LOS ANGELES —“Defend constitutional freedoms: Oppose U.S. government spying, harassment and frame-ups” was the topic of the May 21 weekly Militant Labor Forum here. Speaking were Mwezi Odom, from the African People’s Socialist Party, and Norton Sandler, from the Socialist Workers Party.
Odom is the chairperson of Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! Counteroffensive. The defense committee is fighting the frame-up of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and Uhuru Movement leaders Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel. The three are facing up to 15 years in prison after being indicted May 2 on federal charges of conspiring to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government.
Odom showed forum participants a video of the July 29 FBI military-style assaults on the Uhuru Movement’s headquarters and residences in St. Louis and St. Petersburg, Florida. The FBI used flash-bang grenades, drones, armored vehicles and automatic weapons wielded by scores of flak-jacketed agents from an FBI swat team. You can view the video on YouTube.
“The vicious raids were on seven properties,” Odom said. “They started at 6 a.m. on the East Coast and 5 a.m. in the Midwest. In St. Petersburg, $40,000 of damage was done. They stole archives, laptops and cellphones.
“This is a struggle for democracy, for freedom of speech,” Odom emphasized. “The government is trying to silence leaders of the Uhuru Movement.
“They charge that we are operating as Russian agents because we have run candidates, pushed for reparations, and charged the government with genocide. We don’t need Russians to tell us what to do,” she said. Supporters of the fight against the frame-up seek to raise nearly $300,000 for the legal defense effort. Participants at the forum kicked in contributions.
Sandler said the pretext of serving a foreign power has been used by the government for decades to go after militant workers, Black rights fighters, the Socialist Workers Party and others. These foreign-agent laws are a key part of the government’s “national security” arsenal — a direct attack on First Amendment protections. “If any of your political positions are similar to some other country’s government, you are fair game to be spied on, disrupted and prosecuted.”
Sandler noted that the raid on the African People’s Socialist Party was within days of the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Both were organized by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department.
“Currently,” Sandler said, “Democrats are pressing seven different civil and criminal proceedings against Trump, all partisan efforts aimed at accomplishing the same goal — preventing him from running again.”
The stakes, he said, are substantial in defending constitutional freedoms. “Make no mistake, they may start with Trump but the target is the working-class vanguard and organizations that are the most conscious fighters. The capitalists are in power — it’s their police, FBI and CIA. When working people threaten their interests, both parties turn their repressive forces loose against us.”
He described the SWP lawsuit against the FBI filed in 1973 that helped expose the extent of the government’s vast, unconstitutional Cointelpro operations against the SWP, Communist Party, Black Panther Party and many others involved in the labor movement, civil rights struggle or the movement against the Vietnam War. The attacks included spying, blacklisting, mail covers, wiretaps, use of undercover informers and break-ins at party headquarters.
Accompanying Mwezi Odom to the forum was her husband, Matsemela Odom, a fellow APSP member, who spoke in the discussion. “I told Mwezi on the way up here that it is an honor to speak at the Militant Labor Forum. Malcolm X spoke at these forums,” he said.
He also noted that I.B. Tabata had spoken at Militant Labor Forums. Tabata was a member of a revolutionary organization in South Africa and a leader of the Unity Movement of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. He was forced into exile by the apartheid government.
Matsemela Odom noted Tabata’s preface to the pamphlet Why Watts Burned, published by the Los Angeles Local of the Socialist Workers Party. It describes the social conditions and cop brutality that led to the uprising in the Watts section of L.A. in 1965.
What Sandler said about the unconstitutional attacks targeting Trump, Matsemela Odom added, “is spot on.”
NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Los Angeles Militant Labor Forum panel discusses fight for constitutional rights – The Militant
New indictment of Trump is assault on political rights all workers need – The Militant
....The criminalization of political differences is dangerous for working people. Defending the freedoms protected by the Constitution, and pushing back against the U.S. rulers’ drive to refurbish the FBI, are at the center of the class struggle today.
Tuesday, June 13, 2023
"Anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the subconscious of the middle classes"
....Would it be possible to transmute the anti-capitalism of the masses into still something else? Fascism found in the Jews-under favorable circumstances-a second scapegoat.
Anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the subconscious of the middle classes. Throughout the entire nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie, victim of capitalist development, had a tendency to concentrate its animosity on the Jewish usurer or banker and the little Jewish merchant. Toussenel, the Frenchman, gave his Financial Feudalism the subtitle, "The Jews, kings of the epoch," and wrote: "I advise all makers of revolution to take the banks from the Jews." By exploiting the theme of racism, the fascists were sure to please the middle classes; at the same time it protected its own financial backers from popular anger, and it diverted the anti-capitalism of the masses to the Jews.
