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MAY - JUNE 2015
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Issue No. 012
LIBERTY.
EQUALITY.
SOLIDARITY.
U.S. POLITICS
A BUYER’S MARKET
WOMEN AT WORK
WOMEN, WORK AND
THE SECOND SHIFT
#RECLAIMMLK
TARGETED BY THE
STATE
THE RED VINE
Journal of the Red
Party
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MAY - JUNE 2015
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Women, Work & the Second Shift
by Mari Pierre-Antoine
Women today remain
disadvantaged in the work
environment and socially
compared to men even though
women are now legally equal to
men in most aspects in most
countries, glaring inequality still
remains in a key area, parenting.
Traditionally, a woman’s role in
society was to raise her children,
care for her husband and look
after the household. This cultural
expectation broadly remains
intact today despite large steps
toward gender equality taken in
other areas of life. It is reflected
both in our culture and in law.
Women are allowed and usually
expected to work, but if they also
have a family which in itself is
another strong social expectation
they have to also take on this
second job at home.
Feminist academic Arlie
Hochschild popularized this
concept with her 1989 book The
Second Shift: Working Parents
and the Revolution at Home. She
describes what she calls the
“second shift”, referring to this
u n p a i d d o m e s t i c l a b o r.
Hochschild and her team
interviewed fifty couples for the
book throughout the 1970s and
‘80s, to find the different loads
of child care and housework
shared by the couples and
measure the “leisure gap”
between them (the difference in
the amount of free time left over each week after work, child,
household and personal care
duties.)
Table of Contents:
General Content
‣ Women, Work & the
Second Shift
Pg. 02
What she found,
unsurprisingly, was that wives
disproportionately undertook the
domestic labor that makes up the
second shift, but because of the
large scale entry of women into
the workplace throughout the
20th century this wasn’t a clear
cut or universal practice.
Hochschild placed each family
she studied into one of three
categories: traditional, egalitarian
and transitional. Since the
problem is a structural one and
can’t just be wished away, these
married couples had to have
some kind of way to manage
their home lives. Who does what
tasks? Do they share them, and if
so how much? Is the gendered
division of labor satisfactory for
both parties, or are there tensions
and conflicts in the relationship
because of them?
In “traditional” families,
the wife and mother took on all
of the cooking, cleaning and
nurturing the children, basically
living up to the idealized picture
of proper womanhood, being a
hausfrau. Men at work, women
at home. These families were a
minority, surprisingly given how
widespread the image is. It was
more popular with the working
class families she studied than
with more affluent ones.
LABOR DONATED
‣ Why MLK Had to Die
Pg. 12
‣ Beyond “Money in
Politics”
Pg. 14
‣ Party Update
Pg. 17
‣ Labor and the Iowa
Caucuses
Pg. 17
‣ ”Untitled” from the Daily
Worker c.a. 1924
Pg. 21
Editorial
‣ After Baltimore, What?
Pg. 08
Letters
‣ You Can’t Build
Anything Real on A
Foundation of Sand
Pg. 18
‣ Reply: Service à la
Russe
Pg. 21
The Red Vine is the official
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reflect the views of the RP
Central Committee. We
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MAY - JUNE 2015
In “egalitarian”
households, both partners felt
that they should share domestic
responsibilities as much as
possible. Husbands should be
fathers just as much as they’re
providers, and wives should be
career-oriented as much as
they’re family-oriented.
Egalitarian arrangements were
also a minority. “Transitional”
households had blending
between the two poles, to
different degrees. The wife
shouldn’t be homebound but
should still do the majority of the
domestic work, though the
husband has a role in it too. This
arrangement was the most
popular.
The three approaches
weren’t necessarily decided by
explicit consent; more often the
spouses just “fell into” these
roles as an unconscious or
unspoken act. Couples also
didn’t necessarily agree on
which ideological position to
take, and disagreements on
fulfilling or subverting gender
norms were sources of serious
marital conflict.
Hochschild wrote that
our situation was a “stalled
revolution.” Even though women
had broken into the work force
and were advancing upward
from the lowest-paid professions
steadily suggested a combination
of both government policies and
changing cultural attitudes to fix
the problem. In an interview
conducted 25 years after
publishing The Second Shift, she
regretfully noted that these
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
government policies haven’t
materialized yet. She noted
several things that made the
position of American workers
less favorable to women
compared to other countries.
U.S. employees work long hours
and with less flex time, which
hurts workers in caregiver roles,
mainly women. Most other highincome countries, not just the
Scandinavian welfare states,
have paid parental leave. We
don’t have government
subsidized child care - “even
talking about government help
seems more like a pipedream
now.” She says that the added
pressure on wages and
employment is hurting not just
blue collar workers, but also
white collar workers and
workers’ families. She
acknowledges the spreading of
female upward mobility that has
brought many female managers
and CEOs, but says that overall,
we have now hit a second stall in
the stalled revolution.
