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Just How Rich Are They? 2
The Trump Era: An Economic Perspective 4
Peasant Uprising in the Russian Revolution of 1917 10
Leon Trotsky Was My Grandfather 16
Russian Revolution and its Relevance to the U.S. Working Class 18
Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration 27
Truth About Civilian Deaths in Iraq 28
America’s Affordable Housing Crisis is Driving Homelessness 30
The Fight for Free Time And the Fight Against Capitalism 34
Korea: State of Fear 41
Pilots in Germany Stop Some Deportations 44
Democratic, Secular Palestine for All Its Peoples 44
Alliance Between Zionism and Anti-Semitism 46
South Africa and the Russian Revolution 51
Frackville Prison’s Systemic Water Crisis 57
International Call to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now! 63
Serious Questions About Philly DA 64
Roy: “...Just a good ’ole boy” 65
Cyntoia Brown 67
SocialistViewpoint
January/February 2018 Vol. 18, No. 1
Contents
U.S. and World Politics
Vol. 18, No. 1 Socialist Viewpoint
Vol. 3, No. 2 Socialist Viewpoint
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Top .001 percent making 636 percent more since 1980
A new report released Thursday, December 14, 2017, finds that economic inequality has soared in nearly every country around the world, with the United States’ income and wealth gaps widening to a particularly extreme degree compared to European and other countries.
The World Inequality Report, compiled by five economists including Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, found that the richest one percent of Americans held 39 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016, compared with about 22 percent in 1980. Meanwhile, the average annual income for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has stayed at $16,000-per-adult over the last four decades, adjusting for inflation.
Most of the increase in wealth at the top has been due to fast-rising incomes among the very richest Americans; while annual income for the one percent has shot up by 205 percent since 1980, the top .001 percent of Americans—only about 1,300 households—have seen their earnings go up by 636 percent.
In an editorial published in the Guardian alongside their new report, Piketty and his colleagues noted that the Republican tax plan that Congress is expected to vote on before Christmas 2017, “will not only reinforce this trend, it will turbocharge inequality in America. Presented as a tax cut for workers and job-creating entrepreneurs, it is instead a giant cut for those with capital and inherited wealth. It’s a bill that rewards the past, not the future.”
The tax bill would further leave out the bottom 50 percent of American earners, who have been left out of the wealthy’s income boom due to the collapse of federal minimum wage laws, the weakened power of unions, and increasingly unequal access to higher education, the report finds.
“Recent research shows that there can be an enormous gap between the public discourse about equal opportunity and the reality of unequal access to education,” reads the study. “Democratic access to education can achieve much, but without mechanisms to ensure that people at the bottom of the distribution have access to well-paying jobs, education will not prove sufficient to tackle inequality. Better representation of workers in corporate governance bodies, and healthy minimum-wage rates, are important tools to achieve this.”
While income inequality has reached a new extreme in the U.S., Western European countries have experienced slightly less severe gaps. The top ten percent of earners hold about 37 percent of wealth in Europe, and the income share captured by the richest one percent in the region has only risen from about ten percent in 1980 to about 12 percent in 2016, compared to the rapid rise in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the Middle East, Africa, and Brazil were noted as places where income gaps haven’t grown much in the last four decades—instead staying at a severe level since 1980. In Brazil and sub-Saharan African nations, the wealthiest ten percent of the population own about 55 percent of the national income, while in the Middle East they control more than 60 percent.
The World Inequality Report was released a day after the World Health Organization and the World Bank published its own study showing that nearly 100 million people around the world are forced to choose between healthcare costs and other necessities, including food and education, due to extreme poverty.
“Furthermore,” the WHO-World Bank study notes, “some 800 million people spend more than ten percent of their household budget on healthcare, and almost 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty each year because of out-of-pocket health expenses.”
In addition to access to education and a living wage, the World Inequality Report recommends progressive tax structures as a way to combat soaring inequality around the globe, as well as a crackdown on tax havens among the wealthy, like those detailed in the recently-released Paradise Papers.
In their report, Piketty and his fellow economists say that rising global inequality is “not inevitable in the future” and point to European nations, who have enacted policies specifically designed to lessen the gap between rich and poor. “If in the coming decades all countries follow the moderate inequality trajectory of Europe over the past decades,” they write, “global income inequality can be reduced—in which case there can also be substantial progress in eradicating global poverty.”
—Common Dreams, December 14, 2017
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/14/top-001-making-636-more-1980-gop-tax-scam-will-turbocharge-inequality
U.S. and World Politics
The Trump Era: An Economic Perspective
The following is a response to a July 29, 2017 letter from Dave Gilbert who is a political prisoner serving a long term in federal prison. Over the past year Dave and I have been in a fruitful exchange of ideas, a recap of which was printed in the September/October 2017 issue of Socialist Viewpoint. In his latest letter Dave posed a number of issues: the character of Trump’s role as leader of the America First/nationalist wing, the disputes in the U.S. ruling circles over Russia vs. China, China’s industrialization, its future evolution and impact on relations with the “Global South.”
Excerpts from David Gilbert’s letter:
Trump is hardly a “strategically coherent representative” for the emerging “nationalist” faction in the U.S. ruling class. He is increasingly seen as erratic and unreliable, particularly lately with the growing crisis over North Korea. Neither wing of the emerging split in the U.S. ruling class wants to stumble into another Asian war, let alone a nuclear war, over North Korea. Steve Bannon, who perhaps represents a more reality-based strategy for the nationalist faction, argues that it’s now too late to prevent a nuclear North Korea. Rather U.S. imperialism needs to concentrate on the real threat, the growing industrial power of China.
But it is Trump who got elected president proclaiming a return to an aggressive nationalist/America-First line, and successfully mobilized racist, anti-immigrant sentiment in support. Whatever his other limitations, the coalescing nationalist wing feels stuck with him and they are falling in line behind him, at least for now. Even more worrying for the nationalist/America-First wing is their growing suspicion that Trump’s only real political commitment is to his own personal wealth and ego. Bannon in an August interview with The Weekly Standard1 gives voice to this sentiment; “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”
More broadly, most of the elected politicians in both capitalist parties are in confused disarray over the growing split in the U.S. ruling class. They are not confident over how the division will play out, and what position will best serve their own political futures in the end. As Marxists we, unlike bourgeois historians and political philosophers, adhere to the historical reality and validity of a ruling class. But this of course does not mean that any particular ruling class at any particular time is unified and in fundamental agreement. Or even that a ruling class under all circumstances, especially under the stress of a real crisis, is capable of correctly assessing its own best interests.
Background for understanding today
I think the most pressing questions in your letter were those concerning China. One—how did China, while using a market economy, become more of an economic threat than the USSR did? And two—whether China is emerging as an imperial power and what does this say about the terms of their economic relationships with Third World countries?
To begin grappling with these questions we have to again go back to the world that emerged out of WWII, and its subsequent evolution. As I previously wrote, U.S. imperialism was the completely dominant winner of WWII. It won WWII not just against the Axis powers but against its own allies as well. With the exception of the United States, the entire capitalist world came out of WWII in social, political and economic shambles. The question then before U.S. imperialism was how should it proceed?
At the end of World War II, one option the U.S. government had was the unique opportunity to use its economic and military power to dismantle the major industrial corporations of its competitors. Under the so-called Morganthau Plan, Germany was to be forcibly de-industrialized and turned into a decentralized collection of agricultural states much like it had been in the middle of the 19th century. The U.S. also had similar plans for Japan. Indeed, why stop with Germany and Japan? Why not forcibly dismember the capitalist industry of all of the United States’ major potential competitors, including its so-called allies Britain and France? After all, the logic of capitalist competition among nation-states pointed in this direction.
If that had been done, U.S. corporations would have had the entire world market—both as buyers and sellers—for themselves. If the U.S. government had followed an “America First” policy in the years after 1945—and gotten away with it—it would have meant that the stock market value of U.S. corporations would have soared to vastly higher levels than is actually the case today. The U.S. would have been “great” indeed! But as we know, the U.S. government didn’t dare attempt this, especially with the threat of the Soviet Union and the continued example of the 1917 Russian Revolution still before what would have been an increasingly impoverished and radicalizing European proletariat.
Instead, with the launching of the “Marshall Plan” Washington adopted a bi-partisan foreign policy, supported by leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties alike, buttressing a world empire in which the corporations of Britain; an economically resurgent Germany; and an economically resurgent Japan, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and so on could actually compete with U.S. corporations, cooperatively exploit the Third World, and appropriate a portion of the surplus value for their non-American owners (free market imperialism). Things were made easier by the fact that the world market in the wake of the Great Depression, and the massive physical destruction of WWII, had entered an extended phase of rapid expansion.
A key element in organizing this “New World Order” was the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in which 44 nations met in New Hampshire to “negotiate” a new international monetary system. No real negotiations took place. A completely dominant U.S. imperialism, holding all the cards, could and did dictate the terms. The alternative other participants faced was some version of the Morganthau Plan.
The lynchpin of the Bretton Woods system was the new privileged status for the U.S. dollar. All international accounts and trade would now be settled in dollars—dollars that the U.S. Treasury could just print. It was true that dollars could be converted to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce, which was redeemable by the U.S. government. But the U.S. government held most of the world’s official gold reserves, and what the rest of the world desperately needed and wanted was not gold but dollars to spend on American manufactured goods—cars, steel, machinery, etc.
However, as manufacturing began to recover in the rest of the capitalist world, resistance to the Bretton Woods system and the privileged position of the dollar began to grow. In Europe the Bretton Woods system began to be characterized as “America’s exorbitant privilege”—an “asymmetric financial system” where non-U.S. citizens “see themselves supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals.” In February 1965 French President Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to exchange its U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. By 1970 other nations began to demand redemption of their dollars for gold. Underlying this shift was the broader reemergence of international capitalist competition, especially in the sphere of manufacturing. In 1950 the U.S. share of the world’s total economic output was a whopping 35 percent. By 1969 it had dropped to 27 percent. The U.S. economy was faced with rising unemployment (6.1 percent in August 1971), recession and the threat of deeper recessions.
Flood tide of Keynesian economics
U.S. ruling circles became convinced that a policy of massive deficit spending and monetary expansion could successfully stimulate the economy and reverse its decline. The 1960s represented the flood tide of neo Keynesian economics in both policymaking and academic circles. If there was one time in the history of modern capitalism when the academic and political mainstream believed that they could finally beat the “business cycle” once and for all, it was then. In 1971 President Richard Nixon was reported to say, “We are all Keynesians now.” Even many Marxists seemed foolishly willing to accept these claims.
But implementing such a policy was impossible as long as the dollar was tied to gold, which would allow nations throughout the world to flee an inflating dollar by demanding the U.S. Treasury redeem their dollars for gold. On August 13, 1971 fifteen high ranking White House and Treasury advisors met secretly with Nixon at Camp David and unilaterally abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement by suspending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. Historically this is known as the “Nixon Shock.”
While the rest of the capitalist world was certainly not happy with the unilateral ending of dollar/gold convertibility, nothing else was available to function as the world’s reserve currency and the essential vehicle for carrying out world trade. In the final analysis, overwhelming military power enabled the U.S. to convert the dollar into a token currency with an internationally forced circulation.
Now that this “metallic majesty” had been overthrown, the U.S. government and central bank believed they could guarantee “effective demand” sufficient to buy the vast and ever-growing quantity of commodities U.S. capitalist industry was churning out. Throughout the 1970s these policies were now put into effect with massive deficit spending and aggressive monetary expansion. But the results were not as expected and predicted. Rather than stimulating the economy and returning the growth rates of the ’50s and ’60s, the result was sharply increasing inflation peaking at almost 15 percent by the spring of 1980. This crisis required the coining of a new term in economic jargon—stagflation.
But stagflation was much more than a crisis for just the U.S. economy. The rest of the world began losing confidence in the dollar as the reserve currency. Even though the dollar was no longer officially convertible to gold, it began to be dumped for gold, whose price soared to over $800-an-ounce. Conversely the dollar’s value plummeted on the foreign exchange markets. While many capitalist countries have experienced runaway inflation or even hyperinflation, runaway inflation has never hit the central or reserve currency. If the dollar succumbed to runaway inflation, it would drag down every other capitalist currency with it. If this were allowed to happen while the dollar remained the reserve currency, the result would certainly be by far the worst financial crisis—not excepting the super-crisis of 1929-33—in the history of capitalism.
Crushing inflation
U.S. imperialism was left with no alternative but to move aggressively to crush the dollar inflation it had inadvertently set off. The job was assigned to Paul Volcker, a prominent investment banker who was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. Over the next two years he quickly more than doubled the prime interest rate to an unheard-of level of over 20 percent. This harsh medicine, known as the “Volcker Shock,” brought inflation somewhat under control but not without significant costs, precipitating the sharp 1981 recession.
U.S. imperialism and its Federal Reserve, admittedly in a pragmatic and empirical way, learned that contrary to widespread hopes in the 1960s, replacing the gold standard with paper money does not enable capitalist governments and central banks to expand demand up to the physical ability to produce and thus abolish periodic crises of general overproduction under capitalism.
But beyond the 1981 recession there was another even more important consequence of the rise of the rate of interest above the rate of profit in the wake of the dollar crisis. The period of extremely high but declining interest rates that followed the Volcker Shock led to a massive destruction of heavy industry in the U.S., Great Britain and to a lesser extent Western Europe. This occurred in two interrelated ways, the first was called “financialization;” the second, a particularly aggressive form of “globalization.”
Financial manipulation vs. production of things
Soaring interest rates made capital investment in the actual production of things less and less profitable, but investment in various forms of financial manipulation extremely profitable. Capital shifted away from manufacturing to a proliferation of new (and often risky) exotic financial instruments—hedge funds, derivative securities, credit default swaps, securitized and bundled mortgages, etc. Between 1973 and 1985, the U.S. financial sector accounted for about 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In the 1990s, it increased to 21 percent to 30 percent. In the first decade of the 21st century it soared to 41 percent of all U.S. domestic corporate profits. General Electric, for instance, became one of the nation’s poster-children for this development, shifting from one of the premier U.S. manufactuers to more and more a financial, money lending corporation.
Then as interest rates fell, and positive net profits in manufacturing returned, capital in the form of money and loan money capital was free to invest in new areas. It chose to do this not in the old industrial areas of Britain, the United States and Western Europe but in areas where the rate of profit was far higher, leading to what has come to be known as “globalization.” No matter how much capitalists speak about “love of country” as the highest virtue, the capitalists themselves—whether they are American, German, Japanese, Russian or Chinese—put profit first, last and everything in between.
Two political changes that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s played a crucial role in making this aggressive globalization possible. First, the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European “socialist” allies meant that capitalists of the U.S., Britain and Western Europe became much more confident that capital invested outside the imperialist countries would be safe. It even raised expectations among many capitalist leaders—such as George W. Bush—that something like pre-World War II colonialism could be restored. But this time it would be the U.S. Empire rather than the British Empire that would be the chief jailers of the colonized peoples. It led to the Iraq invasion and other adventures in the Middle East and now Africa.
China
The second crucial development was the outcome of the great Chinese Revolution of the 20th century. With the rise of Deng Xiaoping to power in 1978, the Chinese revolution had finally run its revolutionary course. Unlike in the Soviet Union however, in China while there was political reaction—epitomized by Deng’s “it is glorious to get rich” slogan—there was no similar counterrevolution.
When the dust finally settled after decades of revolution, civil war, counterrevolution, Japanese occupation, still more civil war, the liberation of 1949 when China “stood up,” and finally the Cultural Revolution, China emerged with a strong central government independent of western imperialism. The new government was eager to attract foreign capital and willing to respect bourgeois private property rights in order to achieve rapid economic development along capitalist lines—but on its own terms. It was determined not to allow a repeat of what had occurred in the Soviet Union—the chaotic collapse of the Communist Party apparatus and a Western influenced privatization and deindustrialization of the economy.
The defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Vietnam War had led to yet another crucial development favoring China. In the 1970s, unable to break the resistance of the peoples of Indochina, the Nixon administration finally decided the time had come to normalize relations with the People’s Republic of China, including, most importantly, allowing China access to the world market, something they never did with Russia as long as the Soviet Union existed. Nixon-Kissinger had their own motives in this: driving a wedge between any existing and future Russia-China alliance; increasing long existing antagonisms between China and Vietnam; and also the possibility of opening China to U.S. investment.
Handed down from the pre-revolutionary past, the new China possessed a gigantic peasantry numbering in the hundreds-of-millions accustomed to a very low standard of living and hard manual labor. This peasantry served as the source for an industrial proletariat willing to put up with a much higher rate of extracted surplus value than the workers of North—and even Latin—America, Western Europe or modern Japan. Huge amounts of foreign investment, especially U.S. investment flowed into China. What the United States capitalists wanted most of all from China, was the lion’s share of the surplus value produced by the Chinese working class. Russian workers produce very little surplus value compared to what the U.S. capitalists could appropriate from Chinese workers in the form of profit, interest and dividends.
The problem from the viewpoint of the U.S. capitalist class and its political representatives—the Party of Order of both Democrats and Republicans and the emerging Trump America First gang—is that the U.S. capitalists, in squeezing huge amounts of surplus value out of the Chinese, have been forced to develop China’s productive forces at the same time.
As a result of the convergence of historical forces described above, including the failed attempt of capitalist governments and central banks to solve the problem of periodic crises of general overproduction through issuance of paper money, in an amazingly short period of time China emerged as the country with the highest absolute level of industrial production—though not on a per capita basis. Meanwhile, the imperialist countries of the U.S., Britain and Western Europe have become increasingly de-industrialized as result of the operation of the same economic laws.
In order to make the empire last for even 70 years—a very short period historically—the U.S. had to give up much of its domestic industrial production. This initially was no great sacrifice for the U.S. capitalists because in exchange they have, at least up to now, vastly increased their ability to exploit the industry and workers of other nations. Herein lies the answer to the riddle of why the U.S. stock market has been able to perform so much better after the “Great Recession” than was possible after the Great Depression, despite the vastly stronger recovery of U.S. industrial production during and after the Great Depression compared to the feeble recovery of U.S. industrial production since the Great Recession. But as U.S. post WWII hegemony continues to disintegrate, this becomes harder and harder to maintain.
The Trumpists fear that sometime in the not too distant future, the U.S. capitalists will have to be content with a far smaller share of the global surplus value produced. Among the consequences when this comes to pass will be that U.S. capitalists will have much less surplus value to maintain—actually bribe—a relatively large but already shrinking middle class, which includes the “aristocracy of labor” inside the U.S. Therefore, Trump and his gang believe, the U.S. shouldn’t let itself be distracted by an avoidable war—or even war of words—with Russia. Trumpists believe that it is not Russia but China that must be confronted and must be confronted now. (I should say here that throughout this analysis I have drawn heavily on Sam Williams excellent blog, “A Critique of Crisis Theory”2 and encourage readers to avail themselves of his monthly postings, past and future.)
China’s direction and
future evolution
The other crucial China question is whether China is emerging as an imperial power, and what does this mean for their future economic relationships with Third World countries?
After the victory of Deng Xiaoping’s grouping within the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of China in 1978, China has industrialized through the massive import of foreign capital, the development of capitalist industry, and a massive expansion of exports. The economic laws governing China’s rapid industrialization since 1978 have been the laws that govern the development of capitalism.
The Chinese Communist Party itself describes the current Chinese economy as a market economy and not a planned economy like was the case with the Soviet economy. During Deng’s rule the Chinese Communist party developed the slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” to provide an ideological footing for the Party’s embrace of market remedies. At the just completed Communist Party Congress, which meets every five years, President Xi Jinping introduced a new slogan which was incorporated into the constitution; “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
While this new phrase could be open to many interpretations it is clarified by the dominant theme of the Congress and President Xi’s repeated central goal—“Make China Great Again.” And further, only the Communist Party of China can guarantee this “China Dream” of national rejuvenation. This slogan seems to be an echo of Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” but in reality, the two slogans encompass diametrically opposed world strategies.
The Trumpists believe that to “Make America Great Again” U.S. imperialism must abandon the globalizationist strategies it followed since the end of WWII, including promoting “free trade” and multinational trade agreements, which are no longer in its interests. Rather the United States needs to return to a policy of aggressive U.S. nationalism, including, when necessary, protectionist trade policies. From now on, the U.S. government should directly use its state power to enrich U.S. corporations at the expense of the corporations of other countries; including so-called “allies” just like was done in the “good old days” before 1945. The U.S. is still the largest economy in the world and the planet’s overwhelmingly dominant military power. Before China becomes any stronger it should use that leverage to impose its economic will.
China on the other hand, as the world’s most rapidly expanding manufacturing power, is now its strongest proponent for globalization, “free trade,” open markets and multinational trade agreements. Under China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which is aimed at creating a modern version of the Silk Road, a network of trading routes from China to Africa and Europe, it has launched a massive economic outreach dwarfing even the Marshall Plan of U.S. imperialism following WWII.
A nervous May 18, 2017 New York Times editorial titled, “China’s Trillion-Dollar Foreign Policy,”3 warns: “China clearly aims to dominate the international system…shaping how vast sums are spent and where, and which laws are followed or not—it could upend a system established by Washington and its allies after World War II.”
Through direct investments, loans, financial aid, construction and engineering expertise, China is penetrating the economies of numerous countries it considers among its geopolitical priorities. One revealing example is the NATO member, Greece. China has poured money into its key Mediterranean port of Piraeus, considered the “dragon head” of China’s vast “One Belt, One Road” project. “While the Europeans are acting towards Greece like medieval leeches, the Chinese keep bringing money,” said Costas Douzinas, the head of the Greek Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee and a member of the governing Syriza party.
And it is not just construction projects. As Europe’s banks demanded the gutting of Greek pensions and sharp tax increases to guarantee repayment of their predatory loans, the Chinese offered to throw Greece a lifeline by buying toxic Greek government bonds.
Meanwhile China has transformed Piraeus into the Mediterranean’s busiest port, investing nearly half-a-billion euros through the Chinese state-backed shipping conglomerate, Cosco. As a result, Cosco now controls the entire waterfront through its 67 percent stake in the port. With a rueful chuckle, Mr. Douzinas comments; “It’s a kind of neocolonialism without the gunboats.”
Today the ruling Communist Party of China still proclaims its ultimate aim is to build a communist society in China, if only in a distant future. But the party explains that to do this, China must go through a preliminary stage called—“socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or most recently—“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
While periodically the party does launch anti-corruption crackdowns on individual capitalists, the size and weight of this sector continues to grow. In his speech at the opening of the Communist Party Congress, President Xi proclaimed the party would “inspire and protect the spirit of entrepreneurship.” China now has 647 billionaires in American dollar terms, according to The Hurun Report, which claims to track wealth in China. Many of these billionaires began as members of the Communist Party, others later acquired party membership. All of this poses the question, what is the probable future evolution of the China state and its economic relationship with other nations?
Impact of Stalinist ideology
Any assessment of the future direction and evolution of China has to take into account the deep impact of Stalinist ideology on the Chinese Communist Party. An impact that goes back at least as far as the slaughter of the Chinese urban proletariat in the 1927 counter-revolution lead by Chiang Kai Sheki, who had been made an honorary member of the Third International by Joseph Stalin.
The Stalinist bureaucracy and leadership that successfully displaced the original Bolshevik-Leninist revolutionaries in the Soviet Union had many reactionary characteristics—authoritarianism, opposition to worker’s democracy, oppression of national minorities, material privileges based on corruption, etc. But the essence of Stalinism, the core of its counter-revolutionary character, was its abandonment of the Leninist commitment to international revolution, its abandonment of international class solidarity. Under the new Stalinist rubric of “Building Socialism in One Country,” the role of the world proletariat, and the task of Communist Parties outside the Soviet Union, was not socialist revolution, but reduced rather to that of border guards for the Soviet Union and its conservatized bureaucracy.
The People’s Republic of China today, with its access to the world market and its aggressive “One Belt, One Road” strategy, is penetrating and influencing the world economy in ways which were never available to the Soviet Union. But like the Stalinized Soviet Union, in word and deed, the Chinese Communist Party makes clear its goal in this is not international class solidarity, let alone socialist revolution. Rather its aim is restricted to developing political and economic accommodations with select capitalist and third world regimes that further its “silk road” trade expansion.
In the Soviet Union the left opposition to the consolidating bureaucracy and its developing counter-revolutionary politics originally centered on winning the party back to an internationalist revolutionary course. But after the Stalinist role in the defeat of the 1927 Chinese revolution, followed by the victory of Nazi fascism in Germany, with no real fight from what was then the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union—a Rubicon had been crossed. Reform of the Stalinized Russian Communist Party was no longer considered a possibility. Instead, what was required was a political revolution that would remove the Stalinist leadership and its bureaucratized base from power. Leon Trotsky, the principal leader of the left opposition, summed up the situation in 1938 with his now famous prognosis: “There are now only two possible courses for the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”
While China and its communist party has its own history, and is certainly not a carbon copy of the Soviet Union, I believe the prognosis and dichotomy laid out by Trotsky in 1938 very much applies to today’s China. China in its amazing industrialization, even while carried out by capitalist methods, is creating a massive, modern proletariat, with tremendous revolutionary potential. Counterposed to this is the increasing power of an internal capitalist class. The eventual outcome of course remains an open question. A successful socialist revolution elsewhere in the world, especially in an advanced capitalist country, would have a decisive positive impact on the outcome.
1 “Bannon: ‘The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over’”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/bannon-the-trump-presidency-that-we-fought-for-and-won-is-over./article/2009355
2 A Critique of Crisis Theory
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com
3 “China’s Trillion-Dollar Foreign Policy”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/china-xi-jinping-foreign-policy.html
Soaring interest rates made capital investment in the actual production of things less and less profitable, but investment in various forms of financial manipulation extremely profitable.
No matter how much capitalists speak about “love of country” as the highest virtue, the capitalists themselves—whether they are American, German, Japanese, Russian or Chinese—put profit first, last and everything in between.
...the U.S. capitalists, in squeezing huge amounts of surplus value out of the Chinese, have been forced to develop China’s productive forces at the same time.
Peasant Uprising in the Russian Revolution of 1917
“The subsoil of the revolution was the agrarian problem.” —Trotsky
The Russian Revolution was, above all, a workers revolution. It put the working class in power for the first time in history, and promised a world revolution to come, which would abolish war, national oppression and exploitation forever. It inspired workers’ rebellions around the world, and came close to succeeding in its ultimate goal. But workers were not the only ones to rebel in Russia in 1917. Without peasant support, indeed without the peasant uprising to throw off their own chains of oppression, the Russian Revolution never could have survived.
Unlike most of Europe, Russia was a backward, primarily agrarian society, in which capitalism had a late start, and still, at the opening of the Twentieth Century, held no political rights under the Tsarist autocracy. The overwhelming majority of its populace were peasants. As in most peasant societies, there was a long history of rebellions, all of which were defeated, but which were memorialized in legend and song for centuries. When in February of 1917—in the midst of the devastation of World War I—urban workers and soldiers rose up and toppled the fragile Tsarist autocracy in a matter of days, peasants immediately took notice. Could their grievances, so long ignored, be addressed in this new situation?
Peasant rebellions were endemic in Russia
Peasant rebellions dated back as far as the Russian defeat of the Mongols, and the establishment of the Tsar as the “ruler of all Rus” in 1503. People of Mongol origin—Tatars, Kirghiz, Kalmuks, etc.—were deprived of all rights and could be forced into serfdom by the Russian nobility, and even into outright slavery (slave markets were legal until 1828.) Serfdom in Russia was slave-like feudalism—peasants were not allowed to leave the land they were born on. This soon produced uprisings, including major revolts in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The leader of the first of these, Stepan Razin, was memorialized in a statue dedicated by Lenin in 1918; and the second, led by Yemelyan Pugachev, amassed a great army and took several cities before its eventual defeat, and Pugachev’s public beheading.
