Satire from Товарищ Х

Call for the Weiner Single Payer Amendment Today!

Well, as Ed McMahon used to say, "You may already be a Weiner."

According to the Congressman's web site, he advocates, for all Americans, the same kind of coverage members of Congress have and calls that "single payer." That program, if I have not been misinformed, lets the Congresspersons choose any commercial insurance company they want to do business with, and then writes checks to cover 66% of the cost of the premiums. It then reaches into one of the workers' pockets for the premium, and the Congressperson reaches into another one for his/her paycheck from which the remainder of the premium is deducted. The insurance companies are the primary beneficiaries of this scheme.

(Single Payer ambulance is pictured above.)

Brilliant! Let's all line up behind that bandwagon and sing The Weiner Song

Sam Webb will be there, supporting his new party , the Democrats Who Lean Slightly to the Left. He explained his new party affiliation here.

Excerpt - "The notion of the capitalist class on the one side and the working class on the other may sound "radical," but it is neither Marxist, nor found in life and politics. Pure forms exist in high theory, but nowhere else. It would be a profound mistake to distance the core forces of this coalition from others who are temporary and unreliable at this and subsequent stages of struggle."
Товарищ Х's Reply - So, comrade Webb, the consciousness of class conflict between the workers and their capitalist exploiters "is neither Marxist, nor found in life." It is difficult to argue with that kind of Marxist analysis. Perhaps I should not have allowed myself to be confused by, e.g., such as Marx's Capital, v.1 where he wrote the following:

"Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process or as a process of reproduction produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation itself, on the one hand the capitalist and on the other, the labourer.”

Thanks for clearing that up.
[Posted by Odnovo Litso, 01/11/2009 1:44pm (22 hours ago)]

Thanks be to the Nonexistent that we have comrades like Earl Browder and Sam Webb to correct all the mistakes of Karl Marx lest they lead us astray.

__________________________________

Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Working to Rule: a Staley Balance Sheet

When Illinois was the war zone

Lance Selfa reviews a new book chronicling the important events and debates of the struggle at A.E. Staley--the centerpiece of the 1990s Illinois War Zone labor battles.

Steven Ashby and C.J. Hawking, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement [1]. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 384 pages, $25. (Visit the book's companion Web site)

October 15, 2009

FOR NEARLY three years in the 1990s, the central Illinois town of Decatur was the epicenter of a series of labor battles that crystallized many of the crucial issues that faced the labor movement. Strikes at Caterpillar Inc. and Bridgestone/Firestone and the lockout of the more than 700 workers at the A.E. Staley corn-processing plant pitted older unionized workforces against ruthless multinational corporations determined to turn back the clock to the pre-union era.

At one point in 1994, an estimated one in four blue-collar workers in the city was on strike or locked out. Workers in Decatur described their city and state as a "war zone." Soon, labor activists around the U.S. began to refer to the three struggles as the War Zone struggles.

Of all of the War Zone conflicts, the one that stood out was the fight of the 700 locked-out workers at the A.E. Staley plant, owned by the British multinational Tate & Lyle. Although the workforce at Staley was the smallest of the three in the War Zone, it was the most politically advanced and innovative.

Steven Ashby and C.J. Hawking's account of struggle, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement, captures the history and feel of the fight, as well as drawing out a number of important issues the War Zone raised for the U.S. labor movement.

The authors, both key organizers in solidarity with the Staley workers, make excellent use of interviews and video documentation of union solidarity meetings to infuse the narrative with a sense of immediacy, despite the passage of a decade and a half. As a result, the voices of the workers--the key activists who kept the struggle alive for almost three years--comes through.

As a member of the Chicago-based Staley Workers Solidarity Committee who worked closely with the two authors for almost three years and participated in many of the events they narrate, I can say that their account both rings true and provides a number of insights that only people involved in the day-to-day organizing can convey.

Their description of the internal work organization in the plant, and their history of women and African American workers, told largely through oral testimonies of the workers themselves, stands out. These were important aspects to document because, through the course of the Staley struggle, the workers fought to overcome divisions based on skill, sex and race. They succeeded to a great extent.

The sight of this union--primarily made up of middle-aged white men from rural Illinois--marching in celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday through Decatur's Black community, was an important moment in the struggle.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BEFORE THE company locked them out in 1993, the Staley workers had run a disciplined "work-to-rule" campaign inside the plant after their union contract expired in 1992. Knowing that they faced a company intent on forcing a strike to impose draconian concessions, the Staley workers instead remained at work and followed the company's procedures to the letter. This had the effect of greatly impeding production and shifting much of the control of day-to-day plant operations to the workers.

