at a time when it was least expected, through instrumentalities that seemed most unpromising, and in a manner that, for a time, has shrouded the victory with the dark mantle of apparent defeat.”

From The Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1855

With this position they sought to couple the struggle for political enfranchisement and social

liberation of free Blacks in the parts of the country where slavery had already been banned.

The man overseeing the proceedings and serving as emcee was James McCune Smith. Like

Douglas, McCune Smith’s name was synomous with the Black liberation struggle and defiance of

racism. When he discovered that no medical school in the United States would admit him as a

student because of his skin color he went to Scotland and attained a doctorate. By the time he

took to the podium at the Radical Abolitionist founding convention he had a national reputation

as a medical doctor, an ally of escaped slaves, and as Philadelphia’s most outspoken advocate of

the city’s free Black community. Also playing an important role at the convention was John

Brown, who had over the last decade corresponded and collaborated with many of the men that

he shared the podium with that weekend. As the 1850’s intensified, Brown emerged as the

leading practitioner of revolutionary physical force abolitionism. He came to the founding

convention of the Party looking for support for his efforts in Kansas.

The party was created in a time of crisis for abolitionists. From the slaveholder-financed gangs

fighting to make Kansas a slave state, to the influx into Northern states of armed slave catchers

escorted by Federal marshals as ushered in by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to the

increasingly bellicose pronouncements of slavery’s spokespeople, across the country “Slave

Power” was becoming more powerful and bold in the 1850’s. Abolitionists had been speaking

out and hurling critiques at this rising threat to liberty for decades, but their voices were

repeatedly drown out and their ability to organize stifled. If anti-slavery forces did not go on the

offensive immediately, Radical Abolitionists argued, Slave Power might snuff out their

movement entirely.

"The expectation of enlisting larger numbers, by taking a moderate, middle course, has been disappointed. The attempt to organize a mere anti-Nebraska movement, being still more moderate, has still more signally failed. The public mind, though still hesitant, vague, indeterminate, and thoughtful, cannot be roused to action on half issues. It is waiting for something more. It is reserving its strength for an occasion worthy of being put forth. The slumbering Hercules will not be roused to the hunting of a fly—the pruning of a limb—the recovery of a lost fraction. BUT IT WILL BE ROUSED."

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist

Convention, 1855 Page 49

Tactical Orientation

The Radical Abolitionist Party was a part of a broad, increasingly militant abolitionist movement

but was in many ways unique in that movement. Unlike some of their comrades in other

anti-slavery organizations, the Radical Abolitionist Party believed in a using a wide variety of

tactics in the fight against slavery. Central to their political position was the belief that slavery

had to be entirely done away with, not simply contained. This put them in sharp contrast with

the Republican Party. Radical Abolitionists did not want to trim the branches; they wanted to

pull up the root.

"That we, therefore, reject as useless, all schemes for limiting, localizing, confining, or ameliorating slavery—all plans for protecting the non-slaveholding States from the aggressions of slavery, and from the liability of becoming overspread and overborne [overwhelmed] by it—which do not look, directly, to the immediate and unconditional prohibition and suppression of slavery in all parts of the country."

From the Proceeding of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1855 p 87

They also strongly disagreed with Garrison who maintained that the political process was too

corrupted by slavery to participate in. They sought to reject the condescending racial

paternalism that was pervasive amongst white opponents of slavery at the time. The Radical

Abolitionist Party set out to include Black people as members, activists, and leaders. Members

of the Radical Abolitionist Party participated in the Underground Railroad at a time when some

white abolitionists feared it aggravated sectional tensions or was too risky.

They disagreed with the Free Soil and Republican goals of merely “resisting the encroachments

of slavery”. The only way to resist slavery was to end it once and for all, as explained below:

“Resolved, 1. That experience has now fully proved that there is no way to get rid of the evils of slavery, but by getting rid of the existence of slavery—no successful method of resisting the encroachments of slavery but by the overthrow of slavery—and no appropriate plan or measure for SECURING the abolition of slavery, but by ABOLISHING it.”

Resolution #1, from the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention, 1955

They also advocated sweeping egalitarian land reforms and used the language of class struggle

at a time when some of the abolitionist movement’s important leaders and key financiers were

in opposition to these sentiments.

Resolved, That recognizing, as we do, the fact of MAN’S EQUALITY, as the foundation principle, which underlies the Anti-Slavery movement, we abhor, and will use our every effort to annihilate, that abominable spirit of caste

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Convention,

1855 p 55

The Radicals were building on the work of the Liberty Party and other abolitionist groups by

attempting to connect with labor rights. Radical Abolitionists insisted that the struggle against

the tyrannical boss was linked to the struggle against the tyrannical master. Abolitionists

insisted that the struggle against slavery was the most urgent struggle facing the nation and this

did not always square with the priorities of urban labor leaders in the North.

They parted ways with much of the organized abolitionist movement in their open embrace of

physical violence as a tool for ending slavery. While some abolitionists silently supported armed

resistance in their hearts, few organized abolitionist

groups exclaimed their support for violent attacks on slavery so loudly. Pacifism was a widely

held tenant in abolitionist circles at the time, with Garrison as it’s leading radical advocate. At

the time of the Radical Abolitionist Party’s emergence John Brown was making a name for

himself battling pro-slavery forces in Kansas and was recruiting both Blacks and whites into an

anti-slavery guerrilla army. The Radical Abolitionist Party was very proud to count firebrand

Brown as a party supporter. Whenever Brown or his comrades addressed a Radical Abolitionist

Party meeting or convention, as they did repeatedly, they received overwhelming moral

support in addition to donations of cash and arms. Although they usually insisted they wished it

could be peaceful, Radical Abolitionists believed that the forced end of slavery would involve

bloodshed. Slavery, they argued, was itself a state of war.

Connecting with the Image of the Indian

In their writings, letters to each other, and in public writings, Radical Abolitionists celebrated the struggle of American Indians—or at least their romanticized image of American Indians. Historian John Stauffer looks at this issue extensively in his book The Black Hearts of Men (2001), which pays special attention to the bi-racial comradeship of James McCune Smith, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, and Fredrick Douglas. These men identified with the image of the Indian for divergent but related reasons. John Brown bragged that his skills shown in Kansas were learned growing up in Ohio with Indians. In Brown’s mind Indians represented cunning and bravery, qualities he longed for the abolitionist movement to show more of. Fredrick Douglas imagined Indians as rebels against white racism. Both McCune Smith and Brown saw Indians as people who first and foremost knew how to deal with oppression—make war on the oppressors. Stauffer points out that these radicals knew the difference between their fantasy of American Indians (constant sublime resistance) and the reality (broken treaties, death). But Indians nonetheless remained a powerful image of righteous struggle against all odds to men like Douglas and Brown.

Preparing for Insurrection

John Brown was serious about his plans to lead an armed slave insurrection. He had been telling Fredrick Douglas of his plans since the two first met at an abolitionist house in upstate New York in the late 1840’s. He had told McCune Smith of his plans too, and Gerrit Smith agreed to help sponsor. Douglas was sympathetic to Brown’s intentions, but always played devil’s advocate in their conversations about the plan. Douglas argued that the plan could trigger horrific retaliation against the slave population, or harsh repression against the abolitionist movement (which was already plenty repressed), or both. Brown was not afraid of his actions bringing down repression because he was confident the movement would surge forward even if the raid itself failed.

The plan seemed plenty daring: Brown and his recruits would take over a federal armory, steal the weapons, and escape to the hills where the process of running off slaves from nearby plantations would begin. As newly escaped slaves amassed in the mountains, Brown’s army, now doubly reinforced, would organize them and distribute pikes. Dividing themselves into flying columns, Brown’s swarming fugitive army would cut a river of escape through the mountains leading North. As rumor spread, more slaves would rebel which would give courage to more rebellions. White militias and state forces would of course try desperately to suppress the rising, but a guerrilla force operating in small cells deep in the mountains is a hard force to pin down. Brown knew the history of escaped slave communities, he knew there had been maroon communities that had escaped white society, and he hoped that his raid would tap into this tradition of resistance. Brown also anticipated solidarity risings in the North. Once the façade of slavery’s invincibility was cracked, the walls would come down.

Although Douglas had always been skeptical of the specifics of Brown’s plan, Brown continued to

urge Douglas to get involved right up to the raid in 1859. Brown imagined using Douglas’

organizing and communication skills to quickly shape freed slaves into a resistance force. Brown

wanted Douglas to be his liaison to the newly freed slaves. Harriet Tubman actually agreed to

participate. She had been corresponding with Brown and he had high hopes she could connect

him with more Blacks sympathetic to a planned rising. She became ill and lost touch with Brown

the week before he was set to attack the arsenal. Brown had been in the area of Harper’s Ferry

for weeks planning the attack on the armory before October 16th. He and his men had made

some contact with local slaves and revealed to them the plan. They knew these efforts to

canvass local slaves had not been extensive enough, but they were confident that local slaves

knew and were ready to rally to the standard. They did not rally to the standard as Brown had

hoped. After 36 hours of fighting John Brown and his inter-racial band of radical abolitionists

surrendered to federal authorities.

White Southerners were not surprised that someone like John Brown would attack a federal armory, newspapers had been telling them to expect that for ages. What surprised Southern whites and indeed many in the North was the incredibly outpouring of support for Brown’s actions shown in cities across the North. Massive rallies and meetings in Boston and New York and Syracuse and Philadelphia cheered him as a freedom fighter.

After the Rising

“And, therefore, while the specific action of Brown at Harper’s Ferry was insane, the controlling motive of this demonstration was sublime.

While it is the duty of the slave patiently to endure his lot so long as he sees no way out of it, is it wrong for him when, by swiftness of foot or strength of arm, he can seize the opportunity of freedom, to use it rather? Is it wrong in the sight of God for any man to help him in this by peaceable means? While the oppressed must suffer patiently so long as there is no hope of redress, it is wrong for the, when there is a reasonable prospect of success, to rise to achieve their own emancipation?

From The Liberator, December 1859 page 190

For the most part, the abolitionist movement was absolutely electrified by Brown’s raid. The Radical Abolitionist Party, on the other hand, was essentially destroyed by the raid. Gerrit Smith, who had been in on the plan and had been funding Brown the whole time, suffered a nervous breakdown. After a lifetime of ever increasing activity and militancy, Smith fell back to earth with burned wings. Douglas was widely suspected in the newspapers of being behind the plan. Douglas, of course, lied to journalists and said he had never heard of the plan. Douglas then left for Britain. Although anti-slavery sentiment was boiling over everywhere, those closest to Brown were laying low.

The Liberator had always condemned Brown’s tactics on pacifist grounds, but they could not deny that Brown was of their movement and spoke for many abolitionists. Though they ridiculed his poor planning and romanticism, The Liberator realized John Brown’s execution ushered in a new period of struggle against slavery. And, ultimately, it would be the slave system that would be tried and hanged.

Not John Brown but Slavery will be gibbeted, when he hangs upon the gallows. Slavery itself will receive the scorn and execration it has invoked for him. That execution will strengthen and consolidate the feeling of the North in determined and irrepressible hatred of the barbarism that makes traitors and criminals of those who seek to deliver the oppressed

From The Liberator, December 1859

Page 190

After extolling all that his brave actions and impending execution brought to the movement,

The Liberator turned more introspective and self-critical as the day of the execution arrived.

Garrison is melancholy as he meditates on what rising against slavery really means. Here he

recognizes that his movement contributed to the emergence of John Brown and wonders what

other dark implications might come from his work:

In accordance with this recommendation, circulars have been distributed over the country, suggesting to the friends of abolition everywhere—in all the cities and towns of the North, to have the bells tolled for an hour publicly on Friday, the second of December. This is Boston abolition philanthropy. Through the instigation of the Anti-Slavery fanatics preaching resistance to the laws as a religious duty, crazy old Brown and a half dozen insensate vagabonds like himself, have got their necks in nooses, and the Anti-Slavery Society having push them into this strait, have nothing better for their relief than going through the melancholy farce of ‘tolling bells for an hour’, while outraged laws are choking the poor dupes of their wicked folly of death.

It must be highly gratifying to Brown and his associates, and deeply consolatory to their unfortunate and distressed families, to know that these men go ignominiously out of the world, while the instigators of the mischief for which they died are making a general clamor over their victims for the ‘good of the cause’. A more heartless farce over a sad tragedy could not be performed. But it is of a piece with the sympathy and philanthropy, which teach that, to free the Negro, it is necessary to cut his master’s throat. To change the condition of three millions of slave to one where starvation is assed to degradation, it is necessary to stir up the embers of civil war among thirty millions of free men, and drench the country in blood from one end to another.

William Lloyd Garrison, in The Liberator

December 2^nd, 1859

(The day of John Brown’s execution)

By the elections of 1860, the Republican Party looked ready to take power nationally. Fredrick Douglas pledged his support to the Republican’s candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was no abolitionist, as every Radical knew. But he was hated by slaveholders (who saw little difference between Lincoln and John Brown) and stood a solid chance to winning the presidency. The Radical Abolitionist Party watched most of its’ members support the Republican Party in 1860

Radical Political Abolitionists seeded political opposition to slavery at a time when slavery’s power was growing. They were the first US party to run a Black person for office, and the first Black person elected in the US was a Liberty Party member. As Slave Power expanded its’ influence, the political abolitionists became more and more radical. With the founding of the Radical Abolitionist Party, this current had fully blossomed into a political movement that defied mainstream US society in every imaginable way.

