When communists sell their newspapers

Fighting miners, hotel workers, Machinists sign up for ‘Militant’


BY LOUIS MARTIN
“ This paper needs to get around more,” coal miner Connie Jewell said as he signed up for a subscription to the Militant at the April 1 United Mine Workers union demonstration of more than 6,000 in Charleston, W.Va.

The action was called to protest moves by Patriot Coal to cut thousands of miners off health and pension plans and tear up union contracts. (See article on front page.)

Jewell was one of 27 participants who bought Militant subscriptions at the action. In addition, 46 single copies were sold, showing the interest by coal miners and their supporters in a socialist newsweekly that tells the truth about and backs the struggles of working people.

Two books on revolutionary working-class politics were also sold on the buses going to the event, including The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free, one of eight books offered at reduced prices with a subscription to the Militant. (See ad below.)

Militant distributors from Seattle had a similar experience when they brought solidarity to the picket lines of members of International Association of Machinists Local 79 on strike against the Belshaw Adamatic Bakery Group in Auburn, Wash., selling seven subscriptions in two visits. The plant manufactures donut equipment. (See article on page 5.)

“It’s important to have a paper like this to see what is happening all over to working people,” said Josephine Ulrich, a shop steward who has worked 25 years at the plant. “I want to show it around. This is what unionization and solidarity is all about.”

On March 30 Militant supporters sold the paper door to door in Seattle and Kent, Wash., reported Edwin Fruit. They talked with working people about the impact of the bosses’ productivity drive, the bank crisis in Cyprus, the cuts in postal service and other political developments of interest to workers.

“I very much liked the fact that the Militant talked about what was happening to us, but I also wanted to support the paper. I also found the international news to be very interesting,” said Brigitte Malenfant when asked why she had decided to renew her subscription.

Malenfant is one of 180 hotel workers who have been on strike since Oct. 28 against the Hôtel des Seigneurs in Saint-Hyacinthe, about 30 miles northeast of Montreal. They are fighting for wage parity with hotel workers in Montreal.

Join the ongoing international effort to increase the circulation of the Militant among working people. You can call the distributors in your region (see directory on page 6) or order a bundle at themilitant@mac.com or (212) 244-4899. 

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7714/771406.html

A social movement in the Eastern coalfields?

W.Va.: Thousands protest Patriot’s attack on mine union, retirees
UMWA calls next action for April 16 in St. Louis

March in Charleston, W.Va., April 1 to protest slashing of medical benefits and pensions and tearing up of union contracts by Patriot Coal as part of company’s bankruptcy filing. 

BY ALYSON KENNEDY
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Some 6,000-7,000 coal miners, their families, and other workers poured into the Civic Center here April 1 in the largest mobilization of miners in many years. The action was the latest in a series of demonstrations organized by the United Mine Workers of America since August 2012 to fight Patriot Coal’s attempt to use bankruptcy to gut union contracts, pensions and health care.

“Corporate greed has taken over this country. This is a death sentence for retirees,” said Benny Parker, a member of the UMWA from Mannington, who retired in 2007 from Patriot’s Federal No. 2 Mine.

Many retired miners have black lung and other debilitating work injuries from decades in the mines and depend on what they thought were lifetime benefits set down in UMWA contracts since the 1940s.

More than 50 busloads of miners came from seven states. Hundreds drove up from southern West Virginia. The rally included both working and retired coal miners as well as union delegations, including from the United Steelworkers, United Auto Workers, Communications Workers of America, Ironworkers and the American Federation of Teachers.

Terry Steele, a retired miner from UMWA Local 1440, came to the rally from Matewan. He used to work at the Zeigler Old Ben Mine owned by Horizon. “In 2002 they filed for bankruptcy, just like Patriot’s doing. They got out of all their responsibilities,” he said.

In 2007 Peabody Energy spun off most of its union mines to form Patriot Coal Corp. A year later Patriot bought Magnum Coal Co., an Arch Coal spinoff. More than 90 percent of “Patriot” retirees today never actually worked for Patriot.

As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Patriot Coal on March 14 asked a judge to sanction its plan to tear up union contracts and end benefits covering 10,000 retirees and their 13,000 dependents. Patriot’s bankruptcy takes place in the context of a recent contraction in domestic demand for coal, fueled in large part by falling natural gas prices.

There are no union mines left in Mingo County, W.Va., or Pike County, Ky., Steele said.