These rebellions were remembered by the peasants, but also by the landed gentry and the autocracy. When Russia suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War in the 1850s, at the hands of the decrepit Ottoman Empire and its British and French allies, Russian rulers began to think about modernization. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 under Alexander II was the immediate result. This decree took a step away from feudalism, and at first, peasants were thrilled. The communal land on which peasants toiled had belonged to the landlord, but now it was “allocated” to the peasant commune (the village mir.) But the devil was in the details, and the problems were many.
Fearful of revolution—such as those of 1848 in Western Europe—the gentry at first had wanted serfs to be freed, but without any land. The also fearful Tsar however, did not want to create a proletariat of landless workers. A compromise ensued, but it did not provide enough land for a growing population of peasants to survive on and still maintain their traditional three-field system.1 Furthermore, the landlords retained the best lands for themselves, and large sections of what had been commons, including forests, roads and rivers, were now accessible only for a fee. The forests were important to the peasants for building material and for fires in winter. Finally, the peasants were also required to make redemption payments for the land they did receive for 49 years, with interest! The peasants were still tied to the communal land, could not sell their portion of it, and often had to take jobs working on landlords’ farms, to the neglect of their own plots. In short, life remained grim for the peasants.
Capitalism creeps in
Underlying the land situation in 1861 was the insinuation of capitalism onto the scene. Just as in the latter days of feudalism in Western Europe, the landed gentry in Russia was accumulating debt to urban financiers. The redemption payments demanded of the peasants were to be the source of financing of bonds issued to the landlords by the state, so that the loss of ownership of the land could be turned into capital. But the redemption payments were essentially uncollectible from the poor peasants, who lacked sufficient land to be able to survive, let alone sell their produce.
The 1861 reforms had the effect of stimulating a capitalist market, however. The amount of grain for sale on the open market increased, as did non-gentry ownership of farms. The rural proletariat of landless laborers, composed of peasants who couldn’t make it as farmers, also increased. Here we have the background to uneven and combined development: an ancient but still dominant feudal aristocracy was becoming more intertwined with a nascent capitalism.
The 1905 revolution
As the Twentieth Century dawned however, the Russian autocracy failed another big test on the international stage. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, the Tsar’s naval fleet was demolished by the Japanese Empire, which the Tsar had seriously under-estimated. This debacle quickly sparked the Revolution of 1905. Workers rose up, went on strike, established workers soviets, and chose a revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, to lead the St. Petersburg Soviet. Peasants rose as well; not all, but enough to make the Tsar pick very carefully for a loyal regiment to shoot down protestors outside the Winter Palace in the Bloody Sunday massacre, killing at least 1,000. The 1905 uprising was put down, but the autocracy knew it had to do something to prevent further risings, and accelerate its modernization without undermining its still feudalistic noble ruling class. A fake parliament called the Duma was created, and the “solution” on the land was, essentially, more capitalism.
Based on earlier assessments of what was needed, Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Tsar’s Council Ministers, laid out a plan in 1906, which was based on “banking on the strong ones.” The traditional communal land system was to be undermined by empowering peasants with the right to privatize the land by “cutting out” and selling their section of the commune. The reform also enabled the formation of peasant co-operatives, which became dominated by kulaks and middle peasants, who could operate on the market. This was “an explosive capitalist shell” aimed at the commune. The purpose was to promote capitalist farmers who would be a support for the regime. To facilitate this, the redemption payments of 1861, destined to expire anyway in 1910, were abolished.2
Peasants remained hungry and rebellious
Again, the penetration of capitalism on the land produced a stronger market, including international grain sales, as a minority of peasants were able to break away from the communes. Meanwhile, peasants who sold out their land because it was insufficient for them to live on added themselves to the ranks of landless farm laborers. Most peasants were enraged, and opposition to the land sales grew. In a year or two there were incidents of peasants seizing land that had been “cut out” from the commune, as well as attacks on big landlords, including the burning of mansions. The peasants, having gone through all the Tsar’s reforms, were still land hungry and rebellious.
The numbers illustrate the situation. In 1905, about one-half of all arable land was private (including church and state-owned land), and about half of that was owned by 30,000 great landed gentry. The other half of all arable land—and often the worst land—was in the hands of some ten million peasant families, mostly in the communes, or small ownership plots.
The final disaster for the Tsar
Enter the next, and, as it turned out, final disaster for the fragile regime of Tsardom: World War I. War recruitment carried away ten million workers and peasants, and stripped away two million horses, as well as food stuffs for the army and other resources, while defeats in the trenches mounted. Peasants who could no longer sow the land increased in number, and in the second year of war even some middle peasants began to go under.
An initial surge of patriotism was a setback for the revolutionary left (the Bolsheviks had been gaining strength in recent years,) but that didn’t last long. Workers’ rebellion soon infected the cities, and peasant hostility exploded from month to month. The stress on the economy was shown by the steady decline in bread rations for workers in (newly renamed) Petrograd. This provoked women workers to take to the streets in protest on International Women’s Day 1917; and they were soon followed by the rest of the workers and the soldiers who were garrisoned in and around Petrograd. Tsar Nicholas II, who had foolishly thought he could save his futile war by himself going to the front, abandoned his throne within days. The February Revolution was on.
Workers and peasants rise up
The workers immediately formed soviets again as in 1905, and peasants began to take action against the landlords, slowly at first, but soon ramping up. The February Revolution had dramatically increased the already high rate of desertions of peasant soldiers from the trenches. Returning to their home villages, these men were armed, impatient and ready to promote radical action. They took a leading role in events that were soon to envelop the countryside. The first weeks in February saw villages remain inert, but by March, the specter of a peasant war hung over the landlords. This was a mixture of paranoia and reality: in some provinces, peasant committees were arresting landlords, banishing them, seizing the land, or “readjusting” their rents arbitrarily. As some of the frightened nobles began selling properties, often to foreign investors, kulaks began buying them up as well. Poor peasants’ resentment of landlords began to extend to rich peasants as well, and objection to land sales mounted.3
The Revolution thus far had unleashed a torrent of organizing activities among the masses, and peasants were no exception. In May, a month-long All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies was held in Petrograd. This conclave, though, composed primarily of representatives of the upper layers of the peasantry, provided an opportunity to assess the peasants’ state of mind. Delegates came from the zemstvos, or elected local assemblies, established by Tsar Alexander II in 1864, which were dominated by village shop keepers, as well as the co-ops of the more well-off peasants; and a few from the village mir. The representatives were overwhelmingly of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), the descendants of the Narodniks, who were intellectuals who proclaimed going “to the people” as the path to end Tsarist rule. While they proclaimed “land to the tiller,” their plan now was to pressure the bourgeoisie to implement land reform, through the projected Constituent Assembly, and were resolutely opposed to workers demands for peace or the eight-hour day, or peasants acting on their own to solve the land question.
Lenin addresses peasant congress
The Bolshevik delegation to this assembly was small, but Lenin addressed the congress on May 20th, and he proclaimed a program of land nationalization through organized direct action by the peasants regardless of legality. According to eyewitness Nicolai Sukhanov, “It would seem that Lenin had landed not merely in a camp of bitter enemies, but you might say in the very jaws of the crocodile.” But Sukhanov went on to report that, “The little muzhiks listened attentively and probably not without sympathy. But they dared not show it...”4
In fact, Lenin (not for the first time) had put his finger on the central problem facing the revolution: the fact that the bourgeoisie, which was tied in with the landed aristocracy, was incapable of making a democratic revolution. The Bolshevik position, in distinction from the Mensheviks, had always been that the working class alone was capable of making the democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks’ formula for this was the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. With the influence of Lenin’s thinking, and Trotsky’s promotion of the Marxist understanding of the revolution in permanence, this formula was revised to assert the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry. And that alliance, while it would expect the workers to take the lead in making their own revolution, and establishing a workers’ state, would not depend on the workers substituting themselves for peasant action. This was to be an alliance, not an over-lordship.
The key to the Russian Revolution
The revolution would necessitate that the workers put forward their own demands, not limiting themselves to the democratic simplicities of the capitalists. After all, the masses had rebelled in February against the imperialist war, yet it went on; and against the approaching famine (largely due to the war,) yet that went on; workers demanded the eight-hour day, but that was ignored; and the peasants were rebelling against the icy grip of the aristocracy over the land, yet the Provisional Government let that go on. Of all the supposedly “revolutionary” parties—Mensheviks, SRs, etc.—the Bolsheviks alone said that the masses should act for themselves in putting forward their own demands.
And that is the key to understanding the Russian Revolution: it was not a “coup;” it was a coming together of what the masses wanted and needed, and a leadership prepared to facilitate their success. That formula included the peasants, and explains the Bolshevik’s Land Decree, and its relation to the theory of permanent revolution.
For most of 1917 however, the peasants were represented by the SRs, not the Bolsheviks. At the peasants’ congress in May, at which Lenin spoke, the SRs promoted and passed an extremely radical resolution, calling for: “Conversion of all land into national property for equal working use, without any indemnity.” But they didn’t mean that the peasants should act on their own! As Trotsky explains, “To be sure, the kulak understood equality only in the sense of his equality with the landlord, not at all in the sense of his equality with the hired hands. However, this little misunderstanding between the fictitious socialism of the Narodniks and the agrarian democratism of the muzhiks would come out in the open only in the future.”5
SRs or Bolsheviks,
who should lead?
That “future” came quick. As the congress was winding down, reports came in of peasants taking the Congress’ resolutions seriously in the localities, and appropriating the land and equipment of the landlords. The SRs, at their own conference in early June, immediately sounded a retreat! They condemned all land seizures done arbitrarily by the peasants, and insisted that they wait for the Constituent Assembly. Their line was based on the fact that they were in alliance with the Provisional Government, in which they would soon be a part (their representative Alexander Kerensky became Minister of War, and then Minister Chairman.)
And so it went for months. The peasants clung to the SRs at the local level because of their avowed aims, but the SR leaders were all about compromising with the bourgeoisie, which was financially interlinked with the landed gentry. The landlords complained of the mounting confiscations of their land, and the Kadet (bourgeois liberal) bankers loaned out against the real estate for billions of rubles. So the SR tops supported the bourgeois government’s feeble attempts to defend the gentry’s land. They planned to dicker with the landlords over reconciling their utopian slogans with bourgeois interests at the Constituent Assembly; but the peasants were not waiting around for this pie in the sky.
Assault on the landlords
The action in the countryside soon became a stampede, with kulaks in the lead, with poor peasants drawn in on the general assault on the big landlords. The rich peasants had horses and wagons with which to sack the estates and carry off the goods, while the less well-off followed their lead in a wholesale demand for land. This was certainly not what the SR compromisers wanted, but it wasn’t exactly what the Bolsheviks wanted either. Lenin had called for organized confiscations, with peasant organizations taking over the big estates to work as collectives; and he emphasized the need for the landless workers and poor peasants to form soviets to present their own needs for socialization of the land. With some exceptions, neither of these calls were being heeded.
Yet the Bolsheviks, by October, though still a minority in local peasant organizations, had been the only party to call for peasant direct action, and peasants were listening. Trotsky reported that, in the escalating rush to attack the gentry’s estates, the SR leadership was increasingly pushed aside. This was documented by Trotsky in the Volga region: “The muzhiks called [their SR leaders] ‘old men,’ treating them with external deference, but voting in their own way.” Trotsky continues, “It is impossible to weigh the influence of the revolutionary workers upon the peasantry. It was continuous, molecular, [and] penetrating everywhere...”6
The October Revolution: Bolsheviks conquer power
This was the situation, as of the Bolshevik conquest of power on October 25th: the peasant masses, in opposition to their own SR leadership, and under the influence of revolutionary workers and Bolsheviks, were seizing the land. While carrying out the SR program of land to the tiller, rather than the Bolshevik plan for organized takeovers to establish collectivization, the peasants were staking their claim as a petty bourgeois class: they wanted the land. The brilliance of Lenin’s leadership now lay in accepting this, for the present, as the will of the masses.
The working class took power in alliance with the peasantry, who were the vast majority in the country, and Lenin knew that simply declaring the Bolshevik program as law would not change the reality of what the peasants were doing. The workers were in power, but no revolution can impose socialism by decree; it must be built brick by brick. The Land Decree, the second (after the peace decree) to be passed by the 2nd Congress of Soviets, was based on the resolutions of peasant organizations, passed under the leadership of the SRs. But while the SRs saw this as a bargaining chip to present to the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks saw it as the will of the peasants, taken by direct action, and endorsed it as such.
But how does this square with the theory of Permanent Revolution, which affirms that the working class in a backward country such as semi-feudal Russia, must not only make the democratic revolution that the bourgeoisie could not make, but must also put forward its own demands for socialism and workers’ rule? The workers’ own demands, for bread, peace and land, had been out there on the street from the February beginning. But complaints were heard, both within the Bolshevik Party and from without, about how the Bolsheviks failed to implement the socialist revolution on the land.
Rosa Luxemburg’s critique
Foremost among these critics was that of the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Writing from prison in 1918, Luxemburg asserted that, “the direct seizure of the land by the peasants has in general nothing at all in common with socialist economy.” And, she goes on, “In the first place, only the nationalization of the large landed estates...can serve as the point of departure for the socialist mode of production on the land.” In the second place, she asserts that, “one of the prerequisites of this transformation [is] that the separation between rural economy and industry...should be ended in such a way as to bring about a mutual interpenetration and fusion of both.”
All of this is right on the mark. Luxemburg then continues, “That the soviet government in Russia has not carried through these mighty reforms—who can reproach them for that!” She insists that the Soviet government, “in the brief period of their rule, in the center of the gripping whirlpool of domestic and foreign struggles,” could not have been expected to have accomplished these reforms, which she calls, “the most difficult task of the socialist transformation of society!” Again, well and good.
But then we come to the crux of the matter: Luxemburg says that, “A socialist government which has come to power must...take measures which lead in the direction of that fundamental prerequisite for a later socialist reform of agriculture...” This, she says, the Bolsheviks did not do by calling for “immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants,” or, she says, Lenin’s slogan of “go and take the land for yourselves,” which “simply led to the sudden, chaotic conversion of large landownership into peasant landownership.” (Emphasis in original)7
Lenin promotes organized
land seizures
What Luxemburg missed here was probably not her fault. News of the Russian Revolution was highly restricted in Germany in 1918 under a government of Social Democrats who were soon to be her murderers; and especially if one was in prison, as she was. But the truth she missed is that Lenin tirelessly made clear two things: First, the call for the peasants to seize the land themselves was directed explicitly against the program of the SRs, which called for land nationalization, but instructed the peasants to wait for “negotiations” with the landlords, or for the bourgeois Constituent Assembly to decide. Secondly, Lenin consistently called for land seizures to be organized. As he said at the aforementioned Peasant Congress in May 1917, “Let him [the peasant] know that the land he is taking is not his land, nor is it the landowners, but the common property of the people...” and, “Until [the power of the working people is established], the local [peasant] authorities...should take over the landed estates and should do so in an organized manner according to the will of the majority.”8
In order to facilitate these aims, Lenin tried to promote the organization of landless and poor peasants, both before and after October, with, unfortunately, little result at first. Lenin also consistently argued for the preservation of gentry property for peoples’ use, rather than its destruction, which is what many peasants were doing. (In this, peasants were remembering their long experience with failed rebellions. They were saying, you must destroy everything, lest they come back.)
But Lenin’s Land Decree was very clear in laying down what Luxemburg advocated, i.e., “measures that lead in the direction [of] a later socialist reform of agriculture.” According to the Decree, “All land...shall become part of the national land fund. Its distribution among the peasants shall be in [the] charge of the local and self-government bodies, from democratically organized village and city communes, in which there are no distinctions of social rank, to central regional government bodies.”9
Peasants withhold grain in famine
Nevertheless, it’s true that the peasants’ appropriation of the land for themselves led to trouble for the workers state, in that peasants began to withhold grain to the cities, sparking threat of famine, as Rosa Luxemburg noted. But Luxemburg’s plea for a “fusion” of agriculture and industry, much to the chagrin of the Bolsheviks, was impossible just then. Starting with the early days of the Revolution, factories began to lock out workers in defiance of the Bolsheviks, and the trickle of workers who went back to the peasant villages where they were from increased.
Then, with the start of the Civil War, workers and peasants were called upon to form the Red Army, which they did with little hesitation, further interrupting what little production capacity was left. This became a key to the famine which gripped urban Russia in 1918-19: the workers—and their new state—had nothing to offer the peasants in the way of manufactured tools and goods in exchange for foodstuffs. Forced requisitioning of grain became essential. But without this Land Decree, solidifying the removal of the landlords, the Bolsheviks would have lost the civil war.
Bolsheviks finally make headway on the land
This dismal situation ironically improved somewhat with the resignation of the Left-SRs from the Soviet government after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which ended Russia’s participation in World War I. I say “ironically,” because under the treaty, the Bolsheviks had to cede the Baltic States to Germany, and they had to recognize the independence of the Ukraine, which quickly came under German influence: not good. This is not to say that signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was not necessary: it was of utmost importance to end the imperialist war that had devastated Russia and Europe. But the Ukraine was the most highly developed, most capitalistic, and most productive of agricultural areas of the former Russian Empire.
However, with the SRs out of the government, their influence over the peasants declined. The SRs had tended to favor individual action by the richer stratum, while the Bolsheviks, whose influence now increased, continued to support poor and landless peasants. The “improvement” was that with this rising influence, and with the onset of the civil war in mid-1918, Lenin finally succeeded in mobilizing poor and landless peasants, through Poor Peasants Committees and Communes. This signaled that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in splitting the peasantry along class lines.
Lenin explains collectivist goals
Lenin explained this in a speech to a peasant congress of the Poor Peasants Committees and Communes, in December of 1918: “At first there was the general drive of the peasants against the landowners...This was followed by a struggle among the peasants themselves, among whom new capitalists arose in the shape of the kulaks, the exploiters and profiteers who used their surplus grain to enrich themselves at the expense of the starving non-agricultural parts of Russia.” Lenin emphasized that now, “...our common task and our common aim is the transition to socialist farming, to collective land tenure and collective farming.” This was to be done gradually, using persuasion and “transitional methods,” and involving middle peasants as well as poor.10
The Kulaks and poor peasants had been united in overthrowing the landlords, but now rich peasants were selling their grain on the black market at high prices, defying the workers’ state’s monopoly, and even threatening its survival. The organization of poor peasants promoted the state monopoly on the sale of foodstuffs, aided in grain seizures from the rich peasants, and supported the mobilization of peasants in support of the workers state in the face of imperialist and White army reactionaries mobilizing to destroy it.
The drive to collectivize would not be completed in Lenin’s lifetime, nor would it prevent the “one step back” that the Bolsheviks had to take at the end of the civil war in 1921, in the form of the New Economic Policy, or NEP, which became necessary to jump start Russia’s devastated economy. However, the Bolshevik’s commitment to the permanent revolution is fully confirmed by their handling of the peasant question. Just barely out of feudalism, the peasant majority in Russia, oppressed by the landlords and hungry for land, had to go through the stage of making the bourgeois revolution on the land, which they could only do with the alliance, and leadership, of the urban proletariat.
But this “stage” of the peasant revolution must not be confused with the stagism of the Mensheviks or the Stalinists who later led the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. In the Menshevik/SR/Stalinist worldview, the bourgeois revolution had to come first, while the working class waited for the bourgeoisie to complete a revolution (which it was incapable of completing.) But the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky were not so inclined. They showed that indeed, the working class had to press forward with its own demands in order not only to complete the bourgeois revolution (including that of the peasants), but to move forward toward socialism for workers, and in timely fashion, for the peasants as well.
Throughout history, peasant revolts had never been capable of leading to a peasant revolutionary state. The peasants, being class divided among themselves, could only prompt a new dynasty (as in China,) or a new urban petty-bourgeois layer into power. They had never been so capable, that is, until the Russian Revolution, when, together with the working class, they made history.
1 The three-field system, in which two fields were planted and one left fallow, rotating each year, was a standard throughout feudal Europe. This helped prevent soil depletion from over-working, and from the planting of single crops endlessly on the same fields. Modern agriculture attempts to circumvent this with artificial fertilizers, but that is another story.
2 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol. I p. 59
3 Trotsky, Vol. I, p. 364-65
4 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, Harper, 1962, Vol. 2, p. 371. Sukhanov was a Menshevik with a wide range of contradictory opinions, but he was a great eyewitness reporter. A “Muzhik” is a Russian peasant.
5 Trotsky, Vol. I, p. 371.
6 Trotsky, Vol. III, p. 24.
7 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, 1970. This was written in mid-1918 and not published until years later.
8 Lenin, “Speech On the Agrarian Question,” to First All Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, May 22 (June 4th) 1917, Collected Works (CW), Vol. 24. pp. 486-505.
9 Lenin’s Decree on the Land, in Mervyn Matthews, ed., Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, New York, 1974, p. 319.
10 Lenin, “Speech To The First All-Russian Congress of Land Departments, Poor Peasants’ Committees and Communes.” December 11, 1918, in CW, Vol. 28, pp. 338-48. Transitional methods included state support and incentives for collective farms.
...without the peasant uprising to throw off their own chains of oppression, the Russian Revolution never could have survived.
...that is the key to understanding the Russian Revolution: it was not a “coup;” it was a coming together of what the masses wanted and needed, and a leadership prepared to
facilitate their success
Leon Trotsky Was My Grandfather
An interview with Leon Trotsky’s grandson who lived with the famous revolutionary the last year of his life.
Esteban Volkov was thirteen when assassins tried to murder him because his grandfather was Leon Trotsky. Now ninety-one, Volkov keeps Trotsky’s memory alive at a museum in Mexico City.
The building is one of countless villas in Coyoacán: a house with a garden behind a very high wall. Coyoacán used to be a rural town outside of Mexico City where artists sought tranquility. Today it’s a hip neighborhood in the middle of the megacity, a few steps from a subway station. The garden full of cacti could be idyllic—if it weren’t for the noise and smell of the highway.
When we arrive, Volkov is waiting for us in a gray suit and a red baseball cap from the Brazilian trade union federation CUT. His deep-set eyes look severe—but soon he starts laughing. Without any noticeable difficulty, he guides us through the house—the residence where Trotsky spent the final years of his life. We see the bullet holes, the walled-up windows, the heavy steel doors—a bit like a prison. All this is now a museum for his family, the majority of whom fell victim to political murders.
Trotsky was forced to leave the Soviet Union in ١٩٢٩ and found refuge on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. After a few years, he was expelled from Turkey, then from France and Norway as well. In ١٩٣٧, he received asylum in Mexico.
Trotsky’s daughter, Zinaida Volkova, suffered from severe depression and took her own life in 1933, leaving behind a small son, Vsevolod “Seva” Volkov. After briefly joining his uncle—who had to flee to Paris to escape the Nazis, and was subsequently killed by Stalinist agents—the young Seva moved in with his grandfather in Mexico.
He still recalls those months with the famous revolutionary, going on cacti excursions and narrowly dodging assassination attempts. Then, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky’s luck ran out. He was killed by a Stalinist agent.
Life went on after. Sedov became a Mexican citizen and adopted a Spanish version of his name: Esteban. He studied to be a chemist, and invented a method for the industrial production of the contraceptive pill.
But he didn’t forget his grandfather’s legacy. Since 1989, Sedov has served as the director of the Museo Casa León Trotsky.
Wladek Flakin: What are your first memories of Leon Trotsky?
Esteban Volkov: I was thirteen-and-a-half when I first arrived in this house—from Paris, with Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer. The contrast was stark. Europe in winter is gray, gray, gray. I came from a sinister climate full of grief: after the death of my uncle, Lev Sedov, I was emotionally damaged. Sedov died in February 1938. His widow wanted to keep me in her care, and grandfather had to resort to lawyers. In August 1939, I finally came to Coyoacán.
My first impression was: color! Mexico is a country full of colors. At that time, this was a village completely isolated from Mexico City. You had to go through fields of beets and corn to reach the city. The dirt roads turned to rivers when it rained.
Wladek Flakin: Was it safer for you here?
Esteban Volkov: Somewhat. But the Stalinist secret service was active here as well. The first assassination attempt was on May 24, 1940. I hid under my bed. The assassins came into my bedroom from three different directions and emptied a pistol into the mattress. Seven or eight shots, one of which hit my big toe.
Wladek Flakin: They shot at a child?
Esteban Volkov: Of course. They murdered many Trotskyists and wanted to eliminate his entire family. Trotsky’s son, Sergei Sedov, who remained in Russia and was not interested in politics, was also shot.
In May 1940, a young bodyguard from the USA named Sheldon Harte had just arrived. He was a Stalinist agent and opened the door for the assassins. Later they killed him and buried his body in a park outside the city. In the Stalinist archives it was claimed that he had criticized his comrades—if he had known that they intended to murder the child as well, he would not have participated, he said.
So he was branded a traitor. That is how the Stalinist system worked: when something went wrong, you had to find someone to blame. And in this case, it was very easy to blame the American: they said Harte had warned Trotsky who then hid in the cellar.
The story was filmed this way several times. But that is absurd. As if grandfather would have left me alone.
Wladek Flakin: How did it really go down?
Esteban Volkov: Grandfather took pills to help him sleep. When the shooting started, he first thought it was fireworks from some Mexican religious celebration. [laughs] His partner Natalia jumped right up. She dragged him to his feet, pushed him into a dark corner, and saved his life.
Wladek Flakin: What happened after the attack?
Esteban Volkov: The Stalinists tried to present it as a farce that Trotsky had organized himself. They paid a policeman and two cooks who had worked here to give false testimony. All three said that the guards had been nervous that night and had been talking in grandfather’s office until very late. In the beginning, the police fell for this lie.
But more than twenty people were involved—gangsters and Stalinists. And somehow they caught one who was bragging about it in a bar. The famous painter Alfaro Siqueiros, a leader of the Communist Party, had led the plot. Siqueiros was briefly in prison, but then he emigrated to Chile.
Wladek Flakin: How did life change in the house after that?
Esteban Volkov: Before, we often had trips to the countryside with friends to collect cacti. Grandfather was a big cactus fan. There is a great variety in Mexico, and the challenge was to find new species. We spent hours traveling in the car on gravel roads.
After the first assassination attempt, these trips stopped. I went to school every day, but grandfather was basically a prisoner in his home.
Originally, an Italian family had rented out this house. The Trotskyist party in the USA collected money and bought it so that they could build fortifications, wall up windows, and construct bunkers on the roof. Trotsky himself knew that the next assassination would not be a simple repetition.
Wladek Flakin: Could you not have fled to a different place?
Esteban Volkov: It would have been the same. Trotsky’s secretaries were criticized for not taking the right precautions. But Trotsky knew that he had only received a short respite. Perhaps one could have extended his life by a few months. But Stalin was prepared to do anything to get rid of Trotsky. Three months later, the Catalan Ramón Mercader was successful.
Wladek Flakin: Were you in the house on August 20, 1940?
Esteban Volkov: I arrived shortly after the murder. I saw a man in the corner, detained by policemen. Mercader was put in prison for twenty years.
Wladek Flakin: How was your grandfather in everyday life?
Esteban Volkov: Affectionate, with a strong sense of humor. He was a person with great vitality and boundless energy. If we were to look for an actor to portray Trotsky, the only one who could play the role really well would be Kirk Douglas (laughs). Douglas has that drive that was typical of grandfather.
Trotsky spoke many languages. He spoke English with the American guards, German with the Czechoslovak secretary Jan Bazan, and French with the secretary Jean van Heijenoort. He spoke French to me as well.
Wladek Flakin: Not Russian?