The work-to-rule campaign helped to convert a previous passive workforce into a mobilized and activated base. As union adviser Jerry Tucker, who brought the experience of the "in-plant" strategy from a successful campaign that he directed in the United Auto Workers union, noted:

Some workers are born leaders and throw themselves into the campaign. But for most, there was a threshold moment when they went from passive to active in the struggle. They went from being a relatively good, docile, following-orders employee to somebody who was going to find a way to resist.

It came to a point at which the company felt it was losing control of the plant, and in June 1993, management escalated the battle by locking out the entire unionized workforce, and hiring scabs to run the plant. Having lost the shop floor power they had held, the workers were forced to apply pressure on the company from the outside.

For the next two and a half years, Staley workers' representatives--who called themselves the Road Warriors--traveled around the country (and even outside the U.S.) to seek support.

Unlike many union struggles of that period and earlier, the Staley workers openly campaigned for support from whomever was willing to offer it, whether they were union locals, Chicago Symphony Orchestra members, student groups, religious organizations, socialists or other radicals. A network of solidarity committees, whose "flagship" operated in Chicago, provided crucial financial, activist and political support.

The union used a variety of tactics, from boycotts of Staley customers like Miller Beer to nonviolent civil disobedience to running union president Dave Watts and other striking workers for the notoriously pro-company city council (Watts lost). But as the activist core around the Road Warriors reached for a tactic that would break the company's will, a growing conservative faction plotted surrender on the company's terms.

Ashby and Hawking capture a number of the debates and disputes that arose over the course of the struggle. For instance, workers and supporters were divided on the union's choice of boycott targets. Union adviser Ray Rogers--whose Corporate Campaign Inc. earned the astounding figure of $28,000 per month, plus expenses, plus 15 percent of any money he helped to raise for the union--insisted on targeting State Farm Insurance.

State Farm had a number of indirect corporate connections to Staley that the union found difficult to explain in seeking to build support. Miller, a purchaser of Staley products, was a much more tangible target--and much more open to pressure. While the State Farm campaign petered out over months, the later decision to target Miller bore immediate fruit as Miller canceled its contract with Staley.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A MORE momentous debate turned on how and whether to stop scab production in the plant. Here again, disagreements opened up between the most committed activists, who wanted to find some way to impede production for at least some period of time, and the Watts-led union leadership that was hesitant to pursue this strategy.

The union settled on a series of civil disobedience actions modeled on the experience of the civil rights movement and Gandhian nonviolence. At the largest of these, a phalanx of Decatur police pepper-sprayed dozens of workers and their supporters when we marched and sat down inside the plant gates.

"The whole concept of shutting down the plant," union activist Dan Lane told Ashby and Hawking, "even if you can only sustain it for several hours, is potentially like a spark under kindling, which grows into a great flame...Nobody can ever convince me that [our] people weren't willing to much further than the leadership or Ray Rogers were willing to let them go."

As the struggle moved into its second and third year, workers faced the reality that despite all of their brilliant outreach and solidarity, they were unable to stop the Staley plant from operating with scab labor. This was due, in no small part, to the complete uselessness of most of the official labor leadership.

The Decatur Trades and Labor Council refused to stop union trades workers from servicing the plant. AFL-CIO chieftains rushed off in their limousines rather than meet with a delegation of Staley workers who crashed the federation's winter meeting in Bal Harbour, Fla. The Staley workers' international union, the Paperworkers, forced the Decatur local to fire Rogers and ban Tucker from the bargaining table as it sought a way to end the lockout.

Given these obstacles--in addition to a ruthless company, a hostile city government and a local newspaper that read like a company newsletter--it was a credit to the determination of the workers and their supporters that the struggle continued for as long as it did.

The Staley struggle ended in defeat when the local accepted the company's concessionary contract in 1995. Although the Staley struggle was lost, it had helped to revive some of the best traditions of the labor movement--and to expose some of the worst aspects of the modern-day labor union bureaucracy.

For bringing these lessons to light, Ashby and Hawking's Staley is a vital contribution to a discussion of how to rebuild the labor movement today. What's more, it's a tribute to the men and women who gave their all during the Staley struggle--people who those of us involved in the solidarity campaign will always remember as some of the finest we've ever met.

The People's Charter & 1839's Newport Rising

Newport Rising 1839

Workers storm the gates of privilege

ON 4 November 1839, 170 years ago, the 'Chartist Rising' in Newport, south Wales, ended in bloodshed. 30 members of the working-class political movement, the Chartists, were killed; many more were wounded by soldiers as they attempted to storm the Westgate Hotel. Never since has the military killed more civilians on British soil.

