....Behind the general smoke screen of anti-communism, one of the most sinister anti-union bills was introduced into the Senate in April 1953 by Senator John Marshall Butler, Maryland Republican. He had been elected with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s direct aid. Butler’s bill required the National Labor Relations Board to deny collective bargaining recognition or elections to any union under “investigation” by the Subversive Activities Control Board set up under the McCarran-Kilgore Act of 1950. Such investigation and denial of NLRB certification were to be based on any employer’s mere complaint that a union seeking collective bargaining rights was “communist dominated.” If the Subversive Board should “find” against the union, the latter would be permanently banned by the NLRB unless and until such a ruling was reversed by a regular federal court.
Mu
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
How workers mobilized to resist the McCarthyite witch hunt – The Militant
Sunday, July 9, 2023
Defend constitutional freedoms won in over two centuries of class struggle – The Militant
Won over two-and-a-half centuries of bloody class struggle, key constitutional protections against government interference are under attack by President Joseph Biden’s administration. The push for even more prosecutions against former President Donald Trump, Biden’s main rival for the presidency, is a dangerous attempt to criminalize political differences. It goes hand in hand with increasing attacks on the right to legal representation....
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine
'Monroe Doctrine' aided fight against colonial rule in the Americas
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
July 3, 2023
Mural in Chihuahua, Mexico, depicts from left, Abraham Lincoln, leader of Union forces in 1861-65 U.S. Civil War; Benito Juárez, Mexican national hero who fought foreign occupation, 1861-67; and Simón Bolivar, who led 1811-25 Latin American independence struggles against Spanish colonial rule.
The Monroe Doctrine, whose 200th anniversary is marked this year, has been the subject of countless articles in the press. Many argue that the foreign policy position announced by President James Monroe in 1823 was a declaration of "imperialist" designs on Latin America, and that Washington's course today is simply a continuation of that policy.
That explanation is false. It blurs together different historical periods. To understand where we came from and where we are going, working people need to study the history — the concrete conditions and evolution — of the conflict between class forces that has driven U.S. and world politics.
Today we live in the imperialist epoch. But we can't look at history through 21st century eyeglasses. When the United States was established as a republic in the late 1700s, capitalism was on the ascent. It was the most progressive social system the world had ever seen — a revolutionary advance over outmoded feudalism, which had prevailed for centuries.
As capitalist trade, agriculture, industry, transportation and communications were revolutionized and spread worldwide between the 15th and 19th centuries, humanity's productive capacities multiplied more than during all its previous existence put together.
Most importantly, capitalism created the working class — the only class that has the capacity and material interest in leading a successful struggle to replace the rule of the propertied, exploiting classes with a society organized in the interests of the vast majority.
The United States was born through a deep-going popular revolt. "The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars," Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1918 "Letter to American workers."
"That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery."
Over the first half of the 19th century, the U.S. developed rapidly, expanding coast to coast. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the 1846-48 war with Mexico, and the 1846 Oregon Treaty were all part of securing for the American capitalists the land, waterways, ports and internal market that helped consolidate a modern bourgeois nation.
From a historical perspective, this process was in the class interests of working people. Only the most thoroughgoing development of capitalism could bring about such a vast expansion of productive forces and put the working class in the strongest position to lead the next historic battles to advance humanity. A more in-depth explanation of this dynamic can be found in the book Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, George Novack and Mary-Alice Waters.
Another leap forward took place with the Second American Revolution — the 1861-65 Civil War, which overthrew chattel slavery, followed by Radical Reconstruction. By its end, Karl Marx wrote that he could see the social forces that would lead the next American revolution — the developing working class, exploited Western farmers and the oppressed Black population.
The U.S. became the most politically advanced nation in the world. Marx, co-founder with Engels of the modern revolutionary workers movement, called it the "great Democratic Republic." The Bill of Rights, added to the U.S. Constitution as a result of struggles by farmers and workers after the First American Revolution, contained democratic protections beyond any recognized in Europe: freedom of speech and assembly, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, the right of citizens to bear arms, and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, among others.
European colonial threat
Now let's take a look at where the Monroe Doctrine fits into this history.
In an 1823 message to Congress, Monroe warned European powers that Washington would not tolerate any "future colonization by any European powers" or interference against "governments who have declared their independence" in the Western Hemisphere. There was good reason for this concern.
Despite what some opponents of U.S. imperialism argue today, the biggest threat to struggles for independence and sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean through most of the 19th century was not the United States. It was the European powers — especially the British rulers.
The British Empire continued to interfere with the sovereignty and economic independence of the fledgling United States. That led to the War of 1812, and then to London's support to the Southern slaveholders in the U.S. Civil War.
The British rulers flexed their muscles throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, seeking to replace Spain — which lost most of its American colonies between 1810 and 1825 — as the dominant power.
Eduardo Galeano, in his classic book The Open Veins of Latin America, describes how British bankers and merchants dominated South America's export market — Chilean copper, Peruvian nitrates, Brazilian coffee, Argentine beef. British and French warships blockaded Buenos Aires in 1845 to try to open up Argentina to unrestricted imports of European goods.
Monroe Doctrine
In 1822 the Monroe administration recognized the new republics of Chile, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Colombia, and soon after, the newly independent Central American Federation.
In Europe, however, a reactionary coalition of the Austrian, Prussian and Russian monarchies — the "Holy Alliance" — had defeated Napoleon's armies and was making clear its determination to wipe out all vestiges of the French Revolution and threats of republican rule. They were also concerned that the French invasion of Spain had weakened the Spanish crown and spurred the independence wars in its New World colonies. The Holy Alliance began preparations to back renewed efforts by Spain's Bourbon monarchy to subjugate insurgent Latin America.