“To the Radical Political Abolitionists:

WE are few but we are not, therefore, to cease from our work. Work for a good cause, be that cause popular or unpopular, must be work to the end.”

From the Proceedings of the Radical Abolitionist Party, 1855

North of Ireland: Union activist and former Hunger Striker TOMMY McKEARNEY on the Selling of the "PSNI"

2006-12-19T05:20:00.000-05:00

Sinn Féin and Policing the North

(Tommy McKearney, Fourthwrite)

Those with experience of Sinn Féin manoeuvring will have recognised recent signs that a policy change is in the air. Look at what has been taking place. GAA stars have been playing football with the PSNI and never a word of rebuke from the Ard Comhairle. Gerry Kelly dropping hints in a Belfast Telegraph interview about the closing gap between his position and that of the British government on acceptable policing. Gerry Adams telling a Yankee audience how much he wants to be able to support the police in the 6 Counties. Have no doubt about it, the party wishes to endorse policing in the north of Ireland and is in the process of persuading its loyal and docile support base that this is something that they too should aspire to.
In the short term there is little doubt but that the Sinn Féin leadership will be able to carry the day at a special delegate convention and win approval for policing in the north. Before long the party will be nominating representatives to sit on local district policing boards and its elected representatives will be repeating the same old mantra as other Establishment politicians about the need to support law and order and asking all to give whatever help they can to the constabulary.
There will be a certain amount of token resistance from the older Provo wing. There remains, after all, a small incorrigible group of old war horses who still cling to the notion that the only good copper is a well shot through one. These folk, however, are now an aging anachronism with fast diminishing influence in the movement. The skilled 'party-handlers' who have extensive experience of placating irritated but politically limited Provos will easily deal with any objections.
Difficulties will set in, though, as the process develops. The party faithful will have been told that accepting the PSNI will put enormous pressure on the DUP to do business with Sinn Féin. This will be one of the early disappointments as there is little likelihood that this generation of republicans will ever find favour with the Paisleyites. In reality, the DUP would find itself in real danger of losing its core support if it were to do a deal with those they deem guilty of prosecuting the physical force campaign of the past thirty years.
In short time too, fond hopes of making policing accountable to Sinn Féin representatives will quickly prove an illusion. For so long as the Six County state is part of the United Kingdom, London will ensure that it exercises control over any and every armed body within its territory. Moreover, the notion that Sinn Féin might see its representative made responsible for justice and policing in the North is sheer fantasy. It will prove nigh on impossible to persuade the DUP to share power with the Gerry Adams generation of republicans under even the best of circumstances. To envisage them participating in an executive with a Sinn Féiner in charge of, or contributing to guiding the police is stretching credulity to the point of believing in leprechauns.
Sinn Féin will, in the short run, contrive to execute what a few short years ago would have been an impossible feat and bring the party around to endorsing policing in the North. It will seem at first as if a minor miracle has been performed with police and Provos cooperating on a wide range of issues in order to bolster 'law and order'.
The problem will be that in the medium term, social and economic conditions in Ireland, north or south, will not dramatically change for those on the lower rung of the ladder. No amount of smoke and mirrors will alter the fact that the neo-liberal agenda remains in place and a socialist republic is not in view. Those people most likely to vote Sinn Féin at present will not see any improvement in their lives in the tough world of free market capitalism. They will begin to notice, though, that the party, which once appeared as marginalised and as isolated as they were has become virtually indistinguishable from the others in parliament.
This will surely come to pose a problem for Sinn Féin. Michael Harrington, the American sociologist and writer once said that for the urban poor; "…the police are the people who arrest you." There was a time when Sinn Féin and its supporters would have found themselves in accord with this view. With endorsement of the law enforcement agencies north and south, the party will gradually lose this distinction and grow less relevant and attractive to the most marginalised and deprived.
This will happen, of course, for a very simple reason. The law that these agencies are obliged to enforce is not designed to help the poor. Neo-liberal, free-market economics by their very nature leave losers in their wake. Competition, which is the engine of the system, must by definition lead to a situation where some fall behind in the race for prosperity. In their bewilderment and anger and frustration at being excluded from the affluent society all around them, many will inevitably fall foul of the law more often than other sections of society.
It is doubtful whether Sinn Féin support will remain as solid as it used to in areas of high deprivation, especially in the Republic, as the party grows closer to the Establishment. To a certain extent it was this factor – being outside the cosy coterie – that allowed the party brand itself as anti-establishment in many of the constituencies where Sinn Féin now has elected representatives. If this base is eroded, the question may be asked whether the move towards 'respectability' will bring a compensatory increase in support among other sections of society. Theoretically, this may be possible but with little to distinguish them from other left-of-centre candidates the party will find it difficult to increase its share seats above ten or eleven and will find it difficult thereafter to maintain that number.
The party would once again find itself confined largely to the north and that will not achieve its long stated objectives. Seats on policing boards will come at a high price.

December 19, 2006

This also in the news...
From the newspaper Derry Today

Dissidents step up pressure on policing

DISSIDENT REPUBLICANS are to step up the pressure on Sinn Fein on policing with meetings in Derry and Strabane early in the New Year.

by Ian Cullen
Hardline republicans - who organised a "well attended" public debate in Toomebridge on Thursday last to discuss the issue - have anounced that a series of meetings are to take place across the North.
A 12-strong 'focus group' is organising the meetings in an attempt to highlight what it regards as a Sinn Fein "sell-out". The 'focus group' is made up of representatives of the IRSP, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, (the political wings of the INLA and Real IRA respectively) independent republicans and what are being described as "disillusioned Sinn Fein members".
Willie Gallagher, a Strabane-based IRSP representative on the group, said a number of items will be up for discussion at the gatherings, with Sinn Fein's proposals for policing at the top of the agenda.
"Republicans in all areas are crying out for meetings on the issue. It's been suggested that after Christmas there'll be public meetings in East Tyrone, then possibly Derry City and then Strabane.Last Thursday's meeting in Toombridge was very well attended by around 200 to 250 people."
He said the group met in Belfast recently to get the ball rolling in terms of opposition to Sinn Fein's proposed move.
"Afterwards we were approached by a lot of people, including Sinn Fein members, demanding similar debates around the country. We were told Sinn Fein is having private meetings on policing but they are geared towards the yes men. It is a closed shop."
Mr. Gallagher has also confirmed that the group is considering mounting political opposition to Sinn Fein by supporting independent candidates in marginal constituencies if Assembly elections are called on March 7.
"We condemn Sinn Fein's plans outright. We believe it's a simple quid pro quo for going into power with the DUP. It seems they're not living in the real world at all. You can't negotiate away political policing within a partitionist system," he said.
However, Mr. Gallagher has condemned recent reported threats against Sinn Fein leaders.

19 December 2006

Reflecting on the US in Latin America: The Case of Pinochet

2006-12-12T07:07:00.000-05:00

The Atrocities of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the United States

The Condor Model

By ROGER BURBACH

In Santiago on September 11, 1973 I watched as Chilean air force jets flew overhead. Moments later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky as the presidential palace went up in flames. Salvador Allende, the elected Socialist president of Chile died in the palace.

As an American the death of General Augusto Pinochet brings back many memories of the military coup and the role played by my government in the violent overthrow of Allende. From the moment of his election in September, 1970 the Nixon administration mounted a covert campaign against him. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's National Security adviser, declared: "I don't see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Weeks later the pro-constitutionalist head of the army, General Rene Schneider, was assassinated in a failed attempt to stop the inauguration of Allende.

For the next three years CIA-backed terrorist groups bombed and destroyed state railroads, power plants and key highway arteries to create chaos and stop the country from functioning. The goal was to "make the economy scream" as Nixon ordered. US corporations such as IT&T also participated in the efforts to destabilize the country.

In the midst of this struggle for control of Chile, Allende insisted, almost stubbornly, on maintaining the country's democratic institutions. He enjoyed immense popular support from below, even in the waning days of his government when the economy was in shambles and virtually everyone believed a confrontation was imminent. I'll never forget the last major demonstration on September 4, 1973, when the Alameda, the major avenue of downtown Santiago, was packed with tens of thousands of marchers, all intent on passing by the presidential palace where Allende stood on a balcony waving to the crowd. This was no government-orchestrated demonstration in which people were trucked in from the barrios and countryside. These people came out of a deep sense of commitment, a belief that this was their government and that they would defend it to the end.

In the aftermath of the coup over three thousand people perished, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi. The United States knowing of these atrocities, rushed to support the military regime, reopening the spigot of economic aid that had been closed under Allende. When the relatives of Horman and Terrugi made determined inquires about their disappearances and deaths, the US embassy and the State Department stonewalled along with the new military junta. Four weeks after the coup, I fled across the Andes, returning to the United States to do what I could to denounce the crimes of Pinochet and my government.

I returned to Chile for the 1988 plebiscite that finally forced Pinochet out of office after seventeen long and brutal years. But for eight more years his dark hand hung over Chile as he continued in his role as the commander in chief of the army. Finally as a result of years of hard work by the international human rights movement, Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998 for crimes against humanity. Five hundred days later he was sent back to Chile, allegedly for health reasons. There the Chilean courts lead by Judge Juan Guzman squared off with the general's right wing supporters and the military, stripping him of his immunity from prosecution as "Senator-for-Life," a position he bestowed on himself when he retired from the army.

[Families of the Disappeared]
As the proceedings against Pinochet advanced, new reports of US complicity in the coup and the repression began to surface, particularly about the role of Kissinger. The Chilean courts tried to compel Kissinger to testify, but they received no cooperation from the US Justice Department. French courts also issued orders for the interrogation of Kissinger, making him realize that he like Pinochet did not enjoy international impunity from prosecution. Small wonder that Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, decrying the use of the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' by courts to bring human rights violators to justice.

In Chile President Michele Bachelet whose father died in prison under Pinochet has refused to grant the ex-dictator a state funeral. Only military bands will play at his interment. Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean human rights lawyer, declared, "Pinochet should be buried as a common criminal," adding, "The dictator died on December 10, the International Day of Human Rights. It is as if humanity chose this special moment to weigh in with its final judgment, declaring 'enough' for the dictator."

The burial of Pinochet comes at a moment when the current Bush administration is being scrutinized for its atrocities and crimes against humanity that are even more appalling than those of the former Chilean dictator. It is another irony of history that Pinochet died on Donald Rumsfeld's last full day as Secretary of Defense. Like Pinochet and Kissinger, Rumsfeld may very well spend the rest of his life trying to escape the grasp of domestic and international courts. Eleven Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib and a Saudi detained in Guantanamo are filing criminal charges in German courts against Rumsfeld and other US civilian and military officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. And on last Friday as Rumsfeld was making a farewell speech to his cohorts at the Pentagon, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a Washington D.C. federal court that Rumsfeld and three senior military officials should be held responsible for the torture of Iraqi and Afghani detainees.

The Pinochet affair has shaped a whole new generation of human rights activists and lawyers. They are determined to end the impunity of public officials, including that of the civilian and military leaders in the United States who engage in state terrorism and human rights abuses while violating international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author with Jim Tarbell of "Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire," His latest book is: "The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice."

New Expressions of the resurgent Latin American Left

2006-12-08T19:31:00.000-05:00

Ecuador

Correa’s triumph is victory against oligarchy and neoliberalism

Margarita Aguinaga

“Arise the poor of the world, stand up the slaves without bread, we advance united...” The victory of the oppressed is expressed in the election of Rafael Correa as President of the Republic. The last two months have produced a meeting of social consciousness and left politics, expressed in Correa’s triumph against oligarchy and neoliberalism represented by Alvaro Noboa and the ultraconservative forces of the country; while their support for Noboa has unmasked the Social Christians, Roldosistas, PRIAN and what remains of Popular Democracy.

Some years ago, after the fall of President Lucio Gutiérrez in 2003, it was said that there were two possibilities at that time of crisis of political representation in the state, an advance towards the most recalcitrant form of the crisis of neoliberalism, which would imply a strong right bloc and the harshest measures against the people to restore the situation of the model, or a turn to left and the possibility of reversing the neoliberal model in its fundamental aspects.

That change is now certain, it has taken shape and simultaneously a new correlation of forces has been opened and the possibility of a historic moment, favouring the proletariat and the oppressed of Ecuador. The right did not manage to make the fall of Lucio Gutiérrez the arena to usher in neoliberal proposals, as happened in 2000, with Jamil Mahuad and dollarization, after the fall of Abdalá Bucaram in 1997.

Instead, democratic content and the confluence of struggles against the TLC [Tratado de Libre Comercio - the free trade treaty with the United States], fought mainly over the last two years by indigenous and popular organizations, have come together in the left alliance in favour of Rafael Correa. The course of history in favour of the people has been opened initially and this is reason not only to be happy, but to put an impetus into the anti-capitalist processes.

It is evident that the right and imperialism have suffered a defeat, although the form of their counter-offensive can be foreseen, we can be guided by what has happened and continues happening against Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia; they will not remain quiet, the bourgeoisie is going to look to regain control of the government, under the political and military forms that it requires to do this, hoping to erode this government and the left, to turn the people against it. Rafael Correa won the elections representing, amidst weaknesses and errors, a quite radical discourse and set of proposals.