Arlie Hochschild’s most
widely read works appeared
during a transitional period
between two periods in the
development of the feminist
movement, second-wave
feminism and third-wave
feminism. Third-wave feminism,
which started in the early 1990s,
put more focus on challenging
and deconstructing gender roles
than in the second wave that was
more focused on rights. Although
she was very influential,
Hoschschild wasn’t the first
prominent thinker to pay
LABOR DONATED
attention to gender relations in
the workplace.
Alexandra Kollontai was
one such figure from the early
20th century,
a Russian
revolutionary who was the main
women’s theorist and activist in
the Russian Communist Party.
Like other Bolsheviks, she saw
social issues through the lens of
class, and she produced a large
body of material on issues
specific to working class women.
She called the unequal share of
domestic labor the double burden
instead of the second shift, but it
was the same problem they were
both describing. The difference
between them comes from
Kollontai’s looking at the class
dynamics. Working class women
(women who work for a wage
a n d d o n ’t o w n t h e i r o w n
business or productive land)
don’t share the same interests as
“middle class” (petty-bourgeois)
and bourgeois women.
Hochschild found that working
class women were more likely to
be “traditional” housewives Kollontai would explain this as
them lacking access to nannies
and other kinds of hired help.
Her view was that in precapitalist, feudal society, femalebased home child care was
necessary because the household
was the main productive
economic unit. Peasant families
tended their own small plots or a
parcel from a landlord to grow
food. Under capitalism though,
this was no longer needed
because the household is now a
unit of consumption. Its
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MAY - JUNE 2015
continued existence oppressed
women, so child care needed to
be taken out of the private sphere
and put into the public sphere:
“A labour state
establishes a completely
new principle: care of
the younger generation
is not a private family
affair, but a social-state
concern. Maternity is
protected and provided
for not only in the
interests of the woman
herself, but still more in
the interests of the tasks
b e f o re t h e n a t i o n a l
economy during the
transition to a socialist
system: it is necessary to
save women from an
u n p r o d u c t i v e
expenditure of energy on
the family so that this
energy can be used
efficiently in the interests
of the collective; it is
necessary to protect
their health in order to
guarantee the labour
re p u b l i c a f l o w o f
healthy workers in the
future. In the bourgeois
state it is not possible to
pose the question of
maternity in this way:
class contradictions and
the lack of unity between
the interests of private
economies and the
national economy hinder
this. In a labour
republic, on the other
hand, where the
individual economies are
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
dissolving into the
general economy and
where classes are
disintegrating and
disappearing, such a
solution to the question
of maternity is demanded
by life, by necessity. The
labour republic sees
woman first and
foremost as a member of
the labour force, as a
unit of living labour; the
function of maternity is
seen as highly important,
but as a supplementary
task and as a task that is
not a private family
matter but a social
matter.”1
Kollontai knew this
transfer of the domestic burden
from the individual level to the
social level wouldn’t happen
overnight, but thought it had to
be taken on consciously and that
gender equality wasn’t an
automatic process. She actually
had to fight with some other
prominent Communist leaders on
this, who thought that women’s
emancipation would happen
more or less automatically under
socialism. Kollontai successfully
agitated for creating the
Department of Mother and Child
in the new Soviet government,
which introduced creches,
canteens and public laundry
facilities, either from building
new ones or taking the few
existing facilities into state
o w n e r s h i p . W i t h Ya k o v
Sverdlov, she drafted the 1918
law on marriage, family and
LABOR DONATED
guardianship that legalized civil
marriage, no-fault divorce, and
abortion.2
She also initiated and
lead the Zhenotdel (Women’s
Department) of the Bolshevik
Party itself. One of its jobs was
to make sure the new laws were
actually implemented, which
frequently only existed on paper.
Soviet Russia inherited a lot of
economic and cultural
backwardness from the Russian
Empire, and fighting in World
War I followed by the Russian
Civil War only made things
worse. The Zhenotdel was
unpopular among factory
managers, government
departments and unions, seen as
a nuisance. Kollontai resigned
her leadership role after suffering
a heart attack, and the
Zhenotdel’s role was diminished
year by year until it was shut
down by Joseph Stalin in 1930.
A lot has changed since
1920s, or even since 1989, but
women are still widely
disadvantaged by the same
economic setup. The share of
domestic labor in households has
evened out more in the past
twenty years in the United States
but it still falls more on women
than men. This effects women
very sharply in terms of wages.
Since overtime work is an
important way to bring in more
money, women’s decreased
ability to work overtime because
of domestic commitments hits
hard.
!4
MAY - JUNE 2015
According to a study
released by the Department of
Sociology at Indiana University3,
the percentage of American male
workers who worked 50 hours or
more per week was 19%, while
for women it was 7%. Women
were less likely to take or keep a
job that required overtime work.