Esteban Volkov: No, I did not know Russian anymore. At home, most of the secretaries were Americans. One of the conditions imposed by the government for Trotsky’s exile was that he not interfere in Mexican politics—so we couldn’t hire Mexican assistants.
Wladek Flakin: But there are numerous essays by Trotsky about Mexican politics.
Esteban Volkov: He wrote a bit about Mexico under a pseudonym, but he did not intervene in politics.
Wladek Flakin: What happened to the house after Trotsky’s death?
Esteban Volkov: We continued to live here. Natalia died in 1962 and was buried in the garden together with Trotsky. In 1965, soldiers occupied the house—the government’s revenge against students with Trotskyist convictions. [laughs] But after a few months they called us—they did not know what to do with the house, and so we moved in again.
We stayed another fifteen years, and then we opened the museum. In 1990 it was expanded to include an institute for the right to asylum. Some empty squash halls were refurbished to create an auditorium, an exhibition space, and a library.
I myself always stayed on the margins of politics. Grandfather had told the secretaries: if you talk to my grandson, nothing about politics.
Wladek Flakin: What is the significance of Trotsky today?
Esteban Volkov: He had an absolute faith that socialism would determine the future of mankind. He had no doubt. But the clock of history moves more slowly than one would like. A human life is very short compared to the historical cycles.
But it is unquestionable that humanity needs a different form of social organization if it is to survive. For capitalism always reaches new levels of destruction.
—Jacobin, November 12, 2017
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/11/trotsky-museum-mexico-city-esteban-volkov-interview
Now ninety-one, Esteban Volkov was thirteen when Stalinist assassins tried to kill him, and murdered his grandfather, Leon Trotsky.
Russian Revolution and its Relevance to the U.S. Working Class
Lessons on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution
One hundred years after the Russian revolution, the conditions for world revolution are growing. In fact, today, one hundred years after the Russian revolution, capitalist academic hacks are worrying that “Bolshevism is Back.”
This was the title of an article by Anne Applebaum in a major piece in the Washington Post. She is a propagandist for U.S. imperialism and is even on the board of directors of the National Endowment For Democracy, which is involved in counter-revolutions throughout the world. She rewrites the history of the Russian revolution and says that the new “Bolsheviks” will be right-wingers and Nazis. “But suddenly, now, in the year of the revolution’s centenary, it’s [Bolshevism] back.”
What she does get right is that the capitalist class and their political parties are collapsing, and this political degeneration is allowing for the introduction of Bolshevism as a solution to the capitalist crisis.
Despite the massive witch-hunts during the ’40s and ’50s, millions of workers and youth now see socialism as a solution to the crisis. While in Cuba this month, I watched an interesting debate on CNN on taxes between rightwing anti-communist Cuban American Ted Cruz and social democrat Bernie Sanders.
Sanders said that he was in favor of free medical care for all, free education for all, and free childcare for all. At this point, Cruz accused him of being a “socialist.” Sander’s response was that he was a socialist but not the Cuban variety, but the Denmark and Scandinavian variety.
Sanders, of course, wants to make capitalism better through reforming the banks and instituting a WPA (Work Projects Administration) type program. The fact however, that on mainstream corporate media, the debate was between socialism and capitalism again confirms that the issues of socialism and capitalism are on the agenda for millions of workers. The youth of the United States, in the millions, see socialism as their only way to have a future.
One of the growing developments of this political internecine war between the capitalist parties is the Democrat’s campaign to blame the loss of the election on the Russians. The attacks by this corrupt reactionary warmongering party and their shills are linked up in a campaign to further encircle Russia and threaten North Korea and China.
The Democrats have launched an hysterical campaign to cover-up their political bankruptcy by blaming the Russians for losing the election instead of their own corruption, rigging of the primaries, and hatred of them by the working class. Their growing anger against Clinton and the policies of the Democratic party led directly not only to support for Sanders but the election of Trump.
What is behind this hysterical attack on Russia is the utter political and economic bankruptcy of U.S. capitalism and the growing drive toward world war. The adventurism of the U.S. is not new.
Declining imperialist power
Historically, every declining imperialist empire has become more and more adventurist, and we face a growing inter-imperialist rivalry. Already the U.S., under Trump, has openly supported far more U.S. imperialist interventions including invading Venezuela and threatening the total destruction of North Korea. In a brazen act of war ignored by the capitalist media he even invaded and occupied the Russian consulate in San Francisco. Under international law, this property is the Russians’, but for Trump and the Democrats, when it comes to the Russians, there are no international laws. They are also now demanding that RT (the Russian 24/7 English-language TV news channel) register as foreign agent and are moving to shutdown RT in the U.S. Of course for now, the Chinese and other countries media are not immediately threatened but the fear that the U.S. capitalist class and their corporate controlled media have of RT is, again, an example of their political desperation.
The capitalists in the U.S. and around the world could not, in 1917, believe that the Bolsheviks would take power much less hold it. Their shock at the victory of the Soviets in seizing state power, and the ability to withstand an invasion by thousands of imperialist troops including 8,000 from the United States was not supposed to happen. Trotsky who built and led the Red Army was able to rally the working class and maintain the revolution but not without a very high cost. Thousands of workers and unionists were killed and it created the conditions for the rise of Stalin and a parasitic bureaucracy. It also led to the view that socialism could be built in one country. Today, there is no question that only an international revolution, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, can develop socialism, and indeed, the conditions for that world socialist revolution are more fertile today than in any time in history.
Rise of Trump
One cannot looks at the rise of Trump without also looking at the decline of U.S. imperialism and the collapse of income and conditions for millions of workers in the United States. For the last 30 years, the real income of the working class has declined by 20 to 30 percent and the exodus of the U.S. industrial base was all about increasing capitalist profits. The movement out of the unionized industrialized mid-west to the non-union south, then Mexico and now China, and other countries throughout the world, has left an angry fury among the working class.
The rise of the fascist racist rightwing in the U.S. and internationally also coincides with the growing crisis of imperialism. The U.S. invasions of Iraq, Libya and interventions in Syria have made millions of people refugees—forced to move to Europe for survival. This is the largest migration since the second world war and of course the rightwing has used this influx to blame the migrants in order to incite racist, fascist ideology against them.
In the U.S., Trump is a reflection of the failure of U.S. capitalism and the rise of an open, racist, fascistic ideology that the solution needs, to be a strong man to bring back capitalism in “the good old days.”
The policies of Democrats and the U.S. trade unions
The policies of deregulation pushed by Carter in the airline industry, and followed up in trucking and other industries by both Democrats and Republicans has had little organized political opposition by the pro-capitalist trade unions. The result of the witch-hunts in the U.S. against militant trade unionists who built the CIO and mass worker unions was a neutered trade union movement that in fact had been decapitated. In fact, the formation of the AFL-CIO was the establishment of a pro-capitalist pro-imperialist trade union federation built on anti-communism, and collusion with the CIA and U.S. capitalism throughout the world. This business union operation is run by bureaucrats and labor brokers who make hundreds-of-thousands of dollars and are part of an aristocracy. They have refused to organize any national fight against privatization and deregulation and they have built a top down structure that mimics the corporations that they make deals with, or try to make deals with.
If you go to the AFL-CIO website or any of the major international union websites, there is nothing about any strikes or lockouts of their own members. Instead, they push support for the Democrats, and their fight-back consists of sending emails to the capitalist Congress begging it not to hurt them. A latest example of their total political bankruptcy is calling on Trump to make the anti-working class trade agreement, NAFTA, better under his regime. They urge workers to send emails to Trump’s negotiators to get a good deal.
It is also not surprising that this same bureaucracy has refused to link up the workers in Mexico and Canada directly with workers in the U.S. When workers in Mexico organized in the parts, and auto plants, they faced repression by the U.S.-controlled government with company unions and harassment and even murder of organizers. In auto, the UAW bureaucracy refused to take direct solidarity action to refuse scab parts from these plants. They of course were on the boards of these same corporations.
Coming crash bigger than 2008
The crash of the world economy in 2008 shook capitalism and threatened a total collapse of the world capitalist economy. In the U.S. millions of workers were dispossessed of their homes by the same vulture capitalists that created the panic, and millions also lost their retirement. Today, many U.S. workers cannot afford to retire. The deregulation of the financial markets was, in fact, pushed by Clinton and the very Democrats who were in charge of Congress at the time. The banks were bailed out by trillions of tax dollars, and now the U.S. is in debt to China and other capitalist countries. Trump has actually escalated the very decline of U.S. capitalism and imperialism.
The rise, at the same time, of a U.S. and global oligarchy is greater today than at any time in our history. The wealthiest 25 individuals in the United States today own $1 trillion in combined assets. These 25 hold more wealth than the bottom 56 percent of the U.S. population combined, 178 million people.
This world oligarchy and the capitalist drive for profits will, without a doubt, lead not only to another collapse even deeper that 2008, but to revolutionary conditions throughout the world, and especially in the United States, where laissez faire capitalism still dominates.
The social crisis in the United States is not new. When millions of immigrant workers marched in 2006, the capitalists were very concerned that this would turn into a social movement. The Democrats and Republicans spent billions to terrorize and deport workers and their children. This was a bi-partisan operation. The Democrats and Republicans passed NAFTA, which forced over ten million Mexicans to immigrate and now they are blamed for the economic crisis created by the capitalists corporate trade agreement. Obama was, until now, known as the “Deporter in Chief,” and the militarization of the border and deaths of thousands of immigrants on the border is on the bloody hands of both Obama and the Democrats, as well as the Republicans.
Unity of Mexican and U.S. workers
We must unite with the Mexican and Canadian workers with direct working class links and action. We need to oppose the re-colonization of Mexico and for not only the cancellation of NAFTA, but also the re-nationalization of the lands, oil, railroad, telecom and mines under workers control. U.S. workers need to support the working class of Mexico taking back their country, and obviously we need to do the same here.
Environmental catastrophe
There is also a catastrophic environmental and climate disaster that in fact is being escalated by the fossil fuel industry and utilities who control the Congress. The necessity of public control of the energy industry and the utilities must immediately be raised as a critical solution to this deadly and dangerous world crisis. The hurricanes and the deadly fires in California that go on throughout the year are further examples that capitalist control of our economy is threatening the world.
Racism and fascists ideology
The open rise of racist and fascist ideology is exemplified by Trump and his advisor, Bannon. They argue that we need to preserve a white nation and this has incited and encouraged the growth of neo-Nazi, racist and anti-Semitic groups. The open harassment and terrorism against Blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, LBGT people, has created a massive backlash of anger. Trump has helped unite the mass of people in the United States against this government. It is also a historic opportunity for the working class to bring millions into militant, class struggle unions, that defend democratic and human rights.
Rise of social democracy
The rise of social democracy is part and parcel of the social and economic crisis in the United States, and the likely election of Sanders, or someone like him, will be a reflection of the growing backlash against capitalism, and also the movement toward socialist ideas by millions of workers and youth who have no future in capitalism.
In the midst of this fundamental capitalist world crisis, there also exists a massive political vacuum.
There is no mass democratic workers party in the U.S. And while there is a growing class hatred, the U.S. working class has been disorganized and atomized not only by the capitalist class but also by a trade union bureaucracy that is terrified that mass workers actions will lead to general strikes and their overthrow.
A section of the U.S. trade union bureaucracy is now talking about the formation of a social democratic labor party. They met at the 2017 AFL-CIO convention, and talked about the formation of a labor party in conjunction with a formation called Labor For Bernie. Like former Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union Secretary, Tony Mazzochi, they see a Labor Party as a capitalist electoral party and not a mass working class party with a working class program of action. Despite this, there is growing anger and frustration with the support for the Democrats. This will obviously grow as this crisis deepens.
Like Sanders, those union officials’ support is for reforming capitalism—including the Democrats’ implementing a Roosevelt-type WPA program. The idea that this world capitalist system and crisis can be solved with a WPA program has little real reality, and those who voted for him and consider him a socialist will soon discover the reality of this plan.
What now?
What to do now is the question of the day. There is no mass working class party, but the need for one that is based on the rank and file workers grows more critical. The first step to develop such a party is to build United Fronts that bring together workers on class struggle issues. We need to unite all workers organized or unorganized to defend workers nationally who are on strike, locked out, or who have been fired for defending worker and union rights. The Transitional Program,1 a set of immediate but far-reaching demands that call into question capitalist rule and lead to workers taking government and state power, is a plan for action in taking forward the defense of the working class and to build its power.
We also need a national political education campaign against privatization and outsourcing that includes all workers and the communities that are affected by these policies. The need for mass working class action against these attacks have to be fought in order to back these struggles up and also to organize against the attacks on immigrants, African Americans, Asians, Women and LBGT people. We need to build these united fronts as organizations of action that can rally the working class and move toward support for general strikes and mass worker actions.
The growing political and social crisis will offer us historic opportunities for such actions. The ongoing internecine warfare between the capitalist parties and within them is undermining their legitimacy in front of the working class as they see the systemic corruption and manipulation of both parties. This warfare is exposing not only the true nature of these capitalist parties but also the economic and political bankruptcy of the U.S. and world capitalist systems.
Technology and global economy
The development of the Internet, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and the gig economy in fact are escalating the crisis for world capitalism. Workers throughout the world are now temporary, part-time workers with no hope under capitalism for survival in this new world. At the same time, workers are directly linked up with each other electronically, and have the power to organize internationally, including international strikes against multi-nationals and union busting governments. The re-organization of the world economy by the working class is now more feasible than at any time in history, and the communication tools that tech workers have, as well as tens-of-millions of workers, can and will be used to fight the very system that is destroying them. That is why the capitalist fear the communication network and are desperate to control it. What they know is that as mass movements develop with millions of workers, these workers will use these tools to challenge capitalist power and their control of the media and propaganda. The need for an international labor communication network and live streaming channels is vital to unify worker struggles globally and the technology is now user friendly as smart phones allow this broadcasting and live streaming by millions.
Removal of Trump
The growing call for the removal of Trump by impeachment also should be opposed. We should support the independent organization of mass working class action and general strikes to remove him, his family and his cronies. This is the kind of action that can galvanize the entire working class and strengthen it organizationally for the tasks ahead including the formation of a mass democratic, working class party that can put forward a program and action for power.
Unity with workers of the world
Finally, the need to oppose imperialist war is critical, and also offers an opportunity to unite with workers in Korea, Japan, China, and around the world. The drive for imperialist war by the capitalists can only be stopped by the unity of the working class of the world. The use of xenophobia, racism and nationalism is the method of choice for a ruling class in crisis with no solutions other than war.
The U.S. working class has nothing to gain by war against Russia, Venezuela, North Korea or China. Our enemies are not the workers throughout the world but our capitalist class, who have slaughtered tens-of-millions since 1898 when the U.S. occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to supposedly bring “democracy” to these people.
The working people throughout the world are waiting for the working class here to wake up and take control, and that is our task on the road forward.
1 The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power, “The Transitional Program” By Leon Trotsky, 1938.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/transprogram.pdf
The re-organization of the world economy by the working class is now more feasible than at any time in history, and the communication tools that tech workers have, as well as tens-of-millions of workers, can and will be used to fight the very system that is destroying them.
...the need to oppose imperialist war is critical, and also offers an opportunity to unite with workers in Korea, Japan, China, and around the world. The drive for imperialist war by the capitalists can only be stopped by the unity of the working class of the world...
The Russian Civil War
An international struggle
Socialist Viewpoint has been running articles from various socialist organizations. This one, “The Russian Civil War,” from the International Marxist Tendency, is part of our celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
The October Revolution was an earthquake that sent shockwaves throughout the world. The idea that workers could take power into their own hands and run society without the need for kings, queens and capitalists had a big impact amongst the working masses throughout the world. For this reason, the ruling classes of all countries united in an effort to crush the new workers state in its infancy.
In Russia, after the revolution, the former Minister-Chairman of the Provisional Committee, Alexander Kerensky, and his generals made attempts to overthrow the newborn Soviet regime. But faced by the mobilization of the Petrograd workers, their offensive was a total failure.
Initially, Lenin seemed to be right when he declared that the civil war phase of the revolution was over and that the Bolsheviks could now concentrate on the peaceful construction of the new regime. But this idea was soon to be shattered by events.
The imperialists intervene
Whereas the anti-communist counter-revolution—also known as the White movement, as opposed to the Reds—was militarily and politically defeated, its leaders who were living on the country’s borders received enormous military assistance from the great imperialist powers of the time. This started already in the early days of 1918. White units were equipped with high-tech weaponry, such as tanks and planes: all things that were lacking to the young Soviet republic.
Every imperialist power found itself a stooge fighting in the civil war: Ataman Skoropadsky in Ukraine and General Krasnov on the Don river were supported by the Germans; general Denikin in the south was helped by the French; admiral Kolchak in Siberia received full support from the Japanese and the British, who also helped general Yudenich on the Baltic front. Beside this material help, imperialists troops landed directly in Russia as early as 1918. While the Germans were invading Ukraine and the Baltic countries, British forces occupied Baku in the Caucasus, Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the North. After a while, French soldiers took over from the Germans in Ukraine and Crimea, while Japanese and U.S. troops were attacking Vladivostok and the Russian Far-East.
This intervention had an enormous impact on the revolution. Confronted with such a threat, the Soviet regime was forced to devote all its strength to sheer survival. Cheered on by the allies, White generals took their revenge on the people that had dared to overthrow them. Everywhere in White-controlled territories, a bloody orgy of pogroms and terror was unleashed, before the very eyes of the distinguished representatives of the western “democracies.”
The capitalist powers’ intervention was justified by the will to crush the global threat posed by the Russian Revolution. In Russia, the workers had taken power in their hands and set an unbearable example for the world bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution had to be “strangled at birth” as Winston Churchill said. The Russian Civil War very early on acquired an international nature, embodied by the French warships anchored in the Black Sea harbors.
Internationalist propaganda
This feature of the Civil war was not limited to the side of the counter-revolution, but also found an expression on the Bolshevik side. Numerous foreign activists were present in Russia at the time and were used for internationalist propaganda by the new regime. A special attention was devoted to the foreign troops stationed in Russia. Many agitators and propagandists were sent to explain to these men why their governments sent them to fight in Russia while the world war had been over for months. Many of these activists paid for their internationalism with their lives. For instance, the French teacher Jeanne Labourbe, won over to socialism as soon as 1905, was murdered by French army officers in Odessa in 1919.
This propaganda had a big impact: almost every foreign corps stationed in Russia was subject to mutinies, during which soldiers refused to fight and even sometimes tried to go over to the Red Army. The French navy was particularly plagued by this movement. During the spring of 1919, two successive waves of mutinies rocked the warships sent in the Black Sea. The first, organized by socialist activists drafted in the navy, tried to go over to the Red side with some warships after mutiny. It failed, but sparkled a second wave, aimed at delivering the jailed mutineers, improved living conditions, and putting an end to the French military intervention. The mutiny forced the French government to repatriate the fleet in France, without putting an end to the revolt, which arose soon after in French military harbors such as Lorient, Brest or Toulon. This episode is not an isolated one as the British army was also forced to repatriate its forces after a wave of mutinies.
International solidarity
Many mutineers and deserters succeeded in joining the side of the Red Army. French army captain Jacques Sadoul, who was in post in Moscow during the war, deserted to the Red army in 1918 and joined the Bolshevik party. He also served in the propaganda services of the Red Army. He met there tens-of-thousands of foreign volunteers. Some of them were foreign workers (notably Chinese) who had been treated as a second-rate workforce under the Tsarist regime. They massively rallied to the revolution and were exposing themselves to be massacred if captured by the racists white troops.
Numerous war prisoners from the central powers were also in Russia at the time of the October Revolution and thousands of them joined the revolutionary forces. Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and so forth fought in the ranks of the Red Army.
This situation is not a peculiarity of the Russian civil war. Way before the 1917 revolution, during the Paris Commune of 1871, while Bismarck was helping the counter-revolutionary armies of Versailles—his recent enemy—Italian volunteers fought in the Commune’s army, which was led by a 34-year-old Pole, Jaroslaw Dombrowsky.
At the end of the Russian Civil War, the bourgeoisie was forced to renounce its direct aggressions toward the Russian Revolution, fearing it would spark revolutions in the West. When the British government tried to support White Poland in its war against Russia, it was the threat of a general strike that made it pull back. British premier Lloyd George said at the time that a new war against Russian Soviets would bring Soviets to Britain. This fear was justified. From 1918 to 1923, capitalist Europe was the theater of many revolutionary upsurges. In Germany, Italy, Austria and elsewhere, the power of the bourgeoisie, who had just showed its true colors with the bloody slaughter of the world war, was assaulted by the working-class. The workers were defeated only by the inexperience of their revolutionary parties and the betrayal of reformist leaders. In Hungary, the bourgeoisie even needed an armed intervention by France and Romania to crush the Workers’ Republic and impose a military dictatorship on the Hungarian people.
A world revolution
All these events show that the 1917 revolution was not a purely Russian affair, but a global event, in fact, the first step of the world socialist revolution. For millions of workers and peasants around the globe, the program of the Bolsheviks connected to their own problems: war, poverty and exploitation. This unity of interests is a perfect demonstration of what Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “The working men have no country,” as their interests are not defended by existing nation-states: these are tools in the hands of their exploiters. Proletarian liberation will need a common struggle above national borders.
If international solidarity is often a spontaneous reaction during revolutionary times, it needs to be organized if it wants to be victorious. The Bolsheviks understood this very well. That is why, since the day after the revolution, they devoted themselves to the construction of a new revolutionary workers’ international. This task is still as relevant as it was then. If you want future revolutions to be successful and the dawn of a new and better world, you have to build an international revolutionary communist movement in preparation. Join us in the building of the International Marxist Tendency!
—In Defense of Marxism, November 17, 2017
https://www.marxist.com/the-russian-civil-war-an-international-struggle.htm
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The idea that workers could take power into their own hands and run society without the need for kings, queens and capitalists had a big impact amongst the working masses throughout the world.
The Russian Revolution had to be “strangled at birth” as Winston Churchill said.
Proletarian liberation will need a common struggle above national borders
This is Class War
The Trump tax plan is an unprecedented attack on working class people. We must organize against the tax cuts for billionaires using working class tactics.
Socialist Viewpoint has been running articles from various socialist organizations. This one, “This is Class War,” is from Left Voice, an international socialist online network in five languages.
The Trump administration is nearing a badly needed legislative victory after the embarrassing failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. Amid the continued Russia probe—with Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI—the Republican party galvanized enough support to come a step closer to passing the largest tax cut for corporations in recent decades. In a 51-49 vote, the Senate approved Trump’s desired tax plan.
It is described as an “act of class war,” not only by Left Voice authors, but also by the capitalist media. The New York Times Editorial says, “…the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost.”
The bill was rushed through the Senate, as the Republicans found themselves desperate to get something done. On November 28, the bill left the Senate Committee. Three days later, at 2:00 A.M. on Saturday, December 2, the bill passed the Senate. A 500-page long document, the bill had not been analyzed in depth and was largely inaccessible to the larger public before the Senate voted. Furthermore, just before the vote, Senators continued to receive hand-written, last-minute addendums to the bill—many of which were impossible to decipher.
What transpired on the Senate floor flies in the face of democratic processes. It is a slap in the face to the American people, who were not given a chance to even know what was in the bill before it was rammed through the Senate at 2:00 A.M. The Republicans have made clear that they don’t care what anyone thinks about their bill and they don’t even want to put up a facade of democracy. They want only a legislative victory for Christmas.
The major tenet of the Senate bill, slightly different from the one passed in the House of Representatives is the tax breaks for the wealthy. Both reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. The bill also raises taxes for people making $30,000 and less per year, and in ten years, it would raise taxes for everyone making $75,000 or less. According to the Joint Committee of Taxation, this would reduce federal revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
Lily Batchelder, a New York University professor says, “The bill is investing heavily in the wealthy and their children—by boosting the value of their stock portfolios, creating new loopholes for them to avoid tax on their labor income, and cutting taxes on massive inheritances.”
In order to get this bill passed, the Republicans in the Senate included all sorts of provisions that don’t have too much to do with taxes. These include:
Because slightly different versions of the tax bill passed both the House and the Senate, the conference committee made up of Congressional Republicans will meet to reconcile these differences. The bill will then be sent back to the House and Senate for full votes. Lastly, it will be sent to President Trump to sign into law. Some of the differences between the two plans are:
Trump has said that he wants the bill on his desk before Christmas, which seems like a likely scenario. However, there is still time to fight back. As Trump’s popularity drops and the Russian investigation creeps closer, we can still defeat this bill, although it will be an uphill battle.
What will the consequences
of this be?
The Republicans, who have always been obsessed with the national debt except when voting for the military budget, have suddenly decided to ignore it in order to pass this tax bill, which would add 1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
However, the Republicans have only temporarily shifted their attention away from the debt. They are sure to become concerned with the issue again when it comes to social security, healthcare, education and other social services. Marco Rubio said this explicitly in an interview: “We have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth, which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.” In other words, tax cuts for the rich and at the same time, cutting services for most of the American people.
The Democratic Socialists of America Facebook page expresses the dire consequences of the Republican victory:
“The rich will get richer. The poor will get poorer. The debt will get higher. So they’ll call for cuts. They will take your education. They will take your healthcare. They will take your social security. They will take everything until there’s nothing left to take—unless we fight back.”
The resistance
As is to be expected, the general thrust of the strategy by the Democrats was to call your Senator to urge them to vote “no” on the tax plan. The impotence of this strategy is exceedingly clear, as the Republicans pass the tax plan without blinking an eye. Only one Republican voted against it.
Why wouldn’t they? The Republican National Committee is racking up record high donations. As Newsweek correctly states, “Trump gives rich donors massive tax cuts, then asks them for campaign donations.” How much effect does a phone call have compared to millions of dollars for a reelection campaign? Passive resistance via Facebook or even a phone call is insufficient.
There were some mobilizations against the tax plan, usually numbering a few dozen to a few hundred. There were campus walkouts across the country, particularly as the Senate bill threatened to consider tuition costs as taxable income. Twelve ministers were arrested for disrupting the Senate hearing of the bill.
After the bill passed the Senate, there were multiple small protests. In New York City, dozens of people gathered at Trump Tower, as well as at Wall Street.
This is a class war.
Time for us to Act like it.
Throughout history, capitalists and their politicians have waged class war against the workers. This tax plan is an act of class war and a naked expression of the policies put forward by Democrats and Republicans that have allowed the wealth gap in the U.S. to climb to exorbitant rates. Since the 1950’s, the top One Percent has doubled its share of the national income from less than ten percent to more than 20 percent.
During the past few decades, this war has become an asymmetrical one, characterized by capitalist attacks against the working class. It is time to fight back. We must urge our unions to organize against this tax plan. We must call on left organizations—the DSA, the International Socialist Organization, and Socialist Alternative, to name a few—to organize mobilizations on the streets as well as in every workplace and place of study. We must take to the streets with environmental groups, women’s groups, workers organizations, and unions to fight this; it is an attack on all of us.
And, given that this is class war, it is time to remember and reclaim the weapons of class struggle: protests, pickets, and strikes. The wealthy have their own political parties to do their dirty work. We must organize ourselves against the capitalists and their tax cuts using our own tactics, our own strategy, and our own working class party.
—Left Voice, December 2, 2017
http://leftvoice.org/This-is-Class-War-Time-to-Act-Like-It
Three at the Top
Three richest Americans, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett,
now own more wealth than bottom half of U.S. combined
In the United States, the 400 richest individuals now own more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the population and the three richest own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, while pervasive poverty means one in five households have zero or negative net worth
Those are just several of the striking findings of “Billionaire Bonanza 2017,” a new report1 published Wednesday, November 8, 2017, by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) that explores in detail the speed with which the U.S. is becoming “a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and power.”