DAVE REID explains the background to one of the first workers' insurrections in history.

Many workers today agree that the working class needs a political voice - a new workers' party. Some are actively trying to get the trade unions to cut the link with New Labour and support a new party for the working class. This struggle for a political force for workers can trace its origins back not just to the founders of the Labour Party 100 years ago but even further to the Chartists of the mid 19th century.

Chartism in the 19th century was the first political movement of the British working class and arguably the first mass workers' movement in history. In 1838 the London Working Men's Association drew up the People's Charter, demanding equal political rights for the working class. Property qualifications prevented workers from standing for parliament or even from having a vote.

Chartism fought for democratic demands, but it was not solely a democratic movement, it was a revolutionary class struggle to change society. To Frederick Engels it was "the compact form of the proletariat's opposition to the bourgeoisie". William Price, a Pontypridd Chartist leader said: "Oppression, injustice and the grinding poverty which burdens our lives must be abolished for all time."

As workers were forming the first trade unions, the increasingly bitter battles with the employers convinced them they needed to change society through political means. Political power was expected to make a material difference to their lives. Many workers wanted the Newport insurrection to give them control of the mines and ironworks. Garndiffaith Chartist lodge declared: "The [iron] works do not belong to the present proprietors but to the workmen and they will very shortly have them".

While their husbands marched on Newport, two women had the following conversation in Gelligaer: "I want some coal and I don't know what to do now the colliery has stopped."

"Oh don't worry, go and take some coal off the trams on the tram road."

"What will Mr Powell [the colliery owner] say if he should hear it?"

"Oh never mind him, the Gelligaer colliery will be my husband's tomorrow when Newport is taken."

The authorities later discovered the owner had been marked down to work as a coal cutter if the miners had taken power.

Divisions
Chartist organisations were created in workers' districts across Britain and a campaign began to present a grand petition to parliament requesting the vote. The petition, signed by over a million workers and supporters, was rejected by parliament in 1839 - MPs would not even accept the petition.

This rejection created a crisis in the Chartist movement which had already developed both a 'moral force' wing and a 'physical force' wing. The moral force wing believed that reforms could be won by persuading the ruling class of the moral force of their argument. Physical force Chartists were influenced by revolutionary ideas and believed in the use of force to win democratic rights.

The moral force Chartists' position was completely undermined by parliament's rejection of the petition. The Chartists' National Convention broke up in October 1838 with little strategy to take the campaign forward except for the vague calling of a 'sacred month' or general strike. But it seems likely that some physical force delegates secretly prepared a plan to use the disappointment at the rejection to prepare an insurrectionary movement to seize power in a number of areas starting with Monmouthshire and Glamorgan in South Wales.

In 1839 the South Wales valleys were being transformed into industrial power houses employing thousands of workers in the ironworks and mines. The high concentration of workers in heavy industry created a militant working-class movement in South Wales that moved ahead of some more conservative Chartist areas dominated by tradesmen and shopkeepers. 25,000 workers joined the 50 Chartist lodges in South Wales.

A central figure was John Frost, the elected leader and representative from the Monmouthshire Chartist association and speaker of the National Convention. He supported the physical force wing and clearly participated in the decision to organise uprisings following the petition's failure. He was an honest reformer and became a martyr for the cause.

But he had no stomach for a revolutionary movement and was distrusted by many workers in South Wales. He aimed most of his speeches at 'respectable' society, constantly urging restraint, wavering between the capitalists and the workers. From the start he tried to back off from insurrection.

Other Chartist leaders in South Wales were more militant and determined to win power through force if needs be. Weeks before the insurrection, a delegation of Blackwood workers warned Frost: "Mr Frost if you will not lead us, neither you nor your family shall live in Newport. We are beginning to suspect you".

From the rejection of the petition, serious preparations began across South East Wales for an insurrection in Newport which they hoped would trigger other risings around the country. Preparations were made in London, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Newcastle, Birmingham, the West Country and Dundee. On the day of the rising 65 delegates gathered in Newcastle to await the signal from South Wales.

The South Wales Chartists fashioned a highly organised mass party in months. Membership cards were issued. As well as regular lodges, youth lodges were formed. At a time when not even bourgeois women played any role in politics, women's lodges were active in the area. Huge meetings involving over half the population of some towns prepared politically for the insurrection.

Workers' militia formed and drilled under the bosses' noses. 'Sections' originally formed to collect money to sustain Chartist prisoners were improvised into militia of eleven men. Each section had a captain and the sections were grouped into troops, companies and brigades. A directorate of 12 organised the insurrection.