In addition, with a right wing congress dominated by right populism, which, by means of the Patriotic Society Party announcing that it will support the Constituent Assembly, seeks to disguise the fact that this same political force, along with the Social Christians and the PRIAN and PRE, was on the verge of surrendering the country’s sovereignty to the United States by signing the TLC; this is no more than a strategy, because its social base could be weakened - the poor people that voted PSP in the first round, radicalised their position in the second round and went to the left.

It is preferable to trust the direct alliance between the people and the left, to make it stronger, this is the base that not only is going to maintain the new government, but will push for the Correa’s campaign proposals to be carried out so we can advance towards another situation of struggle, not only in Ecuador but in Latin America and the world.

Although Rafael Correa obtained a significant vote in the first round, in the second round, an articulation of left consciousness in the urban and rural sectors of the country was developed; a new encounter between the social and political forces of left, between all the actors who for more than two decades have fought openly against neoliberal globalisation.

We have many challenges: - to consolidate a government which fulfils the most important promises like not signing the TLC, creating the Constituent Assembly and improving the conditions of life, employment, health, education and housing, of the poorest people of the country; on the other hand, to consolidate the unity of the left that will be tested in the capacity to take ahead a Constituent Assembly, not only altering but pushing back the neoliberal model in its substance, that is, on privatisation and in relation to the foreign debt; to radicalise specific reforms and to harness the struggle for respect, human and collective rights, that benefit indigenous peoples, women, young people and so on, in the perspective of constructing a New Society; to affirm a process of unity and alliance with Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia and other peoples in resistance in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia; to promote new processes of organization and to strengthen the proposals of the popular and collective assemblies of struggle to allow the opening of a broad debate about where we want our country to go; also it is a time of revolutionary ideological reaffirmation that should not be lost.

It is a good time to recover and to advance, for a rethink on the new left. The political action of the political and social organizations, in addition, depends on reflection, because to build socialism we need to consider the contributions of history, to strengthen and update it from our conditions, Marxism, feminism and other revolutionary theories that will help us to reconstruct the revolutionary utopia, starting from the historical struggles of our own people.

Times of greater respect, dignity and creativity are coming, some say the beginning of a revolutionary process, in this sense all must contribute in the perspective of maximising the impact the first left government that has existed in the history of Ecuador (there was also the presidency of Jaime Roldós, but this is the first presidency originating from the left and promoting the socialism of the 21st century).

If it represents a great step for one of the smaller peoples territorially, it has beautiful and combative referents next to Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. It is time to gather the first part of the harvest, of the valiant struggles of the indigenous movement, impelled by the CONAIE, the FENOCIN and other indigenous organizations, by women, workers, young people, and the critical thinkers who are pointing out another way in history and another exit from the crises and defeats that we have experienced, challenging us to continue prioritising political objectives by the construction of popular power and socialism.

Margarita Aguinaga is a feminist activist in Refundación Socialista, Ecuadorian section of the Fourth International

Nepal: King Blamed for deadly crackdown on protests

2006-11-20T09:13:00.000-05:00

Mon Nov 20, 3:33 AM ET
by Binaj Gurubacharya

KATMANDU, Nepal - A government commission investigating Nepal's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators blamed the violence on the country's king and recommended punishing the monarch, officials said Monday.

It was unclear, though, what the penalty against King Gyanendra might be. Nepal has no laws concerning how to punish crimes by a king and the case is the first involving a monarch in a country where kings are revered as near-deities.

Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala said those found guilty in the commission's report would be punished.

The April crackdown left at least 19 people dead and hundreds injured and eventually forced the king to cede power and reinstate parliament after 14-months of direct rule by the monarch.

Parliament then quickly stripped Gyanendra of his powers, his command over the army and his immunity from prosecution.

The commission questioned top government and security officials. It also sent written questions to the Gyanendra, but the king did not respond, giving no reason.

Commission member Harihar Birahi said the investigation focused on official misuse of power, state funds and human rights abuses during the king's authoritarian rule.

Besides Gyanendra, the commission also found another 201 officials in the king's administration responsible for the bloody crackdown.

They included the chiefs of the police and the armed forces. The chiefs of the civil and armed police have been suspended while the army chief has retired.

Hundreds of pro-democracy activists were also detained during the April crackdown, and some said they were tortured.

Police moving forward after hosing down protestors at New Road

Remembering movement journalist Brad Will... with a protest in solidarity with Oaxaca!

2006-11-16T11:28:00.000-05:00

from Visual Resistance
For the past two weeks, friends of slain activist and Indymedia journalist Brad Will have been doing an immense amount of organizing to carry on his memory and in solidarity with the struggle in Oaxaca that he died documenting. The outporing of activity and creative resistance brought on by this tragedy has been inspiring and a worthy tribute to Brad’s spirit. The October 30 protest at the New York Mexican consulate in particular combined the spirit of militant direct action with a series of beautiful artwork, and a memorial bike ride saw a ghost bike ridden by a likeness of Brad, camera in hand.
Protester in front of the Mexican Consulate remembering journalist Brad Will who was killed in Oaxaca by mexican police, NY 2006

Internationalist Murals from Belfast and Derry, Ireland

2006-11-15T18:15:00.000-05:00

Revolutionary murals from the north of Ireland have unofficially become a staple of this blog. And they're always painting new ones, so I'll keep posting them.
Again, the internationalism and connectedness with other struggles is right up front.

Interview with Lebanese Communist about Hezbollah

2006-11-15T09:44:00.000-05:00

Hezbollah and Resistance

The viewpoint of the Lebanese Communist Party
Marie Nassif-Debs

Question: The Lebanese Communist Party is a secular party, engaged in the national resistance. What have been its relations with the Hezbollah?

Marie Nassif-Debs: There have been big changes in this relation over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago the Hezbollah began by waging a merciless war against communists. I think that the Islamic fundamentalist tendency, which was especially represented by the Da’wa - an Islamic fundamentalist party which had backing from Iraq and in Iran, made up not only of Shi’ites, but with a majority of Shi’ites - saw in the PCL a party that was opposed to it on everything. It wanted to suppress any idea of secularism, openness, different philosophy, and so on.

Relations began to be very tense and the Hezbollah went so far as to kill several of our comrades, especially intellectuals, cadres from the universities. For example, they killed Mahdi Amil, who had worked on the problems on colonialism and of religion and who was a very great intellectual, a very great philosopher.

And there was also Hassan Mroue, a great philosopher who wrote a very important book, which has been translated into French, and whose title is “The Materialist Tendencies of Islam”. He had begun by being a sheikh, he wanted to study in Najaf in Iraq. There he discovered that it wasn’t what he was looking for and he became a communist. He wrote many books.

There were small scale combats, in Beirut, in the western Bekaa, in several regions, in places where there was a relationship of forces such that one side could suppress the other. That also helped the Syrian tendency to eliminate communists from the national resistance.

There was a certain understanding between the Syrian forces and the Hezbollah, and also other forces. We were hunted, there were comrades who went to carry out resistance operations and they were killed - they had been shot in the back.

After that relations evolved in a positive way. In the Israeli prisons and camps, the communists and Hezbollah were side by side. A majority of communists and fewer Hezbollah. They got to know each other there and that created relations between the cadres of the two organizations. And after they were released the relations more or less evolved.

Furthermore, on the level of its thinking, the Hezbollah has evolved, especially after the election of Hassan Nasrallah to the position of general secretary. Because - this is a point of view that many comrades share with me - he is much more Arab than Muslim, in other words, he looks at things through the eyes of an Arab: he doesn’t want to liberate Jerusalem because it iss one of Islam’s holy places, but because the Palestinians have to go back to the land of their ancestors, have to have their own state... He has a vision that is different from that of his predecessors. Then we had relations that were more or less mitigated, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

And now?

Our relations have especially evolved since the last Israeli aggression, where we ourselves called for the formation of a national resistance front and formed militias which opposed the entry of Israel into several villages, including certain attempts by Israeli commandos to enter them - in the Bekaa, near Baalbeck, where we stopped the commando which wanted to move into Jameliyyah, a village with a communist majority. We had three comrades killed there.

We are still a little bit skeptical in our relations with the Hezbollah, because up to now there are points of dispute between us. For example as concerns the elimination of the confessional regime [1], they don’t have a very clear position, although they have evolved.

We had a difference with them in the summer of 2005, after the withdrawal of Syrian forces. During the legislative elections the Hezbollah felt it necessary, to protect itself from Resolution 1559 [2], to make an alliance with those who awere pro-Syrian and who subsequently became transformed into pro-Americans, i.e. the Lebanese Forces, Hariri (Mustaqbal) and Joumblatt’s PSP. It is thanks to this alliance that the March 14 forces [3] - Hassan Nasrallah admits it - won a majority and were able to form a government. Because if the Hezbollah had made an alliance with the communists and with certain Aounists [4], that majority wouldn’t have existed.

So we consider the Hezbollah as a party of resistance, which is part of a movement of national liberation on the national and Arab level, but we have differences with it on how to resolve the political and economic situation in Lebanon. But on these questions also it has evolved, especially over the last four months: it took part in a very real way in the demonstration on May 10. However, up to now they have not taken a position on many problems. They have two ministers including the Minister of Energy. At the moment they are talking about privatizing electricity in Lebanon, and he is a bit lukewarm, he is not combative.

The second problem is that the Hezbollah has not taken a position on the question of the regime, of political reforms that go into the direction of secularism and modernization. These are two essential points of dispute. And we have a third one: we were against the re-election of the President of the Republic, Emile Lahoud, in 2004 and the Hezbollah supported Lahoud.

Do you see possibilities for a further evolution of the Hezbollah?

They are more or less grouped into two big tendencies. The tendency of the Da’wa, i.e. the one that just wants Islam. And the other tendency, the one which has evolved, which talks about sharing power, which talks about an alternative, and so on. I don’t think that they have any choice but to continue evolving; we are going to continue the discussion with them and we think that if they don’t evolve they will lose the fruits of victory, for the second time ... because what happened in July and August, I call that a victory. We stood up to Israel, the strongest power in the region...

We think that if the Hezbollah wants to take advantage of the victory, if it wants the Lebanese to take advantage of the victory, it has to evolve, otherwise we will go back to the same point as in 2000. In 2000 it was thanks to the Islamic resistance that our country was liberated, for the first time in Arab history. But the victory was devoured by confessionalism. I think that some of Hezbollah cadres understood that. And we hope - because there is a continual battle inside their party - that they will not lose again, by once again adopting confessional positions.

Is the national resistance front which was established during the war going to continue?

We are continuing to discuss an alliance on the political front with the Hezbollah and with the Aounists. Many of their cadres see in Aoun someone who has opposed the Christian fascists. There is a strong d Aounist groundswell among young people, especially in the universities. To start with it was a movement for freedom from Syrian control, but it is being carried along by a wave of Arab sentiment. It is which is really posing the problems that are essential for Lebanon, and also the question of reform.

It goes further than the struggle against corruption, there is also a demand for real secular changes. That creates a possibility for a real coming together. The former Prime Minister, Sclim Hoss, is also very open, with a very Arab outlook, and she sees the essential points in this way: we are working towards a regroupment so as to establish a government of national alliance and to force fresh legislative elections, on the basis of an electoral law that would be proportional and secular, in order to subsequently elect the President of the Republic, amending the Constitution so as to suppress political and administrative confessionalism.

And you are discussing all that with the Hezbollah?

Yes! Of course we are discussing that. Because we said to them - and I think they have really understood this - that a great personality like Nasrallah, such a charismatic personality, can be an emblem for the whole Middle East (and not only for the Arab Middle East), but he can’t become President of the Republic in Lebanon. If we want people to be able to occupy the essential posts in the state, then we have to suppress confessionalism. Because now, if he stood in the elections, although he would be supported by almost all the Shi’ites and although there are many Christians who like him, so even if he can have the majority with him, he cannot become President!

You can be very big on the international level but very small and very restricted on the national level with this confessional regime. Of the 128 members of the Parliament, half are Muslims and within this half there a third of Shi’ites. So the Muslims cannot increase the number of their members of Parliament, they cannot increase the number of their representatives in the government, because there are quotas.

So either we suppress the quotas and then everyone can compete in the elections on the basis of programmes that are well defined on the social, economic, and political level, and so on, making real alliances, or else it’s the quota system. There are many people who are starting to think about this impasse ...Apart from the Communist Party and some left groups, all the political parties are confessional: the Hezbollah and Amal are Shi’ites, the Lebanese Forces are Maronite (there are also a few Greek Orthodox among them), the PSP is Druze, Hariri’s Party of the Future is Sunni’, and so on. We have a system which reproduces itself because we always have members of tparliament who are elected on a confessional basis and who make laws in such a way as to preserve their interests.

There have been civil wars and they were based on religion. Although there were fundamental problems on the social, economic, and political level, these problems were swept aside.

This interview was conducted on 21st September 2006 in Paris by Mireille Court and Nicolas Qualander.

Marie Nassif-Debs is active in the National Conference for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. She is an active member of the Lebanese teachers’ union, a writer and journalist, and a member of the Political Bureau of the Lebanese Communist Party (PCL).