“Over recent decades, an incredibly disproportionate share of America’s income and wealth gains has flowed to the top of our economic spectrum. At the tip of that top sit the nation’s richest 400 individuals, a group that Forbes magazine has been tracking annually since 1982,” write IPS’s Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, the report’s authors. “Americans at the other end of our economic spectrum, meanwhile, watch their wages stagnate and savings dwindle.”
Collins and Hoxie are quick to note that the vast gulf that currently exists between the rich and everyone else is not the product of some inexplicable “natural phenomenon.” It is, rather, the result of “unfair economic policies that benefit those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom.”
Based on data recently made public by the Forbes 400 list and the Federal Reserve’s annual “Survey of Consumer Finances,” “Billionaire Bonanza” examines in detail the principal beneficiaries of America’s “deeply unbalanced economy:” the mega-rich.
“The wealthiest 25 individuals in the United States today own $1 trillion in combined assets,” the report notes. “These 25, a group equivalent in size to the active roster of a major league baseball team, hold more wealth than the bottom 56 percent of the U.S. population combined, 178 million people.”
The top 25 list features billionaires who have attained their vast riches through a variety of means, from inheritance to investing to founding a corporate giant like Amazon or Google. What unites these enormously wealthy individuals—aside from the fact that they are all white—is that they just keep getting richer, decade after decade.
Average Americans, by contrast, have not fared nearly as well: a significant percentage of the U.S. households “have no savings at all or owe more than they own,” making them residents of what Collins and Hoxie term “Underwater Nation.”
“Excluding the value of the family car, 19 percent of U.S. households have zero or negative net worth,” the report notes. “Looking at this trend through the lens of race reveals that 30 percent of Black households and 27 percent of Latino households have zero or negative wealth.”
In order to get a broader sense of the size of the chasm between rich and poor in the U.S., Collins and Hoxie place the net worth of the top one percent and the bottom one percent side by side.
“All combined, households in the bottom one percent have a combined negative net worth of $196 billion,” the report finds. “For comparison, the top one percent, a category holding the exact same number of people, have positive $33.4 trillion in combined net worth.”
Even mainstream institutions like the International Monetary Fund have acknowledged that such vast disparities of wealth and income are not sustainable, politically or economically. But as Billionaire Bonanza notes, the Trump administration—with the help of the GOP-controlled Congress—appears bent on making these disparities worse by slashing taxes for the wealthy while gutting programs that primarily benefit low-income and middle class Americans.
So the first priority, Collins and Hoxie note, is to “reject tax and other federal policies that will add oil to the inequality fire.”
In terms of going on the offensive once the “do no harm” principle is observed, the report makes several suggestions, including:
As “the elite ranks of our billionaire class continue to pull apart from the rest of us,” the report notes, many Americans—including students saddled with loan debt, workers suffering from stagnant wages, and families who have seen “their wealth and savings evaporate”—are revolting against the system that allowed the richest to accumulate such wealth at the expense of so many.
“A century ago, a similar anti-inequality upsurge took on America’s vastly unequal distribution of income and wealth and, over the course of little more than a generation, fashioned a much more equal America,” Collins and Hoxie conclude. “We can do the same.”
—Common Dreams, November 8, 2017
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/08/three-richest-americans-now-own-more-wealth-bottom-half-us-combined-report
1 https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BILLIONAIRE-BONANZA-2017-Embargoed.pdf
Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration
The real face of capitalism
On Wednesday, December 6, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that he would officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This reveals the real nature of the so-called peace talks. In a speech delivered at the White House, Trump said, “I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
“While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering. My announcement today marks the beginning of a new approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Trump’s message caused a great uproar in world politics as one head of state after another came out against him. Even U.S. lapdog, British Prime Minister Theresa May, had to admit that Trump’s announcement was “unhelpful in terms of prospects for peace in the region.” Germany and France also condemned the move revealing the widening gap between the U.S. and Europe.
Liberal media outlets throughout the world have been crying crocodile tears over the so-called peace negotiations. But Trump has merely revealed what was always the truth, that there has never been any such thing. These “respectable” ladies and gentlemen have never supported the oppressed Palestinian people. For decades the bloody wars against the Palestinians and the expansion of Israel have been de facto supported by Western powers.
Israel has waged countless wars and it possesses one of the most advanced and powerful military apparatuses in the world waged against the Palestinian masses who are besieged on all sides. Over the decades, tens-of-thousands of Palestinian men, women and children have been killed in these wars. Many more have been killed in the everyday violence of the Israeli regime.
Officially, since the Oslo accords of 1993 alone, more than 110,000 Palestinians have been arrested and more than 270,000 Israeli settlers have been moved to the West Bank. Israeli capitalism could never accept a strong and vibrant Palestine, nor can it stop its expansion, which is written into its DNA.
Through all of these events our “Democratic,” liberal friends have been giving their tacit or active support to the aggressions of Israeli imperialism. There has never been any peace, nor any genuine talking for that matter. The Palestinian leaders, and the “leaders” of the Arab world, have been playing along with this charade for years, which reveals where their real interests lie.
What Trump is doing is merely to expose this hypocrisy. He is removing the democratic veil with which the ruling class covers all of its barbarism. He is removing the fig leaf behind which Mahmoud Abbas and the leaders of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) have been hiding for years. And he is revealing the brutal bloody truth about capitalism. On a capitalist basis, there will never be an agreement between Israel and Palestine.
The main reason for Trump’s announcement was to appease the reactionary right-wing elements in his own base at home. At the same time he has been signaling a shift from Obama’s policies in the Middle East, in trying to be more assertive in supporting the U.S.’s traditional allies. As the Syrian Civil War comes to an end Saudi Arabia and Israel are more concerned than ever about the ever-rising influence of Iran in the region.
Israel has been trying to keep out of the Syrian quagmire, but last week it escalated its interventions by bombing an Iranian military base just south of Damascus. Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has also been beating the war drums, firstly by trying to provoke a conflict in Lebanon and later by setting up a military alliance with more than 40 countries, designed to fight Iran.
The converging interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel have led to the first ever, public declarations of support for each other in the past few months. Trump’s statement must be seen in the same vein. Although they have protested publicly, behind the stage the Saudis are sharpening their knives, ready to stab the Palestinian people in the back. Nothing has changed here.
However, Trump’s statement is bringing back to the surface the deep hatred of U.S. imperialism that exists throughout the region. And it is weakening the influence of the U.S. and its allies, while Iran is set to see its political influence rise further. Hamas in Gaza has called for a new Intifada and clashes are set to take place throughout the region. Trump’s announcement is not only unmasking the farce of the peace talks but is also increasing tensions between the rulers and the masses in the region.
The true reason for the decline of Saudi Arabia and U.S. power in the Middle East is to be found in the deep crisis of U.S. and world capitalism. The U.S. is incapable of intervening in the Middle East as it used to. Trump’s attempt of speaking his way out of this crisis is like a man stuck in quicksand trying to swim back to safety, it will only lead to an acceleration of the process which is taking place on the ground. The weakest link is the Saudi regime itself, tangled in a web of insoluble contradictions and rising internal opposition, and its new aggressive behavior will only serve to hasten its own decline.
For the masses of the region this is a hard-learned lesson. As long as their fate is in the hands of the ruling class and professional politicians, they will only see more of the bloodletting they are facing today. Twenty-five years of “peace talks” have only led to the complete crushing of the Palestinian movement. Far from solving anything, the Palestinian leaders, helped by the rulers in Egypt and other Arab countries, have increasingly been acting like prison wardens doing the dirty work of Israeli imperialism and enslaving their own people. Only a revolutionary movement throughout the region on the basis of an alliance of all the oppressed, against all of the rulers can bring and end to this tragedy.
—In Defense of Marxism, December 8, 2017
https://www.marxist.com/trump-s-jerusalem-declaration-the-real-face-of-capitalism.htm
Truth About Civilian Deaths in Iraq
Investigation reveals U.S.-led bombings in Iraq kill 31-times more civilians than reported
An 18-month investigation by a pair of New York Times reporters reveals far more civilians are killed in the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—particularly in the air war—than the U.S.-led coalition reports.
After visiting nearly 150 bombing sites in northern Iraq between April 2016 and June 2017, as well as the American base in Qatar where decisions are made about coalition air strikes, Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal “found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition.”
Since the U.S.-war against ISIS began in August 2014, the coalition has released monthly reports in which it claims tens-of-thousands of ISIS combatants and 466 civilians have been killed in Iraq. While the coalition claims civilians have died in only 89 of its more than 14,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Khan and Gopal’s on-the-ground reporting suggests the civilian death toll from coalition bombings is well into the thousands. U.K.-based Airwars estimates at least 3,000 civilians have been killed, but the group’s director told the reporters Airwars “may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq” due to lack of reliable reporting.
In addition to touring and satellite mapping the destroyed sites, Khan and Gopal pored over local news reports, and interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants, and local officials. At the air base in Qatar, they “were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers, and civilian-casualty assessment experts.” They also handed over data they collected on 103 air strikes from ISIS-controlled regions and examined analysts’ responses.
“Our reporting,” they write, “revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all,” concluding, “this may be the least transparent war in recent American history.”
In addition to poor record-keeping and neglecting investigations, the reporters point to civilians unexpectedly being near to an ISIS target and “flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants” as common reasons for civilian casualties.
The coalition and the U.S. Department of Defense post videos of bombings to their websites, which “are presented as evidence of a military campaign unlike any other—precise, transparent and unyielding,” Khan and Gopal write. A Central Command spokesperson insists that “U.S. and coalition forces work very hard to be precise in airstrikes,” and that the coalition is “conducting one of the most precise air campaigns in military history”—but one such clip previously featured on the sites is a bombing of two homes with a caption claiming they were operating an ISIS car-bomb factory.
The homes were, in fact, owned by Iraqi civilians—Basim Razzo, and his brother. The reporters recount the killings of Razzo’s loved ones in vivid detail. Razzo is a 56-year-old who worked as account manager for a Chinese multinational telecommunications company; in the 1980s, while he studied engineering at Western Michigan University, his wife Mayada sold Avon products to their neighbors. A few days after the attack, the badly wounded Razzo wrote on Facebook: “In the middle of the night, coalition airplanes targeted two houses occupied by innocent civilians. Is this technology? This barbarian attack cost me the lives of my wife, daughter, brother, and nephew.”
In response to Razzo’s effort to seek compensation and an apology, and the reporters’ investigation, Razzo was offered a “condolence payment” from the coalition several months after the attack—which he declined—but, through documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, he was able to learn a bit more about how their homes had been misidentified, surveilled, and destroyed.
“Despite everything, Basim could not bring himself to hate Americans,” Khan and Gopal write. “In fact, this experience was further evidence for a theory he had harbored for a while: that he, fellow Iraqis and even ordinary Americans were all bit players in a drama bigger than any of them.”
Because of his ties to the U.S., Razzo occasionally video-conferences with university students about his experiences. “I have nothing against the regular American citizen. I lived among you guys for eight years,” he recently told a Penn State class of about 750 students. “This situation of war, big corporations are behind it.”
—Common Dreams, November 17, 2017]
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/17/investigation-reveals-us-led-bombings-iraq-kill-31-times-more-civilians-reported
On a capitalist basis, there will never be an agreement between Israel and Palestine.
“This situation of war, big corporations are behind it.”
America’s Affordable Housing Crisis is Driving Homelessness
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan in February to tackle the city’s homelessness crisis by opening 90 new shelters across the five boroughs. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti pledged to spend $138 million on ending homelessness in his city by the end of the 2017 fiscal year. Earlier this year, a state senator in Hawaii introduced a bill that would allow doctors to prescribe housing as a cure for homelessness, which would be classified as a medical condition. In San Francisco, often thought of as the epicenter of the nation’s homelessness crisis, Mayor Ed Lee and a coalition of private partners have pledged $100 million to halve the city’s homeless population in the next five years.
Across the country, city leaders and advocates are scrambling to find a way to end—or at least reduce—homelessness. But their efforts have fallen short of the need: A new federal study from the Department of Housing and Urban Development has found that for the first time since the Great Recession, America’s homelessness population has risen.
On a given single night this year, 553,742 were sleeping on the streets, a 0.7 percent rise from 2016. Those numbers come from a mandatory homeless street count that cities perform every two years, and because the count is performed by hand, it likely doesn’t capture the extent of the issue.
In part, the economic upswing following the recession—and particularly the attendant rise in housing costs—is driving this increase in homelessness, The Guardian reports. “The improved economy is a good thing, but it does put pressure on the rental market, which does put pressure on the poorest Angelenos,” said Peter Lynn, head of the Los Angeles homeless agency. It’s no coincidence that the crisis is most pronounced in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, where housing costs have skyrocketed since the Recession with the influx of major tech companies.
Despite Garcetti’s multi-million dollar pledge to end homelessness, Los Angeles has seen the nation’s most dramatic spike in street sleeping over the past year; just half of the $138 million the city budgeted to spend on homeless services has actually been deployed, and the planned construction of housing toward that effort has yet to begin. Efforts on the part of other city leaders have also fallen short. New York City, for instance, has seen a 4.1 percent increase in homelessness; in October, de Blasio admitted to failing to holistically address the issue from the start of his term.
The rise in rates of homelessness illustrates the devastating reality obscured by economic growth and a drop in national poverty levels. In 2016, 13.5 percent of Americans were living in poverty—a rate on par with the pre-2008 recession levels. But it would be a mistake to look at the decline in poverty and assume it means that people’s lives are back on track. The way we measure poverty in the U.S., as Vox has reported, is woefully out of date, and based on three times the “subsistence food budget” for a family. This measure was developed in 1961, using family consumption data from 1955. In no way does it capture the needs of a household in 2017.
Nor does the poverty measure capture the fact that the median hourly wage has remained stagnant since the 1970s, increasing just 0.2 percent-per-year when accounting for inflation, according to the Harvard Business Review. Wages have fallen so far behind housing costs (in New York, for instance, you’d need at least an hourly wage of $27.29 to comfortably rent a one-bedroom, but the median is just over $20) that many Americans are now forced to spend nearly half their income on rent—far over the 30 percent deemed reasonable.
The solution is clear: Cities need to build affordable—truly affordable, not just below-market-rate—housing, and they need to do so quickly. As noble as the efforts of mayors like de Blasio, Garcetti, and Lee are to funnel more money into shelters and homeless-services programs, they won’t be real solutions until they also make investments in building and preserving more affordable units. San Francisco, for instance, is facing an affordable-housing shortfall of at least 40,000 units. Cities should be turning to alternative funding streams—like Seattle’s proposal to introduce an extra tax on corporations that will go toward homeless housing—and investing in permanently affordable housing options like community land trusts. Especially as the Republican Party’s tax plan threatens to gut the financial resources of the lower and middle classes for the benefit of the already wealthy, it’s crucial that cities take more care to account for the reality of living in them, and provide a way for everyone to do so safely and securely.
Eillie Anzilotti is an assistant editor for Fast Company’s Ideas section, covering sustainability, social good, and alternative economies. Previously, she wrote for CityLab.
—Fast Company, December 7, 2017
https://www.fastcompany.com/40504605/americas-affordable-housing-crisis-is-driving-its-homelessness-crisis?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast percent20Company percent20Daily&position=7&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=12082017
...a state senator in Hawaii introduced a bill that would allow doctors to prescribe housing as
a cure for homelessness, which would be
classified as a medical condition...
No Driving for You!
America’s cruel way to punish poor debtors:
take away their driver’s license
Damian Stinnie is one of the millions of people in America who have had their driver’s licenses suspended because of unpaid debt. Despite spending much of his childhood in foster care, Stinnie graduated from high school with a 3.9 grade point average. While seeking work after losing his first low-paying job, he received four traffic violations and racked up $1,000 in fines and costs.
Because he was unable to pay the full amount within 30 days, his license was automatically suspended. As is routine in many states, including Virginia, where Stinnie lived, no one asked him if he could afford to pay. So, like three-quarters of those suspended, Stinnie lost his license essentially because he was poor, not because of the infractions themselves.
At that point, Stinnie joined the millions of Americans who face the dilemma of getting to work, taking a sick child to the hospital, or buying groceries while risking penalties for driving with a suspended license.
Needless to say, many people take the risk because they have no choice; at least 75 percent of those who have their licenses suspended keep driving. So the debtor may be arrested again for driving without a license, this time to be incarcerated and certainly to be hit with another set of fines and fees.
Across the United States, many jurisdictions use this cruel method to coerce payment from people who owe fines and fees to the state. State and local governments do this in large part to balance their books in the face of dwindling tax revenues, heedless of the fact that it makes it much more difficult for the working poor to get to the jobs they need to pay off their debts.
People with means can often forestall suspensions by paying fines and fees, but those without means are trapped in the vicious circle of repeated suspensions and ever deepening debt.
California is the leader and all-time champion in taking away driver’s licenses. As of 2015, more than four million Californians had lost their driver’s licenses for some kind of fine that they did not pay on time, often for an infraction that had nothing to do with driving. That is more than one out of six adult Californians.
The use of suspensions accelerated during the Great Recession: as government revenues went down, fines and fees went up, courts pushed harder on collections, and more people could not pay because they had lost their jobs—so now they lost their licenses, too.
People of color paid the highest price. In Oakland, where Black people make up less than a third of the city’s population, 60 percent of those who lose their licenses are African American. Likewise, African Americans account for six percent of San Francisco’s population but comprised 70.4 percent of clients who came to an arrest and conviction clinic convened by the San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in 2014. Statewide, African Americans are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic whites to lose their licenses, and Hispanics are 20 percent more likely.
Other states also suspend driver’s licenses with abandon. Florida has about 700,000 residents who have lost their licenses, Texas about 1.2 million. When people in those states have unmanageable debts due to repeated arrests for driving on a suspended license, the next step is jail.
Florida suspends licenses without any inquiry as to whether the person is able to pay the underlying debt, and it sends people to prison for five years when they have been arrested three times for driving on a suspended license. Florida’s Chief Justice Jorge Labarga said at a conference I attended at the White House, “Florida loves to suspend driver’s licenses. If you spit on the street you lose your license.”
As in California, suspensions are rarely confined to traffic infractions. Montana suspends licenses for unpaid student loans. Iowa suspends for public drunkenness, with no car involved. Other states suspend for writing bad checks, graffiti, and littering.
In 2012, Tennessee added a category of suspensions for non-traffic-related offenses and now has 90,000 suspensions in that category to go with its 170,000 suspensions for traffic-related offenses.
A study by Robert Eger III of the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California, reported that at least 18 states suspend for not paying the fines on non-driving traffic violations, adding up to 40 percent of all license suspensions nationally.
A real catch-22
The story of license suspensions in the U.S. reveals the extent of the injury states are willing to inflict on low-income people in order to balance their books. For many people, there is no way out of the trap of not being able to work because you have had your license suspended, and not being able to get your license reinstated because you can’t work and pay your fines.
For some, the cycle of exorbitant fines, license suspension, inability to work, further fines and incarceration is a lifelong sentence. Though there have been glimmers of reform, including in states such as California, license suspension remains one of the cruelest and most widespread ways that America criminalizes its poor.
This excerpt originally appeared in Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America by Peter Edelman, published by The New Press.
Peter Edelman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and poverty law and is faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.
—The Guardian, November 10, 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/10/america-punish-poor-debtors-drivers-license-suspension
Loss of a driver’s license due to lack of money to pay fines forces families to walk home with their groceries.
People with means can often forestall suspensions by paying fines and fees, but those without means are trapped in the vicious circle of repeated suspensions and ever deepening debt.
For many people, there is no way out of the trap of not being able to work because you have had your license suspended, and not being able to get your license reinstated because you can’t work and pay your fines.
Statewide, African Americans are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic whites to lose their licenses, and Hispanics are 20 percent more likely.
The Fight for Free Time
The demand for fewer working hours is about liberation—both individual and collective.
October 29, 2017—Last month, Germany’s largest union, IG Metall, launched a campaign with deep historical roots. The union—which represents 2.3 million manufacturing workers—is using annual wage negotiations to call for a reduction in the standard workweek, from thirty-five hours to twenty-six, arguing it would allow workers to, among other things, care for children and elderly relatives. With the initiative, IG Metall has returned to one of the union movement’s most hallowed—and traditionally successful—issues: free time for workers.
Free time, as IG Metall argues, is essential for basic dignity; to care for ourselves and our communities, we need time away from generating profit for employers. Just as importantly, we need it to realize our human potential. Our ability to think independently, experience romance, nurture friendships, and pursue our own curiosities and passions requires time that is ours, time that belongs neither to the boss nor the market. At its core, the campaign for fewer working hours is about liberation, both individually and collectively.
Surprisingly, it has long ceased to be an issue that graces political platforms in the U.S., even on the Left. It wasn’t always so. “The length of the workdays,” labor historians have argued, “has historically been the central issue raised by the American labor movement during its most dynamic periods of organization.”
The martyred radicals at Haymarket were fighting for the eight-hour day (“eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will,” the slogan went in those years.) During the Great Depression, amid significant labor strife, an abortive attempt was made at the federal level to trim the workweek to thirty hours. For decades, American labor saw in the struggle for free time the demand that could unite skilled and less-skilled, employed and unemployed.
Today, we should reclaim that heritage. Reducing working hours while raising living standards should be one of the central, guiding issues on the Left.
The reasons free time fell by the wayside are myriad and complex. Historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt notes that in the U.S., postwar consumer culture, the expulsion of radicals from unions, and labor’s pivot toward embracing economic growth as the engine of prosperity all militated against emphasizing the politics of time.
The rise of neoliberalism didn’t help either. Generations of workers have been inculcated to believe that the basic expressions of humanity can be deferred or purchased, and that working harder and longer is the ticket to a fulfilling life. Keep grinding through the employment tournament bracket, and you can pay (individually) for premium childcare, negotiate for vacation time, then retire prematurely and cash in your investment properties to leave something to your heirs. Many unions embraced this new attitude; several still advocate for increased hours rather than for making employers compensate members more for the hours worked.
Today, however, with wages flat and precarious employment often the norm, many people, particularly those at the beginning of their working lives, no longer toil under the illusion that putting in more time is the key to dignity and happiness. How could it be, when decent pensions are a thing of the past? When the boundaries between working and non-working time require constant negotiation? When the push and pull of whether to work more is always on our minds—whether to pick up one more Lyft fare, whether to cover an extra shift at the hospital, whether to agree to grade fifty psych 101 exams over the weekend?
Within this context, many pockets of the Left are humming with discussions of time and temporality; “late capitalism,” “post-work” futures, and “accelerationism” have become familiar phrases. These discourses are valuable. But because actual goals in these discussions often remain in the realm of the abstract or far, far in the future, such rhetoric, on its own, does not provide adequate tools for movement-building. Furthermore, because these ideas tend to circulate in academia and other small circles, they often bypass most working people, however attractive the ideas themselves might be. In other words, those old rascals, theory and practice, like twin toddlers running in opposite directions, need to be wrangled and brought together.
In the immediate term, we should be fighting for things like shorter workweeks, steeply increased overtime pay, lower retirement ages, expanded social security, family leave, paid vacation, paid sick leave, child allowances, and sabbaticals. All of these are aimed squarely at reducing profit-motivated working hours and improving workers’ self-determination and material conditions. They are tangible, achievable goals that can be built upon. And they have the ability to bring together a variety workers and non-workers. We can achieve full employment, for instance, by pruning working hours and spreading them out between more workers. We can unite the home healthcare worker and the pensioner by expanding social security.
On the more theoretical side, there is a major rhetorical battle to be fought over notions of work as a source of meaning. And that means thinking more deeply about free time, and how we would spend our lives in a society with many fewer hours on the job.
Under global capitalism, free time is often punitive; plenty of people already have ample amounts of it, from refugee-camp dwellers to the unemployed. And the opioid and methamphetamine crises make clear that without proper resources and social networks, free time can be the opposite of liberating. But money, on its own, isn’t the answer. One need only look at Kim Dotcom’s “Good Life” video or the “money diary” of someone on a $1,250,000 salary in Los Angeles to glean the dispiriting vapidity of expanses of time filled with commodity consumption. Meanwhile, capitalism has been rather crafty in pervading what little free time we have with the same urges to produce and measure that we associate with the workplace.
Clearly, then, it remains essential to articulate a positive vision of what free time could look like and how it could be resourced. Movements will hit a dead-end without a compelling vision of a better future; building this vision is where theory and practice come together.
In this, we can take inspiration from abroad.
It’s no coincidence that IG Metall feels emboldened to push for reduced hours—it was the very union that secured the thirty-five-hour week.
But it would be a mistake to assume its battle is a particularly European one. Time and again, the American labor movement has taken up the struggle to reduce the workweek and expand workers’ freedom. It has recognized the potency of a demand that not only imagines a world where people have more control over their lives, but one that builds the bonds of solidarity by uniting the interests of workers and the unemployed, highly skilled and less skilled, foreign-born and native.
The moment is again ripe to mobilize and claim for ourselves as much of our mortal time as we can.
Miya Tokumitsu is a contributing editor at Jacobin and the author of Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness.
—Portside, October 29, 2017
http://portside.org/2017-11-13/fight-free-time
At its core, the campaign for fewer working hours is about liberation, both individually and
collectively.
The Fight for Free Time And the Fight Against Capitalism
Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption. —Paul Lafargue1
Recently, Jacobin published an article entitled “The Fight for Free Time,” written by Miya Tokumitsu. The topic of the article is of great importance for working people and well worth examining for those of us on the Left. Inspired by the campaign launched by the IG Metall Union in Germany to reduce the workday, Tokumitsu raises the crucial issue of the clash between bosses and the working class over the length of the working day and the connection between this conflict and the problem of unemployment.
Tokumitsu makes several important points. She states, “Surprisingly, it has long ceased to be an issue that graces political platforms in the U.S., even on the Left.” She adds that “many pockets of the Left are humming with discussions of time and temporality; ‘late capitalism,’ ‘post-work’ futures, and ‘accelerationism’ have become familiar phrases. These discourses are valuable. But because actual goals in these discussions often remain in the realm of the abstract or far, far in the future, such rhetoric, on its own, does not provide adequate tools for movement-building. Furthermore, because these ideas tend to circulate in academia and other small circles, they often bypass most working people, however attractive the ideas themselves might be. In other words, those old rascals, theory and practice, like twin toddlers running in opposite directions, need to be wrangled and brought together.”
Although Tokumitso is debating with the American Left, it is instructive to bring to this debate the recent experience of the Left Front in Argentina. The Left Front is an electoral coalition composed of three Trotskyist parties: the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), the Partido Obrero (PO), and the Izquierda Socialista (IS). This coalition obtained significant results across the country in last October’s midterm elections, including 1.2 million votes, three national deputies, and more than 40 provincial legislators. These achievements are pertinent here because one of the most critical electoral proposals of the Left Front was to fight to reduce the working day to six hours, five days a week.
The campaign of the Left Front
in Argentina
“Reduce the workday to six hours, five days a week, without any reduction in salary!” “For a salary at least equal to the cost of living!” “For a division of the working hours between the employed and the unemployed!” These were some of the central demands of the Left Front, and particularly the PTS, during the primary elections in Argentina this year.
During the campaign, the militants of the Left Front listened closely to the workers express their deep discontent. A young metal worker, for example, commented that “[the bosses] make our lives precarious.” A worker of the flour industry said: “I am worth more than the earnings of the bosses.” Many workers specifically addressed the problem of unbearably long and exhausting days at work. Nurses, who joined the campaign, explained that “in the papers, it says it is six hours but in reality we work 12 or 14.” Because the Left Front incorporated these grievances and the workers’ demands into its electoral platform, it was not surprising that campaign slogans like “Our lives are worth more than their profits!” resonated among broad sectors of the Argentine working class.