Both the number of coal miners and the proportion who are members of the UMWA has declined dramatically over recent decades. Only about one-quarter of working miners are members of the UMWA today, down from 43 percent in 1994. Today there are about 82,000 active miners in the U.S., down from some 89,000 in January of last year and from 175,000 30 years ago.

“The younger generation, a lot of us, were raised off the union,” said Jeff Samek, 29, a faceman at the Alpha Natural Resources Carmichaels Mine in Southwest Pennsylvania. “If Patriot does this every company will try it.”

Speakers at the rally included Democratic politicians from West Virginia, including Sen. Joe Manchin, Rep. Nick Rahall, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Secretary of State Natalie Tennant.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, in a videotaped message, promised to press for the Coalfield Accountability and Retired Employee Act, which would transfer money from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund, a government fund for restoration of mined land based on taxing coal production, to the UMWA 1974 Pension Plan.

The CARE Act is supposed to prop up the union’s pension plan — which faces insolvency as a result of declining unionization and funds lost through speculative investments — as well as cover retirees who lose benefits when coal bosses file for bankruptcy and reduce taxes on employer payments to benefit plans.

“What Patriot did was designed to fail so they could get rid of these liabilities,” Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, told the rally. “We won’t allow them to take the money and run. Anyone who pulls a paycheck, stand with us.”

Corey Bachman, 22, a member of Ironworkers Local 3 in Pittsburgh, said he and other workers have been on strike for eight months at Patriot Machining and Maintenance Services, which is not owned by Patriot Coal. “After we organized a union, they laid everybody off,” he said. “We have filed unfair labor practice charges.”

Steelworkers from Ravenswood came to the rally along with nurses from Bluefield, who recently formed a Nurses Union, and a van of UAW members from the Ford plant in Louisville, Ky.

“It’s going to affect all of us,” said Debbie Casey, a member of CWA Local 2204 from Castlewood, Va. She said the CWA, IBEW and UMWA brought five busloads to the rally.

“I support the UMWA in this,” said Larry Goodwin, 35, vice president of United Steelworkers Local 477 at a refractory plant in Buckhannon. He came with several others from the local. “We faced the same thing in my plant. We lost health care for retirees and current employees.”

“This is not just about the mine workers, UMWA President Cecil Roberts told participants. “This is a movement about the people.”

Following the speeches Roberts led the massive gathering out of the Civic Center, marching down the streets of Charleston to the headquarters of Patriot Coal. Chants of “U-M-W-A” and “We are union” broke out. Roberts and 15 other labor, civic and religious officials who had declared their intention to be arrested sat down in the street until cops took them away.

The next action will be in St. Louis on April 16 at 10 a.m. in front of Peabody Coal’s corporate headquarters.

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7714/771401.html

Patriot Coal Protest in Charleston, W.Va.

Cuban Missile Crisis - 50 years on

When pro-war was the right side

Racist violence in the North: The 'Draft Riots' of 1863

By Dolores Cox on April 4, 2013 

As the United States commemorates the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, a document which officially ended slavery in those states and regions that rebelled against the Union during the Civil War, one is also reminded of a not-so-noble 1863 event in New York City.

From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, pro-slavery Democrats in New York City warned Irish citizens and immigrants to be prepared for the freeing of Southern enslaved Black people who might relocate to the North and compete with them for jobs.

In 1863, the federal draft law became stricter for men between the ages of 20 and 45. All those in that age group were entered into a lottery to serve military duty. However, if they paid $300 to the government they could evade enlistment. White workers compared their value, $300 to buy their draft exemption, to the $1,000 being paid for a Black slave. Free Black men were exempted from the draft because they weren't considered citizens.

Mainstream newspapers and sensationalist journalists attacked the federal government's draft law in order to incite the white working class. They criticized the government's intrusion into state and local affairs on behalf of the "n——r war." Because of the bad wartime economy, whites seemingly felt their political power and privileges would be threatened and reduced, and Blacks would be gaining power.

On July 13, 1863, and lasting five days, white mobs rioted in New York City, attacking Black men, women and children. Rioters targeted anything that might symbolize any political, economic or social progress and power for Black people. This violence became known as "the Civil War Draft Riots."

Black men were stomped, stoned, kicked and beaten to death. Some were burned to death, others lynched from lampposts and their genitals mutilated. Many who fled jumped into the river to escape. Black properties were destroyed. And fearing destruction of their property by rioters, landlords evicted Black tenants.