NOTES

[1] This refers to the system whereby posts in the government and administration are attributed according to quotas for each religious group, i.e. the President of the Republic must be a Maronite Christian, the Prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and so on.

[2] A 2004 Security Council resolution which demanded among other things, that all Lebanese militias should be disarmed and disbanded.

[3] Name given to the coalition of anti-Syrian forces.

[4] Followers of the retired Christian general Michel Aoun.

San Francisco Labor Council supports the struggle in Oaxaca

2006-11-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

"Teachers, teach the struggle, don't leave the struggle" Oaxaca, Mexico 2006

[Note: The following resolution was adopted unanimously by the Delegates Meeting of the San Francisco Labor Council on Monday, November 13, 2006.]

Resolution in Solidarity with the People of Oaxaca

Whereas, 70,000 teachers in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico -- organized in Section 22 of the National Teachers Union (SNTE) -- went on strike in May 2006 demanding that all teachers across the State receive wage increases and wage parity, and that all school children be provided with shoes, breakfast and uniforms to go to school; and

Whereas, in June 2006, the government of the State of Oaxaca, led by Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, unleashed the first brutal attack against the strike encampments set up by teachers and their supporters; death squads working with state authorities assassinated striking teachers; and

Whereas, the people of Oaxaca -- through their labor, community, political, religious and indigenous organizations -- then rallied behind the teachers and formed a Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) to urge the authorities to meet the strikers' just and legitimate demands, and, with the Teachers, to demand the resignation of Governor Ruiz. At that point it became not only a teachers' strike, but a powerful people's strike for justice and against violent repression; and

Whereas, on October 29, 2006, the Federal government of President Vicente Fox sent in 4500 special troops to tear down the barricades and many of the encampments that the Teachers and people of Oaxaca had created to defend their strike; and

Whereas, Mexicans across the political spectrum have commented on the not-so-behind-the-scenes role of the U.S. Embassy. The Bush-appointed U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza stated on October 28 that the Fox administration had delayed too long, and needed to send in Federal troops to Oaxaca. An hour later Fox announced his decision to send in troops, which he implemented the following day; and

Whereas, over the first six months of struggle in Oaxaca, more than 20 people have been killed, including a north American video journalist, and hundreds wounded by troops, police and paramilitary forces. Hundreds have been "disappeared" (many of them feared dead). And many hundreds of union and community activists have been jailed. Yet the popular forces in their hundreds of thousands have continued to march.

Therefore Be It Resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO, joins with labor and democratic rights organizations in Mexico and around the world in urging the federal and state governments in Mexico to seek every avenue to a peaceful solution to the conflict in Oaxaca; and

Be it Further Resolved, that we urge the Mexican authorities to settle the conflict by meeting the legitimate demands put forward by the teachers and the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, including: (1) Immediate withdrawal of all troops and paramilitary units from the city and state of Oaxaca, (2) Stop the repression and state-sponsored killings, (3) Removal from office of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, instigator of the reign of terror, (4) Release all detainees and political prisoners, and (5) Governor Ruiz and others responsible must be brought to justice.

Be it Finally Resolved, that we forward these demands to our Labor Councils, National Unions, State Federations, AFL-CIO and Change to Win Federation,urging them to embrace these demands and to act in solidarity with the teachers and popular movement of Oaxaca.

(Resolution submitted by Dave Welsh, NALC #214; Alan Benjamin, OPEIU #3; and Frank Martin del Campo, LCLAA)

Fighting Back in a city that's barely there

2006-11-11T08:40:00.000-05:00

There are certain situations when I take a keen interest in writing about the state of my hometown, Detroit. There are plenty of other situations when I just don't want to hear it.
If the writing is by someone with an antiracist and working class political orientation who actually knows the city from the bottom up, of course I'm quite interested in hearing what they have to say. But these articles and commentaries are in the real minority. Most articles on the state of Detroit start out by blaming Black people and union members for the cities collapse, and then go on to mention that a new stadium and a shiny downtown could again make it a livable city. I'm including this article by Robert Mast because he knows Detroit, he cares about the social justice movements, and although we may take different positions on some issues, he is not going to lie to you.
-Brad

Survival Politics in Decaying Detroit
by Robert H. Mast

Most people know that Detroit, the once-vibrant automotive capital, has been in an economic tailspin for decades. Legions of "post-industrial" analyses have properly assigned responsibility for it to profit-motivated factors in capitalist decision-making since the late 1950s. The human cost of the tailspin is nearly beyond comprehension for those who are not directly affected by it, but some grassroots Detroiters who have lived through it are reacting in a form that could be called survival politics.

Detroit has lost nearly one million people since 1950 when it was the fifth largest U.S. city. In the past half century, most auto and ancillary production was transferred to the Detroit suburbs, U.S. South, or other countries. Other companies went out of business, absorbed each other, or automated their production. The good wages and benefits, along with a strong union presence, made Detroit in its heyday a magnet to workers all over the U.S., indeed the world. The families of new workers settled into segregated neighborhoods (Appalachian white, Black, Polish, Arab, Latin, etc.) whose homogeneity partly remained intact due to policies of the white ruling class and its controlling racist institutions. This is a familiar story in nearly every U.S. industrial city.

Detroit today, now eleventh in size, is the poorest large city in the country and has the highest poverty rate. While the official unemployment rate for the state of Michigan is 7.1 percent, Detroit's rate is over 25 percent and the rate for its Black youth hovers around 70 percent. This produces soaring rates in infant mortality, crime, and violence. Thousands of households have had their water, gas, and electricity turned off because they cannot pay their bills. A vast portion of the city is a wasteland of abandoned buildings and vacant space where thriving industrial and commercial infrastructure once existed. Most occupied neighborhoods are clearly poverty stricken. Ironically, Detroiters pay one of the highest real estate taxes in Michigan. Like Delphi, and possibly General Motors, the city government is heading toward bankruptcy with a current annual budget shortfall of $105 million. The city is laying off workers like mad, privatizing all possible remaining city services, and selling off or losing control of public assets like the zoo, museums, and one of the best water systems in the world that profitably supplies water to most of the metro population of some four million. The public education system is tattered beyond description, students now walk out of schools to protest their decaying infrastructures, and privatized charter schools are the newest class-based fad. Hospitals and clinics are closing.

Meanwhile, capital acquires abandoned land and useable buildings at rock-bottom prices and abundant tax abatements through legal shenanigans called Renaissance Zones or Neighborhood Enterprise Zones. Capital is building a small Disney World of downtown-riverfront gambling casinos and sports stadiums (thus, last year's Super Bowl), along with housing and amenities for the youthful affluent who are being enticed to the newly "cool" center-city experience. It all is one of the most vulgar illustrations imaginable of class advantage and class segregation in which race is not the major factor it was in the past. If you have money, you're welcome. According to a recent interviewee, those without money, regardless of color, are all "niggers."

Detroit today is home for some 850,000 Blacks (about 90 percent of the population), making it probably the most segregated large city in the U.S. Expectedly, this population elects Black people to public office to officiate over the contradictions of urban decay and increasingly rigid class stratification. It's not unlike other large cities where people of color have become the majority. When once-socialist-leaning Coleman Young became the first Black mayor of Detroit in 1973, many Detroiters hoped the city's massive downward slide might be slowed or even reversed. At least, Blacks would finally get a piece of the pie. Of course, whites and pretty well-off Blacks were abandoning the city in tandem with industry and commerce. As with Mayor Young, subsequent Black mayors -- Dennis Archer and today's Kwame Kilpatrick (youngish "hip" son of congressional representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick) -- fully cooperated with all levels of the power elite to bring what was left of Detroit into capital's common cause.

Over the recent years, the Detroit City Council, elected at-large, also has reflected Detroit's population, so that now eight of the nine councilors are Black, compared to several decades ago when all were white. It is widely asserted by responsible observers (and given credibility in recent court cases) that the Detroit electoral system is hugely corrupt and strongly influenced by ruling capital. This is not news to any observers of U.S. electoral politics, nor is it news to a dedicated body of genuinely grassroots Black activists in Detroit who thoroughly understand the system and see through the chicanery of Detroit's faux democracy. The November 2005 Detroit elections brought Kwame Kilpatrick back into the mayoralty and produced a relatively conservative city council, including Council President Kenneth Cockrel, Jr. (son of deceased Kenneth Cockrel, Sr. who was a stalwart with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the 60s and a one-term member of Detroit City Council before he left in frustration), Sheila Cockrel (widow of Kenneth Cockrel, Sr., stepmother of Kenneth Cockrel, Jr., from the Catholic Worker tradition, a 70s Detroit "radical" and the only remaining Anglo on Detroit's city council), Monica Conyers (wife of congressman John Conyers), and singer Martha Reeves.

There is a small potent band of grassroots Detroiters named Call'em-Out, "dedicated to the mission of stamping out samboing and selling out of our community by elected officials." Inspired and assisted by vigorous and courageous veterans of Detroit working-class struggles such as Marian Kramer and Maureen Taylor of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Call'em-Out formed a "Sambo Patrol," demonstrating in front of the homes of six members of City Council who voted against considering a rational Water Affordability Program devised by local human rights advocates. Designed to call attention to the 45,000 Detroit households whose water was turned off for nonpayment of bills, and to promote the idea that water is a human right, actions like it have great potential to catalyze the grassroots against the egregious policies of those who control things in Detroit. Reportedly, ALL utilities are now being included in the Affordability Program, which can become a generalized struggle for survival, desperately needed by the majority of Detroit residents.

Demonstration by Call'em-Out at home of Detroit City Council member Kwame Kenyatta (19 March 2006)

Detroit has had a steadfast and proud tradition of working-class left activism in the labor, civil rights, and other movements. Along with a powerful union movement led by the UAW, Detroit spawned such groups as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the white left-radical People Against Racism. The city was considered by some in the 60s to be the "revolutionary capital of America." But this is history. Today Detroit is very different, with a near-impotent UAW, a nearly-total population of color who are aging and increasingly led by women, a state of relative joblessness, a rapidly declining quality of life, and no hope that capital and its cronies have any intent or ability to recreate the city. Even suburbs near the city are deteriorating.

However, Detroit still has an activist grassroots core that swears by the axiom that new material conditions require revised tactics. Activists of this grassroots core are in the process of theoretical and organizational development. Their view is that the disappearance of the means of production from Detroit, along with the rapidly evolving electronic mode of production and the cynical aloofness of capital toward the working-class condition, has produced a new class in working (or nonworking) Detroit who must take leadership in the coming class battle. Not a lumpen proletariat, this new class has been displaced by capital and left to wither. Race is only a crucial subtext in this battle. No longer can Detroit's citizens rely on union strength, white liberalism, or "enlightened" capital -- all pages from the past. At the practical level, the core leadership emerging from this new class evinces confidence because of their personal characteristics: they are nice and moral people, they are strong and confident, they are wise and deeply experienced. Though a Detroit grassroots core, they are a microcosm (in an extreme urban trauma) of innumerable cases throughout the United States, which I have great hopes will become agents of political struggle and change.

I plan in the future to report testimonies in these pages from Detroit leaders, since I believe that Detroit once again will be a beacon of struggle and a tribune of the working class.

Will a softer Ortega ally with the New Latin Left? Or drift further towards Washington...

2006-11-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

The Rebirth of Bolivar's Dream

Tariq Ali, November 2006

Daniel Ortega, blessed by the church, flanked by a former Contra as his vice-president and still loathed by the US ambassador, may be a sickly shadow of his former self, but his victory undoubtedly reflects the desire of Nicaraguans for change. Will Managua follow the radically redistributive policies of anti-imperialist Caracas or confine itself to rhetoric and remain a client of the International Monetary Fund?

Ortega's victory comes at a time when Latin America is on the march again. There have been some spectacular demonstrations of the popular will in Porto Alegre, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Cochabamba and Cuzco, to name but a few cities. This has offered a new hope to a world either deep in neoliberal torpor (the EU, the US, the Far East) or suffering from the military and economic depredations of the new order (Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, south Asia).

The noises emanating from the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, and from the giant social movements from below in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, are obviously not welcomed by the global elite or its media apologists. The struggle spearheaded by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against the Washington consensus has attracted the fury of the White House. Three attempts (including a military coup backed by the US and the EU) were made to topple Hugo Chávez.

Chávez was first elected president of Venezuela in February 1999, 10 years after a popular insurrection against the IMF readjustment programme had been brutally crushed by Carlos Andrés Peréz, whose party was once the largest affiliate of the Socialist International. In his election campaign Peréz had denounced the economists on the World Bank's payroll as "genocide workers in the pay of economic totalitarianism" and the IMF as "a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing".

Afterwards he caved in to the demands of both institutions, suspended the constitution, declared a state of emergency and ordered the army to mow down the protesters. More than 2,000 poor people were shot dead by troops. This was the founding moment of the Bolivarian upheaval in Venezuela.

Chávez and other junior officers organised to protest against the misuse and corruption of the army. In 1992 the radical officers organised a rebellion against those who had authorised the butchery. It failed because it was soon after the traumas of 1989, but people did not forget. That is how the new Bolivarians came to power and began to slowly and cautiously implement social-democratic reforms, reminiscent of Roosevelt's New Deal and the policies of the 1945 Labour government. In a world dominated by the Washington consensus this was unacceptable. Hence the drive to topple him. Hence the demand by Pat Robertson, the leader of political Christianity in the US, that Washington should organise the immediate assassination of Chávez. Venezuela, till now an obscure country as far as the rest of the world was concerned, suddenly became a beacon.