Unemployment stands at almost ten percent in Argentina; among youth, the figure is double that. Businesses are conducting massive layoffs, while one third of the population is overworked—because they are on the job ten or 12 hours-per-day. Around 35 percent of workers work off the books, virtually without any rights. At the same time, the bosses and bankers are making multimillion-dollar profits.
The Left Front dedicated the majority of their media campaign, including the TV spots allotted by the State, to denouncing this situation of rampant overwork and unemployment. However, it has done so based on an understanding that setting limits on the working day is not something that can be easily achieved given the relations of power between the classes under capitalism. History has shown that the struggle for free time has always been a major site of battle between bosses and workers and that it cannot be waged effectively without organization.
From the fight for free time to the fight against capitalism
Miya Tokumitsu discusses various demands such as “shorter workweeks, steeply increased overtime pay, lower retirement ages, expanded social security, family leave, paid vacation, paid sick leave, child allowances, and sabbaticals,” as well as “achieving full employment, for instance, by pruning working hours and spreading them out between more workers.” These demands are considered by the author to be all equally “tangible, achievable goals that can be built upon” and can be fulfilled “in the immediate term.”
The problem is that while the reduction of the workday is to some extent possible (although typically not probable) under capitalism, abolishing unemployment is not. The eight-hour workday (or the seven or six-hour day) itself is a “minimal demand,” attainable through reforms within the framework of bourgeois society. However, slogans for “the distribution of the working hours between the employed and the unemployed” confront capitalist irrationality as such. This is because capitalism, by necessity, propels and keeps millions of people out of the active labor force while simultaneously imposing the most strenuous and most extended hours on those who have work.
The capitalist system needs unemployment and overwork even as the resulting super-exploitation and deprivation systematically cut workers’ lives short. Unemployment is used as a tool by the bosses and governments to put downward pressure on salaries and to further degrade the working conditions for those who are “fortunate” enough to have a job. It is therefore precisely because capitalism requires an army of permanently unemployed people to extract a greater amount of surplus value from the working class that the demand for a division of the working hours between the currently employed and the currently unemployed sectors of the working class represents a direct attack on one of the main pillars of capitalist exploitation.
If one asks the capitalists and their supporters about the viability of distributing working hours between the employed and unemployed, they answer: “That is impossible; that’s utopian.” This demonstrates that capitalism has no solutions to offer for the problems it creates. In reality, the development of technology would allow for a different kind of life. Under capitalism, the economy is organized to guarantee bigger profits for the few. Technological innovation, for the capitalists, means a reduction of the number of jobs available and not a reduction of the length of the working day.
If the working class takes up the demand for a reduced workday, it can develop its conception of a future beyond the narrow confines of capitalism. The Left uses “transitional demands” to popularize ideas that open up paths to questioning the capitalist system as a whole, but always starting from the most felt needs and demands of the masses. Fighting for the distribution of working hours among the employed and the unemployed, and therefore for an end to over-work and unemployment, is such a transitional demand.
Today, in the wake of the neoliberal offensive, the working class is living and laboring under harsh conditions. The eight-hour workday conquered by the working class in the past no longer exists for the broad masses of workers. By taking away this erstwhile concession, capitalism managed to overcome its crisis and continue to guarantee extraordinary profits for the wealthy. The fight against neoliberal reforms can lead workers to challenge capitalism as a system, especially when the demands put forth cannot possibly be granted by the ruling class because doing so would jeopardize their profits. This is why the socialist Left has an obligation to raise “minimal demands” and link them to demands that question the entire economic system.
These demands also need to be a guide for action. It is impossible to think about taking this fight seriously without a specific program to recover the unions for the rank and file from the domination of the bureaucracy. However, the fact that “many unions embraced this new attitude; several still advocate for increased hours rather than for making employers compensate members more for the hours worked” is not because they bought into the consumerist ideology as Miya Tokumitsu suggests. Unions contributed to the triumph of neoliberalism, and they bear a large part of the responsibility for the implementation of even more precarious labor conditions in recent years.
If the task of recovering the unions for the workers is an urgent one, so is the task of raising the class-consciousness of the working class. These are vital elements of the struggle for a government of the workers for the workers, a struggle that can only proceed via the mobilization of the exploited and oppressed.
The battle against the inroads
of neoliberalism
Another problem with Tokumitsu’s argument is that she offers a one-sided discussion of the consequences of neoliberalism. She says, “The rise of neoliberalism didn’t help either. Generations of workers have been inculcated to believe that the basic expressions of humanity can be deferred or purchased, and that working harder and longer is the ticket to a fulfilling life.” What the author seems to forget is that neoliberalism did not just create a culture of individualism, consumerism, and a false “meritocracy;” it was also a massive attack on labor conditions. Based on major defeats of the working class worldwide, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was portrayed by the defenders of capitalism as evidence that history had come to an end and capitalism had won, the system was able to increase the profits of the few by way of increasing labor precarization [the number of people who live precariously increases] for the many.
In other words, the problem is not that workers want to work many hours in order to buy more things. Rather, neoliberal capitalism compels people to work longer and longer hours just so they can survive. One way it has accomplished this is by dividing the working class into “first class” and “second class” workers, the latter including undocumented workers, outsourced workers, temporary workers, non-unionized workers, etc. As a result, many workers must work extra hours or else live on a wage that is not even enough to pay the rent and grocery bill, that is, for their own means of subsistence.
The situation is significantly more aggravated in the semi-colonial countries. There, the bourgeoisie seeks to unload their own backwardness as a class onto the backs of their workers. The ruling classes of the Global South compensate for the shortage of investments in technology by extending the workday, increasing the intensity of work, and paying dramatically lower wages. Multinationals that produce in countries like China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, etc., offer conditions that are far worse, and workers in those parts of the world face even more obstacles to achieving improvements without engaging in a major battle against globalization and the international division of labor under capitalism.
Those demands cannot be separated from a transitional program; they affect the work market itself and therefore the functioning of global capitalism. To fight for a shorter workday must also mean to fight for a workers’ government and a break with capitalism. The goal is to establish a democratically planned economy and a society where the slogan “Our lives are worth more than their profits” is a reality.
Abolish wage slavery!
Marx defined communism as “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor-power in full self-awareness as one single social labor force.” That is, a communist society is a society without classes, a society in which production won’t be ruled by the desire for ever greater profits for a tiny ruling class but by the needs of the whole society in the greatest possible harmony with nature. Money will no longer exist. Neither will the state.
There will not be a minority accumulating all the wealth while the vast majority lives in poverty, forced to work just to survive. A communist society will allow people to live a life free from all forms of oppression, one in which the time spent at work is reduced to a minimum and “free time” is spent not merely on the reproduction of one’s labor power, i.e., on the necessities of life that enable us to return to work the next day, but on actually living our lives.
In his work The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky says that “the very purpose of communism (...) is to free finally and once for all the creative forces of mankind from all pressure, limitation and humiliating dependence. Personal relations, science and art will not know any externally imposed “plan,” nor even any shadow of compulsion. To what degree spiritual creativeness shall be individual or collective will depend entirely upon its creators.”
This is what we fight for.
—Left Voice, December 15, 2017
http://www.leftvoice.org/The-Fight-for-Free-Time-and-the-Fight-Against-Capitalism
1 Paul Lafargue, January 15, 1842-November 25, 1911, was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist; he was Karl Marx’s son-in-law having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right To Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Creole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by a suicide pact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lafargue
Continued on page
The Flint Militants
Eighty years ago, the Flint Sit-Down Strike showed the power of a determined rank and file and a class-conscious leadership.
On February 8, 1937, John L. Lewis, leader of the fledgling Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), met with Frank Murphy, the newly elected governor of Michigan.
Just over a month earlier—and just two days before Murphy started his term—hundreds of autoworkers had seized two General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, paralyzing the massive corporation’s production line. The workers’ new tactic—the sit-down strike—was threatening to fundamentally change the balance of power between workers and management.
Recognizing what was at stake, GM cut the heat to the occupied plants, hoping the cold would break the sit-downers’ morale. But the strikers were determined to stay. They sent Murphy a defiant telegram in response to rumors that he might mobilize the National Guard to evict them, announcing that they would be pulled out dead before they walked out on their own.
Murphy had to do some quick electoral math. On one side, there was Michigan’s most powerful employer. On the other were workers and their families, who would never vote for him again if he broke a strike. Murphy turned to Lewis, demanding that he “do something.”
Lewis replied: “I did not ask these men to sit down. I did not ask General Motors to turn off the heat. I did not have any part in either the sit-down strike or the attempt to freeze the men. Let General Motors talk to them.” He wasn’t being evasive. While Lewis was determined to organize industrial workers, he was wary of the sit-down.
Getting no help from the CIO’s leader, Murphy tried to split the difference. He ordered the nearly four thousand soldiers to shut down the highways into Flint, hoping to prevent the United Auto Workers (UAW) from calling in reinforcements. Then he tried Lewis again, demanding that he remove his strikers from the plants. He backed it up with a signed order permitting the National Guard to use force if necessary.
But something had changed in Lewis. No longer willing to leave it up to the workers and management, Lewis stood fully behind his members. He told Murphy (perhaps apocryphally):
“Tomorrow morning, I shall personally enter General Motors plant Chevrolet No. 4. I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast. I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt, and bare my bosom. Then when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike.”
Lewis’s shift from ambivalence to militancy captures the dynamic of the Flint Sit-Down Strike. After years of industrialization built on their backs, workers were standing their ground—and actors across the economy, from GM bosses to labor leaders, were forced to take note. Spurred on by socialists and communists, organized labor grabbed a seat at the table, much to the chagrin of the ruling class.
Eighty years later, the Flint Sit-Down Strike offers an enduring lesson: that with a well-organized rank and file and a class-conscious leadership, an ambitious union can bring down the most powerful corporations in the world.
Expansion and crisis
1920s America was a nation in transition.
The expansion of mass production industries and the collapse of agricultural prices triggered widespread migration. Millions of rural families in the South packed up and moved to northern towns and cities, lured by the promise of higher-paying factory jobs. The number of working women rose by almost 30 percent over the decade, and Black farming families’ arrival in cities created the conditions for integration on a scale the U.S. had not yet seen.
The rapid changes in the American workforce disrupted what little momentum the labor movement had built up. Employers played organized workers against the unorganized, skilled workers against the unskilled, employed against the unemployed, and the traditional working class against newcomers. Bosses used race and ethnicity to divide and conquer, and pushed for non-union “open shops” across the country.
American workers saw little way out of this bleak situation. The bosses’ blacklists, their “yellow dog contracts” (which forbid union membership as a condition of employment,) and their vast network of saboteurs hobbled workers’ efforts to build solidarity. Courts jailed union leaders and granted pro-employer injunctions. When coercion and the law wouldn’t quell militant workers, employers used private and public police forces to violently break strikes.
The AFL, battered and beleaguered, struggled to survive the onslaught. The federation’s membership was concentrated in just a few industries—construction, coal, railroads, printing, water transportation, music—while the rapidly growing manufacturing sector was virtually union-free.
A conservative, hidebound institution, the AFL still organized by craft rather than industry, leaving out less skilled workers. The AFL not only didn’t attract the immigrant and Black laborers joining mass-production industries—it often fought against them.
The federation’s leadership had also come to accept capitalism’s basic tenets and sought collaboration—rather than confrontation—with employers. They redbaited the socialists, communists, and radicals trying to push the unions in a more militant direction. Certain locals barred communists completely.
The labor movement suffered as a result. At the end of the 1920s, union members made up just 10.2 percent of the more than thirty million non-agricultural workers—an almost 20 percent decline over the decade.
Then, on Black Tuesday, 1929, the bottom fell out of the economy. Fourteen billion dollars vanished in a single day. Anywhere between 13.3 million and 18 million workers found themselves unemployed, and an estimated 1.5 million homeless people wandered the country, seeking jobs, relief, any means to survive. Those lucky enough to find work endured plummeting wages.
The proliferation of shantytowns, the waves of roving migrants, the long bread lines—all testified to the state’s ineffective response and the chasm between the political mainstream’s rhetoric and working people’s everyday struggles.
This polarized atmosphere pushed workers toward more militant action, but they still lacked support. More than once, workers clamored for union representation, signed cards, and later ripped them up when the AFL declined to support their union drives and strikes. By 1933, AFL membership had fallen to a new low.
The militant minority
In 1934, titanic labor battles broke out in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco. Struggles at the workplace spilled into the streets and transformed each city in the process. The seminal victories convinced the AFL to form the Committee of Industrial Organizations (later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations).
Initially, the CIO aimed to organize the steel industry, but autoworkers, backed by left-wing unionists, were already struggling against their powerful industry and its dehumanizing conditions. After some notable wins, autoworkers demanded their own international within the AFL. In August 1935, the UAW was born.
Less than a year later, the AFL leaders decisively lost the fight for control over the nascent international, ceding power to the rank-and-file leadership, many of them militants from the Communist Party (CP) and Socialist Party (SP) who had earned the trust of autoworkers in local struggles.
The radical unionists were but a fraction of the UAW’s membership—and the union itself only represented a fraction of all autoworkers—but they had run aggressive organizing drives and deployed militant strike tactics over years of painstaking work. The UAW hoped to generalize this strategy across the auto industry.
The first target was GM. Like most automakers, the massive company imposed inhumane, dictatorial rule in its plants. Foremen denigrated workers with pejorative nicknames and timed their employees’ every move to increase productivity. Workers who disagreed with their foreman immediately lost their jobs, with no chance to appeal.
Even after workers’ shifts ended, foremen wielded immense power. As socialist activist Genora Dollinger explained, bosses expected their employees “to bring them turkeys on Thanksgiving, gifts for Christmas and repair their motor cars, and even paint their houses.”
Things were especially bad for woman. “In one department of A.C. [a GM division],” Dollinger noted, “the [young women] had all been forced to go to the county hospital and be treated for venereal disease [that was] traced [back] to one foreman.”
GM not only ran its plants with an iron fist, it also practically owned Flint. Politicians cycled in and out of employment with GM, and open support for workers would guarantee electoral defeat.
This meant that the UAW had to do their organizing clandestinely. Slowly, over most of 1936, it built up its membership. The SP played an important role in this process, but CP militants were also crucial. Beginning in 1926, the CP had established cells in factories, published dozens of shop papers, and cultivated a leadership layer among autoworkers. The UAW relied heavily on these networks for recruitment.
After signing up a few hundred autoworkers in Flint, the UAW was confident the time was right for a strike. It chose the sit-down tactic because a few workers could launch it, inspiring thousands to join in.
The initial plan was to wait for January 1937, when labor-friendly Frank Murphy would begin his term. In fact, the union leadership tried to stop spontaneous actions from breaking out at GM plants. But a sit-down strike in Cleveland in late December 1936 and the subsequent transfer of unionists out of the Flint Fisher Body Plant No. 1 got the battle in Flint started early.
The strike begins
At 7:00 A.M. on December 29, 1936, workers at Fisher Body Plant No. 1 sat down. By 8:00 P.M., workers in Body Plant No. 2 had seized their building, barricading the entrances to maintain control of the plants.
The workers formed a broad strike committee that met daily to discuss problems, make decisions, and boost morale. While they elected an executive committee to carry out the day-to-day tasks, the strikers themselves retained decision-making power. This democratic structure flowed from the CP’s conviction that a successful strike depended on the rank and file, especially since the number of occupying workers remained relatively small compared to those not participating.
Outside the plant, the CP—particularly its women members—helped build a strike kitchen for the workers and picketers. CPers Dorothy Kraus and Margaret Anderson created the Women’s Auxiliary, which established a speaker’s bureau, publicity committee, nursery, and first-aid station.
GM, meanwhile, fumed at the two halted production lines.
The company first turned to the courts to jumpstart the plants. Though it won an injunction against the workers, the court order backfired when it was revealed that the presiding judge had invested hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in GM stock. Legal avenues exhausted, the automaker decided to take more aggressive action.
On January 12, the company shut off the heat to the occupied plants, and the police smashed the ladders the strikers were using to receive food and visitors. When picketers rushed the entrance, a street brawl broke out.
Half of Flint’s police force descended on the protesters with clubs, tear gas, buckshot, and firebombs. The workers in the plant threw metal hinges, nuts, and bolts at cops and blasted frigid water from the roof with a fire hose. They overturned four police cars to form a barricade.
The fight dragged on for hours, eventually drawing a sizable crowd. Using loudspeakers mounted on a UAW car, Dollinger appealed to the witnesses. Inspired by her words and the scene unfolding in front of them, hundreds of citizens marched into the middle of the fight, handing the UAW a victory.
The battle motivated Dollinger to establish the Women’s Emergency Brigade. The women wore red berets and armbands emblazoned with the initials “EB.” They wielded clubs, bars of soap in socks, and blackjacks. During some of the strike’s most pivotal moments, this group would prove to be a crucial defender of the sit-downers.
Plant No. 4
The street fight, nicknamed the “Battle of the Running Bulls,” boosted the workers’ confidence. But the UAW and GM remained deadlocked in contract negotiations. Union leaders came to believe that the workers had already exhausted their best tactic and struggled to come up with a new idea to break the stalemate.
Kermit Johnson, a member of the SP’s left wing, proposed seizing another plant—specifically, Chevrolet Plant No. 4, where GM built the engines for every Chevrolet in the world. Taking No. 4 would bring production to a standstill.
GM, fully aware of the potential chokepoint, stationed plant police and anti-union guards outside the engine-building facility to deter workers from joining their comrades. (The UAW also had relatively weak support at the plant.)
Most of the UAW leadership, including Walter Reuther, thought Johnson’s plan was too risky. Reuther’s reputation among the strike leaders was enough to kill the proposal, but Johnson didn’t give up. His wife, Dollinger, wrote to the SP leadership begging for help.
The party sent its labor secretary, Frank Trager. At a large SP-sponsored gathering in Flint, Trager threw his support behind Johnson’s plan. The workers saw no other alternative to the stalemate and voted overwhelmingly for the proposal, overriding the leadership’s concerns.
The strike leaders assented, but devised a ruse: they told most of the workers to seize Plant No. 9, a misdirection that they hoped would throw off the GM’s informants. It worked. GM concentrated their police forces at the decoy location.
On February 1, workers, picketers, and the Women’s Emergency Brigade charged the officers protecting Plant No. 9. GM called in reinforcements from across the complex, leaving the real target vulnerable.
Johnson and a couple hundred autoworkers sprung into action. They pushed out the facility’s supervisors and held Plant No. 4, shutting down GM’s production line entirely.
Losing No.4 dealt GM a mighty blow. The company now recognized that they could only smash the strike if Murphy mobilized the National Guard. But the automaker once again underestimated its employees. The successful seizure of Plant No. 4 had emboldened the workers, who were now prepared to fight until the death. Fearing political suicide, Murphy refused to send in soldiers.
In a last ditch effort, GM once again killed the heat to the seized plants and prepared to send in the police. The strikers responded by opening the plants’ large windows to freeze the fire-fighting equipment and nullify GM’s insurance contracts. Realizing that an intensified struggle would drive the autoworkers to destroy expensive machinery, GM backed down.
Just days later, management agreed to the UAW’s single demand: that the automaker recognize the union as the sole bargaining agent for the entire GM workforce.
The UAW and its members had brought one of the most powerful American corporations to its knees.
Flint today
The successful struggle in Flint triggered a contagion of sit-downs across the country. “Sit-Down Fever,” as the New York Times called it, spread to New England, Pennsylvania, and deeper into the Midwest.
The UAW exploded in size as thousands of autoworkers seized their own plants. By October, the union had secured contracts with dozens of automobile manufacturers and organized some four-hundred-thousand workers.
Sit-down fever reached workers outside the auto industry, too. All over Detroit, bellboys, shop girls, waitresses, truckers, lumbermen, meat packers, and cigar rollers sat down for union recognition. The sit-downs spooked U.S. Steel president William A. Irvin so much that he settled a contract with the CIO before it could even call a strike. The deal established the CIO as a major force in the mass production industries.
Just a decade later, however, the sparks that fueled mass unionization had been smothered. The Supreme Court, privileging property rights over workers rights, ruled in 1939 that the sit-down strike was illegal. And in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act opened the door to a widespread purge of radicals from union leadership. By the time the CIO merged with the AFL in 1955, the militant minority had been driven into isolation.
In the decades since, conservative leaders have dominated the American labor movement, treading the path of business unionism. This conciliatory approach has cost workers wages and rights, and compounded the severe structural issues facing the movement. Today, organized labor is almost as weak as it was before the great strikes of 1934: union membership hovers at six percent in the private sector and 11 percent overall.
But if things seem dire now, we should remember how bad things were back then.
Despite enormous hurdles, the CIO was able to win its early battles because of the bold strategies a militant minority set in motion. These principled fighters were communists and socialists—leftists who successfully merged their radical ideas with workers’ eagerness to fight for dignity and a better life.
Today, eight decades after the sit-downs in Flint, the newly revived American left must invest its time and energy into helping workers prepare for battles for higher pay, better working conditions, and more rights. When socialists and unionists fight together, we can win.
—Jacobin, October 13, 2017
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/flint-sit-down-strike-anniversary-autoworkers
Continued from page 36
...the Flint Sit-Down Strike offers an enduring lesson: that with a well-organized rank and file and a class-conscious leadership, an ambitious union can bring down the most powerful corporations in the world...
Strikers relaxing on auto seats during the occupation in 1936.
Korea: State of Fear
How history’s deadliest bombing campaign created today’s crisis in Korea
As the world watches with mounting concern the growing tensions and bellicose rhetoric between the United States and North Korea, one of the most remarkable aspects of the situation is the absence of any public acknowledgement of the underlying reason for North Korean fears—or, as termed by United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, “state of paranoia”—namely, the horrific firebombing campaign waged by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and the unprecedented death toll that resulted from that bombing.
Although the full facts will never be known, the available evidence points toward the conclusion that the firebombing of North Korea’s cities, towns, and villages produced more civilian deaths than any other bombing campaign in history.
Historian Bruce Cumings describes the bombing campaign as “probably one of the worst episodes of unrestrained American violence against another people, but it’s certainly the one that the fewest Americans know about.”
The campaign, carried out from 1950 to 1953, killed two million North Koreans according to General Curtis LeMay, the head of the Strategic Air Command and the organizer of the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In 1984, LeMay told the Office of Air Force History that the bombing of North Korea had “killed off 20 percent of the population.”
Other sources cite a somewhat lower number. According to a data set developed by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), the “best estimate” of civilian deaths in North Korea is 995,000, with a low estimate of 645,000 and a high estimate of 1.5 million.
Though half of LeMay’s estimate, the CSCW/PRIO estimate of 995,000 deaths still exceeds the civilian death tolls of any other bombing campaign, including the Allied firebombing of German cities in World War II, which claimed an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 lives; the firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japanese cities, which caused an estimated 330,000 to 900,000 deaths; and the bombing of Indochina from 1964 to 1973, which caused an estimated 121,000 to 361,000 deaths overall during Operation Rolling Thunder, Operation Linebacker, and Operation Linebacker II (Vietnam), Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal (Cambodia), and Operation Barrel Roll (Laos).
The heavy death toll from the bombing of North Korea is especially notable in view of the relatively modest population of the country: just 9.7 million people in 1950. By comparison, there were 65 million people in Germany and 72 million people in Japan at the end of World War II.
The attacks by the U.S. Air Force against North Korea used the firebombing tactics that had been developed in the World War II bombing of Europe and Japan: explosives to break up buildings, napalm, and other incendiaries to ignite massive fires, and strafing to prevent fire-fighting crews from extinguishing the blazes.
The use of these tactics was not a foregone conclusion. According to United States policies in effect at the onset of the Korean War, firebombing directed at civilian populations was forbidden. A year earlier, in 1949, a series of U.S. Navy admirals had condemned such tactics in testimony before Congressional hearings. During this “Revolt of the Admirals,” the Navy had taken issue with their Air Force colleagues, contending that attacks carried out against civilian populations were counterproductive from a military perspective and violated global moral norms.
Coming at a time when the Nuremberg tribunals had heightened public awareness of war crimes, the criticisms of the Navy admirals found a sympathetic ear in the court of public opinion. Consequently, attacking civilian populations was forbidden as a matter of U.S. policy at the beginning of the Korean War. When Air Force General George E. Stratemeyer requested permission to use the same firebombing methods on five North Korean cities that “brought Japan to its knees,” General Douglas MacArthur denied the request, citing “general policy.”
Five months into the war, with Chinese forces having intervened on the side of North Korea and UN forces in retreat, General MacArthur changed his position, agreeing to General Stratemeyer’s request on November 3, 1950, to burn the North Korean city of Kanggye and several other towns: “Burn it if you so desire. Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson to any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy.” The same evening, MacArthur’s chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: “Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target.” Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to “destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village.”
While the Air Force was blunt in its own internal communications about the nature of the bombing campaign—including maps showing the exact percentage of each city that had been incinerated—communications to the press described the bombing campaign as one directed solely at “enemy troop concentrations, supply dumps, war plants, and communication lines.”
The orders given to the Fifth Air Force were more clear: “Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter.”
Within less than three weeks of the initial assault on Kanggye, ten cities had been burned, including Ch’osan (85 percent), Hoeryong (90 percent), Huich’on (75 percent), Kanggye (75 percent), Kointong (90 percent), Manp’ochin (95 percent), Namsi (90 percent), Sakchu (75 percent), Sinuichu (60 percent), and Uichu (20 percent).
On November 17, 1950, General MacArthur told U.S. Ambassador to Korea, John J. Muccio, “Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert.” By “this area” MacArthur meant the entire area between “our present positions and the border.”
As the Air Force continued burning cities, it kept careful track of the resulting levels of destruction:
Anju—15 percent, Chinnampo (Namp’o)—80 percent, Chongju (Chŏngju)—60 percent, Haeju—75 percent, Hamhung (Hamhŭng)—80 percent, Hungnam (Hŭngnam)—85 percent, Hwangju (Hwangju County)—97 percent, Kanggye—60 percent (reduced from previous estimate of 75 percent), Kunu-ri (Kunu-dong)—100 percent, Kyomipo (Songnim)—80 percent, Musan—five percent, Najin (Rashin)—five percent, Pyongyang—75 percent, Sariwon (Sariwŏn)—95 percent, Sinanju—100 percent, Sinuiju—50 percent, Songjin (Kimchaek)—50 percent, Sunan (Sunan-guyok)—90 percent, Unggi (Sonbong County)—five percent, Wonsan (Wŏnsan)—80 percent.
In May 1951, an international fact-finding team stated, “The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages.”
On June 25, 1951, General O’Donnell, commander of the Far Eastern Air Force Bomber Command, testified in answer to a question from Senator Stennis, “…North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn’t it?”
“Oh; yes…I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name…Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea.”
In August 1951, war correspondent, Tibor Meray, stated that he had witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital.” He said that there were “no more cities in North Korea.” He added, “My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation. …[E]very city was a collection of chimneys.”
Several factors combined to intensify the deadliness of the firebombing attacks. As had been learned in World War II, incendiary attacks could devastate cities with incredible speed. The Royal Air Force’s firebombing attack on Würzburg, Germany, in the closing months of World War II had required only 20 minutes to envelop the city in a firestorm with temperatures estimated at 1500-2000 degrees Centigrade (2732-3632 degrees Fahrenheit.)