Employers often encourage 24/7
availability, which is also helped
by how common instant, roundthe-clock communication is
today. The economy overall is
trending more toward longer
work hours and more
compensation for overwork (and
employers are increasingly
willing to have more pay
disparity within the same
workplace), so this difference
has the effect of counteracting
trends toward gendered wage
equity. The authors, Youngjoo
Cha and Kim Weeden, dismiss
claims that this is because
women just want fewer working
hours than their male
counterparts. Instead, they point
to multiple studies that explain
the gender disparity in overtime
in terms of “essentialist beliefs
about female caregiving [that]
continue to be a dominant
cultural ideology even among
people who endorse gender
egalitarianism.” This means that
even people who, on an
intellectual level, believe that
child care should be shared, in
practice delegate the majority of
it to the female partner.
This is one of the main
mechanisms that keeps the
gendered pay gap in place.
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Currently, women employed fulltime earn on average 77 cents for
every dollar a man makes. The
way this happens isn’t as simple
anymore as paying a female
worker less for the same position
as her male colleague. For young
women, the gap is smaller (7%
less than men), which shows that
since young women are more
likely to be childless they have
more flexibility in the labor
market.
Women’s educational
achievements and amounts of
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workplace experience have risen
highly in the last four decades,
traditionally signs that they will
have higher-paid jobs. But
despite this, women workers are
two-thirds of the 20 million in
low-wage jobs (less than $10.10
per hour - actually still a poverty
wage) even though they are a
little less than half of the total
workforce. They are
overrepresented in professions
that relate to caregiving, playing
to ideas of traditional gender
roles, like child care workers,
waitressing, home health care
!5
MAY - JUNE 2015
and cleaning. Besides these jobs,
they are likely to be found in
sectors like fast food and retail
that pay at or very close to the
minimum wage.4
This trend has increased
since the 2008 recession, 35% of
women’s net job gains since then
have been in these low-wage
occupations compared to 20%
for men. One third of these
women are mothers. For Black
and Hispanic women, the gap
widens more compared to white
women. At $10.10 an hour,
working full-time and with yearround employment, a worker
with two children would just
barely keep her head above the
poverty line with an annual
income of $20,200. If she was
paid the federal minimum wage
of $7.25 an hour, she would fall
far beneath it at $14,500. How
inadequate is $10.10 that even at
full time it can barely push a
w o m a n ’s w a g e a b o v e t h e
government’s own official (read
conservative) poverty line?
The numbers are even
more dramatic for single
mothers. Families with a
working mom are less than 25%
of the total number of families,
but almost 40% of low-income
families. More than half are
working full time. While not all
working single mothers live in
poverty, the majority, 58 percent
as of 2012, of female-headed
working households are in low
wage occupations. For African
Americans it’s even higher, at 65
percent. Single mothers are an
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
at-risk population for depression,
although they often go
undiagnosed and untreated
because of underrating the
importance of their symptoms or
not being able to access health
care.
Access to child care is a
major barrier for these mothers,
who are often forced to patch
together informal arrangements
with their personal support
networks of friends and family.
Actually, child care costs hit
w o r k e r s i n h i g h e r- i n c o m e
households hard too, which goes
a long way toward explaining
why so much of it is still homebased in a way that
disadvantages women. Enrolling
a child in daycare can cost more
than a month’s rent or food bill,
seriously limiting the options
available to working women. For
some examples, full-time annual
child care center enrollment can
cost around $16,000 in
Massachusetts for an infant and
$12,300 in New York for a four
year old. In 31 states, the cost is
higher than it would be for a year
of college in a four-year public
university. In every state, it’s
more than 25 percent of a single
parent’s median income. For
most people, staying home isn’t
an option even if they wanted to
have a “traditional” male
breadwinner and female
housewife relationship, since
almost half of American families
have two working parents.
At the same time, social
support policies to provide child
LABOR DONATED
care assistance to low-income
families are experiencing budget
cuts. In 2013, the U.S. Congress
cut $400 million from the Head
Start program that gives young
children from poor families
access to preschool and $115
million from the Child Care and
Development Block Grant that
gives money to local authorities
to spend on subsidies for day
cares. This is part of an ongoing
trend in cutting these programs,
which has been partially
countered but overall makes
them unable to keep up their
current levels of service, let
alone expand. Without affordable
child care made available, it falls
to women by default to do it. If
they have problems, if they can’t
“do it all” and balance their work
and home lives by themselves,
they’re seen as personal failures
instead of social problems.
These women basically
subsidize their employers and
their partners’ employers by
providing their own child care.
The same thing happens with
maternal leave. The United
States is the only advanced
industrialized country in the
world that doesn’t doesn’t
guarantee paid parental leave
after childbirth or adoption. In
fact, not only is it the only highincome country that doesn’t do
this, it’s the only country
altogether besides Papua New
Guinea. The U.S. passed the
Family Medical Leave Act
(FMLA) in 1993, which
guarantees up to twelve weeks of
!6
MAY - JUNE 2015
unpaid leave, but there are
exceptions.
The worker must have
worked for at least one year at
his or her place of employment,
worked at least 1,250 hours
during that year, and works in a
business that employs at least 50
people if in the private sector.