The rioters' brutal violence included burning down the four-story Colored Orphan Asylum, located on Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street, which housed more than 200 Black children. The children were forced to move into the almshouse (poorhouse) on Blackwell's Island, where the orphanage's founders had hoped to prevent children from having to go. The orphanage later temporarily relocated to 51st Street in Manhattan.

Cornerstone of white supremacy

For a decade prior to the riots, there had been tension brewing between white longshoremen and Black dockworkers. Irish workers in particular refused to work with Black longshoremen, and during the riots they attacked all Black porters, cartmen and laborers they saw. White dockworkers also destroyed dance halls, boarding houses and tenements that served Black people. On the waterfront, brutal beatings and deaths were cheered, with the promise of more "vengeance on every n——r in New York." The aim of white workers was to eradicate the presence of Black males in the city.

The all-white labor union, the Longshoreman's Association, insisted that "the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of the industry," which gave white workers license to physically remove Blacks, not only from their worksites, but also from neighborhoods and recreation places. Convinced of their racial superiority, white workers violently asserted their power.

Hundreds of Black people were forced out of New York City. Some Black victims escaped by ferry to the borough of Brooklyn. Others fled to New Jersey and elsewhere. The Black orphanage attempted to rebuild at the same site, but was not permitted to. Four years later, it finally relocated to a newly built location on West 143rd Street in Harlem, which later became a predominantly Black neighborhood in the 20th century. In 1867, however, the area was sparsely populated and far from the city's center. Within two years after the riots, fewer than 10,000 Black people resided in the city, the lowest number since 1820.

To date, Blacks and whites remain divided by race, class, social status, aspirations, employment and education opportunities, and income and wealth disparities. Neither New York City nor the country itself has united to overcome or solve problems of racism. The country has failed to fully accept the freedom of its Black population. White supremacy remains the cornerstone of economic exploitation and capitalism. The U.S., a country whose foundation was built on racism, continues to be a country that loves to hate.

Source: "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863," by Leslie M. Harris

http://www.workers.org/2013/04/04/racist-violence-in-the-north-the-draft-riots-of-1863/

Civil wars in U.S. and France

 

Another exceptional find featured by Jodi Dean on her incomparable blog:

American receptions of the Commune

(from Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmarte: Americans and the Paris Commune, Harvard UP, 1998).

'The Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune each posed the question of republicanism in its starkest form: Shall "the people" be sovereign.' (89)

'But defining what "popular" (much less "republican") government proved elusive, as the bitter politics of Reconstruction showed. Reconstruction was a struggle to define what it meant to be a republic, and to decide who was fit to participate in such a polity.' (90)

Marx had followed the civil war in the US closely--his text on the Paris Commune is The Civil War in France.

(In the wake of the civil war, mistrust of popular government spread among Northerners: rejection of women's suffrage, acquiescence to Southern 'home rule,' ruins of 14th and 15th amendements, urban reforms limiting local autonomy, voting reforms limiting the franchise. The Commune became a way to 'focus and excuse the ideological shift away from popular government,' 92.)

For some, the Commune became an emblem of the failure of Reconstruction. The editor of the Nation, 'railed against the "Socialism in South Carolina" that came from allowing incompetent black men to govern and vote" (97). In his polemic againt reconstruction, the political incapacity in South Carolina was as bad as the Paris Commune. Attacks on the Communards were attacks on the political incapacity of the people. For Northerners, "neither Paris nor the South was ready for self-government" 100.

Related positions emphasized the parallel between Southern secessionists and the Commune, both rejecting centralized government. Some Southerners, not surprisingly, rejected the comparison and emphasized differences between themselves and the Commune, in particular, they (the South) were resisting revolution (the Union's attempt to control them) while the Communists were making a revolution. Other Southerners were happy to embrace the parallel, of "wholesome revolt against an oppressive centralized power" (107) -- the same position held by Northern Republican critics. Newspapers in Atlanta and Charleston expressed sympathy for the Communards. Still others associated the Parisian mob with the newly freed slaves.

(Weirdly, a former vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who became a a member of Congress from Georgia after the war, identified himself as a Communist in 1880. For Stephens, to be a Communist meant to favor home rule, the sovereignty of the local government, 108-110. Stephens, of course, explicitly rejected the idea that communism entailed the abolition of private property.)