Preparation
Plans were made to fraternise with troops sent to Newport. Within a few weeks 13 had deserted, been found new jobs and re-housed. The rest were withdrawn before they could desert. Hundreds of picks were secretly stored in caves in the valleys. Firearms were stolen.

The plan was to seize power in Newport, Cardiff, Abergavenny and Brecon, declare a "Silurian" workers' republic and appeal for support in England and Scotland. It was timed to coincide with the 'sacred month' called by the General Convention.

Looting was forbidden on pain of death. The Times later marvelled at the level of organisation of these ordinary working people. "This was no momentary outbreak but a long-planned insurrection, deeply organised, managed with a secrecy truly astonishing.''

A rough economic programme was also worked out, including taking over the mines and iron works and expropriating the banks.

7,500 armed workers eagerly began the long march from the heads of the Valleys to Newport on 3 November. They had been preparing long enough. They knew that some would not return but believed that those that did would be free.

'Glorious struggle'
George Shell, a 15-year old Pontypool carpenter wrote to his parents: "I shall this night be engaged in a glorious struggle for freedom and should it please God to spare my life, I shall see you soon; but if not grieve not for me. I shall have fallen in a noble cause. Farewell!" George Shell was killed the next day.

Despite painstaking preparations, the element of surprise was lost as the earlier sections waited for hours for the slower detachments. The Pontypool detachment did not arrive in Newport in time at all. By the time the workers arrived in Newport 100 soldiers were waiting and prepared in the Westgate Hotel. Despite entering the hotel dozens of Chartists were cut down by gunfire.

Following the Newport defeat, South Wales was placed under martial law and hundreds of Chartists arrested or forced into hiding. 82 were sent to trial and five leaders including John Frost sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered (the last people to be given that sentence). The executions were commuted to transportation to Australia because of the outcry.

The struggle for the Charter continued through the 1840s and 1850s with a mass movement of further petitions, demonstrations and general strikes. Eventually the vote was conceded to male workers in 1867 but not to all women until 1928.

Now, all but one (annual parliaments) of the Chartists' demands (see box above) have been won. But the struggle for real democracy continues. Having resisted the vote for workers the ruling class conceded it, but aimed to ensure that workers' representatives were absorbed into the system, firstly through Lib-Labism (a Liberal-Labour alliance to misrepresent workers).

Then after the Labour Party's formation, Labour's leaders were overwhelmingly absorbed into the capitalist establishment through inducements. The Chartists fought for pay for MPs so that not only the wealthy could afford to go to parliament and workers could represent other workers.

Now the state system pays MPs huge sums to ensure they live lives removed from workers and are not under workers' control. The Socialist Party demand today of workers' MPs on workers' wages continues in the spirit of the Chartist demand of pay for MPs, to attempt to make MPs represent workers.

The Labour Party's transformation into capitalist New Labour means that, once again, working people are disenfranchised. The demand for a new workers' party continues the Chartists' struggle for democratic rights as a step to a workers' democracy.

The People's Charter 1838

Suffrage for all men age 21 and over
Equal-sized electoral districts
Voting by secret ballot.
An end to the need for a property qualification for Parliament
Pay for Members of Parliament
Annual election of Parliament

Entitled to joy rather than submission

The Lacuna By Barbara Kingsolver

Half-truths fizz through this epic tale of a man caught up in world events when he just wants to be left alone
Reviewed by Nina Lakhani

Sunday, 1 November 2009

Every few years, you read a book that makes everything else in life seem unimportant. The Lacuna is the first book in a long time that made me swap my bike for public transport, just so I could keep reading.

In her first novel for nine years, Barbara Kingsolver follows the epic journey of Harrison William Shepherd – a nobody who inadvertently becomes a somebody when all he wants is a safe place in which to be invisible. This is a tender, tragic, optimistic, sometimes depressing – but always compelling – story.

Shepherd is the son of a Mexican mother, who chases her dreams by chasing rich men, but always picks the one on the wrong side of the political divide. She leaves her son's American father, an unemotional, indifferent government employee, and runs off with a Mexican industrialist in search of the glamour she believes is rightfully hers. But they end up on Isla Pixol, an island off the east coast of Mexico, of which she says, "on this stupid island so far from everything, you have to yell three times before even Jesus Christ can hear you".

As she plots another escape with another man, her young son starts to record his world in a notebook, and words become his oxygen: without them he cannot breathe.

The boy moves between the United States and Mexico amid revolution and war, fascism and communism, as both countries search for new identities in the turbulent second quarter of the 20th century. His name is changed by whoever pays the bills, but the boy himself is shaped by the people he meets while trying to survive: the kitchen servant who shows him how to mix smooth pastry dough; the classmate in a Virginia military school who awakens his sexuality; and the celebrated artist Diego Rivera, who hires him to mix plaster for the huge murals he paints on the city's most important walls.