Taking unpaid time off is costprohibitive for many, especially
in low wage jobs. Some
employers do provide paid
parental leave for their
employees for either or both
parents, with paid leave more
likely in unionized workplaces
and the public sector. California
has a Paid Family Leave (PFL)
program, an insurance fund that
is paid for by contribution from
employees’ paychecks and
provides temporary partial
compensation for people who
take time off for having children,
adopting or caring for a sick
family member. New Jersey and
Wa s h i n g t o n h a v e s i m i l a r
programs. Another regressive tax
on working people.
For women who don’t
have a paid leave option, they
either don’t take any time off at
all besides what’s absolutely
medically necessary or they use a
combination of different legal
and employer provided
measures. Accumulated vacation
time, personal days, sick days
and paid time off may be used in
some combination, plus applying
for short-term disability in the
states where STD benefits can be
claimed for childbirth.
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Women in the United
States continue to struggle with
an uneven playing field in the
workplace, given most of the
responsibility for child care and
the home but not given adequate
tools to deal with those
responsibilities beyond what
their own backgrounds and
personal support systems can
give. We need to take concrete
steps toward leveling the playing
field. As stated above, most
countries already have
guaranteed paid parental leave.
The Netherlands, an advanced
capitalist economy but not nearly
as rich as the U.S., offers 16
weeks at full pay. Canada
requires between 17 and 52
weeks of leave for new mothers
depending on their employment
time, with an additional partially
paid (not the full wage) benefit
that can be shared between both
parents. All thanks to the
pressure exerted by the working
class movement.
Subsidized or public
child care should also be brought
up to at the level it’s at in the
other high-income countries.
Ideally, the U.S. would bring
back the brief universal child
care program it had between
1943 and 1946, where the federal
government sponsored cheap
child care for women to access
so they could work as part of the
war effort.
Notes
1. Alexandra Kollontai, “The
Labour of Women in the
Evolution of the Economy.”
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2. http://weeklyworker.co.uk/
worker/960/alexandra-kollontaiemancipation-through-the-russi/
3. Cha Youngjoo, “Overwork and
the Slow Convergence in the
Gender Gap in Wages.”
4. http://www.nwlc.org/resource/
underpaid-overloaded-womenlow-wage-jobs
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MAY - JUNE 2015
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
After Baltimore, What?
Editorial by the Red Party Central Committee
As the bourgeois media turns its shallow and
reliably fickle attention away from last month’s
uprising in Baltimore, the socialist left should ask
itself what the next likely steps are - and what role it
has to play - in the Black freedom struggle.
Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice.
Oscar Grant. Eric Garner. Rekia Boyd. Tony
Robinson. These are just some of the most wellknown names of unarmed Black people whose lives
were taken by police, which itself is only the
sharpest and most immediately noticeable edge of an
oppressive capitalist system. When a demonstration
of a few hundred took place on April 18th, the day
Freddie was unlawfully arrested and the day before
he succumbed to his injuries, it passed by largely
unnoticed outside the immediate area.
It wasn’t until April 25th that the pressure
container burst, when Baltimore police inflamed the
situation by essentially blockading1 students at
Frederick Douglass High School, preventing them
from returning home from school as a response to
spurious Twitter talk of doing a “purge” (named
after the 2013 dystopian flick where all crime is
legal for one day.) When Gray was laid to rest two
days later, anger boiled over - helped along by police
provocations - as sections of the protests became
violent. We all remember and mourn the fate of the
poor CVS store in West Baltimore, taken so
tragically before its time.
Make no mistake: what happened in
Baltimore was an uprising, albeit an elemental one
largely in the form of spontaneous outrage. A riot
can’t transform society, but it can allow oppressed
people to see themselves as the subjects, rather than
the objects, of their own history. Communists are in
favor of the most conscious organization of the
working class and oppressed possible, so we don’t
fetishize these spontaneous explosions as being
somehow the highest expression of struggle. They
have real limits and they sometimes channel their
anger in counterproductive ways.
actions were plainly political, like the looting of the
payday loan place that left CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in
stupefied disbelief.2 Even in the case of the nowinfamous CVS, talking heads pulling out the old
racist canards of rioters as savage, undisciplined
animals, or the products of poor parenting or absent
fathers et cetera miss the key political content. A
payday loan, a pawn shop and even a CVS are not
representations of community enterprise; they are
examples of an alien force extracting wealth, a
fixture of the ghetto economy. It’s a sad reflection of
our official media that broken windows are more
heinous than broken spines.
Demands raised in demonstrations have
been multifaceted, speaking not just to police
brutality in itself but to the generalized oppression
suffered by Black America. Although formal
equality under the law achieved by the civil rights
movement fifty years ago was a real victory,
conditions for Black workers and poor are in some
ways worse today than they were during the postwar economic boom that stretched from the 1950s to
the early ‘70s. Then, the historically unprecedented
new lease on life given to capitalism after World
War II allowed the ruling class to make certain
concessions to the proletariat - even if these
concessions reached Black workers at a trickle.