Another factor contributing to the deadliness of attacks was the severity of North Korea’s winter. In Pyongyang, the average low temperature in January is eight degrees Fahrenheit. Since the most severe bombing took place in November 1950, those who escaped immediate death by fire were left at risk of death by exposure in the days and months that followed. Survivors created makeshift shelters in canyons, caves, or abandoned cellars. In May 1951 a visiting delegation to the bombed city of Sinuiju from the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) reported:
“The overwhelming majority of the inhabitants live in dugouts made of earth supported from salvaged timber. Some of these dugouts have roofs made of tiles and timber salvaged from destroyed buildings. Others are living in cellars that remained after the bombardment and still others in thatched tents with the frame-work of destroyed buildings and in huts made of un-mortared brick and rubble.”
In Pyongyang, the delegation described a family of five members, including a three-year-old child and an eight-month-old infant, living in an underground space measuring two square meters that could only be entered by crawling through a three-meter tunnel.
A third deadly factor was the extensive use of napalm. Developed at Harvard University in 1942, the sticky, flammable substance was first used in World War II. It became a key weapon during the Korean War, in which 32,557 tons were used under a logic that historian Bruce Cumings characterized: “They are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.” Long after the war, Cumings described an encounter with one aging survivor:
“On a street corner stood a man (I think it was a man or a woman with broad shoulders) who had a peculiar purple crust on every visible part of his skin—thick on his hands, thin on his arms, fully covering his entire head and face. He was bald, he had no ears or lips, and his eyes, lacking lids, were a grayish-white with no pupils…. [T]his purplish crust resulted from a drenching with napalm after which the untreated victim’s body was left to somehow cure itself.”
During armistice talks at the conclusion of the fighting, U.S. commanders had run out of cities and towns to target. In order to place pressure on the negotiations, they now turned the bombers toward Korea’s major dams. As reported in the New York Times, the flood from the destruction of one dam “scooped clean” twenty-seven miles of river valley and destroyed thousands of acres of newly planted rice.
In the wake of the firebombing campaigns against Germany and Japan during World War II, a Pentagon research group comprising 1,000 members carried out an exhaustive assessment known as the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The USSBS released 208 volumes for Europe and 108 volumes for Japan and the Pacific, including casualty counts, interviews with survivors, and economic surveys. These industry-by-industry reports were so detailed that General Motors used the results to successfully sue the U.S. government for $32 million in damages to its German plants.
After the Korean War, no survey of the bombing was done other than the Air Force’s own internal maps showing city-by-city destruction. These maps were kept secret for the next twenty years. By the time the maps were quietly declassified in 1973, America’s interest in the Korean War had long since faded. Only in recent years has the full picture begun to emerge in studies by historians such as Taewoo Kim of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, Conrad Crane of the U.S. Military Academy, and Su-kyoung Hwang of the University of Pennsylvania.
In North Korea the memory lives on. According to historian Bruce Cumings, “It was the first thing my guide brought up with me.” Cumings writes: “The unhindered machinery of incendiary bombing was visited on the North for three years yielding a wasteland and a surviving mole-people who had learned to love the shelter of caves, mountains, tunnels and redoubts—a subterranean world that became the basis for reconstructing a country and a memento for building a fierce hatred through the ranks of the population.”
To this day, the firebombing of North Korea’s cities, towns, and villages remains virtually unknown to the general public and unacknowledged in media discussions of the crisis despite the obvious relevance to North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear deterrent. Yet without knowing and confronting these facts, the American public cannot begin to comprehend the fear that lies at the heart of North Korean attitudes and actions.
Ted Nace is the Director of CoalSwarm. He is the founder of Peachpit Press and the author of Gangs of America and Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Coal.
—CounterPunch, December 8, 2017
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/08/state-of-fear-how-historys-deadliest-bombing-campaign-created-todays-crisis-in-korea/
...the firebombing of North Korea’s cities, towns, and villages
produced more civilian deaths than any other bombing campaign in history
Massive bombing of North Korea during U.S War on Korea.
Pilots in Germany Stop Some Deportations
In the first half of 2017, a total of 12,545 people were deported from Germany. But not every deportation was successful. The German government just informed the parliament that between January and September of this year, 222 deportations were prevented because airplane pilots refused to take off. According to the government’s statement, 143 deportations were stopped at Germany’s biggest airport, Frankfurt am Main. A further 40 were stopped in Düsseldorf.
A pilot decides if a flight can start safely. If a passenger is being deported, i.e., forced to travel to a foreign country against their will, then a pilot can refuse to fly.
Pilots especially refused to deport people to Afghanistan. German authorities classify Afghanistan as a “safe country of origin,” despite the fact that the foreign ministry warns against any travel to that destination. German politicians will only travel there in bulletproof vests, staying hidden behind concrete walls. The German army has been involved in the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan for more than a decade.
When refusing to participate in this state-run displacement, pilots show the enormous power of the working class. When hundreds of anti-racist activists protest in front of an airport, they cannot always stop deportations. But a single pilot can do so reliably.
Pilots in Germany have repeatedly shown their massive social power, with both official strikes and campaigns of calling in sick (wildcat strikes.) These strikes have been in defense of their own interests. But pilots can also strike in the interest of the whole working class—refugees, after all, are just the most exploited sector of the proletariat. Deportations just serve to divide our class and worsen the conditions for everyone.
We need unions that organize all workers, regardless of whether they have papers or not. And we need strikes to defend the rights of all workers against racism.
—Left Voice, December 6, 2017
http://leftvoice.org/The-Power-of-the-Working-Class-Pilots-in-Germany-Stop-Deportations
Democratic, Secular Palestine for All Its Peoples
As Israeli troops violently suppress Palestinian protests, what road forward for the Palestinian struggle is again being seriously discussed.
An article in the December 8 New York Times with a headline “Two State Option, a Mideast Keystone, Is Sent Askew,” begins:
“President Trump, in formally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Wednesday, declared that the United States still supported a two-state solution to settle the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, provided it was ‘agreed to by both sides.’
“For the first time in his 26 years as a peacemaker, the chief negotiator for the Palestinians did not agree.
“Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a steadfast advocate for a Palestinian state, said in an interview on Thursday, December 7, 2017, that Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ‘have managed to destroy that hope.’ He embraced a radical shift in the PLO’s goals—to a single state, but with Palestinians enjoying the same civil rights as Israelis, including the vote.
“‘They’ve left us with no option,’ he said. ‘This is the reality. We live here. Our struggle should focus on one thing: equal rights.’”
To understand how we got here, it is useful to review the historical development, beginning with the different approaches to the fight against the physical and cultural oppression of Jews in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Zionism was always a generally rightist force within the European Jewish movement in the first half of the twentieth century, explicitly counter-posed to the socialist movement, including to Jewish socialists who outnumbered the Zionists. At times, the most reactionary Zionists even sought alliances with anti-Semites, since both sought the removal of Jews from Europe, although with opposing arguments. (There is an echo of this today, as the right wing of the Christian Evangelicals, who think all Jews, including in Israel, should go to Hell unless they convert to the Evangelical version of Christianity, yet they support Israel. Anti-Semites in the Alt-Right also support Israel.)
After WWII, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Zionist movement gained strength. The British, French and U.S. imperialists threw their support behind the creation of a Zionist state in British-controlled Palestine. Without this imperialist backing, Israel would not and could not have been created. (Stalin backed the West in this endeavor but that’s another story.)
The creation of Israel meant the dispossession of an estimated 500,000—700,000 Arab peoples, mainly Muslims and a large Christian minority, that had lived for over a millennium in what became Palestine. This created the Palestinian diaspora, in what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (catastrophe,) an historical crime.
Ever since, it has been imperialist political and material support with money, arms and imperialist threats against resisting groups and Arab states that has kept Israel alive. One example: without the massive emergency airlift of heavy weapons by the U.S. to Israel in the 1973 Israeli-Arab war, Israel would have been defeated. (Then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, later admitted that Israel, when it looked like it was losing the war, was ready to use nuclear weapons, which would likely have triggered Soviet intervention and World War III.)
The objective of the Arab states involved in the 1973 war was to take back the areas Israel conquered in 1967, not to attempt to destroy Israel. That the Israeli leaders were ready to use atomic weapons to keep its conquered territories is relevant to this discussion about the Israeli reality today.
The present situation
What is the present situation? Israel occupied all of Palestine in the 1967 war, as well as the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Later, the Sinai was returned to Egypt when Egyptian President Sadat capitulated to Israel, but the West Bank remained under Israeli control to the present day. Gaza, a heavily populated urban strip of land, is brutally suppressed, its borders on land and sea patrolled by Israeli forces.
The actual borders of Israel have been, for 50 years, not the pre-1967 “Green Line,” but the borders the Israeli armed forces defend, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, from Egypt to Syria. Within these, its real borders, there is one currency, the shekel. There is one foreign policy, one army and navy and one government. (The Palestinian Authority is not the governmental power in the West Bank—it’s allowed to police the area, is responsible for some services, etc., but the real state power is the Israeli government.) The same is basically true in Gaza. Every few years Israel carries out a military assault on Gaza (they call it “mowing the lawn”) to show who’s the boss.
In short, there is one state already, between Egypt and Syria in one direction, and the Mediterranean and the Jordan in the other. The “occupation” is not temporary or subject to negotiation—i.e., the West Bank and Gaza are not occupied territory but conquered zones incorporated into Israel.
Within this single state there are Arabs, Druse and others who are citizens of Israel within the “Green Line.” These are severely oppressed as second-class citizens—more accurately as oppressed nationalities—like Blacks in the U.S.
But Arabs and others in the West Bank and Gaza, who are under Israeli state control, are not citizens of Israel and have no rights. This is what makes Israel an apartheid state.
Israel’s policy is to not only preserve the present apartheid state, but to reinforce it by continuing to build new settlements that are legally part of Israel and defended by the permanent presence of Israeli forces in the West Bank. The settlements are connected by roads to Green Line Israel—roads, which Palestinians are not allowed to use. “No two-state solution” while he is Prime Minister, Netanyahu boasted.
(We should note that there never was a real “two state” solution. Both Israel and the U.S. have always insisted that any Palestinian “state” could not have its own armed forces, could not control its own borders, nor have its own foreign policy—these would be under Israeli jurisdiction. That is not a state.)
The “really existing” Israel is already a single state. The only question now is what kind of state—the present semi-theocratic Jewish supremacist, apartheid state, or a democratic and secular one with equal rights for all of its people?
The latter position recognizes that Israeli Jews have become part of Palestine, and have been so for many generations. As opposed to all conceptions of driving the Jewish people out, a democratic state would encompass them as equal citizens. As opposed to a Jewish, Muslim or Christian state, a secular state would guarantee religious freedom for all and strict separation of religious institutions and the state.
This is not a new discussion for me. In 1968, as a young leader of the Socialist Workers Party, I accompanied the SWP presidential candidate, Fred Halstead, in a trip around the world. Fred was a leader of the antiwar movement, and our main objective was to go to (south) Vietnam to talk to U.S. Soldiers about the war. Among other objectives of our trip, one was to go to Cairo to interview people from a new Palestinian fighting organization, named Fatah. I did succeed in sitting down in my Cairo hotel room with two young leaders of the group who spoke English. It was from them that I first heard of the proposal for a democratic, secular Palestine. They explained that the leaders of Arab nations had sought to “drive the Jews into the sea,” and that this was wrong. The Jews were here to stay. Their solution was equal rights for all, in a democratic, secular Palestine. They were against Zionism, not Jews, they said. A photo of a Fatah slogan painted on a wall read, “We fight Israel because it oppresses our people.”
This was discussed in the SWP. In the preparation of our 1971 convention, I, and Gus Horowitz (who knew a lot about Jewish and Israeli history, much more than I, a non-Jew) drafted a resolution on Israel that included support for a democratic, secular Palestine. This resolution was adopted by the SWP at the convention.1
How the situation on the ground has evolved not only since 1971, but for 50 years after the1967 war, with Israel becoming a full-fledged apartheid state, has not only made the arguments for a democratic single state more glaringly obvious, but a burning necessity. The only realistic solution, as Erekat said, is a single state with equal rights for all. This position is gaining ground among Palestinians, as the two-state option fades into oblivion.
—Marxism, December 15, 2017
http://www.marxmail.org/msg148569.html
1 The text of Socialist Workers Party resolution mentioned above is available on line at:
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.ca/2011/09/for-democratic-secular-palestine.html
When refusing to
participate in this
state-run displacement, pilots show the
enormous power of
the working class.
The “occupation” is not temporary or subject to
negotiation—i.e., the West Bank and Gaza are not
occupied territory but conquered zones incorporated into Israel.
Alliance Between Zionism and Anti-Semitism
A discussion with renowned Palestinian scholar, Professor Joseph Massad
At its annual gala this November, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) feted Sebastian Gorka alongside fellow Trump White House alumni Steven Bannon and Sean Spicer. The ZOA’s president, Morton Klein, has established a special relationship with the Trump administration, going out of his way to defend Gorka against accusations of Nazi sympathies.
On the eve of Trump’s election, Gorka appeared in nationally televised interviews clad in a black uniform bearing the medal of the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian fascist group that collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Speaking at a conference organized by the right-wing Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post in May, Gorka defended his wearing the medal, proclaiming, “My father was awarded a medal in 1979 by anti-communist members of a splinter order outside Hungary...I am proud to wear that, as a response to everything that we face today.”
Vitzezi Rend has appeared on a U.S. State Department list of “organizations under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany,” and its late founder, Miklos Horthy, reportedly declared, “I have always been an anti-Semite throughout my life.” During the anti-communist White Terror that took place between 1919 and 1921 in Hungary, Horthy presided over some 60 pogroms, and attacks on Jews continued through the 1920’s. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Horthy participated in the deportation of 437,000 Jews to concentration camps.
Gorka’s attachment to a fascist order that reveres Horthy and his anti-Jewish legacy has not appeared to trouble supporters of Israel’s right-wing government. Not only has Gorka been an honored guest of the ZOA, he was welcomed by the Jerusalem Post, which received him with warm applause and a prominent speaking slot at its annual conference this May in New York. “The real agenda is clear: Gorka has written forcefully about the need to defeat the jihadi threat to Western civilization,” an op-ed defending Gorka in the Jerusalem Post read.
Along with his vitriolic anti-Muslim politics, Gorka’s full-throated support for Israeli settler colonialism has earned him the abiding friendship of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political network. For them, the rest—especially his membership in an organization that assisted in the extermination of Jews—is commentary.
This scenario is a microcosm of the disturbing dynamic playing out across Europe, where ultra-nationalist political parties with fascist roots are forging alliances with Israel’s leadership. Drawn together by a dedication to a perceived “clash of civilizations” between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world, officials from the far-right Alternative For Deutschland and the Austrian Freedom Party have been received for official visits by Israel’s governing Likud Party and even treated to visits at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial museum.
In Ukraine, Dmitry Yarosh, the leader of the neo-Nazi street fighting organization known as Right Sector, was granted a private audience in 2014 with Israel’s ambassador, who proclaimed that “Right Sector will oppose all [racist] phenomena, especially anti-Semitism, with all legitimate means.” Under the watch of Yarosh and his allies, neo-Nazism has since exploded across Ukraine, with mass marches of torch-bearing fascists filling the streets of Kiev and monuments to pogromist Nazi collaborators sprouting up around the country. “Ukraine has more statues for killers of Jews than any other country,” the anti-Nazi activist and researcher Efraim Zuroff lamented on Twitter.
According to Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University and the author of the new book, Islam in Liberalism, the emerging alliance between Zionists and European ultra-nationalists reflects an ongoing historical development that dates back to the late 19th century.
In a wide-ranging discussion with me, and Ben Norton for our weekly podcast Moderate Rebels, Massad explained why, in his words, “Israel has no problem allying itself with anti-Semites who support its colonialism.” He asserted, “The problem [for Zionists] is not pro or anti-Jewishness with Israel, it’s pro-colonialism or anti-colonialism. Pro-Zionism as a colonial movement or not.”
Massad detailed the collaboration between Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, and anti-Semites like Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw brutal pogroms as the police chief of imperial Russia. Arthur Balfour, the former British Prime Minister and author of the Aliens Act that barred the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Britain, was also a key ally of Herzl and his Zionist Congress, which partnered with him on the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 “notwithstanding or precisely because of his anti-Semitic sentiment,” Massad noted.
Zionists like Herzl and anti-Semites like Balfour shared the view that the presence of assimilationist-minded Jews on the continent was unacceptable. Herzl “disdained poor Jews in Western Europe and blamed them for anti-Semitism,” according to Massad, and even argued that it was in the best interest of rich Jews to send poor Jews away to a colony in historic Palestine as it would reduce friction with Christian anti-Semites and allow poor gentiles to take their jobs.
Like Herzl, anti-Semitic European elites viewed a Jewish state as a convenient means for reducing the Jewish population within their societies. “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies,” Herzl declared.
“Anti-Semites saw in Zionism a kindred spirit and they shared with other Zionists the understanding that getting rid of European Jews somewhere else is a goal that they share,” Massad stated.
The alliance deepened during World War Two, as the Zionist movement broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany to embark on a lucrative Transfer Agreement with Hitler’s government that exchanged Jewish property for the bodies the Zionists needed to colonize Palestine. As Massad pointed out, when the fugitive Nazi functionary Adolph Eichmann was captured in 1960 and brought to Israel for trial a year later for war crimes, it was his second visit to the Holy Land. Indeed, Eichmann had been a guest of the Zionist movement in 1937, hosted for a tour of kibbutzim in historic Palestine by a double Zionist-Nazi agent named Feibl Folkes.
“Eichmann quoted Folkes to the effect that Zionist leaders were pleased by the persecution of European Jewry, since it would encourage emigration to Palestine,” the Israeli historian Tom Segev noted in his book The Seventh Million.
When anti-Semitism reared its head in U.S.-aligned nations after the war, the state of Israel generally kept quiet. The disturbing silence was vividly illustrated during the liberal rebellion that momentarily seized power in Hungary in 1956. With assistance from the CIA, which aimed to wrest the country from the Warsaw Pact, the former commanders of Horthy’s collaborationist army were returned to Budapest, where they inspired widespread violence against Hungarian Jews.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “the fact that Hungary’s top four Communist leaders were of Jewish origin—including the dictator Matyas Rakosi, who reigned at the height of the Communist terror in the early 1950s—lent credibility to the idea of communism as Jewish revenge for the Holocaust.” (Herbert Aptheker’s 1956 book The Truth About Hungary1 is one of the most thorough chronicles of the return of fascism to the country during its anti-Soviet revolt.)
While Soviet tanks put an end to the crisis, Israel drew critical benefits from its fallout. Thousands of Jewish refugees streamed out of Hungary and into the hands of an Israeli government desperate for fodder in its demographic trench war against the indigenous Palestinian population. It was not the first time that an eruption of anti-Semitism would serve the interests of the Zionist movement, and it would hardly be the last.
“That strategy would continue from Herzl on,” said Massad. “It was a continuing ideological cornerstone of Zionism, it has never stopped—we are speaking about something that is simply continuous.”
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the award-winning author of Goliath, Republican Gomorrah, and The 51 Day War. He is the co-host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels.
—AlterNet, November 22, 2017
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/zionism-anti-semitism-alliance-israel-joseph-massad
1 “The Truth About Hungary,” By Herbert Aptheker
https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf
No Water for Palestinians
Thirsty for justice: How Israel deprives the Palestinians of access to water
Last year, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota fought loud and proud against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, fearing that the pipeline’s inevitable leaks could contaminate the tribe’s main source of drinking water, the Missouri River. As many of us in the United States thankfully now recognize, this act of resistance by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies constitutes only the latest chapter in the centuries-long struggle by the Indigenous peoples of this continent against the genocidal forces of settler colonialism. In fact, the fight by Indigenous folks for their water rights permeates the globe at this very hour. It extends to South America, Australia and to Israel/Palestine, where the settler colonial state of Israel, with the strong backing of the U.S., continues to systematically block Palestinians’ attempts to access clean water.
The lack of potable water for Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, and even within the state of Israel itself, is a full-blown health crisis. A person needs at minimum 120 liters of water per day, according to the World Health Organization, but an average Palestinian in the West Bank receives only 73 liters of water per day. As a 2009 World Bank report on water restrictions in the Occupied Territories put it, many Palestinian communities in the West Bank, particularly in the area under strictest Israeli control, “face water access comparable to that of refugee camps in Congo or Sudan.” In the Jordan Valley, Israelis use roughly 81 times more water per capita than Palestinians in the West Bank, filling their swimming pools to the brim. In Gaza, the situation is even worse: the United Nations estimates that 96 percent of the water is unfit for consumption. By year’s end, Gaza’s only source of water, the Coastal Aquifer, will be depleted, and irreversibly so by 2020, when the UN projects that Gaza will be literally uninhabitable.
Like many humanitarian crises across the globe, the Palestinian water crisis didn’t evolve naturally. As a matter of official policy and using great precision, Israel and the U.S. have blocked every attempt by the Palestinians to develop and maintain sustainable access to water. In the West Bank, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, documents how Israeli authorities routinely confiscate and demolish Palestinian water infrastructure. Most recently, B’Tselem has reported on the Israeli Army and Civil Administration destroying rainwater cisterns, slashing pipes and seizing construction equipment, like welding machines. An extensive report by Amnesty International in 2009 shows that these cruel practices of the Israeli military and Civil Administration in the West Bank go back decades.
The Separation Wall, constructed and expanded by Israel in violation of orders by the International Criminal Court, stands as the biggest physical barrier to Palestinian realization of their water rights. Winding through Palestinian territory, the wall cuts off Palestinians in the West Bank from their wells and cisterns, as well as some of the choicest farmland in the area. Along the wall, the Israeli military arbitrarily declares wide swaths of land in the West Bank to be “closed military areas,” further seizing the already meager patches of territory left to the Indigenous population.
In Gaza, now in its 10th year under the brutal Israeli blockade, residents cannot import any materials that they need to repair or improve their water network, which Israel has decimated during repeated assaults. The official UN fact-finding mission on the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict (codename Operation Cast Lead) found that Israel deliberately bombed water treatment and sewage facilities in Gaza for no other purpose than to inflict collective punishment on the residents of Gaza—a major war crime. Subsequent reports by the UN and human rights groups found that Israel committed these same kinds of unjustifiable intentional attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in the 2014 conflict (codename Operation Protective Edge), severely damaging what little was left of Gaza’s water and sanitation network.
Official Israeli policy
Furthermore, these crimes were not the aberrant acts of a few rogue soldiers, but were the outcome of official Israeli policy. And we know so beyond a reasonable doubt based on two principal pieces of evidence. First, Israeli officials’ explicitly stated before, during and after the conflicts that they would (and did) inflict collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Israel’s so-called Dahiya doctrine enshrines this strategy of total war (that is, war against civilians and civilian infrastructure, not just military targets) into official policy. Second, we can note, as the UN fact-finding missions did, how Israeli authorities refused to modify their strategy of indiscriminately shelling densely-packed residential areas over the course of the conflict, even after the high civilian death tolls and allegations of war crimes were mounting.
Besides massively and systematically destroying the Palestinian water system through direct violence, Israel also prevents Palestinians from maintaining or developing their network by bureaucratic means. After conquering the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel issued a series of military orders that gave the Israeli Army complete control over all water-related issues in the Occupied Territories and required Palestinians to obtain permits from the Israeli army in order to pursue any and all water projects. All unpermitted water installations would be (and were) confiscated or demolished. While in theory, Palestinians could still manage their water needs after a long and complicated bureaucratic process, in practice, Palestinians were hardly ever granted permits. According to B’Tselem, from 1967 to 1996, Israel granted Palestinians just 13 permits, and all these permits only covered domestic projects; in other words, they wouldn’t even cover the work needed to repair existing wells and pipes, let alone expand the water network in order to serve the growing population.
The Mountain Aquifer
In the 1990s, as a part of the Oslo Accords, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization made a provisional agreement to “share” access to the Mountain Aquifer, a vast underground source of water beneath the West Bank and the easternmost parts of the State of Israel. This agreement, like most agreements made across steep power gradients, reflected the inequality between the negotiating parties, with Israel taking 80 percent of the water potential from the Mountain Aquifer and the Palestinian Authority taking the remaining 20 percent. Keep in mind that the Mountain Aquifer is the only source of water for the Palestinians living in the West Bank, because since 1967, Israel has prevented Palestinians from accessing the shores of the Jordan River. Israel, on the other hand, has many other sources of drinking water, including from the Sea of Galilee, the Coastal Aquifer, its water recycling system (the most advanced in the world by far) and its desalination facilities (also among the most advanced in the world). Nonetheless, Israel, being the unquestionably dominant player here, took the lion’s share of the water resources between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Even worse, it was revealed eight years ago that Israel had in fact been over-extracting from the Mountain Aquifer at almost double the agreed-upon rate, drying up Palestinian wells while causing potentially irreversible harm to the aquifer.
Meanwhile, the old oppressive permitting regime continued, albeit through a new institution called the Joint Water Committee (JWC) that was meant to review permits for water-related projects. But, as the World Bank pointed out in its 2009 report, the name of this committee is a misnomer since the JWC “does not function as a ‘joint’ water resource governance institution” due to “fundamental asymmetries” between the Israelis and Palestinians. Amnesty International described the situation more plainly in its report, writing that, “The Joint Water Committee merely institutionalized the intrinsically discriminatory system of Israeli control over Palestinian resources that had already been in existence since Israel’s occupation of [the West Bank and Gaza] three decades earlier.” The World Bank and Amnesty International pointed out that between 2001 and 2009, about one-half of all Palestinian projects presented to the JWC were approved, compared to the near 100 percent approval rate for Israeli projects. Of the Palestinian projects approved by the JWC, those that touch on Area C of the West Bank (which most do, for geographical reasons) must obtain a second approval from the Israeli Civilian Administration, and this second approval process is done without public participation or representation by Palestinians. So, as much as one-third of water in the Palestinian water system is lost in leakages due to old and inefficient networks that can’t be replaced or modernized because it’s so difficult to obtain a permit.
In addition to the official state-sanctioned strangulation of Palestinians’ water supply, settlers in the West Bank do their part through sabotaging Palestinian water infrastructure and resources. Amnesty International has reported on how settlers have destroyed Palestinian water pipes, poisoned rainwater cisterns and dumped untreated sewage into Palestinian springs. Recent reports show this pattern of settler violence against Palestinians and their allies continuing up to the present.
Significantly, human rights organizations have noted that, though these despicable attacks by settlers aren’t officially state-sanctioned, the Israeli authorities rarely investigate them, so the perpetrators generally enjoy impunity, feeling free to continue terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. It takes no stretch of the imagination to consider how Israel would treat Palestinians even suspected of such crimes, because we know that Palestinians even suspected of terrorism sink into the bowels of the Israeli prisons, never to be heard from again, while Israel demolishes the family homes of suspected violent resisters, letting Palestinians and the world know that Israel won’t tolerate any resistance to its tyranny.
The U.S. allows it
Lastly, we must remember that Israel can only deprive the Palestinians of water because the U.S. allows it. In the past, when Israel committed massacres against Palestinians, or acted in other ways that U.S. presidents didn’t like, presidential administrations have occasionally threatened to cut off the flow of military aid, and in these cases, Israel eventually fell into line. But the flow of U.S. military aid to Israel, roughly $3.1 billion per year (soon to increase to $3.8 billion annually), has continued unabated as Israel has condemned the Palestinians to die of thirst, in violation of not just international law, but U.S. domestic law, which prohibits the sending of non-humanitarian aid to known violators of human rights, which Israel plainly is.
Water is one of the key components of life as we know it. If we allow our country to continue to green light Israel’s dehydration of the Palestinians, we will be aiding and abetting all further deaths and illnesses that befall the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories as a result. Worse, if present trends continue, we will be responsible for yet another genocide against an Indigenous people.
Unlike past generations, many of us now recognize and regret how our nation nearly exterminated the Native people of North America. But what good is this retrospective shame if we don’t act to prevent our country from exterminating another Native people, the Palestinians? The reality is, if we do nothing, the U.S., through our ally Israel, will surely repeat these darkest chapters of U.S. history. We can’t let that happen.