In Italy
In Italy, where the Jews were only a small minority of the population (fifty or sixty thousand out of forty-four million), this demagogy had little chance of success, though fascism did not completely neglect it. The newspaper, Il Tevere, stated after the publication of the Labor Charter that the time of domination by Jewish bankers is now past. 10 The fascist "extremists" readily attributed the economic miscalculations of their regime to the Jewish action of international banking. 11
It was not until July 1938 that Italian fascism, in imitation of its ally Hitler, and to distract attention from its current difficulties, officially added anti-Semitism to its demagogic arsenal.
In Germany
Anti-Semitism found a much more favorable field in Germany. Numerically the Jews constituted only one per cent of the population, but following the war a sudden influx of more than 100,000 Jewish immigrants from Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania, revived the "Jewish question." The role played by the Jews in the economic, political, and intellectual life was considerable. There were enough Jews at the head of banks for the identification of high finance with Judaism to be readily accepted by the masses; at the head of the big department and one-price stores there were enough Jews for the anger of the small shopkeepers to be transferred to the Jews. There were enough Jews prominent in Anglo-Saxon finance for its debtor, Germany, to seem to be the slave of "world Jewry," and among the speculators carrying on profitable operations on the Stock Exchange there were enough Jews for the small investors to consider them responsible for their ruin. The Marxist parties also had at their head enough stirring and brilliant Jewish leaders to make it possible to denounce the collusion of capitalism and Marxism, and to represent Jewish bankers and Jewish workers as working hand in hand for universal domination by the Jewish race, according to the plan revealed by the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion-a legend already invented in the nineteenth century. Finally and most important, there were enough Jews belonging to the middle classes and the liberal professions-enough small Jewish shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers and artists, hated by their "Aryan" rivals-to make it possible when the time came to unleash popular fury against them, and thereby protect not only the "Aryan" industrial magnates and bankers but even the big Jewish financiers! 12
National Socialism's trick is to transmute the anticapitalism of its followers into anti-Semitism. "Socialism," Goebbels wrote, "can be achieved only in opposition to the Jews, and it is because we want socialism that we are anti-Semitic." 13
Subsequently the sorcerer's apprentice, as in Goethe's famous ballad, became a prisoner of the evil spirits which he had invoked. Besieged by a fearsome coalition of great powers which he caused to unite against him, face to face with the dilemma "to be or not to be," his delirious imagination saw in the Jews, by the very fact that he persecuted them, not only a scapegoat, but a servant of the Devil: at home invincible adversaries, and abroad directors of a global encirclement. He imagined they were some foreign body that he must "kill or be killed by."
In the madness of a persecutor himself persecuted, he massacred an entire people, like Herod not even sparing the infants who, though innocent, were threatening because they might perpetuate this race of bogeymen. The slaughter was heaviest in Eastern Europe with its heavy Jewish population; the German conquest made this area the eastern rampart of the Third Reich. Thus anti-Semitism, which began as a racial prejudice exploited as a demagogic trick, ended in the most abominable genocide of all time.
Although fascism arouses the popular masses especially against the "international plutocracy" and the Jews, it cannot avoid-without unmasking itself-an attack on its own big bourgeoisie. However, the fascist declamations against the big bourgeoisie, if examined closely, are in no way socialist.
The middle classes' opposition to the big bourgeoisie differs sharply from that of the working class. The middle classes do not desire the elimination of the big bourgeoisie as a class. On the contrary, they would like to become big bourgeois themselves. When fascism proclaims itself anti-bourgeois, and when it denounces the "degeneration" of the big bourgeoisie, it has no intention of attacking the existing social order; rather, it wants to rejuvenate that order by injecting fresh blood, plebeian blood. Thus it flatters the middle classes, while at the same time diverting the masses from the class struggle and proletarian socialism.
In Italy
Gorgolini sneers when he describes this "bourgeoisie inhibited by the timidity which frequently attacks those who are too refined and made sluggish by digestive difficulties." 14 Lanzillo, at the time of the occupation of the factories, also ridiculed the "humiliated, clumsy, rotten, and corrupting bourgeoisie." 15 But here the cloven hoof appears. To restore to the big bourgeoisie "some of its energy," 16 new talents must come on the scene: "The dynamic law of social history," declares a motion voted on October 5, 1924, by a fascist "trade union" congress, "consists less in an irreconcilable struggle between the classes ... than a struggle of ability, that is to say, the struggle led by professionally skilled groups who are acquiring the ability to assume the functions of management, against groups who are losing their ability to fulfill these functions of command .... " To translate this gibberish into clear language: the big bourgeoisie must gradually give way to the "competent" -that is, to the fascist plebeians.