Now, in a period of stagnation and crisis,
there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Tens of
millions have little hope that things will ever get
much better, so it’s no surprise that what began as
actions against police terror should grow into a
generalized revolt. As we wrote after the nonindictment of Darren Wilson in Ferguson:
But we refuse to join hands with those who
condemn protesters’ acts as “violence” and
protesters themselves as “thugs” while the real
perpetrators of violence go unpunished. Some LABOR DONATED
“When they are not killed outright,
Black Americans – particularly when they
are from the working class – are subject to
larger rates of imprisonment for the same
crimes committed as whites, lasting job
discrimination despite formal equality under
the law, media stigmatization and, most
pervasive of all, crushing poverty. The
everyday realities of poverty and inferior
access to social services that are on the
chopping block for all poor people but
whose withering stings especially hard in
!8
MAY - JUNE 2015
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
poor communities of color are just as real as
shocking events like the federal response to
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the killing of
Mike Brown.”3
No Room
The Baltimore city government’s response
to the uprising shows the dead-end of relying on
“black faces in high places”, as the International
Socialist Organization’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
put it in Jacobin.4 Like most major cities, Baltimore
is governed almost exclusively by the Democratic
Party. Mayor Stephanie-Rawlings Blake and the
entire city council are all Democrats. Its status as a
Black-majority city (64% African-American, not
counting African immigrants) is reflected in
government, too - even Police Commissioner
Anthony Batts is Black. So unlike Ferguson, where
the disparity between population and government
evoked memories of apartheid South Africa and
local policy lorded over the Black population with
all but open racism, in Baltimore the liberal
establishment has little basis to agitate for “getting
the vote out” as a remedy.
Instead, we got to see what the Democrats
do in power without the convenient Republican
boogeyman to use as an alibi. Rawlings-Blake and
Batts presided over more than 3,000 police officers
and coordinated with 2,000 National Guard troops
supplied by the Maryland Governor to impose a
military-style occupation on the city. A curfew and
state of emergency, both anathema to a democratic
society, were used to detain hundreds of arrested
protesters without charge, with bail bonds being set
as high as half a million dollars. The most generous
compliment we can give to the Baltimore
administration is that they weren’t as heavy-handed
in their repression as their counterparts in Ferguson but then again, tell that to Joseph Kent, an organizer
swept away by National Guardsmen in an armored
car on live television for civil disobedience.
Naturally, President Obama lined up behind
Mayor Rawlings-Blake to denounce protesters as
“criminals” and “thugs.” True, the Obama
administration is curbing the flow of military gear to
police departments - talk about too little, too late. It
also did its part in combatting the uprising by
lending the use of two FBI spy planes to help
coordinate police and National Guard efforts. That
hasn’t stopped key Democrats from claiming victory
in their usual combination of wild optimism and
flaccid or nonexistent policy. Liberal Maryland
Congressman Elijah Cummings heralded “a new era
of justice” after the charges were filed on May Day;
the Mayor posed as a people’s champion when she
claimed there is “no room” in the Baltimore PD for
“racism and brutality.” But we have heard these lines
before, and after the experiences of Ferguson and
New York City a small but notable militant section
of the movement is turning its back on the
Democratic Party and its shepherds, including
millionaire “official” Civil Rights leaders Al
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
The Left
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(cont’d. on page 10)
!9
MAY - JUNE 2015
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
What has been the Left’s response in
Baltimore? What can it offer to the radicalizing
Black youth? The city is home to a number of
socialist groups of varying ideological hues, as well
as the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the
World. As is usual during any pronounced uptick in
the class struggle, the results are mixed - with
admirable ground-work combined with some
questionable politics and the inevitable problems
that result from our disunity in competing
bureaucratic sects.
Take the Party for Socialism and Liberation
as an example. The PSL, a Marcyite5 sect known for
its full-throated defense of nationalist dictatorships
as part of its “anti-imperialism” and its economistic
conception of socialism. In a May Day statement6
the PSL warned that, even though Prosecutor
Marilyn Mosby had indicted the six officers
responsible for Gray’s death under popular pressure,
the police would quickly move to undermine this
partial victory. All well and good. But in terms of
what to do next, the PSL has little to offer except
letting us know we need to “intensify the fight-back”
(how, comrades?) and “organize, protest, [and] join
together.” It’s not possible to sustain high levels of
street mobilization forever; protests have already
dwindled down to a small fraction of what they were
since the prosecution announcement.
The Workers World Party, which the PSL
emerged from in 2004, is a little better. Their front
group, the People’s Power Assembly, has been out in
force in Baltimore. To its credit, Workers World can
mobilize an impressive number of people through
the Baltimore PPA, given their small size. The PPA
has spread basic class-related demands - for living
wage jobs and the like - and collected aid for
imprisoned youth. The same is true for the Baltimore
Free School, backed by the Industrial Workers of the
World, which opened itself up as a forum for
community organizing. These types of organizations
represent something of a break with spontaneity
fetishism, but only a partial one. Aside from being
another example of the sadly common practice of
covering one’s Marxist politics with a front group,
there is little perspective for the near and long-term
future beyond turning bodies out for the next protest.