When school is no longer an option, Shepherd finds work and a home as a cook in the Rivera household, where he starts a lifelong friendship with the artist's wife, Frida Kahlo. With the arrival of the exiled Lev Trotsky and his wife into the house, Shepherd finds himself working as a translator for a man who is fighting for his life.

During these formative years of the 1930s, he discovers a passion for Aztec history that helps him understand the revolutionary beliefs held by his employers. Thousands of miles from his homeland, his children killed simply for being his children, Trotsky's unshakeable resolve makes Shepherd wonder: "Is that what makes a man a revolutionary? The belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?"

Kingsolver's ability to make words dance off each page reawakened my passion for Mexico City, transporting me from the overcrowded Tube back to the vivid sights and smells of this complex city.

This is the first time Kingsolver has interwoven real lives and events into her fiction, but Shepherd's hopes belong with the love affairs, the work and politics of Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky, just as his fears find a natural home with America's post-war hatred of anything "un-American".

The story is told through Shepherd's diaries and letters as well as actual newspaper cuttings that reflect the selectively reported half-truths and lies used to justify hatred towards "them": first the fascists, then the Reds. And, of course, anyone can become one of "them".

Which Shepherd does, as his former life is used as evidence of subversion and his bestselling Aztec novels become recast as anti-American activities. The power of words to devastate means he must once again continue his journey.

The Lacuna unfolds more slowly than many of Kingsolver's previous books, but every word and twist has earned its place in this provocative and beautifully told story. The bestselling Poisonwood Bible won Kingsolver widespread critical acclaim; this book will only add to the praise.

Their Trotsky and Ours

The life and death of Trotsky

Tariq Ali on Trotsky by Robert Service and Stalin's Nemesis by Bertrand M Patenaude

Trotsky: A Biography
by Robert Service 600pp, Macmillan, £25

Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
by Bertrand M Patenaude 352pp, Faber, £20

For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy. Twelve years later the culture in this country has become so overwhelmingly conformist that any alternative to capitalism is considered outlandish.

The Service industry has now produced a stodgy volume on Trotsky to add to a collection that includes Lenin and Stalin. Unlike Deutscher, as he tells us, Service is hostile to the revolution and its leaders, but he is irritated by the fact that Trotsky has had such a good press in the west (news to me). He was just the same as the others except that he wrote very well and this appealed to New York intellectuals. The Service view can be summarised in a sentence: Trotsky was a ruthless and cold-blooded murderer and deserves to be exposed as such.

This counter-factual approach is nothing new and was the stock-in-trade of most anti-communist and pro-Stalin ideologues for much of the last century. Service informs us that Winston Churchill backed Stalin against Trotsky during the show trials. The old warhorse certainly knew how to distinguish between conservatives and radicals. He had little time for Gramsci either, and almost drowned Mussolini in praise as a bulwark against the evil tide of Bolshevism.

Churchill's essay denouncing Trotsky as the "ogre of Europe" is written with a brio and passion that almost matches that of his target. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Service's plodding account in which some of the allegations are so trivial that they are best ignored. On most of the important issues – the danger of substituting the party for the state in Russia, the necessity of uniting with social-democrats and liberals to defeat Hitler, the futility of forcing the communists into an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek in China, the fate that awaited the Jews if Hitler came to power and constant warnings that the Nazis were preparing to invade the Soviet Union – he was proved right time and time again.

Unsurprisingly, the counter-factual school of historians rarely discusses what might have happened had Generals Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich triumphed instead of Lenin and Trotsky. One thing is virtually certain: since the revolution was portrayed as the work of Jewish-Bolsheviks, a wave of pogroms would have decimated the Jews.

Patenaude's shorter and much better written book is far more objective and, in fact, more scholarly. Though it concentrates on the period of Trotsky's Mexican exile and provides fascinating pen-portraits of lovers, acolytes and killers alike (including details of Trotsky's affair with Frida Kahlo that Isaac Deutscher so sweetly veiled), it also encapsulates his earlier life.

The socialist revolution, unlike the bourgeois revolutions that transformed Europe in the 16-18th centuries, was a premeditated project intended for a more advanced country than Russia. Even for its leaders, the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 was a leap in the dark. Bolshevik orthodoxy did not believe that the infant republic could last on its own. The party leadership was waiting for the German revolution to break its isolation and transform Europe. Instead the main imperialist states decided to back the White counter-revolution, leading to a civil war that was won by the newly created Red Army, but at a terrible cost: the peasants had been alienated by forced requisitions and conscription. The civil war of 1918-21 exhausted the tiny working class. Many died and a layer that survived was rapidly absorbed into the machinery of the new state.