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2013/03/american-receptions-of-the-commune.html

Never conventional: E. P. Thompson

EP Thompson: the unconventional historian

The Making of the English Working Class is 50 this year, yet it is still widely revered as a canonical work of social history

EP Thompson ... intellectual figurehead. Photograph: John Hodder

Fifty years ago, an obscure historian working in the extra-mural department at the University of Leeds delivered a manuscript, overdue and over-length, to Victor Gollancz – a publishing house then specialising in socialist and internationalist non-fiction. No one could have foreseen the book's reception. EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class became a runaway commercial and critical success. The demand for this 800-page doorstop was nothing short of remarkable. In 1968, Pelican Books bought the rights to The Making and published a revised version as the 1,000th book on their list. In less than a decade, it had gone through a further five reprints. Fifty years on, it is still in print, widely revered as a canonical work of social history.
It was not Thompson's first book. A history of William Morris had appeared in 1955, and had been met with the indifference that is the fate of most academic monographs. After The Making came Whigs & Hunters, a book on the Black Acts – the notorious Georgian legislation that criminalised not only the killing of deer, but also any suspicious activity that might hint at the intention to kill deer. This was followed by a series of colourful essays on diverse themes, including time and industrial capitalism, food riots, and wife sales (yes, in the 18th century men really did take their wives to market and "sell" them). Time and again, Thompson proved himself capable of taking on new topics and revisiting old ones in new ways, creating a body of work that was original and hugely influential.
And yet Thompson was never a conventional historian. His many years at Leeds were spent not in the history department, but in adult education. His tenure at the newly created University of Warwick was brief: he resigned just six years after taking up the post, disgusted at the commercial turn it was taking. Ever the man of letters, his resignation was accompanied by a lengthy pamphlet outlining his intellectual objections. The rest of his life was devoted to a range of political causes. Thompson was an active member of the Communist party in the 40s and 50s, and founder of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946. He was part of the mass exodus from the party in the 1950s following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but remained closely allied with a range of leftwing movements. By the end of the 1970s, Thompson was playing a key role, as both tireless organiser and intellectual figurehead, in the nascent peace movement, a cause to which he remained devoted until his death in 1993. It was a life of activism no less than of scholarship.
But towering above it all remains The Making, with its preface so memorably declaring the book's intention "to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity". The book's mythic status should not distract us from the raw originality of the work. In 1963, weavers and artisans were not the stuff of history books. Pioneering social historians had been studying working people since the early 20th century, but the focus remained squarely on the tangible, the measurable, the "significant" – wages, living conditions, unions, strikes, Chartists. Thompson touched on the trade unions and the real wage, of course, but most of his book was devoted to something that he referred to as "experience". Through a patient and extensive examination of local as well as national archives, Thompson had uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards. He took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side. Here, then, was a book that rambled over aspects of human experience that had never before had their historian. And the timing of its appearance could scarcely have been more fortunate. The 1960s saw unprecedented upheaval and expansion in the university sector, with the creation of new universities filled with lecturers and students whose families had not traditionally had access to the privileged world of higher education. Little wonder, then, that so many felt a natural affinity with Thompson's outsiders and underdogs.
And there was something more. Running through The Making was a searing anger about economic exploitation and a robust commentary on his capitalist times. Thompson rejected the notion that capitalism was inherently superior to the alternative model of economic organisation it replaced. He refused to accept that artisans had become obsolete, or that their distress was a painful but necessary adjustment to the market economy. It was an argument that resonated widely in the 1960s, when Marxist intellectuals could still believe that a realistic alternative to capitalism existed, could still argue that "true" Marxism hadn't been tried properly.
Appearing in the heyday of Marxist scholarship, The Making's political framework lay at the heart of the book's success. Perhaps its greatest achievement, however, is how it has managed to weather Marxism's subsequent fall from academic grace. By the 1980s, Marxist history no longer held a significant place in academic history departments. It has been on the defensive ever since. Surveying the literary spat between Thompson and the Polish philosopher, Leszek Kołakowski – who, after years of living under Communism, had had the temerity to desert the Marxist banner – Tony Judt observed: "No one who reads it will ever take EP Thompson seriously again." And yet we do still take Thompson seriously. More than any of his books, The Making continues to delight and inspire new readers. Of course, Thompson's scholarship was partial and driven by his politics. But the originality, vigour and iconoclasm of his book make certain that it will endure.
• Emma Griffin's Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution will be published by Yale later this month.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/06/ep-thompson-unconventional-historian