Horizontalist outbursts have an inherent
tendency toward disintegration, and in any case
aren’t powerful or conscious enough to change
society on their own. Class struggle is inevitable, but
victory - even in partial concessions, let alone
revolution - is not. For that, we need a perspective
based on the long-term institutional rebuilding of the
working class movement, crucially of a Communist
Party.
There is no communist party in this country
today, no single organization with national reach
welding together disparate sections of workers and
oppressed people through shared commitment to a
Marxist program for changing the world. Instead
what we have is an array of confessional sects
unified on a bureaucratic-centralist basis… until the
next split, at least. Our sects are not fit for the tasks
history poses for us today.
Charm City Bolsheviks
There are important lessons to be learned
from the history of the Communist Party USA,
which even after its bureaucratization and
subordination to Stalinism in the 1920s remained a
real working-class party until rather recently. Many
of the CPUSA’s accomplishments are well-known in
radical circles, but perhaps less known is what it was
able to do in Baltimore, a city which at the time had
a historically small labor movement and weak
traditions of struggle.
Maryland has always straddled the dividing
line between North and South, and not just
geographically. During the Civil War it was a Union
slave state, with this contradiction fueling
Copperhead reaction up to and including the
counterrevolutionary Baltimore riot launched by
anti-war Democrats and Confederate sympathizers
in the first year of the war. While racist terror wasn’t
as openly expressed in Maryland as in the Deep
South, it was by no means absent.
In the opening of the Great Depression,
there was a political vacuum in Baltimore. The AfroAmerican, the city’s main Black newspaper,
routinely complained that the traditional freedom
organizations couldn’t “justify their existence.”7 The
trade unions were quiescent, and in any case mostly
unwilling to move beyond segregated craft unions
for skilled white workers. Neither Republicans nor
Democrats were in any rush to promote racial
equality or relief for the working class beyond
empty gestures - in fact, the CP was the only racially
integrated party in town.
The Communists had to go it alone. Though
they were small locally, they were part of a truly
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
national party armed with an expansive Party press,
a common program (albeit one hobbled at the time
by hyper-sectarian “Third Period” nonsense) and a
number of affiliated social, cultural and legal
organizations. In Baltimore as elsewhere, the
Communists had a well-earned reputation as the
most determined enemies of racial oppression. Their
main (though not only) avenue of work during this
time was the Unemployed Councils. The Comintern
launched “International Unemployed Day” for
March 6th of 1930, which in Baltimore drew a
modest crowd of a few hundred. While much
smaller than in other major American and European
cities, it was enough for the Baltimore Party to
organize its own Unemployed Councils. These
councils, open to all “hunger fighters”, successfully
blocked or reversed evictions through direct action,
challenged relief denials for individuals and
boisterously delivered collective demands. At one
point, the Waterfront Unemployed Council took over
hiring, firing and distribution of unemployment
relief at the Port of Baltimore. In alliance with the
CP-affiliated union at the port, the seamen
desegregated jobs and administered state aid to the
unemployed seamen under the auspices of a
democratically elected “Baltimore Soviet”, as it was
nicknamed at the time.8
The disproportionate effect of
unemployment among Black workers was
emphasized in recruitment efforts, agitation and
demonstration locations. Of course, the Party’s work
for Black liberation didn’t end with unemployment
relief. It was one part of the multifaceted struggle to
build a truly multi-racial working class movement.
On the positive end, the national CP “put the Dixiecrat lynch mobs on the defensive”9 in their defense
of the Scottsboro Boys and championed integration
and civil rights - including through a broad
organization, the National Negro Congress. On the
negative end, the ultraleft Third Period line they
upheld from 1928 to roughly 1934 lead them into
some strange blind alleys. Among them was the
demand for an independent country to be carved out
for African Americans in the “Black Belt” in the
Southern states. This idea, completely out of touch
with political reality, never found any purchase
among Black Americans and was mercifully ignored
even by Party activists in practice.
Unfortunately, other exercises in Third
Period adventurism were not ignored - and in
Baltimore they would eventually cripple the Party’s
unemployed work. The CP had abandoned the trade
unions; when elements of the Baltimore Federation
of Labor made tentative motions in an anti-racist
direction they were denounced as “social fascists”,
as was the Baltimore Socialist Party when it
belatedly recognized the problem of Black poverty.
Having isolated itself, the Unemployed Councils
withered on the vine.
The Baltimore Communists’ record on
Black liberation is key to understanding what our
role as revolutionary socialists must be for the next
Baltimore. We don’t endorse blindly emulating the
old CP with all its bureaucratic distortions. Quite the
opposite; extreme democracy is not only the only
way the working class can rule the future socialist
society, it’s also the most effective way we can
organize our movement in the here and now.