Trotsky, as the founder and organiser of the Red Army, was undoubtedly ruthless in ensuring the victory of his side – as was Lincoln during the American civil war. Exhausted at home and isolated abroad, the Bolshevik leaders, obsessed by the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, decided that they must hold on to power whatever the cost. An early outcome was the brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors' mutiny. A later result was Stalinism, which destroyed not simply the aspirations of the revolution but most of its leading cadres.

Ninety per cent of Lenin's central committee were denounced as traitors and executed. Stalin killed more Bolsheviks than the Tsar. The murder of Trotsky, as Patenaude points out, was inevitable. Earlier antisemitic caricatures portraying him as an agent of Hitler had to be withdrawn lest they annoy the Führer after the Stalin-Hitler pact. Trotsky now became an agent of the US. Further change was unnecessary, since he had been bumped off before the US became a wartime ally.

Attempts to reform the system from within failed largely because the bureaucracy refused to surrender its power. Ultimately it exhausted itself and capitulated quietly and shamefully to the forces of global capitalism. The realm of necessity was never to be replaced by the realm of freedom, self-emancipation and human sovereignty as Marx had written. It came to an end – as Trotsky had calmly predicted – with the restoration of capitalism. Cromwell, Napoleon and Stalin had all created a system of rule that made restoration of the old order almost inevitable.

Tariq Ali's books include The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom: And Other Essays (Verso).

The working-class fight for power

From Martí, Juárez, and Lincoln
to Lenin and Fidel: The Revolutionary
Struggle Redeemed

U.S. Civil War, rise and defeat of Radical Reconstruction,
and working-class fight for power: talk by Mary-Alice Waters
at international conference in Mexico

The following presentation was given by Mary-Alice Waters at the International Conference on Martí, Juárez, and Lincoln in the Heart of Our America, held October 15-17 in Monterrey, Mexico (see front-page news article on conference). Waters is the editor of the Marxist magazine New International and president of Pathfinder Press. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant

.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
The decisive battles waged in the second half of the nineteenth century by popular forces under bourgeois leadership, which Juárez, Lincoln, and Martí exemplified, ended the reactionary colonial ambitions of the European monarchies in Mexico, Cuba, and the United States and abolished the institutions of chattel slavery and indentured labor. These were no small accomplishments. They were, in fact, historic, sweeping away the greatest obstacles not only to the expansion of industrial capital but also, along with it, to the development of a fighting, class-conscious proletarian movement.

In all three countries, however, the plebeian masses, who had paid dearly for these revolutionary conquests, soon found their victories drowned in blood.

Others participating in this conference have addressed some of these same questions, concentrating on the history of the class struggle in Mexico and Cuba. My remarks will focus on what we in the United States often refer to as the Second American Revolution—the Civil War of 1861-65 and the postwar decade of Radical Reconstruction—and the lasting consequences of Reconstruction’s bloody defeat.

What they don’t teach us … and why
Radical Reconstruction was born in the revolutionary war that was necessary to abolish slavery and the system of production based on it across the states of the South and to prevent its expansion into the territories, including those that are now the U.S. Southwest, lands taken from Mexico in the 1846-48 Mexican-American War. What I want to emphasize here is that Radical Reconstruction remains to this day the best example in U.S. history of the kind of fighting alliance of rural toilers and the working class that we must build if there is to be a future for humanity.

This is something they don’t teach us in school, and you won’t find in many books either. That’s because history is written by the winners, and the Reconstruction state governments went down to defeat by 1877, betrayed by the northern industrial bourgeoisie and its political parties. That still rising class feared above all the potential that was developing for an expanding alliance of free working farmers with a united working class—artisans and industrial workers alike, urban and rural, Black and white. Their fears were not without foundation. They saw their gravedigger being born—something that had been precluded, to paraphrase Marx, as long as labor in a Black skin was in chains.

The crushing of these popular revolutionary regimes that arose in parts of the South was facilitated, above all, by the refusal of the ruling families of the North to countenance any broadside attack on private property beyond the abolition of slavery. This was the course implemented by their appointed Federal Army commanders in the occupied South, who exercised veto power over legislation adopted by state legislatures during Reconstruction. In particular, the capitalist rulers opposed any sweeping intrusion on the landholdings of southern property owners. Land reform—“forty acres and a mule” for former slaves, and land for the rural poor—was blocked. As a result, former slaves were forced into conditions of virtual peonage throughout the South. The value of labor power was driven down, and the toilers were forcefully divided along race lines for nearly a century to come.