That was the context for Monroe's warning to the European powers not to interfere in the affairs of newly independent Latin American nations.
Today, some opponents of Washington's policies assert that U.S. "imperialism" has been seeking to conquer Latin American territory since the founding of the U.S. But that's not accurate.
Prior to the U.S. Civil War, small groups of American adventurers organized armed expeditions to Mexico, Central America and Cuba. They sought to grab land for U.S. Southern slaveholding interests. The most notorious was William Walker, who landed in Nicaragua in 1855, proclaimed himself president, and declared slavery legal there, until he was driven out in 1857 by the united Central American armies.
Such adventures were historically doomed to fail — as was the Confederacy's war of conquest to establish a reactionary slave empire extending into the Caribbean.
Lincoln and Benito Juárez
The best illustration of the progressive character of the Monroe Doctrine took place during the Second American Revolution. It was the response by President Abraham Lincoln's administration to the French invasion and occupation of Mexico.
In 1861, the Mexican government of Benito Juárez, after winning a revolutionary democratic war against the power of the semifeudal landholding classes and Catholic Church hierarchy, declared a two-year moratorium on onerous foreign debts. In response, the British, Spanish, and French governments launched a joint military intervention against Mexico, which Marx denounced as a "new Holy Alliance." Their goal was not only to make Mexico pay the debt, but to prop up reactionary class forces there and regain a foothold in the Americas. It was also part of efforts by the European powers to aid the U.S. slavocracy in the Civil War.
Although the British and Spanish governments backed out of the adventure, the French regime of Napoleon III carried through the invasion and installed Austrian Prince Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.
The Lincoln administration backed the Juárez government and opposed the French-led war on Mexico, a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Union Army generals Ulysses Grant and Philip Sheridan massed 50,000 troops near the Texas-Mexico border and transferred weapons to Juárez's forces.
After the victory of the North in the Civil War, some 3,000 Union Army veterans joined and fought in Mexico's republican army. And in U.S. cities from San Francisco to New Orleans, groups called Defenders of the Monroe Doctrine and the Society of Friends of Mexico held public meetings to promote solidarity and recruit volunteers for the Juarista army. By 1867, Juárez's forces expelled the French invaders, a revolutionary victory celebrated annually as Cinco de Mayo.
It's no surprise that José Martí, leader of Cuba's independence struggle against Spanish rule, wrote in 1889, "We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting." Francis Cutting was a leader of the American Annexationist League, which agitated for Washington to seize Cuba from Spain.
Martí was contrasting his admiration of the bourgeois-revolutionary heritage of the U.S. with Washington's transformation, then underway, into an imperialist power.
What Lenin and Sankara explained
It's Lenin, in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, who best described how world capitalism had outlived its progressive character. He explained that imperialism is marked by the domination of finance capital, the rise of monopolies, and the division of the world among the big capitalist powers.
Lenin pointed to the 1898 U.S. rulers' war against Spain over its colonies — Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam — as the first war of the imperialist epoch.
Imperialism, Lenin noted, is not a policy that a government chooses. The drive toward war and plunder is inherent to imperialism. It can only be ended by organizing a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers to take state power and overturn capitalist rule.
In taking a historical materialist approach to understanding developments like the Monroe Doctrine, we can also learn from Thomas Sankara, the outstanding communist and leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso.
"Our revolution in Burkina Faso," Sankara said in a 1984 speech, "draws inspiration from all of man's experiences since his first breath." We "draw the lessons of the American Revolution, the lessons of its victory over colonial domination and the consequences of that victory. We adopt as our own the affirmation of the Doctrine whereby Europeans must not intervene in American affairs, nor Americans in European affairs. Just as Monroe proclaimed 'America to the Americans' in 1823, we echo this today by saying 'Africa to the Africans,' 'Burkina to the Burkinabè.'"
Sankara saluted the powerful legacy of the French Revolution of 1789, the 1871 Paris Commune and "the great revolution of October 1917" led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia.
We are, Sankara said, "the heirs of all the world's revolutions."
From:
Saturday, July 1, 2023
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
“WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN by the latter half of the 1960s as affirmative action — that is, not simply the concept of equal justice under bourgeois law, fought for and more broadly codified by the mass civil rights struggles — but explicit and transparent quotas in hiring, college admissions, promotions, and seniority-based layoffs — is what broke down barriers that had long blocked large numbers of African-Americans from achieving such social status.
“THE URBAN REBELLION BY BLACKS in Harlem, Watts, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, etc, and the rise of Black nationalist consciousness and organizations, convinced the U.S. rulers that they had to concede something in addition to formal equality. At least for a time, they had to accept the need for quotas.
“IF THE CLASS STRUGGLE does not continue to advance, [these conquests] are more and more often perverted into programs that provide a golden key for a relative few Blacks, Hispanics, & others.
“TODAY ‘AFFIRMATIVE ACTION’ IS USED to further divide African-Americans and other nationally oppressed layers along class lines, and to *deepen divisions within the working class as a whole.*
“[BUT] SO LONG AS CAPITALIST RELATIONS EXIST, the fight for quotas in hiring, promotions, seniority-based layoffs, and college admissions — that is, openly stated numerical targets or separate lists for those facing discrimination based on their race or sex — will continue to be an indispensable element in forging class solidarity along the road toward the revolutionary fight by the working class to take state power, hold it, and aid those the world over fighting to do likewise.”
https://www.themilitant.com/2009/7324/732450.html?fbclid=IwAR0Mc2EBs8joBR0otaILZY7aSMBQEeHyrQQ8plV03GK8z-lmL-Telrp1a3Y
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Los Angeles Militant Labor Forum panel discusses fight for constitutional rights – The Militant
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 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
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