Zak Witus is a freelance writer based in metro Detroit. Zak is a recent graduate from the University of Michigan, where he studied Cognitive Science and Art History. His research and writing post-graduation have focused on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, particularly the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Zak currently works on an urban farm on the East Side of Detroit.
—Truthout, November 26, 2017
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42699-thirsty-for-justice-how-israel-deprives-the-palestinians-of-access-to-water
Children in Gaza help fill and carry water buckets for cooking and cleaning due to Israel’s water restrictions in the occupied territories of Palestine.
By year’s end, Gaza’s only source of water, the Coastal Aquifer, will be depleted, and irreversibly so by 2020, when the UN projects that Gaza will be literally uninhabitable.
The official UN
fact-finding mission on the 2008-2009 Gaza
conflict (codename Operation Cast Lead) found that Israel deliberately bombed water treatment and sewage facilities in Gaza for no other purpose than to inflict collective punishment on the residents of Gaza—a major war crime.
South Africa and the Russian Revolution
South Africa’s biggest union celebrates Russian Revolution
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is commemorating this revolutionary moment with a weeklong celebration of the Russian Revolution.
One hundred years ago on the November 7, 1917 (or the 25th of October in the old style Russian calendar) the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin launched an armed insurrection against the Duma, which is the legislative body in the ruling assembly of Russia.
The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in Petrograd, and soon a new government was formed.
The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 resulted in an upheaval of the social fabric of Russian society. After the October Revolution, no one could deny the remarkable strength and unity of the working class and the peasantry. For the first time in human history, political power and the state were transferred to the working class majority; the dictatorship of the bourgeois state was replaced by a democracy of a workers state.
Fast track 100 years later to present-day South Africa and the conditions, which were facing workers in Russia, are similar to the conditions facing workers today. The working class and the poor are suffering under the oppression of the neo-liberal capitalist system. More than half of the South African population lives in poverty; at least 35 percent of the working population is unemployed in a society, which has the highest levels of inequality in the world.
The majority of the working class and the poor live a dehumanizing existence in slums and informal settlements, which do not have basic services like water and electricity. Furthermore, they are denied access to quality education or healthcare. The same conditions, which were responsible for the suffering of the African working class majority, continue to persist 23 years after the end of the brutal racist Apartheid system.
We now know that the negotiated settlement, which ended the repressive regime of the racist National Party government, in fact resulted in a more sanitized version of Apartheid which is being administered by a Black government through the African National Congress (ANC).
The ANC’s biggest failure was selling out the revolution through the negotiated settlement. A deal was done with capital to ensure that this government would continue to serve the interests of white monopoly capital and that is precisely what they have done for the last 23 years. The deal was that South African capital and the white population will continue to own and control the economy, and the Reserve Bank and National Treasury will preserve the value of white wealth at all cost, even at the expense of the working class and the poor.
The role of the National Treasury and the Reserve bank is to maintain high interest rates. They have liberalized trade and removed exchange controls allowing money, which we desperately need to be invested in productive sectors of the economy to create jobs, to leave the country. It is also very clear that the ANC government was in power to run an inferior budget, for inferior people who will continue to be regarded as such.
If Africans were not regarded as inferior, they would not be squashed into slums and informal settlements when this country has an abundance of land. It has been over a hundred years since Africans were dispossessed of their land through the 1913 Land Act, and yet its effects continue in 2017.
The ANC through the implementation of neo-liberal macro-economic capitalist policies like GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) and the National Development Plan is upholding and defending inequality. That is why according to Oxfam’s report: “An economy of the 99 percent” after more than two decades of so-called democracy, the entire wealth of the country is in the hands of three white billionaires. Only wealthy capitalists are free to enjoy the full fruits of democracy, whilst the working class majority continues to languish under the oppressive burden created by poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
The working class in South Africa is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The governing party is persistent in attacking the working class. It has implemented labor brokering and commodified the roads through e-tolls. It is now trying to undermine the power of the working class to negotiate better working conditions, by putting in measures in place to limit the right to strike. It has legalized slave wages through the proposed National Minimum Wage of R20-per-hour (one U.S. dollar.) It has done all this with the help of weak yellow trade union federations like COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and FEDUSA (Federation of Unions of South Africa) who have sold out the working class to fulfill their own narrow political agenda.
Furthermore, the intense battle we are witnessing between President Jacob Zuma and his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, can be summed up as the battle between two capitalist factions who are fighting for control of the fiscus (fiscal.) Whoever wins at the end of the day will continue to exploit the working class just like they have been doing for the last 23 years.
That is why the achievements of the Russian working class are so significant. It is proof that true power lies in the hands of the working class. The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 proved that a new civilization based on genuine human equality is not only desirable but is possible if the working class is united behind a common vision. Genuine radical economic transformation can only happen if the working class is organized as a class for itself, so that it can transform society for its own benefit. A truly just and equitable society is possible, but only if the working class is in control.
A luta continua!
The struggle continues!
Issued by Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is commemorating this revolutionary moment with a weeklong celebration of the Russian Revolution.
For more information on the celebrations contact:
Phakamile Hlubi
NUMSA National Spokesperson
0833767725
—Black Agenda Report, November 15, 2017
https://www.blackagendareport.com/south-africas-biggest-union-celebrates-russian-revolution
Obama/Trump War on Yemen
“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation.” —M.L. King, “Beyond Vietnam”
November 22, 2017—Yemen, the poorest Arab nation on Earth, is the victim of a savage, illegal war waged by the Saudi Arabian monarchy. Armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated weapons in the world manufactured and supplied by the merchants of death in the United States, the Saudis are providing another grotesque example of what happens when a powerful nation with modern weapons is unrestrained by law and basic human decency.
Flying hundreds of sorties and targeting the civilian infrastructure—water and sanitation plants, the electrical grid, agricultural fields, food storage facilities, hospitals, roads, schools—the result is over 20 million people, or 70 percent of the population, are now dependent on food imports; seven million of them are facing famine-like conditions and rely completely on food aid to survive. Conservative reports put the number of dead from the Saudis’ barbaric air war since March 2015 at over 11,000, with the vast majority being innocent civilians. Meanwhile, untold millions have been displaced.
All of the above acts against the Yemenis are war crimes.
But the trauma and devastation of the people doesn’t end here.
For the last two weeks, the gangster family running the Saudi state has imposed a murderous air, sea and land blockade preventing vital aid to those millions now dependent on it for their basic survival.
However, the Saudis are not the only ones implicated in this unfolding international crime. Like most of the egregious, international human-rights crimes of the late 20th and 21st centuries, the U.S. state is once again complicit.
The fact is the Obama administration gave the green light to the Saudi war on Yemen. This is a war that could not then or today have been launched and executed without direct support from the U.S. military. The United States provided critical support in the form of intelligence sharing and targeting, air-to-air refueling, logistics support, participation in the naval blockade, and billions of dollars in weapons sales.
That support continues under the Trump administration, including the finalization of the multi-billion-dollar arms deal with the Saudis that was initiated under the Obama administration.
In this period when the corporate capitalist press and social media companies coordinate with the U.S. state to determine the range of acceptable information and selected facts presented to the U.S. public, it is not surprising Yemen has received scant coverage. Yet, in those few instances when the Obama administration felt compelled to comment on the situation—usually when the foreign press asked—it downplayed its role. When pressed, the Obama administration provided a ludicrous explanation: Apparently, Saudi Arabia was justified in intervening for its own security and to restore democracy in Yemen!
Today, the Trump administration doesn’t even need to bother to provide an explanation for continued U.S. support to the barbarism in Yemen. More focused on domestic political intrigue, his critics are not concerned about the crimes against humanity and war crimes being committed by the U.S. administration in Yemen. Recent legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in the form of a resolution to compel the administration to comply with the War Powers Act on Yemen or withdraw U.S. forces has stalled after generating miniscule interest. Since the people who are dying are “over there,” to borrow from Senator Lindsey Graham, who cares, and who cares if U.S. involvement is constitutional or not?
Once again, the hypocritical morality of the U.S. and the West is exposed. With all of its moralistic pontificating about human rights, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, the global public is reminded that U.S. and Western geo-political interests will always “trump” their supposed commitments to the rule of law, human rights, and all of the other high-sounding principles that they have consistently violated through practice.
Dr. King suggested 50 years ago that the United States was approaching spiritual death, that the deep malady in the “American” spirit was producing a sick people and making the United States a danger to the world. With mass shootings, the epidemic of suicides, pervasive drug addiction, intensifying anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, white supremacy, generalized narcissism, and the normalization of war, the conclusion should be obvious today: the United States is a much sicker nation and an even more dangerous threat to the world.
The people of Yemen are suffering. They cry out for help, for an end to their misery, for respect, and protection of their human right to live. But their voices are unheard, drowned out by the noise of Russia-gate, arguments about the meaning of Trump’s latest tweet, and the latest episode of the TV show “Scandal.”
While many activists in the U.S. who are aligned with the Democratic Party would reject it, the people in the global South, the racialized “others” whose lives have never mattered, understand clearly that Trump is not an aberration; he is the reflection of the “American” spirit.
—Black Agenda Report, November 22, 2017
https://www.blackagendareport.com/ongoing-agony-obama-trump-war-people-yemen
A malnourished Yemeni child getting treatment at a hospital in the port city of Al Hudaydah on November 5, 2017.
Environment
ENVIRONMENT
Rights of Nature
Activists call for a legal transformation
The mighty Colorado River and its watersheds are a crucial source of life in the arid Southwest, supplying water to vast ecosystems and millions of people across seven states and northern Mexico. With so much depending on its existence, the Colorado River filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against the state of Colorado last month, demanding that its right to evolve, flourish and be restored in the wake of human interference be recognized in the court of law.
Well, sort of. An activist lawyer filed the legal complaint at a federal district court in Denver, naming the river itself as a plaintiff and calling on the court to recognize its ecosystems as a “person” under the law. Still, Colorado River v. Colorado is fairly unprecedented, at least in the United States.
Bodies of water can’t defend themselves in court, but they do not go untouched by the law. All the organisms—including humans—that depend on a river to survive can be affected when existing environmental laws fail to prevent water pollution, or when a government or corporation wins the legal right to guzzle up its life-giving resources.
Western states have fought over the Colorado River’s water resources for decades, damming and diverting more than 70 percent of its water to vast cities and cropland. In 2015, two tributaries of the Colorado River suffered an environmental disaster when federal remediation workers accidently allowed 880,000 gallons of wastewater contaminated with heavy metals to spill from the defunct Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado.
“Water is life,” declared the Native Water Protectors and allied activists at Standing Rock. Without clean water, clean air and a stable climate, the future of all life on Earth is in peril, including our own. This raises important questions: Is a river like the Colorado simply a collection of resources to be bought, sold and haggled over in courts and legislatures? Or do rivers and all ecosystems actually rise above monetary value?
The answer to this question is central to a growing global movement of activists and attorneys who are forging a new kind of environmental law by proclaiming the legal “rights of nature.” Since nature can’t directly assert legal rights itself (although the Earth may punish us for disrupting the climate and other follies), these advocates also fight for the right of local communities to protect the natural systems around them from destruction and exploitation.
That nature and its entities have the same “right” to exist and flourish as people do is not a new concept—many Indigenous people have embraced such ideas for millennia. However, the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Colorado River is attempting to inject this thinking into the contemporary legal system, challenging Western capitalist notions such as “corporate personhood” in the process.
“The rights of nature is all of us sitting here, because there is no separation,” said Casey Camp-Horinek, a water protector, grandmother and activist from the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, at a recent symposium on the rights of nature at Tulane University in New Orleans. “When we say ‘rights of nature,’ are we so ego-bound that we think it is separate from human beings?”
Does nature have legal rights?
Colorado River v. Colorado outlines the basic ideas driving the “rights of nature” movement. The current system of law has failed to adequately protect the environment and the natural and human communities that depend on it, as evidenced by climate disruption and rampant pollution. Current laws fail because they treat the natural world as private property, with existing protections only regulating the rate at which it is exploited and destroyed in the name of profit.
The lawsuit traces its legal roots back to a 1971 dissent written by liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who argued that “inanimate objects” are unable to represent themselves in court but are parties to lawsuits all the time. For example, a cargo ship has a legal personality for the purpose of maritime law. “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium,” Douglas wrote, is reason to give “environmental objects” standing to sue for their own preservation.
After all, if a corporation can claim the same legal rights as persons, as the Supreme Court famously held in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission and other cases, then why not a river ecosystem that has sustained human civilization in the Southwest for many thousands of years, and life for millions more? Still, the lawsuit faces a tough road ahead.
An initial hearing on the case was set for November 14, and Colorado’s attorney general has already called for it to be thrown out. [Update: On December 4, 2017, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit.1] The lawsuit asks the court to recognize members of the radical environmental group Deep Green Resistance as “next friends” of the Colorado River who may defend its rights in court, a request that could raise eyebrows because the group has promoted Earth-defense tactics such as sabotage that are technically illegal.
The case is not without precedent, however, at least internationally. Earlier this year, the high court in India’s northern state of Uttarakhand issued a ruling recognizing the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers as legal persons with certain rights in order to “preserve and conserve” water resources. The ruling came after the same court found that the rivers and glaciers that feed them are “central” to the well-being of half the Indian population, but still they suffer from pollution that threatens their very existence.
Similar rulings have come out of a number of other countries in recent years. A river in New Zealand now enjoys the same rights as a person under a law that Indigenous people spent decades fighting for. In 2010, Bolivia’s legislature passed a law affirming the “rights of Mother Earth.” In 2008, Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature or “pachamama” into its constitution, and legal rulings there have since recognized that rivers have rights that can be violated by human activity.
While these victories are milestones for the rights of nature movement, they have not put a total halt to pollution and resource extraction in their respective jurisdictions.
Ecuador’s constitutional amendment was a “top down” initiative won by NGOs and friendly lawmakers rather than a bottom-up grassroots effort, according to Natalia Green of Ecuador’s Pachamama Alliance, which pushed for the constitutional amendment and also works with Indigenous groups on the ground. Empowering local communities to defend the rights of the natural systems around them is often a different story, and it’s how the movement is making the most immediate impact in the U.S.
“We need to have everyone in the country believing that nature has rights, and that’s why we start at the local level,” said Ben Price, an organizer with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), during a symposium in New Orleans.
CELDF worked on the constitutional amendment in Ecuador and is at the forefront of the rights of nature movement in the U.S., where it’s a major backer of the Colorado River lawsuit. It’s also a driving force behind the “community rights movement,” which has taken hold in town halls across the U.S. as local communities take a stand against invading polluters.
A tiny town takes on
the fracking industry
In 2013, Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) proposed a fracking wastewater injection well in Grant Township, Pennsylvania, a rural community of about 700 people. Wastewater from fracking can contain dangerous chemicals and radioactive material, and injection wells have been linked to water pollution and earthquakes.
Residents weren’t happy about the proposal, which would bring 152 million gallons of fracking waste into Grant Township to be dumped down the well over the next decade, according to CELDF. About 50 people showed up in opposition to the injection well at an initial public hearing held by the Environmental Protection Agency, but months later they learned that a permit would be issued anyway.
So, in 2014, the township adopted a “community bills of rights” ordinance that banned injection wells and asserted the community’s right to self-governance, with help from CELDF.
PGE then sued the township, arguing the ordinance violated its corporate constitutional “right” to build the injection well. In response, CELDF filed a motion to intervene on behalf of residents and the local watershed, which is home to the hellbender salamander, the largest aquatic salamander in North America. CELDF’s assertion of the rights of nature alarmed the oil and gas industry, which feared that the move could set a dangerous precedent.
In 2015, a federal district court threw out the motion to intervene and ruled that state law preempted the local ordinance banning injection wells. The ruling put the well back on track, so local activists and township commissioners went to work knocking on doors and building opposition among their neighbors.
Within weeks, the township adopted the country’s first municipal charter establishing a local “bill of rights,” including the right to prohibit injection wells. Highland Township, another rural community in Pennsylvania facing a proposed injection well, worked with CELDF and passed a similar charter. The charters define local government structure and establish “home rule” in order to trump state laws seen as favorable to industry.
“What if your community could just say ‘no’ instead of using loopholes like industrial zoning [to stop polluters]?” said Grant Township Supervisor Stacy Long at the symposium in New Orleans.
The charters effectively stalled the state permits for the injection wells, but eventually the state relented. In March, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which was mired in controversy for working too closely with the industry during the state’s fracking boom, finally issued permits for the injection wells. Regulators then sued both townships, arguing that the charters unlawfully interfered with state oil and gas policies.
For rights of nature activists, legal battles like this one are proof of the absurdity that plagues current environmental laws and regulations, which favor the rights of big business over ecosystems and fail to protect the people living in harm’s way.
“Our community wrote a new constitution, with wide community support and input, to protect our rights and our environment,” Long said in a statement at the time. “And now we’ve been sued, not only by a corporation that wants to profit by dumping toxic waste in our community, but also by our own state ‘environmental protection’ agency.”
PGE, perhaps wary of the community rights activism that boiled up in response to its injection well proposal, asked a federal court in July to order CELDF to pay $560,000 in compensation for the attorney fees it accrued while fighting Grant Township in court over the past three years. CELDF is a relatively small organization that provides pro bono and low-cost legal assistance, and the fees would suck up more than half of its annual budget.
However, both cases are still winding through the courts, effectively blocking the injection wells in both townships to date. Last year, Grant Township passed another ordinance recognizing the rights of local residents to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience if PGE wins the legal right to finally install the injection well.
“This work is really about conducting civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking, challenging the system by using the system,” CELDF Associate Director Mari Margil told Truthout in an interview.
If the goal is to block unwanted industrial activity, the rights of nature movement has had a number of successes. Margil said small towns in the Northeast have used community rights ordinances to ward off Nestle and other private water companies. About 200 communities across the country have now passed local ordinances declaring their rights to ban fracking, wastewater injection, sludge dumping, factory farming and other sources of industrial pollution.
“For the most part, those laws are in place and prohibiting the activity that has been banned,” Margil said.
In Ohio, Washington and other states where community rights initiatives have been challenged by powerful corporations and preempted by state law, networks of community activists are pushing legislation and ballot initiatives that would enshrine that right to local self-governance into state law. In Wisconsin, the Ho-Chunk Nation is considering a rights of nature amendment to its tribal constitution. A final vote is expected next year.
CELDF admits that its efforts cannot always succeed under the current legal system. However, activists say, inspiring people to challenge that system is a success all its own.
“Suddenly, people are willing to fight like hell when they didn’t used to be,” Price said. “For me right now, the success is that people are engaging in ways that they never have before.”
Just a decade ago, the rights of nature movement occupied an odd corner on the fringe of environmentalism. Since then, its influence has grown both globally and at home, operating at the intersection of traditional legal tactics and radical environmental ideas rooted in Indigenous wisdom that have called activists to direct action for decades. Whether the rights of nature will be accepted into the broader legal system remains to be seen, but in a time of mounting ecological crises, recognizing nature’s right to flourish may just be what preserves our own.
Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter at Truthout and a contributor to the Truthout anthology, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? In 2014 and 2017, Project Censored featured Ludwig’s reporting on its annual list of the top 25 independent news stories that the corporate media ignored.
—Truthout, November 10, 2017
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42565-nature-has-rights-activists-call-for-a-legal-transformation
1 “Colorado vs. Colorado Lawsuit Dismissed,” December 4, 2017
http://news.kgnu.org/2017/12/colorado-river-vs-colorado-lawsuit-dismissed/
Pollution of the Colorado River from the Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado.
Incarceration Nation
Frackville Prison’s Systemic Water Crisis
On September 19, 21, 24 and 27, 2017, we prisoners at Pennsylvania’s SCI-Frackville facility experienced four incidences with respect to the crisis of drinking toxic water. While this was not the first indication of chronic water problems at the prison, it seemed an indication that things were going from bad to worse. This round of tainted water was coupled with bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, sore throats, and dizziness by an overwhelming majority of the prisoner population exposed to this contamination. This cannot be construed as an isolated incident.
The SCI-Frackville staff passed out bottled water after the inmate population had been subjected to drinking the contaminated water for hours without ever being notified via intercom or by memo to refrain from consuming the tap water. This is as insidious as it gets!
SCI-Frackville’s administration is acutely aware of the toxic water contamination crisis and have adopted an in-house practice of intentionally failing to notify the inmate population via announcements and or by posting memos to refrain from tap water, until prisoners discover it for themselves through the above-mentioned health effects.
In general, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) knows it has a water crisis on it hands. The top agencies like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) know about this “open secret” and have conspired to deliberately ignore most, if not all, of the prisoners’ official complaints. DEP has received four drinking water violations from the EPA. But the underlying problem is money, money, and more money.
Earlier this year, federal officials warned DEP that it lacked the staffing and resources to enforce safe drinking water standards. That could be grounds for taking away their role as the primary regulator of water standards, and would cost the state millions of dollars in federal funding.
In a letter dated December 30, 2016, EPA Water Protection Division Director Jon Capacasa stated, “Pennsylvania’s drinking water program failed to meet the federal requirement for onsite review of water system operations and maintenance capability, also known as a sanitary survey.” He added, “Not completing sanitary survey inspections in a timely manner can have serious public health implications.”
One example in the City of Pittsburgh led to the closure of nearly two-dozen schools and a boil-water order for 100,000 people. State environmental regulators had discovered low chlorine levels, after testing the city’s water as part of an ongoing investigation into its water treatment system. The city has also been having issues with elevated lead levels. The EPA also told DEP that the department’s lack of staff has caused the number of unaddressed Safe Drinking Water Act violations to go from 4,298 to 7,922, almost doubling in the past five years.
This leaves us with 43 inspectors employed, but, to meet the EPA mandates, we need at the least 85 full-time inspectors. That means Pennsylvania inspectors have double the workload, and this has resulted in some systems not being inspected. Logically, the larger systems get routine inspections, and systems that have chronic problems get inspected, but smaller and rural system like ours may not be because we are the minority that society doesn’t care about. Persona non grata!
To top it off, Frackville is in Schuylkill County, near a cluster of the rare disease known as Polycythemia Vera (PV). While there is not definitive research on PV, it is believed to be environmental in origin and could be water borne. There’s no telling how many of us may have contracted the mysterious disease caused by drinking this toxic-contaminated water for years without being medically diagnosed and treated for this disease.
The DOC refuses to test the inmate population, in spite of the on-going water crisis. What would happen if the inmate population would discover that they have contracted the disease PV? Obviously, this wouldn’t be economically feasible for the DOC medical department to pay the cost to treat all inmates who have been discovered to have the water-borne disease.
Many Pennsylvania taxpayers would be surprised to know that our infrastructure is older than Flint, Michigan’s toxic water crisis. Something is very wrong in our own backyard and the legislative body wants to keep a tight lid on it. But how long can this secret be contained before we experience an outbreak of the worst kind.
Silence, no more, it is time to speak. I can not stress the sense of urgency enough. We need to take action by notifying our Pennsylvania State Legislatures and make them accountable to the tax-paying citizens and highlight the necessary attention about Pennsylvania’s water crisis to assist those of us who are cornered and forced to drink toxic, contaminated water across the State Prisons.
If you want to obtain a goal you’ve never obtained, you have to transcend by doing something you’ve never done before. Let’s not procrastinate, unify in solidarity, take action before further contamination becomes inevitable. There’s no logic to action afterwards, if we could have avoided the unnecessary catastrophe, in the first place.
Let’s govern ourselves in the right direction by contacting and filing complaints to our legislative body, DEP, EPA, and their higher-ups, etc. In the mountains of rejection we have faced from these agencies as prisoners, your action could be our “yes;” our affirmation that, though we may be buried in these walls, we are still alive.
—The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, November 5, 2017
https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/frackville-prisons-systemic-water-crisis/
Write to:
Bryant Arroyo #CU-1126
SCI Frackville
1111 Altamont Blvd.
Frackville, PA 17931
Update from The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons
After initially receiving this article from Bryant Arroyo, this update came in: On October 26, 2017, at or about 8:00 P.M., Frackville shut down the Schuylkill County Water Municipality’s water source and switched over to this facilities water preserve tank. Staff here, indicated the Schuylkill Municipality was conducting a purge to the repaired pipelines, etc.
Then on October 27, on or about 11:00 A.M., Frackville’s staff passed out individual gallons of spring water due to the dirty, toxic, contaminated water flowing from our preserve tank water supply. Here we go again!
More about the author, Bryant Arroyo, can be found on PrisonRadio.org. Additional sources for this article came from State Impact (A reporting project of NPR member stations) and the Washington Post.
INCARCERATION NATION
Lynching Culture
Florida officials are experts at killing prisoners by natural causes
On August 24, 2017, guards here at Florida State Prison (FSP) donned special “formal” uniforms of black pants, dark grey shirts and black neckties—their usual uniform consists of black pants, a light grey shirt and no necktie. The special occasion?
They were executing a man who was sentenced to die for a double homicide in 1987.
Looking at each guard that day I could only shake my head at their solemn pretensions and utter hypocrisy. There they were united in killing a man as punishment for a “crime” that they frequently collude in committing themselves.
“We bury our problems”
In fact, not a month before, a ranking FSP guard, Sergeant S. Cazee, casually boasted to me that numerous prisoners have been murdered by guards at this prison.
His boasts were the conclusion of an exchange between us that began weeks before, when I was struggling to receive my prescribed blood pressure medications. I’d been transferred to FSP on July 14. Cazee was the supervisor of my assigned cellblock.
Upon my FSP assignment, I tried for several days to no avail to have nurses who distributed medications in the pod to bring my meds. After threatening to gas me with chemical agents for talking to the nurse out the side of the cell door when she walked past ignoring me on July 15, Cazee returned later presuming to “inform” me “how things work” at FSP.
He stated that any medications previously prescribed are automatically terminated when a prisoner is newly assigned to FSP, until he sees the prison’s doctor—even life sustaining meds. He added that although it could take weeks to see the doctor I’d just have to wait. It was pointless to argue that this was illegal.
So I sent word out about being denied my meds and outside protests followed. I then began receiving my meds on July 19 without seeing any doctor.
On July 28 Cazee “escorted” me fully restrained to the FSP medical department, at which time he asked if it was my first FSP medical visit. I replied that it was.
With a puzzled expression he asked, “Didn’t I see the nurse give you your meds this morning?” I replied that she had. He then marveled that he’d worked at FSP for many years, and had never seen a prisoner receive any meds without seeing the prison’s doctor first, even those with life-threatening heart and cancer conditions.
I responded maybe it was because of outside concern and complaints.
“You’re in Florida now,” he replied with a defensive edge, “we don’t care about that here.”
“Well, I’m receiving my meds, so someone must care,” I said.
“You really don’t get it do you? This is the Twilight Zone, people disappear here,” he stated. “We don’t care about outside complaints. People create problems, we know how to get rid of them.”
“And how’s that?” I asked.
“We’ve had a lot of suicides. Best way to get rid of a problem,” he threateningly boasted.
“So you’re saying you all help prisoners die involuntarily, huh?”
“And we bury ’em.”
“Can I quote you on that?” I asked.
At that he hesitated, then said sheepishly, “I don’t know nothing.” Then added, “Don’t put me in your articles, I’ve read your blog.”
“You said y’all don’t care, so what does it matter?” I asked. He then stopped talking.
Complicit “integrity”
On returning to the cellblock, Cazee led me into a dayroom area, where I was met by a Black male mental health worker named Bowie who’d tried to “interview” me several times before. As I’d done before, I immediately told him I wasn’t interested in speaking with mental health staff.