The U.S. rulers and their apologists, in the press, pulpit, and academy, do all they can to hide the truth about Radical Reconstruction because that history explodes every racist and anti-working-class notion they try to instill in us. It shows the opposite—the vanguard role in the U.S. class struggle of toilers who are Black, the potential to forge a fighting alliance between working people who are Black and white, and much more.

Reconstruction state governments
The elected Reconstruction legislatures—especially those of South Carolina (with a sizeable Black majority), and Mississippi and Louisiana (both, for a time, with large numbers of legislators who were Black)—established what with substantial accuracy can be called popular revolutionary dictatorships. Backed by the power of well-organized local militias, drawing their troops from working people who were white as well as Black, as well as by the Federal Army, these governments adopted and implemented broad programs of immediate and democratic demands in the interests of working people.

These measures included abolition of the infamous Black Codes former slave owners had imposed in the immediate aftermath of the war; the barring of racial discrimination; universal suffrage for males regardless of race; property taxes that fell heaviest on plantation owners and the moneyed classes; the first free public schools in the South (including desegregated and free university enrollment in South Carolina); public hospitals and medical care for the poor; public-relief systems; the elimination of whipping and other cruel and inhuman punishments; expanded grounds on which women could sue for divorce and enactment of other measures to advance women’s equality. And more.

Such measures were popular with working people of all skin colors.

None of the Reconstruction governments, however, had the power or the will to enforce an expropriation of the big plantation owners, the measure that could have made possible a radical land reform. It was too late in history for the ascending industrial bourgeoisie in the United States to lead such a revolutionary struggle. Inroads on private ownership of the means of production threatened the foundations of its own class domination. At the same time, the U.S. working class and its organizations were too weak and too politically inexperienced to provide leadership for the kind of class-struggle social movement that could have waged an effective battle to expropriate and redistribute land to the freed slaves, rural toilers, and urban poor.

Necessary alliance of class forces
As the Federal Army was withdrawn state by state from the South a decade after the end of the Civil War, and Radical Reconstruction governments were crushed by spreading counterrevolutionary terror, the first great labor struggles of the post-Civil War years exploded. In 1877 a battle against wage cuts by West Virginia rail workers turned into the first nationwide general strike in the history of the United States—spreading from there to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois.

In a letter to Frederick Engels, Karl Marx underscored the significance of that development, pointing to the alliance of class forces whose foundations had been laid over the previous decade.

“What do you think of the workers of the United States?” Marx asked Engels. “This, the first outbreak against the associated oligarchy of capital that has arisen since the Civil War, will, of course, be suppressed,” he noted. Then, referring to the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South and the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the Reconstruction regimes, Marx added that “the policy of the new President [Rutherford Hayes] will turn the Negroes … into militant allies of the workers,” just as “the big expropriations of land (exactly of the fertile land) for the benefit of the railway, mining, etc., companies” (which was accelerating rapidly across the western territories) will bring free farmers in the West to their side.

Marx and Engels could not have been more correct about the alliance of class forces that would have to stand at the center of any revolutionary struggle in the United States from that day forward. But with the bloody defeat of Radical Reconstruction, it was soon clear that not only African Americans but the entire U.S. working class had suffered what would be its worst setback to this day. The consequences have shaped the course of the class struggle in the United States ever since.

Jim Crow and Uncle Sam
Contrary to widespread misconceptions in the United States, legislation imposing the most extreme Jim Crow segregation was not adopted in the immediate aftermath of this defeat. Codification of the U.S. form of institutionalized segregation (on which South Africa’s 1948 apartheid laws were later modeled) was intertwined with the growing dominance of finance capital in the final decades of the 1800s and the emergence of the United States as an imperialist power.

Anti-Black race riots, pogroms, and lynchings expanded murderously throughout the 1870s and 1880s, reaching their highest point in the opening years of the 1890s. The wave of anti-Black terror surged again at the close of World War I and into the postwar economic crisis of the 1920s.

Jim Crow and Uncle Sam advanced hand in hand. Institutionalized segregation and discrimination dividing the toilers at home was the domestic face of Washington’s expansionist course the world over. The racist poison against the black-, brown-, and “yellow”-skinned peoples of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii—ideological rationalizations for U.S. imperial designs—reinforced the spreading reign of bigotry and terror within the United States. United action by the oppressed and exploited was crippled. And development of the class alliance pointed to by the founders of the modern working-class movement was postponed for decades.