In Germany
The Nazis make the big bourgeois their whipping boy. Hitler has not enough epithets at his command with which to flay the big bourgeoisie. He denounces its "proverbial cowardice," its "senility," its "intellectual rottenness," its "cretinism." But later his real meaning appears: it is necessary, he writes, "to take care that the cultivated classes are continually renewed by an influx of fresh blood coming from the lower classes." 17 August Winnig devotes an entire book to the theme that the mission of the popular masses is to rejuvenate an aged social order and regenerate an exhausted ruling class: "The raw material that is the proletariat has the vocation of creating its own new values, its own ideas, and introducing these forces into the old community, not in order to destroy it, but to rejuvenate it." 18
Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin
http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/c.ACCT136348/sc.8/category.110/.f
‘Solidarity is strengthened by social struggle’
Saturday, June 10, 2023
"Apocalypse is not inevitable. It depends on the actions of the international working class and its political vanguard. It depends on us — all of us."
The Anatomy of Stalinism: The American Communist Party today by Mary-Alice Waters (1978)
The Militant. Pp 13-21
http://themilitant.com/1978/4237/MIL4237.pdf
....the CP's policy is for members to seek posts in the unions-not only as shop committee people and grievers, butofficial posts as high as they can go. They do not get elected on the basis of clearly explaining to the workers the limits of what can be accomplished by electing any given individual to a union office. Also, they are often not even known to their fellow workers as socialists who, as individuals, defend a whole range of political views.To the contrary, they soft-pedal their politics. Like other aspiring bureaucrats they tell the workers, "Elect me, I'll set you free."
Thus a CP member starts down the slippery slope of the union bureaucracy like any other petty office seeker who wants to get the "outs" in. The labor bureaucracy is expert at the art of corrupting promising potential leaders who engage in that kind of union politicking.
This is just the opposite of the Socialist Workers Party's policy. SWP members in the unions seek to mobilize the ranks to fight for their own interests. We tell them that only they can open the way for labor to move forward. This doesn't exclude participating in union elections, of course. To the contrary. But that's useful only as part of building a movement of class-conscious union members.
Third, the CP's line in the unions is to build sectarian "rank and file" caucuses, which are invariably counterposed to the development of any real motion toward a class-struggle left wing. An example of this was the way the CP counterposed the National Steelworkers Rank and File Caucus to Steelworkers Fight Back. While formally supporting Ed Sadlowski's campaign for president of the Steelworkers, the Stalinists feared Sadlowski and the forces in motion around him. They thought he was too radical, too independent, too far ahead of the center bureaucrats. They thought he would isoIate himself from the majority of the workers.
The one thing the CP fears most is the mobilization of the ranks of the labor movement. As real class forces begin to move, they can take an independent direction and develop a dynamic the CP cannot control. On this the CP has a profound feeling of psychological identity with the entire labor bureaucracy....
The Struggle for Black Liberation
....The Communist Party's opposition to the right of self-determination is a genuinely counter-revolutionary position for one simple reason. Unless the oppressed nationalities of this country are convinced that a workers government will guarantee the right to genuine self-determination for them, the forces necessary to assure the victory of the American socialist revolution can never be assembled....
Equal Rights Amendment
....In a letter to the Militant a few weeks ago, George Breitman posed a question. If 100,000 Blacks supported by numerous trade unions and other organizations had marched on Washington demanding equality, would the CP have been absent, even if they were critical of the demands raised? Breitman defied anyone to come up with an explanation for the CP's stance other than simple chauvinist bigotry towards women. I think he is correct.
But this still doesn't answer the question, why? Why is it so hard for the CP to make a shift on this question? Why is the resistance so strong?
Why is this true on all the issues related to women's rights? For example, the CP favors legalized abortion, but they are uncomfortable with the question. They don't like to raise it and avoid it like the plague. You have to go through months of the Daily World to find even one article about the fight for abortion rights. The answer lies in the central place women's liberation occupies in the socialist revolution.
The Stalinists have a deep fear of the independent and radical character of the struggle for women's liberation-radical in the original sense of the word: going to the roots....
[Conclusion]
....Year by year, we have steadily gained on our main opponent in the American labor movement.
One thing we know for sure. The mounting forces of world revolution are on our side.
We approach our competition with the CP, our fight to win the confidence, trust, and leadership of the American working class, without an ounce of sectarianism in our blood. Unlike the CP, we have no interests distinct from those of the international working class.
The fate of humanity is at stake. The hegemony of the Stalinist movement in the 1930s - the small size of the Trotskyist movement, and the success of the Stalinists in winning major influence in the American labor movement in that decade - derailed the movement for class independence and crippled the anticapitalist and antiwar forces. This paved the way for the imperialist slaughter of World War II.