The majority of the people who elected Chávez were angry and determined. They had felt unrepresented for 10 years; they had been betrayed by the traditional parties; they disapproved of the neoliberal policies then in force, which consisted of an assault on the poor in order to shore up a parasitical oligarchy and a corrupt civilian and trade-union bureaucracy. They disapproved of the use that was made of the country's oil reserves. They disapproved of the arrogance of the Venezuelan elite, which utilised wealth and a lighter skin colour to sustain itself at the expense of the dark-skinned and poor majority. Electing Chávez was their revenge.

When it became clear that Chávez was determined to make modest changes to the country's social structure, Washington sounded the tocsin. Nowhere has the embittered bigotry emanating from this quarter been more evident than in its actions and propaganda against Venezuela, with the Financial Times and the Economist in the forefront of a massive disinformation campaign.

They are united by their prejudices against Chávez, whose advent to power was viewed as an insane aberration because the social reforms funded by oil revenues - free health, education and housing for the poor - were regarded as a regression to the bad old days, a first step on the road to totalitarianism.

Chávez never concealed his politics. The two 18th-century Simóns - Bolívar and Rodríguez - had taught him a simple lesson: do not serve the interests of others; make your own political and economic revolution; and unite South America against all empires. This was the core of his programme.

In a speech in Havana in 1994, Chávez stated: "Bolivar once said that 'Political gangrene cannot be cured with palliatives', and Venezuela is totally and utterly infected with gangrene ... There is no way the system can cure itself ... 60% of Venezuelans live in poverty ... in 20 years more than $200bn just evaporated. So where is the money, President Castro asked me? In the foreign bank accounts of almost everyone who has been in power in Venezuela ... the coming century, in our opinion, is a century of hope; it is our century, it is the century when the Bolivarian dream will be reborn."

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso.

Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead

2006-11-08T15:48:00.000-05:00

Rumsfeld and Saddam, 1983

BASQUE COUNTRY: With ETA's armed struggle over, the struggle continues in the prisons

2006-11-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

BASQUE PRISONERS ON HUNGER STRIKE

IN A statement on October 16 the Basque Political Prisoners Association confirmed that a number of Basque prisoners were now on hunger strike in Spanish jails.

The statement said: "As the fight for political status gathers momentum in the Basque Country, political prisoners belonging to the EPPK (Basque Political Prisoners Association) have now confirmed a prison hunger strike protest by those involved in the prisoners' association.

"EPPK stated in a recent interview which was given to the Basque Newspaper 'Berria' that they met with several Penitentiary Institutions throughout 2005 to state their case as political prisoners and to demand recognition for political status as 'political prisoners'. Such requests have to date not been taken seriously.

"The EPPK is made up of political prisoners from across the Basque Country whose aim it is to assist and as well as to deliver many protest actions within the Spanish Prison system.

"Many protest actions to date have been against 'Strip Searches', 'Isolation & Confinement', 'punishment beatings and torture' which is common practice.

"As well as protests for 'political status', 'education and free association' and 'to be regrouped closer to home' an act which is enshrined within 'Spanish Law' but isn't on offer to any political activists. Political prisoners are dispersed far from their homes, their family, friends and loved ones."

A spokesperson for EPPK stated that although the present political climate has improved (slightly on the outside) they believed that the general process was in crisis and warned the Spanish Government that political prisoners must not be used as exchange elements, claiming that political prisoners are a consequence of years of political conflict.

However, to date their requests have been ignored by the Spanish authorities. Instead it is said that it was followed by "the wave of repression", not to mention further "political isolation".

The EPPK have said that they intend to carry out a hunger strike on October 19 and 20 to direct and to focus urgent attention to the demands for political status, self-determination and an amnesty for all political prisoners.

"The Revolution of the 21st Century Will Arise in Oaxaca"

2006-11-07T14:38:00.000-05:00

Leftists pour into Oaxaca for march

By IOAN GRILLO, Associated Press Writer

OAXACA, Mexico - Rickety buses and cars carrying leftists from across Mexico rolled into Oaxaca's university Saturday to join protesters preparing for a massive march to confront police.

Demonstrators plan to march Sunday from the university to police encampments in the center of the city as part of their five-month protest to oust the state's governor.

At least nine people have died since August in the unrest, which has rattled outgoing President has sparked fears of more violence in the colonial city that was once one of the country's main tourist attractions.

Masked federal police clutching automatic rifles took rooftop positions above the city's main plaza, where other officers reinforced blockades. A commander briefed a group of police late Saturday.

"There is going be a mega march tomorrow. Be prepared. Keep your bullet proof vests on at all times," he said, alongside armored vehicles with water cannons, a bulldozer and a burned-out bus.

Protest leader Flavio Sosa, who is wanted by state police on conspiracy and riot charges, said the marchers will not look for a fight Sunday, but he fears police may provoke one.

"Our enemies carry out murders, persecution and arbitrary arrests," Sosa told The Associated Press. "We have the right to defend ourselves."

Mexico's largest leftist group, the Democratic Revolution Party, has said it would join the protesters who want to form human chains around federal police detachments that enter the city.

The public university of 30,000 students in this southern city has been transformed into a stronghold for protesters since Fox sent in thousands of federal police last weekend to drive protesters from the city center which they had seized. The demonstrators poured onto the campus after the police pushed them out of the main plaza, where they had camped out for months.

Masked men armed with bats and gasoline bombs patrolled the university's gates Saturday, while the student radio station blared pleas to fight police. The lawns were filled with barbed wire and booby traps.

There have been no classes at the school this week, just talk of revolution, the building of makeshift weapons and drawn-out fights with police.

"The university has always been a center of progressive thinking, so it's natural that it has become the center of our revolt," Sosa said.

Federal police, who tried but failed Thursday to clear barricades on a street just outside the university, are not allowed to enter the campus under a law designed to protect academic freedom.

Protesters rushed out to attack the officers Thursday and police fought back with nightsticks, water cannons and tear gas. More than 30 were injured in the six-hour battle.

Protesters said they fear the police could return at any moment, and are making preparations for the next battle.

"We are on maximum alert," said Guillermo Contreras, a teacher and protest supporter. "We will fight their weapons with our spirit and dignity."

A Simple Spark is back

2006-11-07T14:34:00.000-05:00

I've been off-line for over a month.
But I'm back, just in time for an uptick in the class struggle...
Red Regards,
Brad

The Iron Behind the Velvet in Thailand

2006-09-20T10:02:00.000-04:00

After Coup Dictatorship Rules Thailand
by Giles Ji Ungpakorn Peoples Coalition Party, Turn Left newspaper and Workers' Democracy, Thailand

Last night the military staged a coup against the elected, but controversial, government of Taksin Shinawat. In the tradition of all Thai military coups for the last 60 years, the dictatorship claimed to have staged the coup in order to "reform politics" and "protect democracy". They said they had "no interest in taking personal power" and would be "returning power to the people as soon as possible". And in the tradition of many previous coups they later sought and received support from the monarchy.

The military have taken over all Thai TV channels and have blocked foreign news channels such as CNN and BBC. The TV is showing pictures of the royal family along with various declarations from the so-called "democratic reform committee".

The Thai peoples' movement had good reason to oppose the Taksin government which presided over gross human rights abuses in the south and in the so-called war on drugs and pushed for many neo-liberal policies, such as privatisation and free trade agreements. Yet the Taksin government retained huge popularity among the poor. On 2 April this year 16 million people voted for the government, as opposed to 10 million who voted against.

The reason was simple. The Thai Rak Thai government of Taksin had initiated many pro-poor policies, including a universal health care system and various measures to cut poverty. Yet many of those who joined the anti-government movement earlier this year, dismissed the electorate for being uneducated and ill-informed. Unfortunately many social movement leaders also took this position. Instead of respecting the poor and the electorate, they demanded that the king sack the government. Although the king refused to do this, the position taken by the anti-Taksin movement has helped pave the way for this coup.

It is now up to us in the peoples' movement to once again struggle for democracy in Thailand. This struggle for democracy can be the only road to real and lasting political and social reform which is much needed in order to make Thai society a more just and peaceful society. In the near future we shall have to make sure that the Thai Social Forum takes place in late October this year and that this forum creates a nucleus for democracy and social justice.

The Rise of the Radical Stencil

2006-09-18T19:38:00.000-04:00

There is graffiti all over my neighborhood; some is of the generic gang-related variety but most of it is pretty creative and gives our apartment blocks a lot of character. The neighborhood is mostly Latin American and the mural traditions of Mexico and Nicaragua are also all over this corner of Detroit. The logo of the Farmworkers Union pops up on buildings constantly, and images of Zapata and 'la raza unidad' can be found too.
But I was still startled to see a large, detailed portrait of Noam Chomsky on the dumpster at the end of my street. Nothing really prepares you for that oddity. I walked over to it and discovered it was a stencil painting. Within weeks I had seen stencils, many expressing anti-militarist or anti-capitalist ideas, in a dozen locations and when I brought it up to friends on the coasts or in other cities they confirmed that leftwing stencil art had indeed invaded their neighborhood, too.
And really it's so brilliant I can't figure out why activists didn't start doing this ages ago.
I mean even the best poster-weatpasting can't weather a northern winter-- but paint has a lifespan! And according to the DIY guides you can find on the internet, making a decent stencil is pretty damn easy. --Brad
Seattle, Washington

Glasgow, Scotland and London, England (above and left), Canberra, Australia (right)
Dublin, Ireland and Santiago, Chile

San Fransisco, California and Rome, Italy

Ron Lare talks about the Ford buyouts and the UAW

2006-09-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

Friends of mine and folks who follow this blog will recall how much I have enjoyed appearing on the BBC radio call-in show "World Have Your Say" on three separate occasions this last year (discussing unemployment, immigrant rights, and Palestine and Lebanon). And I was blown away when they called me to be on the show again two weeks ago (see earlier entry for transcript). Well they called again. This time they were doing a show on the buyouts at Ford Motor Co., what this would mean for the UAW, etc and wanted to know if I knew any auto workers they could talk to (knowing I live in Detroit). I immedidately gave them the phone numbers of Ron Lare and Judy Wright, and then called up Labor Notes for three or four other numbers. I was pretty excited that I got to connect BBC radio with these people, who are dear friends of mine and who have BOTH taught me a lot about politics. There is no better trade union activists in Detroit to talk to about what's going on at Ford and in the UAW. So after I gave her these phone numbers the woman form the BBC asked "So, are these people Democrats?", and I said "I think they are a little too pro-union to be Democrats" "Oh, interesting" "Yeah,these are people you would call 'shopfloor militants'" Later that day my comrade Aaron in Ann Arbor called and yells in to the phone "Ron Lare is on PBS right now!!!!". I guess I'm not the only one who knew he was the guy to talk to. -BRAD Ron Lare Ford employee I think the UAW members are their best resource, and I think they're cutting back more than they need to. And certainly, I think this is the fault of bad management, not the fault of the workers. A worker considers his options RAY SUAREZ: Ron Lare, what kind of work do you do for Ford? RON LARE, Member, United Autoworkers Union: I'm a skilled tradesperson, tool- and dye-maker at the Ford Rouge plant. RAY SUAREZ: What does a tool- and dye-maker do? RON LARE: Tool- and dye-maker makes or maintains machines that stamp metal parts. RAY SUAREZ: And will Ford no longer need people like you? When they offer a buyout to all 75,000 production workers, how do they make sure they still have who they need? RON LARE: Well, I think that's a very good question. I think they are going to get rid of more people than they can afford to. I think the UAW members are their best resource, and I think they're cutting back more than they need to. And certainly, I think this is the fault of bad management, not the fault of the workers. RAY SUAREZ: Well, what goes into your decision of whether or not to take the buyout? What do you have to consider before you know whether you can take Ford up on the offer? RON LARE: Well, there are some personal considerations. I'm 59 years old, but I have a young daughter. I'd like to spend more time with her. On the other hand, I need to save for her education. And I'd also like to stay in the fight to make the UAW stronger, because we're going to need that to be a fighting union again. RAY SUAREZ: Have you had a chance to talk with fellow workers, especially those in your boat who might have thought of themselves as a little too young to retire, but kind of old to start over on a work career? RON LARE: Well, yes, I have, and there's a very wide range of views from people. Some people are trying to recover from the news itself, although it wasn't totally unexpected. Many are angry at Ford management. And others say that the UAW -- and others like myself say that the UAW needs to organize the transplant facilities in the U.S. from other auto companies around the world, and we can do that only with some changes in the UAW. Looking elsewhere for jobs RAY SUAREZ: Rebecca Lindland, a lot of guys and women, like Ron Lare, have lost their jobs working for the big three over the last decade, yet there are foreign plants popping up all over the country. Why don't those workers get those new jobs? REBECCA LINDLAND: Well, because they're nonunion jobs, as Mr. Lare referred to. The transplant new factories, which are primarily moving into the South, are nonunion plants. They tend to pay significantly less sometimes or, in fact, their health benefits are really the big difference that you'll see at a transplant location. And we talk about transplants, basically the imports like Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, building plants here in the U.S., but those plants are nonunion. RAY SUAREZ: And so even middle-aged workers, workers still in their 30s and 40s, if they were willing to relocate, could they vie for jobs in Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, some of the states where those new plants have gone? REBECCA LINDLAND: You know, Mr. Lare would actually probably be a better person to answer that. I'm not sure if the union prohibits you from taking a job with a nonunion facility. Does it, Mr. Lare? RAY SUAREZ: Ron Lare? RON LARE: Well, one would have to leave the company one is at now and give up a lot of seniority, so that would be a very risky proposition. REBECCA LINDLAND: For younger workers, maybe. RAY SUAREZ: Yes, yes, especially if you're not in line for a lot of money, the way the buyout plan has been structured, it might look like more of a proposition for you. Csaba Csere, this must be hitting Michigan hard. CSABA CSERE: Well, it's hitting Michigan extremely hard. The state already has the highest unemployment rate in the country. A lot of that unemployment is concentrated around the Detroit area. And ultimately, Detroit is still a company town, and the company is the domestic auto industry. And all three companies are hurting to a greater or lesser extent. There have already been a large number of layoffs, both blue-collar and white-collar. There is a large number of layoffs already scheduled that haven't even happened at General Motors. And now Ford is bringing this forward, and it's extremely hard on southeastern Michigan. RAY SUAREZ: And is there no compensating inflow of new manufacturing or investment that will soak up some of this workforce? CSABA CSERE: Not terribly much, really. Part of the problem is that, for an awful lot of the manufacturing in the United States, it is going nonunion, and this is a very strongly union area of the country, and there isn't really that much moving in here. I believe in the last census Michigan actually didn't gain much population. In the last five years that they looked at, the state is losing people, and it's because these jobs are going away.