Popular resistance to police brutality will
continue, and already some activists under the
banner of Black Lives Matter are forging links with
the fight for $15.10 But if we are going to challenge
the ruling class and its state effectively, we need to
l o o k b e y o n d p r ep a r i n g f o r th e n ex t b i g
demonstration and toward a strategic perspective of
building (or rebuilding) the working class
institutions - not front groups. This perspective is
only tangible if we commit ourselves to creating a
radical alternative political project - a Communist
Party worthy of the name.
Notes
1. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/howbaltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge
2. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/wolf-blitzer-baffled-atbaltimore-riots-i-dont-remember-seeing-anything-likethis-in-a-long-time/
3. http://red-party.com/statement-on-ferguson/
4. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/baltimoreuprising-protests-freddie-gray-black-politicians/
5. Named after Sam Marcy, founding leader of the
Workers World Party. “Marcyite” politics combine
elevation of economic struggle to the highest level of
importance (economism) with support for ‘AntiAmerican’ bourgeois nationalist regimes abroad.
6. http://www.liberationnews.org/breaking-baltimorepolice-indictments/
7. Andrew Skotnes, “The Communist Party, Anti-Racism,
and the Freedom Movement: Baltimore, 1930–1934”,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40403552
8. Ibid, pp. 175.
9. James P. Cannon, “The Russian Revolution and the
American Negro Movement.”
10.http://www.salon.com/2014/12/05/
black_poverty_is_state_violence_too_why_struggles_for
_criminal_justice_and_living_wage_are_uniting/
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Why MLK Had to Die
by Matthew Bruce
Many people are familiar
with the peaceful monk-like
image of Martin Luther King Jr.
that is so popular. In reality, the
story of Dr. King has been
sanitized, polished, and glorified.
We've all heard the timeless
soundbites from the I Have a
Dream and Mountaintop speeche
s that are circulated by media
outlets and people who consider
themselves relevant
commentators on race relations
in America whenever something
“significant” happens in the
black community.
However,
most people would be shocked to
hear the things that Dr. King
preached in the final years of his
tragically short life. The MLK
that most people are unfamiliar
with condemned the War in
Vietnam, sympathized with
rioters in Chicago, and
demanded that the United States government reimburse AfricanAmericans for 350 years of
oppression. Now, I am the last
person to fall for every
conspiracy theory presented to
me, but did you know that in
1999 a jury found the unnamed
United States intelligence
agencies guilty of aiding in
M a r t i n L u t h e r K i n g J r. ' s
assassination. I am being 100%
genuine and serious. A jury of
12 (six black six white) actually
unanimously came to that
verdict in under an hour. The
case had over 70 witnesses
present evidence - it’s hard to
believe, so google search Coretta
Scott King et al. vs Loyd Jowers
et al. I mean this was published
in the New York Times. At the
very least the U.S. government
knew of a planned assassination
and turned their head. That's not
the point. The point is, why after
all of the fame and power King had obtained, did it take until April of 1968 for somebody to
decide to assassinate him?
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The Poor People's
Campaign was started in 1967 by
Martin Luther King Jr. Don’t
feel bad if you hadn’t heard of it;
most people haven't. MLK had
become very disgruntled by the
fact that despite having won civil
rights and the right to vote life
for African-Americans and
people of color all around the
world had seen little true
improvement.
King began to
condemn the War in Vietnam.
Calling it an "unjust war" fueled
by the "evil of American
militarism."
He even urged
African-Americans not to serve
in the armed forces. Along with
a damnation of the Vietnam War
MLK also insisted that the
United States Government pass a
bill that would seriously address
the issue of poverty, especially in
African-American communities.
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Dr. King had even begun to
speak about the hypocrisy of the
United States’ commitment to
providing white communities
with economic opportunities and at the same time "Tell[ing] the
negro to pull himself up by his
own bootstraps." Two weeks
before the death of Dr. King he
was planning to march to
Washington D.C. to demand a
bill allotting $30 billion to "fight
a bloodless war on abject
poverty."
Of course this didn't fly
well with the power elite in 1968
(and surely would not fly over
very well with the powers that be
today). King said himself "It did
not cost the nation one penny to
integrate lunch counters. It did
not cost the nation one penny to
give us the vote. The problem
we are addressing now will cost
the nation billions." He literally
said that the only way that the
problem of poverty could be
solved would be a radical
redistribution of social and
economic resources. Dr. King
planned to shut down D.C. in
what he hoped would be the
longest running protest in the
nation’s history.
MLK was
consequently called a communist
(possibly true), a traitor, and his
image was systematically
tarnished by the media who tried
to portray his movement as
dangerous and out of control.
The FBI and NSA stepped up
their surveillance of him, Lyndon
Johnson turned his back on King,
and the government even went so
far as to prepare 20,000 troops to
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
protect the nation’s capitol when
the marchers reached
Washington. Despite all of the
pressure and resistance, Dr.