These were the conditions that gave birth to the first war of the imperialist epoch. Known to Washington as the “Spanish-American War,” U.S. military forces dispatched to Cuba in 1898 not only stole from the Cuban people the independence they had conquered in thirty bitter years of war. They established the battle lines of the class struggle in the Americas for the coming century and beyond.

From bourgeois to proletarian leadership
As the interests of the ever-expanding power of industrial and banking capital came more and more into conflict with the Second American Revolution, in 1877 Washington’s counterrevolutionary course accelerated. With that turning point, revolutionary leadership in the Americas could no longer be exercised by any force other than the working class—which wrested its first decisive triumph some eight decades later with the taking of state power in Cuba. That was the opening in our hemisphere of the trail first blazed in October 1917 by the toilers of tsarist Russia, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The unfinished struggle of Martí was redeemed in 1959 by this revolutionary act of the workers and farmers of Cuba. Even more, the unparalleled steadfastness of the Cuban people in face of Washington’s half century of imperialist aggression has transformed the Americas for all time.

For us today, that unparalleled steadfastness is demonstrated to the world by the dignity and unwavering convictions of our five Cuban brothers and comrades unjustly imprisoned for more than eleven years now in the United States. They are being held hostage by Washington to the refusal of the people of Cuba who conquered the first free territory of the Americas to surrender to the U.S. rulers’ imperial demands.

The capitalist depression and social crises that are unfolding worldwide are today bringing home to growing numbers of working people an understanding of where we will sooner or later end up so long as we live under the dictatorship of capital. We have watched as the U.S. ruling families, using their state, have cranked out literally trillions of dollars to save the moguls of finance capital from ruin, at the same time that tens of millions of workers and their families are thrown onto the streets and expelled across borders, with accumulating plant closings, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies. The overstuffed prisons of the United States are becoming ever more dehumanizing. And imperialism’s wars, today focused in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, continue to expand.

In Mexico and the United States, the goals of the unfinished revolutionary struggles inherited from the times of Juárez, Lincoln, and Martí are yet to be redeemed as they have been by the working people of Cuba.

As we are being taught anew with each morning’s breaking news, however, only the conquest, and exercise, of state power by the working class and its allies, and the expropriation of finance capital, can lay the foundations for a different kind of world. A world based not on exploitation, violence, racial discrimination, and dog-eat-dog competition, but on solidarity among working people worldwide that encourages the creativity and recognition of the worth of every individual, regardless of sex, national origin, or skin color.

The class alliance pointed to more than 130 years ago by Marx and Engels, together with the living example of Cuba’s socialist revolution, shows the road for the Americas and the world. The line of march is clear. What’s more, this class alliance has today been strengthened in the United States and Mexico by the tens of millions of workers from Mexico who are part of the fighting vanguard of the labor movement north of the border. We have witnessed the manifestation of that power in the millions-strong mobilizations demanding “Legalization, now!” that swept cities and towns across the United States in the May Day demonstrations of 2006 and 2007, and the broad working-class resistance that has met factory raids and deportations by the immigration police.

The exploration of that class line of march is the most lasting and fruitful contribution this conference is making to struggling humanity.

Satire from Товарищ Х

My Imaginary Friend - The Sweetest Day Fairy

I am a tad late in remembering the Sweetest Day Fairy again this year. That was scheduled to happen, by the Lords of Sweetness one presumes, on the third Saturday in October. Mea maxima culpa. For all you may care, at this late hour, I imagine my friend not as the chubby flying toddler seen on Valentines, but looking rather more like this fellow that I surprised in flagrante delicto at the Cleveland Museum of Art one afternoon. That image derives, at least in part, from my confusion over the eponymous holiday observance that I encountered for the first time when I was transplanted to Cleveland in late adolescence. The very name "Sweetest Day" raised the sort of questions that incomplete comparisons have always teased out of me. "Sweetest Day," you say? Well then-- sweeter than what other day, according to whom, and by what measure of sweetness?

Well you, no doubt, are not so easily sidetracked by such questions, and will have already surmised that they were completely off the mark in this inquiry. The holiday was proposed, in Cleveland as it happens, by several civic minded chaps (merchants all) who, as they said in announcing their first Sweetest Day, "recognized the eternal tendency of men and women to forget the finer, more appealing things." And urged us to. "Regard its observance as a sacred duty-- and a rare opportunity." It was just before this that my friend, through a revelation of sorts, had them title their holiday in his honor rather that relying on their original choice, "Buy Our Cheap Crap and Give It to Someone in the Desperate Hope of Distracting Attention From Your True Character Whilst You Have a Go at Them Day." Those long titles never sell.

Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.