Explosive protests against pollution rock Ivory Coast

2006-09-15T19:47:00.000-04:00

Ivory Coast Pollution Worse Than First Thought
GENEVA (AP) — Protesters angry about recent toxic waste dumping around Ivory Coast's commercial capital attacked the country's transport minister Friday, pulling him from his car at a roadblock and beating him, a party official said. The protesters recognized Transport Minister Innocent Kobenan Anaky in his car and then attacked the vehicle, said Joel N'Guessan, the vice president of Anaky's party.

"They attacked him with anything they could find," N'Guessan said. "Then they burnt his car."
N'Guessan said Anaky managed to escape with injuries to his face.
Some 9,000 people have reported to health facilities in the weeks since the material apparently was illegally dumped around Abidjan, with 19 people requiring hospitalization, according to the Health Ministry. Spokesman Jean Denoman said six people died from exposure to the waste.

Hundreds of youth blocked the road to the main garbage disposal site in Abidjan on Friday and burned tires and shouted in protest. Police arrived to try to contain the situation.

"People want to breathe. They have the impression that nobody is doing anything, while this is a national catastrophe," said a protester in his 20s who only gave his name as Major.
Abidjan residents began complaining of an offensive stench in recent weeks and Trafigura Beheer B.V., a Dutch-based commodities company, said a local contractor may have improperly disposed of a byproduct from a fuel shipment sent to the West African nation.

Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny said Thursday that he has launched an investigation into the dumping and suspended three high-ranking officials: the general manager of the Abidjan port, the general manager of customs, and the governor of Abidjan district.
A U.N. report issued Thursday said up to 14 open-air sites have been contaminated by toxic waste. Previously 11 sites had been reported contaminated.
Eight of the sites already have been confirmed, including the main garbage dump, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, adding that the full extent of the toxic spill was not yet clear.

Among the substances found in the petrochemical waste are hydrogen sulfide and hydrocarbons, which can be harmful to humans and the environment, OCHA said.

Three experts from the World Health Organization will visit Abidjan's hospitals to evaluate the health consequences and establish how many people have been affected, said WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib. People were suffering from respiratory problems, headaches, vomiting and nosebleeds, she said.
The black substance was discovered by residents, who took to the streets last week to complain about persistent health problems and a pervading smell of rotten eggs near their homes.

Mounting public anger resulted in the resignation of a postwar, power-sharing government last week. Banny, who remains in office, was expected to announce a new Cabinet by the end of this week.

Authorities have arrested seven people in connection with the dumping, including three customs officials and a high-ranking official at the Transport Ministry, according to local news reports.

More on the unfolding rebellious season in Mexico

2006-09-15T09:38:00.000-04:00

Where is Mexico Headed Next? By Lance Selfa

Mexico at the Edge: Towards the Declaration of Dual Power By Dan LaBotz

Political and Cultural Murals of Los Angeles, California 1990's-2000's

2006-09-12T17:50:00.000-04:00

Posters of the Palestinian struggle: 1970's and 80's

2006-09-11T23:26:00.000-04:00

Finding those Cuban posters I posted last week got me in a political graphics mood---especially the 60's/70's national liberation movement. I had a whole 'activist reflections on 9/11' ready to post, but I think you may need a break from that kinda stuff. These posters celebrate a freedom struggle. Remember when the secular revolutionary left was kicking ass in the Middle East and lots of other places? These religious fundamentalists are late to the game, commies were fighting imperialism when they were in diapers! So raise a glass to all the women and men who ever fought for a free Palestine as part of a socialist Middle East under workers' control!

Summer 2006: Women in the struggle for Lebanon and Palestine

2006-09-08T18:02:00.000-04:00

Haifa, New York City, Detroit, London, Gaza, Tel Aviv,
Beirut

Cuban Posters in Solidarity with National Liberation

2006-09-08T11:17:00.000-04:00

These days when you think of Cuba's friends you might think of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, or the other aspiring Bolivarians of Latin America's anti-neoliberal left. In many ways the Cuban revolution has never forgoten its roots. Today's insurgents and rebels can be a power on the world stage tomarrow, and Cuba itself is an ongoing example. For nearly half a century Cuba has built relationships with movements for national liberation and socialism.
The Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) was created in Cuba in 1966 hot on the heels of the Tricontinental Congress. The Tricontinental Congress brought together revolutionary forces from every corner of the colonial world and helped crystalize not just frateral relations between them but cemented these movements turn towards armed struggle and socialist transformation. The Cuban revolution had tremdous prestige amongst the anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after its 1959 victory over the Batista regime. Che Guevara in particular became a symbol of the armed rebellion against imperialism---his call for "two, three, many Vietnams" echoed from Angola to El Salvador.
In the wake of this Congress and in the spirit of this global network of revolutionary movements, OSPAAAL became a clearinghouse of ideas and, most strikingly, images. OSPAAAL brought together some of the finest, most cutting edge graphic artists from Cuba and the world to create posters and artworks to celebrate the revolutionary and independence struggles of the period. OSPAAAL made it so even if your movement was low on cash, had it's printing press seized, was facing international propaganda against it, and was generally forced underground you could still count on your message and ideas being plastered on walls in cities across the globe.
And those OSPAAAL posters got around! I'm sure there are many people in this world that only knew about the Western Saharra independence movement, or the movement in Yemen, or repression in Haiti because they saw a Cuban-printed (often Cuban designed), multi-lingual OSPAAAL poster in their neighborhood. They sent buddles of these beautiful designs to leftists all over and these images became part of the common language of a generation of revolutionaries, especially in the self-indentified Third World.
OSPAAAL is still around, still printing posters and publishing materials aimed to help social justice movements. Although today, as you might have guessed, many of the posters take aim at the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, and US agression in the Middle East.
Here are some of my favorites from the late 60's through the 70's.

Solidarity with anti-apartheid movement in South Africa from 1974 (left) and 1977 (right)

Solidarity with anti-Pinochet forces in Chile (1975) and against US involvement in Nicaragua (1985)

For an independent South Yemen (1969), and declaring "Unity is Vitory" in Lebanon (1978)

Against US imperialism in Vietnam (late 1960's), and in solidarity with the Japanese New Left (1968)

BLACK WORKERS LEAGUE on real Katrina Justice

2006-09-06T23:29:00.000-04:00

The one-year anniversary of Katrina

A time of decision for African Americans and the poor!

Published Aug 28, 2006 9:37 PM

The Black Workers League is a political collective engaged in work in the trade union movement, Black political power movement, and other social justice movements in North Carolina, parts of the U.S. South and a few areas throughout the country. For more information, write to BWL, P.O. Box 934, Rocky Mount, NC 27802. This statement was written on Aug. 23.

The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is a time of decision for African Americans and poor people in the Gulf Coast and throughout the U.S. as it is a moral and political statement about the meaning of so-called American “democracy.”

The act of leaving hundreds of thousands of Black and poor people to die in the richest country in the world and the treatment of those who survived as criminals and refuse to be discarded as a burden on society, is a crime against humanity.

The overwhelming destruction of the communities, including the unprecedented massive internal dispersal of Black people to all corners of the U.S., has almost totally occupied survivors and their supporters in the Gulf Coast and throughout the country, with efforts to try and protect the immediate needs and interests of the survivors—insurance claims; stopping forced evictions; stopping the demolition of homes; protecting renters; gutting of homes; establishing health clinics; defending existing healthcare institutions, prisoner rights and worker rights while trying to help survivors re-enter their communities.
Now is the time for the Reconstruction Movement to take on a stronger political character, as a movement for self-determination and human rights. It must become an international struggle where nations and peoples throughout the world are called upon to become witnesses and judges of the actions of the U.S. government, demanding that they address this human tragedy which the policies of racism and greed were largely responsible for creating.
Without a movement to exercise power and to win public opinion and support at the national and international levels, the U.S. government won’t feel the pressure to adequately address in a timely manner the needs of the peoples in and dispersed from the Gulf Coast.

The upsurge by the Latin@ communities on May 1st, where millions stayed out of work in protest of the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant rights bill, was an example of exercising power that should be followed by African Americans in the Gulf Coast and throughout the U.S. demanding a just and immediate Reconstruction, starting with the right of return with affordable housing, a living wage and safe jobs, quality public education and public and affordable healthcare.
The people must build organizations in the communities, neighborhoods and workplaces throughout the Gulf Coast that become part of a constituent’s assembly that fights for major input in all decisions related to rebuilding the communities, businesses and institutions in the Gulf Coast.
Black and poor people must organize and struggle for control of the levee boards, school boards, hospital boards, housing boards, police control boards, prisoner rights boards, historical and cultural boards and public authorities of Reconstruction financing, etc.

An independent Reconstruction Party is needed

Neither party, Democratic nor Republican, has aggressively addressed the needs of the survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita and U.S .government neglect and corporate greed. Both have been more concerned about big contracts to corporate friends, protecting the oil companies and the affluent large white and wealthy neighborhoods.
Black, working class and poor survivors need a collective voice that speaks for and represents the interests of those most impacted by this human disaster; a political organization and voice that organizes and expresses the power and will of the people, a Reconstruction Party.

Without political power, the most impacted survivors and communities throughout the Gulf Coast will receive little to no resources to rebuild. The communities in the various states throughout the Gulf Coast will be divided and manipulated politically to cut their own deals and New Orleans will no longer be a majority Black city.
The Black majority can begin the initiative of building a Reconstruction Party, anchoring it while reaching out to all working class and poor communities regardless of race or immigration status.
The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast must not only be an architectural model, it must become a political model of building a zone of democracy that contributes to the spread of real democracy and social transformation throughout the country.
Not since the Reconstruction following the Civil War has there been such an opportunity to build democracy from the ground up in the U.S. This is an historical moment for African Americans and the poor to demand that the U.S. government use its resources to rebuild for democracy and human rights and not for war to destroy and divide.

MEXICO: Massive civil disobedience is how you're SUPPOSED to respond to a stolen election!

2006-09-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

Mexico Political Future Still Uncertain
By Tracy Carl, Associated Press Writer Tue Sep 5, 5:55 PM ET
MEXICO CITY - Protesters still occupy Mexico City streets. The country is still divided along class lines. Two candidates each still claim to be the next president.
A ruling by the Federal Electoral Tribunal on Tuesday ended two months of uncertainty over the winner of the July 2 elections but did little to clear up Mexico's political future.
In a way, it couldn't have. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist who claims fraud robbed him of victory, had already said the court was corrupt and vowed to run his own government from the streets.
The key question is how many supporters Lopez Obrador has left, and how far they are willing to go to defend his cause.
Certainly, his numbers are dwindling. While more than 14.6 million Mexicans voted for the leftist candidate, only a few thousand man the protest camps that line Mexico City's main Zocalo plaza and its elegant Reforma avenue. Many of the protest tents erected two months ago remain empty.
Many of Lopez Obrador's supporters were turned off when protesters barged in on a Mass being celebrated at Mexico City's Cathedral. Others felt he went too far when lawmakers from his party seized Congress and kept President Vicente Fox

from delivering his annual state-of-the-nation address.
The camps themselves, which have snarled traffic and cost businesses an estimated $370 million in lost revenues, have alienated other supporters. In a recent poll by the newspaper Reforma, 75 percent opposed the protest camps.
And despite Lopez Obrador's claims that the tribunal is crooked, only 8 percent of respondents said they have no confidence in the court. Another 35 percent said they had some confidence, while a full 57 percent said they have a lot of confidence in the electoral tribunal.
Pollsters interviewed 1,515 registered voters nationwide on Aug. 18-20 and reported a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
The departure Tuesday of the Convergencia party from the electoral alliance that nominated Lopez Obrador highlighted his dwindling support. The party, one of three in Lopez Obrador's alliance, said "it is time to rethink strategies."
Those who do support Lopez Obrador are increasingly radical. They vow to prevent Calderon from taking office Dec. 1 and to keep him from governing if he manages to be sworn in anyway.
In the end, Calderon's success will be measured in large part on his ability to neutralize the specter of violence.
When the court announced its decision on Tuesday, some Lopez Obrador supporters advocated taking up arms. Lopez Obrador and his aides have urged their supporters to remain peaceful, and so far that call has been heeded.
But with the rest of the country ready to move on, the movement could be forced to turn to more radical actions to hold the nation's attention.