But he pressed on, attempting to get me to talk about myself. Instead I diverted the topic to abuses of Florida prisoners. I mentioned hearing from numerous prisoners’ accounts of prisoners being killed by guards and even hearing guards boast about such killings.
He implicitly admitted knowing about such abuses stating, “All I’ll say is not everyone does what they’re supposed to do around here. I can only accept responsibility for myself. I’m not part of any of the cliques or groups around here and I don’t participate in these things.”
“You see this?” he said raising his wrist to show me a small bracelet. “It says ‘integrity.’ That’s what I live by.”
I asked how could he live by integrity when he’s surrounded by corruption. He replied again that he could only account for himself.
I mentioned having read articles about a prior Florida Department of Corrections (sic!) mental health worker who’d witnessed and reported numerous abuses of FDC prisoners by guards. In turn her supervisor turned on her and guards repeatedly put her in situations where she felt they were trying to scare her or set her up to be assaulted by frequently locking her alone in areas with numerous mentally ill prisoners around, some reputed to be violently unstable.
In the end she lost her job. The experience so haunted her that her hair began falling out in patches. She apparently wrote a book about her ordeal in FDC and exposed how mental health staff colluded with or turned a blind eye to guard abuses. Bowie said he’d never heard about her.
I then asked if he knew about Darren Rainey, a mentally ill prisoner who was killed in 2012 by guards at the Dade Correctional Institution, who locked him inside a shower and scalded him to death; and how the FDC transferred a prisoner out of state who witnessed the murder, wrote about it in a journal and spoke out about it.
Bowie conceded that the killing was true but claimed no knowledge of the secreted witness.
“If you live by integrity, why don’t you challenge and expose the corruption and abuse around here, like the mental health worker I just mentioned?” I asked him.
He evaded the question, stating that I sure was talking a lot for someone who didn’t want to talk to him. I clarified that I wasn’t interested in talking about myself, but that I’m always interested in conditions I, and my peers, are compelled to live under.
Continuing to dodge my question, he asked if I were having any thoughts of hurting someone.
“So much for your integrity,” I replied. “I’ll go back to the cell now.”
Bowie hasn’t attempted to talk to me again since.
Readers should bring folks like Cazee and Bowie to mind when you hear cops and prison officials repeat the tripe that most so-called law enforcement officials are “good people,” and when “bad things” happen it’s the work of only a handful of “bad apples.”
In reality there are many who commit the full range of abusive and murderous acts, and the rest are just like Cazee and Bowie, who protect those wrongdoers through lying or silence (“I don’t know nothing.” “I can only accept responsibility for myself.”) “Integrity” to them means not doing “bad things” themselves, but by lies and silence condoning and protecting those who do. Fundamentally they are cowards.
Prisons full of murderers—
in uniform
In 2014 Florida’s prisons saw a record number of prisoner deaths. Many occurred under suspicious circumstances. Like Latandra Ellington, who warned her family shortly before she died that guards at Lovell Correctional Institution threatened to beat and kill her.
The state coroner dismissed her death as by natural causes. But an independent autopsy found her skull was bashed in and “hemorrhaging caused by blunt force trauma consistent with kicking and punches to the lower abdomen.”1 Yet the FDC claimed there was no evidence of a beating.
As a National Public Radio report observed, Ellington’s was “just one of the deaths that have thrown a spotlight on Florida’s prisons. Many came to light through a series of reports in the Miami Herald. The stories documented a pattern of inhumane treatment, abuse and unexplained inmate deaths….”2
Then there was the staged hanging of Robert Peterkin after he’d also warned his family of sinister intentions by guards against him.3 And Matthew Walker who had his throat crushed and head bludgeoned by guards at the Charlotte Correctional Institution. And while on this rare occasion the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the nine responsible guards went unpunished and most kept their jobs. Prison officials had cleaned up the crime scene, which is a crime in itself. This too went unpunished.4
Take also Darren Rainey’s death mentioned above. It’s beyond doubt that he was murdered by guards scalding him to death. Yet the government pathologist, Dr. Emma Lew, dismissed his death as an accident caused by several combined factors, including mental illness, heart disease and “confinement to a shower.” She claimed there was no evidence of a scorching shower, and that his skin—in spite of severe peeling of over 90 percent of his body—showed no burns.
The state then tried to hide Rainey’s tissue samples, to prevent an independent review by a nationally renowned pathologist hired by his family. The state even refused to comply with a federal subpoena.
This compelled a court order to produce the samples. A retired Miami-Dade public defender testified that in 30 years of handling homicide cases she had never seen a court order required in this manner to have specimens reviewed.5
Not surprisingly the guards who murdered Rainey were cleared by the state of any criminal wrongdoing.6
But this all barely scratches the surface. In the wake of complaints of prisoners’ grieving relatives, and consequent media reports of numerous prisoner killings, a number of investigations have been staged into many of these deaths. But only a handful of prosecutions have followed for less serious abuses—all as damage control.
In this climate a few guards came forward as witnesses to murders and cover-ups by other guards. These witnesses were, however, harassed and fired, leading several to sue the FDC.7
As Randall Berg, Executive Director of the Florida Justice Institute observed of the token responses to these exposed abuses, “The culture hasn’t changed.”8
He pointed out that there’s a system-wide intergenerational culture of abuse in the FDC. I’d go further and link it to the culture of the old Jim Crow South, of which Florida was a principal part, where Blacks were terrorized by frequent lynchings. Which is exactly what the killings by groups of guards with the tacit or explicit support of their peers boils down to.
The continuation of lynching
and racist terror
Like in the Old South, the terror amongst FDC prisoners is palpable.
I’ve been confined in the FDC less than three months and have found prisoner killings by guards to be an almost daily topic of prisoners’ conversations. And here there is a condition and expected attitude of passivity and total deference towards the largely white FDC guards by the predominantly Black and Brown prisoners that I’ve not witnessed in other prison systems.
The submissiveness to the guards is only matched by an equally extreme level of overt abuse and a culture of racist domination and impunity by guards, the likes of which I’ve only read about in books on the antebellum and old Jim Crow South. This is especially so in FDC’s solitary confinement units, where prisoners are forbidden to even talk among themselves, and a strict old South code is enforced of “protecting” and keeping white females away from males of color who are disproportionately confined in solitary.
In FDC white females especially are forbidden to work in solitary confinement or to work unescorted by male guards in the cellblocks. This is enforced with particular vigilance by the white male guards like in the old South.
In the FDC’s Reception and Medical Center’s Solitary confinement unit where I was confined, Black and Latino female guards were “allowed” to walk unescorted in the cellblocks, usually serving disciplinary reports; white female guards however were not.
In other prison systems where I’ve been confined (Virginia, Oregon and Texas), there is no outright discrimination against women working on the same terms as men in solitary units and cellblocks. In FDC any time a female (white females in particular) of any position or rank enters a solitary cellblock, male guards announce a female’s presence and yell for the prisoners to “get off the door!” If any prisoner is “caught” standing at his cell door after this announcement is made, he is subject to being refused meals, being put on strip cell (being left in the cell with nothing other than his boxer shorts for no less than 72 hours), being gassed with chemical agents and/or receiving a disciplinary report.
The old South culture of racism and sexism (white male supremacy) is so openly flaunted in FSP, that there are almost no female ranking guards or administrators, and the one female lieutenant doesn’t operate in a general supervisory position as ranking male guards do. Her position is confined rather to presiding over disciplinary hearings.
Every FDC prisoner of color I’ve talked to has witnessed or been the victim of multiple unprovoked assaults by guards and having white male guards routinely refer to them or others by racist epithets, especially “boy.”
FDC prisoners are literally spoken to and treated like animals and incompetent children by officials, and are expected to instinctively defer to being dehumanized under threat of immediate violent abuse; exactly like in the old South. Most I’ve been around feel powerless to change this and those who resist even in words or attitude are met with prompt abuse. In turn their frustrations are directed at each other, which officials enable, instigate and encourage, to prevent the prisoners from focusing on them and challenging their abuses and the inhumane living conditions in FDC prisons.
The routine brutality and murderous acts against prisoners by FDC guards is, as Randall Berg pointed out, a deeply ingrained cultural practice, continued over many generations.
Amerika has always feared to acknowledge or reckon with its history and founding upon class, racial and gender oppression. So how much more readily will it concede that much of that history still lives on inside its prisons today? The past is hidden by willful ignorance, the present by concrete, steel and razor wire.
Regardless, the struggle to abolish the continuation of slavery in Amerika’s prisons and its attendant abuses must continue until they are completely abolished and we usher in a new era of genuine freedom for all peoples.
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
Kevin Rashid Johnson’s writings and artwork have been widely circulated. He is the author of a book, Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Minister of Defense, New Afrikan Black Panther Party, (Kersplebedeb, 2010).
Write or email:
Kevin Johnson, #158039
Florida State Prison
P.O. Box 800
Raiford, FL 32083
www.rashidmod.com
1 Greg Allen, “Record Number of Inmate Deaths Has Florida Prisons on The Defensive,” “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio, March 18, 2015, 5:56 P.M. ET
2 Ibid.
3 Julie K. Brown, “Death Leads to Seventh Criminal Probe at Troubled Florida Prison” Miami Herald, August 5, 2015
4 Ibid.
5 Julie K. Brown, “Judge Orders Medical Examiner to Release Skin Tissue in Autopsy of Inmate’s Shower Death,” Miami Herald, July 14, 2017.
7 Op cit., note 3; see also, Dara Kam, “5 Prison Guards Arrested After Attack on Inmate.” The Times-Union, September 13, 2014.
8 Ibid., Dara Kam
Thanksgiving on Death Row
Death row, San Quentin, California—As I sit here in a 4½-by-11-foot cage on Thanksgiving Day, I first and foremost am thankful to be alive. On February 10, 2004, I came within three hours and 42 minutes of being strapped down to a gurney, tortured with lethal poison and murdered by volunteer prison-guard executioners. So, yes, I am very thankful to be alive. I am also very thankful for all the people—my legal team, friends, family, supporters and activists working to end the death penalty—who have helped make my being alive possible.
I have been in a cage like this, with two feet of space between the side of the bed and the wall, for most of my adult life, for murders I did not commit. I eat prison slop for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the guards look up my butt at least once a day to make sure I don’t have contraband when I leave this cage.
I have been on death row in the state of California for more than 32 years, having come to this place in May 1985, and I have been fighting for my life ever since. This modern-day plantation in which I am forced to live is a very dirty and inhumane place for any human being.
After my stay of execution in 2004, I suffered from post-traumatic stress for years due to that sick ritual of death this prison put me through. No human being should ever have to endure what I have, not even if they are guilty of the crime they were convicted of.
I am innocent, and my fate now lies in the hands of Governor Jerry Brown. On February 17, 2016, Norman Hile, my pro bono attorney from the prestigious law firm of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, filed my petition for clemency in the office of Governor Brown. I have respectfully asked the governor and others to look at my case with an open mind, outside the legal box that has me close to being killed for murders of which I am innocent. Doing this is truly important, especially now that many Americans are learning, from frequent news reports, the truth about America’s criminal justice system and some of the people who work within it.
People have learned that this system is dishonest, and that some of its investigators, prosecutors and judges cannot be trusted and are more concerned with winning cases or with following their political ideology than with truth or justice. This is especially true in my case.
Start with the fact that for the first time in the history of the death penalty in California, as well as within the history of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 11 federal circuit court judges dissented in one death penalty case—mine.
To show their concern as to why my case should be heard on its merits before I am executed, six of the 11 stated these words of dissent in my last appeal: “Public confidence in the proper administration of the death penalty depends on the integrity of the process followed by the state. …[Twenty-four] years of flawed proceedings are as good as no proceedings at all.”
Five judges, showing their concern about the truth not being told stated: “The state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” One of them, Judge William Fletcher, later said in a speech at New York University Law School: “[Kevin Cooper] is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”
A 12th judge wrote in a separate opinion: “Significant evidence bearing on Cooper’s culpability has been lost, destroyed or left un-pursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. …Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the outcome.”
There have been many judges in other cases who have turned a blind eye to the truth and let a poor person get executed, even when there were serious doubts about that person’s guilt, but it is rare for judges to speak out against a possible execution. If these 12 judges are ignored, what will happen to me will not be my execution but my murder at the hands of the state of California.
The political ideology of many judges allows them to ignore truth and injustice. Politics—the politics of life and death—do play a very real part in this country’s criminal justice system. That is why Republicans in Washington, D.C., would not allow President Obama to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court [after his death]. This truth may never be admitted in words, but actions speak louder than words. Among these actions are the continuing oppression of people like me, who are poor and fighting for our lives from within this rotten criminal justice system.
So while finality, rather than justice, may be what certain judges are more concerned with, it is my hope that others in positions of authority—in particular the governor—will see the miscarriage of justice in my case and stand up and speak out to prevent this state from murdering me.
What makes my case unique in many ways is the fact that a dozen federal judges did just that—they stood up and spoke out against my questionable conviction—based on all the evidence and not just what the state claims after hiding, lying, destroying, tampering with, withholding and manipulating the evidence, all of which is exposed in my clemency petition to Governor Brown.
Just because other judges in my case chose not to acknowledge the truth about it doesn’t mean I’m guilty. This can be said for all the people who have been exonerated for crimes, including murder, they did not commit. Certain judges in their cases upheld bogus convictions and then closed the cases.
I am respectfully asking you, no matter who you are, no matter your religion, your political party, your skin color or your sexual orientation, no matter what your job is, your economic class, or anything else that makes you the individual you are, to please get involved in this fight to save my life, as well as the fight for our collective humanity.
While I may indeed be murdered by the state of California in the not-too-distant future, this fight is not just about me. It is much bigger than me, or any one person. It is about us as a people bringing to an end the historic and horrific crime against humanity that is only done against America’s poor people, especially its Black people like me.
My legal team and I have petitioned the governor to grant me an innocence investigation so that he and everyone else can learn the truth about the law enforcement misconduct in my case, as well as DNA testing that we hope will reveal the real killer’s DNA and exonerate me.
We are asking the governor to grant me a reprieve so that if this state resumes executions, I will not be executed. The state has me marked for death and has me at the top of the execution list, in part because it did not murder me in 2004, and subsequently because of the attention my case is now receiving, with many people, including several jurors who convicted me, believing in my innocence.
There is entirely too much sadness and pain and inhumanity inside these modern-day prison/plantations to go into any one essay. Just know that I am thankful on this Thanksgiving Day that my spirit has endured and is keeping me alive, when all around me is death.
—truthdig, November 22, 2017
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/thanksgiving-death-row/
Kevin Cooper is an innocent man on San Quentin’s Death Row in California. He continues to struggle for exoneration and to abolish the death penalty in the whole U.S. Learn more about his case at: www.kevincooper.org
Write to him at:
Kevin Cooper C-65304, 4 EB 82
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
www.freekevincooper.org
International Call to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!
December 9, 2017
To: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner
From: Concerned Members of International Community
A call to release the District Attorney and police files relevant to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case and to free Abu-Jamal now!
We, the undersigned individual and organizational members of the international community concerned with issues of human rights, call your attention to an egregious example of human rights violations in your respective jurisdictions: the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Specifically, we call on you both, key officials with the power to determine Abu-Jamal’s fate, to:
Partial list of initial endorsers:
Angela Davis; Danny Glover; Mireille Fanon-Mendes- France, President, Frantz Fanon Foundation; Sabine Lösing, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Left & DIE LINKE, GERMANY; Fatma Alloo, Media Women’s Association, Tanzania; Nambiath Vasudevan, Trade Union Solidarity Committee Mumbai, INDIA, Continuation Committee of the International Workers Committee; Vanessa Brown, PA State Assembly Representative, 190th District; Gregory Muhammad, Nation of Islam, Prison Reform Ministry; Fifteen Members of Danish Parliament; Basyn Hasan, Democratic City Committee Member, PA Prison Society; Estela Vazquez, First Vice President, Local 1199 SEIU (U.S.); Dr. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Historian, Author; Marc Lamont Hill, Author, Professor, Temple University; Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Long time Freedom Fighter, Former Political Prisoner; Harold Wilson, 120th Exonerated PA Death Row Survivor; Mimi Rosenberg, Esq., Senior Staff Attorney, The Legal Aid Society, Radio Producer, WBAI; Laura Whitehorn, Former Political Prisoner; Linda M Thurston, War Resisters League; Julian Kunnie, First Nations Enforcement Agency;
Partial list of organizations: Committee to Save Mumia; Free Mumia Network (Free Mumia Berlin, Free Mumia Frankfurt, Free Mumia Heidelberg, and Free Mumia Nurnberg); French Collective Libérons Mumia (encompassing 100 organizations and municipalities including Paris); Saint-Denis Mumia Committee; Amig@s de Mumia de México; International Action Center; International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal; Workers World Party (U.S.); The MOVE Organization; National Jericho Movement; The Northeast Political Prisoner Coalition; Educators for Mumia; Teachers for Mumia (Oakland); Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC); Campaign to Free Mumia; Local 10, International Longshore Workers Union; Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
To sign onto this letter, please email infomumia@gmail.com with the subject line “International Letter for Mumia.” Submit your full name as you want it listed and your organizational or professional identification.
Continued on page
Serious Questions About Philly DA
Longtime Philadelphia civil rights attorney and newly elected District Attorney Larry Krasner has appointed former DA and retired State Supreme Court Justice Ron Castille, a notorious death penalty advocate, to his 16-member transition team. Krasner’s official term begins in January.
A number of supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal and other community activists criticized the selection of Castille to a committee that features 15 other elected officials, city power brokers and attorneys (including noted civil rights defense attorney Michael Coard.)
Some Krasner supporters are suggesting that it’s only his transition team, which includes people who will not necessarily be in his official administration, so it’s not that important.
There are many reasons, however, to ask what good could come from Krasner’s appointment of Castille.
Castille refused to recuse himself from ruling on Abu-Jamal’s appeal at the State Supreme Court level, even though the former Philly DA was instrumental in denying Mumia’s appeal years earlier. Mumia currently has a case under litigation, which could lead to his freedom, that hinges on whether a federal Supreme Court decision against such practices applies to him.
Castille’s inclusion on Krasner’s team gives a false impression that the former DA and justice is somehow progressive. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Castille’s long reactionary history
While Krasner often stated opposition to the death penalty during his campaign, he chose Castille, who bragged during his election campaign for State Supreme Court in 1993 that he was responsible for putting 45 men on Pennsylvania’s death row.
Krasner campaigned that he would reduce mass incarceration, yet Castille boasted about strengthening state laws against drug trafficking, which more than tripled the conviction rate of local drug dealers. In other words, Castille contributed mightily to mass incarceration.
Castille and the state’s other DAs persuaded the Pennsylvania Legislature to approve mandatory sentencing for drug dealers—one of many state laws for which Castille took credit as legislative chairperson of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association in the late 1980s.
Castille asserted that he took on “every child advocacy group in the state” to push through a tougher law on juvenile crime. This law let police photograph and fingerprint youths arrested for felonies and gave the DA the power to veto judges’ decisions to send youths into probation-like programs. (Philadelphia Daily News, September 25, 1989)
Krasner promised to end the civil asset forfeiture law; yet this law was actually written by Castille. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania says that under this law, “[T]he government can legally take property it claims is connected to illegal activity but without actually charging, much less convicting, the property owner of a crime.” (aclupa.org) In Philadelphia, up to $1 million a year in cash is seized from innocent residents. (aclupa.org, June 2, 2015)
Krasner gained his reputation as a civil rights attorney willing to take on police brutality cases, but Castille is notorious for defending cops, no matter what they may be accused of. As Philly DA, Castille concluded that despite the deaths of 11 Black adults and children after the city bombed the home of MOVE, a Black liberation group, in 1985, there was insufficient evidence of criminal intent to justify a prosecution of any city officials.
More than 100 members of the racist Fraternal Order of Police attended Castille’s victory party in 1985. The organization had sent out 16,000 letters urging members to “bring their moms, their brothers, their sisters, their aunts” to the polls. Retired officers staffed telephones and drove 26 vans to deliver the message on Castille’s behalf.
The FOP named Castille FOP Man of the Year in 1986. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 6, 1985) Unsurprisingly, Castille was named attorney for the state FOP in 1993.
The unconstitutional McMahon tapes, which train DA attorneys how to keep Black and Brown people off juries, were recorded during Castille’s term as DA.
On May 8, 2013, State Justice Castille wrote the opinion that allowed unnecessarily gerrymandered legislative districts for the next eight years in Pennsylvania, especially obstructing the voting rights of Black, Brown and poor communities. This practice in Wisconsin and other states is currently being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Krasner has the right to appoint anyone he wants to his transition team. But if he chooses to invite a former DA with a long history of supporting the death penalty, mass incarceration and the FOP, and of being anti-justice, the people have a right to raise questions. Many politicians have been elected after making many promises to voters, only to do an about-face once in office.
Krasner now has to answer what many people are asking: Is the appointment of Castille the first sign of compromise with Philadelphia’s racist power structure?
—Workers World, December 7, 2017
https://www.workers.org/2017/12/07/serious-questions-after-notorious-philly-da-appointed/
Roy: “...Just a good ’ole boy”
The stunning scandal surrounding Judge Roy Moore’s Senate campaign is a tale of power, not one of sex.
Nothing so engages the news media like a sex scandal, for it’s a ratings bonanza! And although it appears to be the story of a man with a case of the Lolita Syndrome (or an adult man’s obsession with little girls,) again, it’s about power: political power; spiritual power; male power.
But no commentator I’ve seen has yet penetrated to the central point that illustrates this case.
Hints emerge from Moore’s repeated acts of disobedience to the Constitution, in favor of biblical guides to interpreting the law.
I don’t know Alabama law, but in Pennsylvania all judges must swear an oath to obey both the state and federal constitutions.
Moore’s judicial oath was seemingly twice violated when he objected to U.S. Supreme Court holdings. His oath instead, to religious belief is the elevation of religion above the law.
Several years ago, award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges wrote a book entitled American Fascists, 2006, describing men called “dominionists,” who want to transform America into a theocracy—where the Bible becomes the Law of the Land.
Imagine The Handmaid’s Tale come to life, where females are entirely controlled by men who treat them as sexual property, without choice.
How better to begin, than with a child?
That’s what Judge Roy Moore represents.
—Prison Radio, November 13, 2017
Write to:
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM-8335
SCI-Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, PA 17932
In the wake of a spate of scandals bursting out of Hollywood, names of the rich and famous are dropping like ripe fruit from a bush.
This latest eruption stems from the growing claims against super-director/bankroller, Harvey Weinstein. (Truth be told, when I first heard his name, I had no idea who he was. I thought of a prominent gay actor with a raspy voice, and could make no sense of the reports.)
Although known by many in Hollywood, he barely burst the bubble to the outer world.
But before long, a dam had burst, of famous women from the biggest blockbusters of the last few decades, saying the film executive sexually assaulted or harassed, well “#MeToo” (to quote the hash tag.)
And it didn’t end with Weinstein; a who’s who of male Hollywood were “outed” as sexual abusers—and then, miraculously, the river burst its banks and the names of nationally known politicians began to fill the air!
What we are seeing is the beginning of a movement, augmented by social media, yes; but also animated by real, live women, as shown by the unprecedented mobilization of women shortly after Trump’s unexpected win in the presidential race.
That’s because social movements first change consciousness; then they change society itself.
When I was a youth, I heard whispers and hints about the “casting couch.”
It was simply the way things were.
How many women accepted such vile treatment on their road to fame and fortune, only to find that everything that glitters ain’t gold?
Today, because of the courage of such women, we are seeing the extraordinary costs of such a couch.
But this time, the men in power, are paying the price.
—Prison Radio, November 9, 2017
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Continued from page 63
Child sex trafficking victim jailed for killing an abuser gains support
The story of a Tennessee teen who was instrumental in the rewriting of the state’s human trafficking laws has gone viral, gaining national support for her case. Cyntoia Brown, a former child sex trafficking victim, is currently serving a life sentence after she was convicted in 2006 of killing one of her abusers in 2004, when she was only 16 years old. Internet activists have this week renewed interest in her case by spreading the hashtag #FreeCyntoiaBrown.
A documentary about Brown’s case, “Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story,” gained national attention when it first aired on PBS in 2011. While it is unclear exactly why her case is back in the public eye now—though it is likely in part from the attention from celebrities like Rihanna—her story has revived national concern about the difficulty that child sex trafficking victims face in navigating the criminal justice system.
“Cyntoia Brown was only sixteen years old when she was trafficked by a pimp who called himself ‘Cut-throat.’ Cyntoia suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, a birth defect caused by her birthmother’s excessive consumption of alcohol during her pregnancy. The effects of fetal alcohol syndrome include intellectual disabilities that affect a person’s ability to think rationally and appreciate the consequences of her conduct, as well as neurological, emotional, and behavioral issues. Cyntoia came from a broken home, and as a young teenager she began abusing alcohol and drugs. She eventually ran away. By the time she took up with Cut-throat, she had already been the victim of several rapes and physical abuse. She and Cut-throat lived in a motel room, which, along with his drug habit, Cyntoia paid for by selling sex. Cut-throat was physically and verbally abusive, and he threatened to find Cyntoia if she ever left him.”
“He would explain to me that some people were born whores, and that I was one, and I was a slut, and nobody’d want me but him, and the best thing I could do was just learn to be a good whore,” Brown told a judge in 2012 during an appeal hearing.
Brown was picked up one night by a 43-year-old man who took her to his home and showed her his gun collection, bragging about being an expert marksman. Fearing, she said, that the man was preparing to kill her, she used a gun given to her by Cut-throat for protection to shoot him in the back of the head. Later, she took two of his guns back for Cut-throat.
Brown was tried as an adult, and though she claims she feared for her life when she fired the fatal shot, prosecutors in the murder trial argued that her intent was robbery. She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison at the Tennessee Prison for Women, where she is not eligible for parole until she is 67. At an appeal hearing in 2012, Nashville attorney Charles Bone and other attorneys argued that Brown deserved a new trial on the grounds that her original trial was deficient because she had been advised not to testify. According to NewsOK:
“Her current attorneys believe that advice was given based on a misconception about the law.
“‘I wanted to testify. My family thought I should testify,’ Brown, now 24, said on Tuesday. If she had, the jury likely would have heard something like what she next told the judge. …
“Although Brown has a high IQ, Adler said that testing last year showed her to be functioning [psychologically, in some respects] at the level of a 13 or 14-year-old.
“Brown’s attorneys argued that was evidence that should have been presented at her original trial.”
Others, like state Representative Jeremy Faison, a Republican from Nashville, have also pushed for Brown’s release. The New York Times reports:
“(Faison) visited Ms. Brown in 2015 on a friend’s recommendation, and has since been pushing for her early release. They speak about four times per year on the phone, he said.
“‘I was amazed at the person I met,’ he said. ‘She was kind, intelligent, she had a disposition or presence about her that was just amazing.’
“He described Ms. Brown as ‘extremely remorseful,’ but said she also thinks ‘it was unjust what had happened in her life, and what a 40-year-old man was doing to her.’
“Mr. Bone said his client hopes to focus her energy on combating sex trafficking.
“‘Seldom do you have someone as articulate as she is, with the ability to say: ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I want to speak out, to let the world know that this is indeed an awful problem,’ he said.”
The nationwide outrage that Brown’s case inspired played a part in a change in Tennessee law in 2011. Now, anyone under the age of 18 cannot be charged for prostitution; rather, they are seen as too young to consent to sex. Some Tennessee activists are trying to change state laws so that juveniles can no longer be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Brown remains in prison, where she has been called a “model prisoner” and is pursuing higher education.
—Truthdig, November 22, 2017
Write to:
Ms. Cyntoia Brown #00410593
3881 Stewarts Lane
Nashville, Tennessee 37218
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