Today, in the nuclear age, the stakes are higher. But the odds in our favor, in favor of the survival of humanity, are better too.
We say it without bravado but with the deepest confidence: the Socialist Workers Party is a party equal to the challenge.
Friday, June 9, 2023
UK Socialist Workers Party supports Moscow's war against Ukraine
UK communist Brian G.'s public post on FB:
Socialist Worker, the weekly publication of the British Socialist Workers Party, in the name of anti-imperialism, has come out firmly against any Ukrainian effort to expel the Russian aggressor. The headline of it's current issue declaims: "Ukraine War Hell Escalates - Launch an anti-war offensive". The escalation to which they refer is the imminent Ukrainian counter offensive against the Russian occupation. Opposition to such a counter-offensive makes a mockery of their claim to stand for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. For the SWP, Ukraine has no independent agency. It is merely a puppet in a NATO-led proxy war against Russia. Hence they will not countenance any call for Russian withdrawal which would involve a defeat for Russia, or even a setback. Ipso facto this would signal victory or at least an advance for NATO and western imperialism. The hollowness of their Troops Out claim is also exposed by their allied campaign to prevent Ukraine getting the arms it needs to kick out the aggressor.
What's more, their call for troop withdrawal doesn't cover the whole of Ukraine. In relation to president Volodymyr Zelensky's stated goal of expelling Russia from occupied Crimea we are told in this article: "… every politician (sic) knows the seizure (sic) of Crimea is precisely the scenario that could trigger Vladimir Putin to use tactical nuclear weapons." Hence, for the SWP, kicking Russia out of Crimea should not be an objective. By the same logic this prohibition would apply to other Russian annexed territory - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Their is no sense in which the SWP campaign is anti-imperialist. At best it is simply a rehash of liberal pacifism. Anti-imperialism at minimum requires support for self-determination. This in turn requires that we stand for the defeat of the aggressor. It is a fake and a fraud to suggest that NATO is the aggressor. Putin self-consciously stands in the tradition of Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin. For Putin - as for the Czars and Stalin - the Ukrainian nation is an imaginary invention. Putin is quite clear: It was all the fault of Vladimir Lenin who in the early years of the 1917 Russian revolution granted Ukraine statehood and self-determination. For Putin Ukraine has always been part of Russia and he is determined that it remains so. NATO expansionism is simply an excuse used by Putin to support his imperial aims, which would continue to exist, NATO or no NATO.
For the past 30 years or so since the demise of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine people have struggled to build an independent nation state free from Russian domination. This is what gives to Ukraine the moral high ground. Its war against the Russian invasion has been given its dynamic by the mobilisation of workers and their allies and transformed it into a peoples war, worthy of support. It is this that has given the advantage to Ukraine against Russia, not the sophistication of its armaments. Nonetheless, Ukraine needs arms to fight. We support the right of Ukraine to get arms from wherever it can to help defeat the aggressor - be it Britain, the US or other imperialist powers. The fact that various imperialist powers have their own self-interested motives for supplying the arms is not a reason to oppose Ukraine's acquisition of such arms. There is no reason to suggest that such a stance entails support for imperialism's war drive. This is an unwarranted amalgam. To the contrary, we oppose NATO's war drive, especially, here in the UK, that of the British ruling class. It would be wrong for class struggle fighters in the UK to demand that the British government provide military aid to Ukraine - that's for Ukraine to decide. There is no contradiction between defending Ukraine's right to acquire arms from NATO whilst at the same time standing for the dismantling of NATO and, in general, demanding not a penny, not a person to the imperial war machine.
"Reactionary terror isn’t an understandable response by the toilers to imperialist aggression"
This is the crucial point, and I've never seen it more clearly formulated:
....In a May 29 interview on Legacy Radio, Clifford took up Corbyn's claim that the growth of Islamic State and its terror attacks are a blow-back from London's participation in the Washington-led Middle East and Afghanistan wars.
Reactionary terror isn't an understandable response by the toilers to imperialist aggression. The Algerian people faced tremendous brutality at the hands of French colonialism, but they didn't respond in a reactionary anti-working-class IS-style way, Clifford said. "They organized a powerful revolutionary struggle and established a workers and farmers government."
And in Cuba, Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement led workers and farmers to overthrow the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. They have defended their socialist revolution for over 50 years, setting an example for workers everywhere.
Working people in the Middle East don't need U.N.-imposed "stability," as Corbyn has argued, Clifford said. They need time and space, free of foreign intervention, to find the way to fight for political power. "The Communist League calls for U.K., U.S. and all foreign troops out."
The Militant - June 19, 2017 -- Communist League campaign in UK fights attacks on workers' rights
http://themilitant.com/2017/8124/812406.html