The IWW and Starbucks

2006-09-04T19:49:00.000-04:00

I have to admit to being slightly worried about this campaign. There is no doubt that a national union contract for Starbucks workers would be a fantastic victory for all food service works and for the labor movement. There is also no doubt that the IWW represent the most inspiring and militant chapter in the history of US labor. But I also know for a fact that in the year 2006 the IWW is small, has few resources, and still holds on to it's turn of the century syndicalist position of not believing in contracts.
Huh? A union that won't sign contracts?
The IWW believes that contracts merely negotiate the rate of exploitation (true enough), are usually based on painful concessions made by workers in negotiation (again, it happens), and offen include no-strike clauses that make it illegal to carry out a work stoppage at any time except when the contract is up (which these days seems to be every twenty years).
This last part is certainly true, too, most of the time. Then again, it's "illegal" for Detroit teachers to strike and I am proud to say they are picketing on my street as I write! Anyway, it is for these reasons that the IWW, as a labor union that represents workers in a workplace, does not negotiate or sign contracts.
I understand this reasoning, and most people who believe labor creates wealth would have a hard time disagreeing on paper. But I also understand why every other labor union fights for a signed contract between owners and workers. Although we know that bosses stretch and peel away at contracts in a million subtle and nonsubtle ways everyday, they are nonetheless a set of rules that workers had a say in creating. Honestly, bosses don't want contracts, either. One of these days we'll have massive, reborn workers movement that will simply assume authority on the shop floor... and until then I want something in writing spelling out what the bosses is not allowed to do and that we're entitled to. And here's some news to the top brass of the US labor movement: contracts should get better every time! Of course, that's half the fight right there.
All this makes me fearful that Starbucks will run right over the IWW.
All the talk about the IWW being too radical or too leftwing to pull off an organizing effort on this scale doesn't bother me quite as much. I'm sure there will be more red-baiting, there always is. And I'm sure that not all employees who will want to join up (and the obvious goal is for all employees to join up) will agree with the IWW's credo of abolishing the wage system.
At the same time, the IWW has had real successes at Starbucks so far.
They went to the National Labor Relations Board and got three IWW members
their jobs back and won a verdict against company surveillance of union activists. During the public campaign the IWW organized solidarity pickets at Starbucks around the world. Coffee consumers were treated to a robust Wobbly chorus and rally outside a Starbucks in Endinburgh, Scotland. I'm guessing the UFCW could not have pulled that off, and wouldn't have even thought of it. I won't deny that the political radicalism of the IWW gives them a certain edge insofar as they are willing to be attention-getting, internationalist, and action-oriented where other unions (who may be stronger or better organized) are simply not. It also must be said that the demands being put forward by the IWW's Starbucks Union are pretty straightforward and are the kind of thing that any coffeeshop worker (that's been me at many various points) could connect with and get behind.

We are Starbucks Workers Coming Together for:

Increased pay and raises
Guaranteed hours with the option of fulltime status
An end to understaffing
A healthier and safer workplace

And for all their scant resources, the IWW sure don't have a thick layer of blockheaded beauracrats standing in the way of organizing like most other unions do. The IWW have always had a scrappy energy you can't deny. But they have also made their home largely on the far left and anarchist milliues for the last couple decades as apposed to the labor movement, which can make you rusty when it comes to mobilizing a workplace. This is surely the most ambitious IWW project since the Lowell textile mills! If they are going to pull it off they need our help.

Starbucks workers add shot of unionizing
Historic local group works with baristas

By Ron Grossman

Published September 4, 2006

In the city of its birth, and 101 years later, the Industrial Workers of the World is still trying to strike a blow for the working class.

Just ahead of Labor Day, baristas at the Starbucks in Logan Square told management that they wanted to be represented by the IWW. A veteran of battles that once made the union movement a major force in American life, the IWW has been largely moribund recently.

Starbucks' management was ready for the faceoff, which occurred during a periodic meeting of employees and managers at the giant coffee merchant's store at 2759 W. Logan Blvd., some workers reported. Corporate honchos would not accept employee demands and handed out copies of the preamble to the IWW's constitution in an effort to discredit the union.

"We thanked them for saving us the printing costs," said Joe Tessone, 21, a barista and IWW organizer.

The preamble reads: "There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life."

The match of cheery Starbucks baristas and one of the nation's oldest fire-breathing labor organizations may seem curious. Certainly a century ago, when the union held its inaugural meeting on June 27, 1905, no one could imagine that the nation's economy would be dominated by McDonald's, Home Depot and other giant chains.

But a line of continuity joins the vision of the original "Wobblies," as they were known to friend and foe, and their latter-day disciples in Logan Square. The IWW set out to organize the unorganized--low-paid, often itinerant workers in the mines, mills and lumber camps that were the backbone of the nation's economy.

Times change, smokestack industries vanish, but the lot of those at the bottom of the food chain remains much the same, Tessone said. He said beginning baristas at the Starbucks where he works make $7.50 an hour. He and fellow organizer and barista Christine Morin think the employees should make a minimum of $10 an hour, likening their fight to the big-box ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council.

"We work very hard for a very profitable company and deserve a living wage," Tessone said.

Officials at Starbucks' headquarters in Seattle could not be reached for comment.

Midway through an interview with Morin and Tessone on the patio of the Logan Square Starbucks, another worker sheepishly said she had been sent to tell a reporter and photographer that the conversation had to be taken off company premises.

Old-time Wobblies would be tickled by a dustup over who could say what and where.

"They carried the original fight for free speech," said Les Orear, 95, president of the Illinois Labor History Society and a union organizer in the 1930s. "They'd get up on a soapbox and preach the right of men and women to organize, knowing the sheriff would show up and throw them in jail."

Currently, a war of words is being fought on bulletin boards and over the counters of the Logan Square Starbucks. Morin said management has posted memos warning employees that the IWW is a radical organization, outside the mainstream of the union movement.

Morin said she and Tessone devised a counterattack. At Starbucks, employees are known as "partners."

"But we've started greeting each other as `fellow worker,'" said Morin, 21.

Store patrons have taken up the linguistic battle.

"One customer came in singing: `There once was a union maid, she never was afraid, of goons and ginks and company finks,'" Tessone said.

The lyrics are in "The Little Red Song Book," a collection of union songs still published by the IWW.

Songs and humor always were a big part of the IWW, said Franklin Rosemont, who operates Charles H. Kerr, a Chicago-based publisher of Left literature for more than a century.

"I'm glad to see humor playing a role again," said Rosemont, 62. "Starbucks, a billion-dollar operation, being taken on by the Wobblies, who never had more than $75 in their treasury."

Tessone said he was inspired to join that parade by the IWW's spirit of self-help. A friend in Joliet, where he grew up, introduced him to the organization, which also is working with Starbucks workers in New York City. Tessone was impressed by its grass-roots flavor--and price. Dues were $6 a month.

"I'm a volunteer organizer," he said. "We all are."

The IWW was formed not only to take on the factory owners, but as a challenge to the more conventional union tactics, said Clancy Sigal, a Hollywood screenwriter. Sigal recently published "A Woman of Uncertain Character," a memoir of growing up in Chicago in an Old Left household.

"The older union leaders said they wanted a bigger slice of the pie for their members," Sigal said. "The Wobblies said we want to bake a new pie."

But the IWW ranks were thinned by a backlash against communism after World War I. When the IWW held a centennial reunion in Chicago last year, its membership was estimated at 2,000 nationally, with perhaps 75 local members.

On Logan Boulevard, the struggle currently lies in the balance. Tessone and Morin said some of the 16 store workers are interested in having the IWW as their bargaining agent; others are non-committal.

"But nobody is Red-baiting us," Tessone said. "Except for the company, which keeps saying the IWW is bunch of radicals."

May First might be the real Labor Day, but I never turn down a chance to march

2006-09-04T10:33:00.000-04:00

The Women Who Gave Us Labor Day

By CLANCY SIGAL

Labor Day was created in 1894, when President Grover Cleveland, desperate to win re-election, rushed through a bill to appease the nation’s angry workers just days after he had sent federal troops to Chicago to break a railway strike. A September celebration of labor had in fact been started by the Knights of Labor a decade earlier. Today, for most Americans, it is a long weekend, and the last, lazy day of summer, of barbeques and beaches.

From its inception, the holiday was unabashedly about men - extolling muscles and the workingman. Labor’s mythic personalities were men like Jimmy Hoffa, bushy-browed mine workers’ leader John L. Lewis and the radical organizer Big Bill Haywood. Its martyrs and saints were also men, like Joe Hill and the Haymarket Square anarchists and Gene Debs.

I’m a child of the labor movement, except that I experienced its triumphs and defeats through the eyes of women –- especially my mother, Jennie.

When I was five years old, during the Great Depression, I accompanied her to Chattanooga,Tennessee, where she had been sent by the Textile Workers Union.She was an organizer. Her assignment was to sign up the mill hands who tended the looms and spindles—and were paid as little as four dollars for a 60-hour work week.

Women workers especially were mistreated in the mills. Often denied bathroom breaks or stools to rest on while they stood at their weaving frames, they were victims of a punishing piece-rate and ‘stretch out’ system. The factory owners were like feudal barons, with their own private armies and the National Guard to break strikes. Violence against strikers, or anyone who spoke up, was routine. Pro-union ‘agitators’ were marked for blacklisting or worse. Union organizers like my mom could disappear (get killed) or end up tarred and feathered.

Word soon got out that Mom was having clandestine meetings at our kitchen table, after dark, with both black and white women workers. Breaking the color line was in itself a capital crime at that time and place. Deputies came and arrested Jennie, and so we both ended up behind bars in the Hamilton County jail. We were lucky to get off so lightly. After a day and a half, the sheriff took us to the train station and graciously ran us out of town.

Jennie was an average woman – without being average at all. She had left school at twelve and led her first strike at thirteen after witnessing the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City. She was the equal, if not better, of any man at the bargaining table and on the picket line - where she insisted on wearing her ‘best’: Belgian lace gloves, cloche hat and ‘Cuban’ heels. She was afraid of nothing and could not be intimidated, But, like so many women of her time, she was shy of “putting herself forward”, in self promotion, even more than she feared jail or a cop’s truncheon. Her amazing generation of women could fight for others but were strangely reticent about speaking up for themselves.

How many women were there like my mother? Nobody will ever know. A few are celebrated – Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Frances Perkins the first female Labor Secretary, and in the movies, Norma Rae. But, for someone like me, born on a Labor Day, the real history of this holiday is buried at the Workmen’s Circle cemetery in Los Angeles, not far from where I live. There Jennie is surrounded by the modest graves of her rank and file union sisters and brothers – the anonymous foot soldiers who made the factories safer, banned child labor, fought for our pensions and health benefits and yes, gave us this weekend.

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist living in Los Angeles. He has recently published a memoir of his mother, ‘A Woman of Uncertain Character’

Photos from Labor Day in Detroit, Michigan 2006
Striking Airline workers and Detroit teachers on the move!

P.S. Don't fuck with flight attendants

Generally speaking, when you give workers tips on how to
dumpster-dive as an alternative to better wages they don't
take it too well. But maybe while sifting through the garbage
looking for clothing or furniture (actually suggested by Northwest
managment) they might stumble across their pension.
Rumor has it Northwest placed it there.

Union backers fight gloom at sunny Detroit Labor Day parade

September 4, 2006
By DAVID N. GOODMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT (AP) -- Sunny skies, a gentle breeze and the cheerful banter of thousands of marchers in Michigan's largest Labor Day parade could not mask the gloomy outlook for many unionized workers facing layoffs, pay cuts and concession demands.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney led the 1.5-mile walk, flanked by United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger and Michigan Democratic U.S. Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow.
Last Wednesday, the 9 million-member labor federation launched a $40 million voter drive aimed at boosting union household participation in the Nov. 7 elections and helping elect pro-union lawmakers -- overwhelmingly Democrats.
Workers' welfare has steadily eroded under the Bush administration, said Sweeney. He said the election could bring a more labor-friendly Congress that could help change federal labor relations policies that are hostile to unionization.
"We can win this election in so many key states and races," Sweeney told cheering supporters at the march's end. "You have your work cut out for you."
Republicans disputed the contention that Bush has been bad for working people, or that Democrats are necessarily good for them.
"There have been more than 5 million jobs created under the Bush administration," Michigan GOP spokeswoman Sarah Anderson said Monday. Meanwhile, she said, Michigan's unemployment rate has been among the nation's highest under Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
The state's seasonally adjusted jobless rate jumped to 7 percent in July, up 0.7 points from June, while the nation's rate rose 0.2 points to a five-month high of 4.8 percent.
The governor herself pointed to Washington as the place where change must occur to improve conditions for working people.
"We have a No Child Left Behind law in this country," Granholm told the post-march rally after leading the annual Mackinac Bridge walk 250 miles north earlier Monday. "We ought to have a No Worker Left Behind law."
Organized labor faces daunting challenges in 2006. General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. are cutting tens of thousands of jobs and seeking to roll back health benefits, while Northwest Airlines Corp. and Delta Air Lines Inc. are using bankruptcy protection to wring deep pay and benefit concessions from their employees.
Union membership stabilized last year at 12.5 percent of the work force after decades of decline, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Union membership was about a third of the work force a half-century ago, and was 20 percent in 1983.
A sign of the tough times for unions came from marching Northwest Airlines flight attendants, who have authorized a strategy of scattershot walkouts aimed at pressuring the Eagan, Minn.-based airline to offer less drastic cuts.
"We hope we don't have to use it," said Daniel Grey, 32, of Ann Arbor, a Northwest flight attendant based at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
Corporate cutbacks are undermining people's hopes of achieving the American dream of good pay and benefits, Grey said.
"For most American workers right now, I think it's the American nightmare," he said.
Hundreds of Detroit Federation of Teachers also marched, one week after going on strike and the day before classes were to begin. They are seeking their first raise in four years while resisting cuts in health benefits.
Twenty-year Detroit schools veteran Dorothy Burk, a teacher at the Paul Robeson Early Learning Center, said her union's situation mirrors a hostile environment for organized labor in general.
"I don't know what's going to happen," said Burk, 50. "It's scary."

It's going to be a long century

2006-09-04T08:24:00.000-04:00

Empire, and resistance to it, is the central issue of our time

From Iraq and Lebanon to Afghanistan, the Anglo-American attempt to remake the world by force is failing

By Andrew Murray

08/26/06 "The Guardian" -- -- 'How goes the empire?" Perhaps Tony Blair will be tempted to repeat King George V's dying words as he prepares to shuffle off his own political coil. It is a measure of the extent to which the prime minister's foreign policy has restored imperialism to the political vocabulary of the country that, when his legacy is debated, the state of empire will be the main issue.

The answer is that it goes pretty badly. The new imperialism which will for ever be linked to the names Bush and Blair has taken just five years to hit the buffers of popular opposition and moral ignominy. Imperialism has moved from the realm of political jargon to be the central issue of our time - and is seen as such everywhere beyond the ramparts of the neoconservative-New Labour alliance.

In Iraq, the great testing ground for "liberal interventionism", the pitch of resistance to the armies of occupation, along with the failure of a parade of hand-picked premiers to deliver even a facade of stability, is, according to the New York Times, leading George Bush to consider abandoning his "democratic" experiment in favour of, presumably, a dictatorship.
In Afghanistan, to which British troops were rushed nearly five years after regime change was imposed, the Karzai government is floundering in epic levels of corruption. It has reinstated the power of opium-funded warlords, the suppression of whom was perhaps the Taliban's only popular achievement. The consequence has been a conflict of a ferocity that the British army has not seen since the Korean war, according to Lieutenant-General David Richards, the commander on the spot.

And despite Blair's determined green light to Israel's attack on Lebanon, the "long, strong arm of the US" in the region - as the Israeli commentator Sima Kadmon describes his country - has had to retreat with its objectives unmet. No one seems to be rushing to pick up the white man's burden there either.

British troops are now back "east of Suez" with a vengeance. According to the foreign-policy establishment thinktank Chatham House, the big winner from five years of them rampaging around the region is Iran. Presumably that was not the plan. Even in the Balkans, the occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo fester, with the underlying conflicts in no way resolved.

The Blair years have been a study in the failures of the Anglo-Saxon powers' capacity to remake the world in their own interests by force. Even the prime minister seemed to acknowledge that wearily in California earlier this month. Of course, the policy has had its friends. The rightwing historian - and proponent of a genetics of racism - Niall Ferguson has taken the case for empires back on to the television, while the chancellor of the exchequer has insisted it is time Britain stopped apologising for empire. As the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, pointed out in response: if only we had ever started doing so.

But the opponents of imperialism are by far the more numerous. Nearly two-thirds of the public believe British foreign policy is too subservient to the US and that the foreign occupations are a failure. The strength of the anti-war movement over the past five years, drawing fresh support during the Lebanon war, testifies that this sentiment goes much further than opinion polls.

Against this renewed left, there has coagulated a coalition of the brazen conservatives in Washington and their transatlantic admirers, including the two parliamentary frontbenches and a pseudo-social-democratic "new right" addicted to the spread of its values at the point of the imperial bayonet. They have set aside the left's traditional support for international law and the UN in favour of backing Bush's endless war.

We can now see where making "anti-anti-imperialism" your touchstone leads. The pro-war bloggers and lecturers who produced the Euston manifesto earlier this year have recently been reduced to providing a platform for Blairite ministers to promote privatisation, just as their stateside superhero Christopher Hitchens backed George Bush's re-election in 2004. They have resuscitated the gloomy traditions of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, whose doyenne Rita Hinden patronised Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, when he came to London to rally support for his country's freedom, with the thought that "British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government".

But it is the tradition of the socialist pioneer William Morris which has come to dominate the left. Morris's support for the Mahdi's rebellion in the Sudan, on the grounds that he at least restored his country to its own people, is detailed in John Newsinger's new history of Britain's empire, The Blood Never Dried.

Empire is of course no longer something that simply happens "over there". Its fault lines run through every British community, with the wars in the Middle East and south Asia now accompanied by a campaign against the new "enemy within", the Muslim peoples of Britain.

One consequence of this has been a serious political engagement by the left with the Muslim communities, united in opposition to war and support of civil liberties. This is also a worldwide alliance. Seven Lebanese Communist fighters died resisting Israel's attack alongside Hizbullah, which has also had the support of the leaders of the Latin American left.

Fifty years on, the alliance of unequals forged between the US and Britain in the aftermath of Suez is once again unravelling in the Middle East.

Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition - apdmurray@hotmail.com

West Belfast: Still Europe's most politicized neighborhood

2006-09-03T16:03:00.000-04:00

Let's face it, the Irish Republican movement lost its war with Britain.
The border is still in place, the 'Unionist veto' is still firmly intact, the cops
are as violent and bigoted as ever, and with the reinvention of Stormont it looks
like formal, institutionalized sectarianism is here to stay.
Worst of all, the so-called leadership of this movement wouldn't own up to any of this.
According to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Danny Morrison (ministers of the Crown all) the situation the movement currently finds itself in is exactly what those 'ten brave men' fought to achieve. To hear Adams spin it, Bobby Sands died for cross-border tourism boards, a couple of seats in parliment (you know, the same one we smashed over three decades ago), a smattering of EU grants, and Ian Paisley as First Minister.
Last time I checked, he died for an end to imperialism and a socialist transformation on his wee island.
The communities that were the backbone of this resistance movement, as exhausted and demoralized as they in many cases are, none the less are some of the most radicalized in the world even to this day. The Sinn Fein leadership may have made it's peace with the system, but clearly the working class people who make up the rank and file of the anti-occupation movement have not. In Belfast, if you want to gauge what a community thinks of itself and world around it that simply browse the walls.
I've walked around Belfast and other cities and small town in Ireland's northeastern six counties and the skyline tells a thousand stories. Not only do shops, apartment buildings, and overpasses tell the story of Irish resistance to British rule, they tell the story of battles for justice around the world. Murals commemorating the farmworkers struggle in the US, the fight against police brutality, and open expressions of solidarity with rebel movements from the Basque Country to Latin America have defined the aesthetic of daily life in nationalist neighborhoods for decades.
The murals I have included here are brand new. They were all painted within the last year or so. You can walk down the Falls Road surrounded by Palestinian flags and portaits of Che and Black Panthers ... and know you are amongst comrades.
"We were just ordinary people", Brendan Hughes onces said, "but history demanded we do extraordinary things"

some good advice from the streets of Troy, New York

2006-09-02T22:55:00.000-04:00

The fine art of defiance

2006-09-02T22:01:00.000-04:00

Artists express anger at Lebanon war

by Guy Smallman

“Are you with Spiderman?” enquires a representative of Hizbollah’s cultural wing.

I am nervously watching British stencil graffiti artist “Arofish” scale yet another crumbling wall in Beirut.

His design for the space involves images of Lebanese children defiantly flying kites in the ruins of south Beirut.

Kite flying is a traditional act of defiance used by Palestinian children to break the Israeli curfews. Here Arofish has also included some ghostly white, unattached kites to represent the children who did not survive the war.

He has previously scrawled less than flattering images of Ariel Sharon in occupied Palestine and defaced US bases in Baghdad.

The latter earned him a kicking from US marines and a few days in jail. They had tried to scare him by locking him up overnight with Iraqi resistance fighters.

This plan failed when they arrived the next morning to find him merrily chatting away and sharing food with his cellmates.

He is pleased at the opportunity to put up his art without being banged up for it. Hizbollah think he is bonkers but they love his stuff.

The street in which he is painting has been put aside for artists to express their feelings about the war.

A recently graduated student called Racha is painting an exquisite oil composition of the candle lighting in Martyrs Square. Her graduation was delayed by over a month due to the bombing. Now she is doing what she loves again, and doing her bit to bring something positive from the Israeli aggression.

An established Lebanese artist is working on a vast installation of 33 door-sized collages each representing a day of the war. The imagery is lurid but an honest depiction.

There are plenty of political caricatures on hand as well - my favourite being one of Condoleezza Rice as a demon with enormous fangs.

As I leave this cultural oasis and head back through the devastation, I can’t help thinking that this flies in the face of the image of Lebanese resistance shown on CNN.

BBC "World Have Your Say" features "Brad in Detroit", again

2006-09-02T15:46:00.000-04:00

I am a regular listener of a radio call-in show on the BBC called "World, Have Your Say". It is your basic political call-in show but the callers are from across the globe. They were reporting live from the US one week last spring and I decided to call in the day they broadcast from my hometown, Detroit. I figured the the show could really use a pro-union, anti-racist, anti-capitalist spin on what has happened to this town and who might be to blame. So I called in and gave my little tirade about falling living standards and rising profits and about the need for the rebirth of class struggle politics. Eventually they cut me off, but it was pretty exciting to get in a couple punches in an otherwise vapid, liberal rap session on why the Midwest is hurting (you know, somthing along the lines of "wages were too high, it's their fault") or what is to be done ( "a shiny new downtown will change everything"). I was excited to score one for the home team even if for only a minute on the radio.
So when I discovered that the topic this last May first was the immigrant rights movement and the nation wide walk-out I sent them an email saying I would be attending a rally near my house and would love to phone in an update for their show.
They called about a half hour later and not only did I give them an update, but also noted that this was the first true MAY DAY in this country for generations and that this new, insurgent civil righs movements was bringing issues of class, race, and economic exploitation to US politics like no movement since the 1960's.
I found out the key to getting to say everything you want on the radio is writing out notes in advance... one pause and they interrupt or go to the next caller. So I had my notes ready and blazed through the essentials of what I would assume any socialist would say about a movement that simultaneously takes aim American racism and class exploitation and makes itself known to the world by declaring a nationwide strike on May Day. And all this on a world-wide radio show. I was pretty thrilled about the whole thing, once again.
So imagine my delight when last week a producer at the BBC called me early in the morning and asked if I had any opinions of hostage taking generally and the hostage crisis in Gaza specifically. They had my name and number on file as someone in the US that could talk on various issues. Instantly I knew this was my chance to speak my mind on the IDF, the occupation, US imperialism... I figured I could lay out a whole anti-imperialist critique of the Middle East on live radio!
I had an hour to get my head together, and then after an hour of callers discussing the minutia of various examples and situations with scant mention of any political context they called me. I didn't have much time but here is what I said.

BBC: We’ve been taking this hour about hostage taking around the world. Let’s go to Brad in Detroit.

Brad in Detroit: Well, there are many ways to deal with a hostage crisis. We’ve seen how Israel deals with one this last month: over a thousand dead and Lebanon is in tatters.

Hostage taking is an essential part of any asymetrical warfare. When one army is much smaller it’s going to look for ways to.. . it needs a lever, in this case it is to get their comrades out of prison. I heard a caller say that often the demands of hostage-takers, even from political groups, are unrealistic or somehow irrational, I heard one say. There are thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese POW’s in Israeli prisons and for people to want them out, to want them free, I don’t think is at all irrational or unrealistic.

And with this thing with the Fox News journalist—which is being covered in the media here in the US a lot less than maybe you would guess—you know, Fox was targeted for a reason. They are widely viewed as being racist in their portrayal of the conflicts in the Middle East, and being colonial in their outlook and coverage.

Of course the back drop to all of this that the Palestinian parliament is still held hostage. When this whole thing started earlier in the summer two thirds of the Palestinian parliament were taken hostage by the Israeli army of occupation! They are still held hostage.

The even bigger back drop, of course, is that the West Bank and Gaza have been held hostage for nearly forty years.

BBC: OK, I hear Brad saying that there needs to be some kind of political response…