King, like a soldier desperate to
accomplish his mission, fought
through the bullets of criticism
and resistance shot at him and
continued to blast the nation's
unjust treatment of poor and
colored people. In King's last major
speech, the Three Evils of
Society, he tells the movement
that America cannot consider
itself a morally just nation until
it eradicated racism, poverty, and
militarism.
Because of these
messages the COINTELPRO
program (An FBI program meant
to eradicate African-American
civil rights leaders and
movements it saw as “threats to
national security) spied on MLK,
tapping his room, opening mail,
monitoring phone calls, etc.
Documents reveal that the FBI
actually blackmailed MLK in
attempt to convince him to
commit suicide all because of
their fear of the spread of
communism, socialism, and
general radical challenges to the
American mode of operation.
Still he prevailed.
Unfortunately April 4th,
1968 was the day Dr. King paid
the price for threatening the
American status quo so strongly
for so long. I am not sure how
MLK's assassination was pulled
off. However Reverend Jesse
Jackson famously said that
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"There is no way a one cent
white boy (James Earl Ray)
killed a one million dollar black
man" by himself. However, I am
sure of this: MLK had to die
because of his support of a plan
to radically redistribute resources
in a way that would bring about
social and economic justice.
What's most important is
that we remember what MLK
was fighting for when he died. It
wasn't just anti-racism; it was
anti-struggle, anti-pain, and antiinjustice. Were he alive today
Dr. King would denounce the
fact that black unemployment is
twice the national average, that
black households make just over
half of what white households
make and only have 5 cents of
wealth to every dollar of wealth
that a white family has, that the
United States is sponsoring the
theft of black life through mass
incarceration, that the justice
system refuses still to prosecute
the modern day lynching that
police violence has become, that
the United States has sponsored
violence and economic
depression in countries inhabited
by colored people such as Iraq,
Iran, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria,
A f g h a n i s t a n , Ve n e z u e l a ,
Colombia, Mexico, Yemen,
Israel, Jordan, and what should
today be Palestine. It is with this
in mind that we must reclaim the
fervor in which he
fought all injustice.
#ReclaimMLK
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Beyond “Money in Politics”
by Gabriel Pierre
(The following is based on a
presentation at the “Democracy and
the 1%” public forum in Iowa City,
IA.)
The question of getting
“big money out of politics” is an
important one. In recognizing the
deformative effect corporate
influence has on what we call
our democracy, it’s a form of
recognizing the class struggle the understanding that some
parts of society have opposing
interests to others, and that the
minority at the top will use their
commanding influence to their
own benefit. Certainly it was one
of the central themes of the
Occupy movement - the 99%
against the 1%.
That being said, I often
struggle to understand the
exaggerated importance given to
campaign finance reform.
There’s Move to Amend, which
exists to promote a constitutional
amendment reversing corporate
personhood and limit campaign
spending. Represent.Us, a lashup between liberals, disgraced
lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the
DC Tea Party, has shown up
recently with some slick ads
online, calling for an American
Anti-Corruption Act to crack
down on lobbyists and, again,
campaign spending.
I’m not saying campaign
finance or lobbying reform is bad
or that it wouldn’t help us at all,
but the transformative effects
touted by organizations like
Move to Amend and
Represent.Us is totally
unfounded. It starts from a false
premise - that if we restrict big
corporations’ ability to buy
elections or legally bribe elected
officials, we’ll open up space for
politicians to be more
representative to their voters. But
the people who would be doing
the regulating are the very same
people who serve the ruling class
of this country - the capitalist
class, the 1%. This is why the
Federal Elections Commission is
such a toothless body. Our
national politics were dominated
by corporate interests before the
2010 Citizens United ruling.
Wi t h s t r i c t f i n a n c i n g a n d
lobbying laws, these interests
would turn their attention to
court challenges, watering down
enforcement or simply flouting
the law altogether. Then there are
the other, more traditional
mechanisms of ruling class
control.
They would still have
their parties, the Democrats and
Republicans. They would still
have control over the economy,
able to threaten capital flight in
the face of any reforms that
threaten their interests. Entire
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countries have been brought to
their knees this way.
And of course we would
still have a situation where
ninety percent of American
media is owned by just six
companies - GE, Disney, News
Corp of Fox News fame,
Viacom, Time-Warner (think
CNN) and CBS. With or without
clean election reform, that’s a
powerful arsenal. And then there
is the most entrenched obstacle
of all: the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitution is
highly contradictory, which we
should expect from a product of
the era of bourgeois-democratic
revolutions… They successfully
overthrew one system of
minority rule, mobilizing broad
masses to do that, but placed
another system of minority rule
in its place. The Constitution
does contain a number of
essential democratic elements, it
is at the core an undemocratic
document. Quite explicitly, it
was designed to put roadblocks
and hurdles between the majority
- women, slaves, American
Indians and propertyless white
men - and the ruling minority of
early industrial capitalists and
plantation owners.
For the left wing of the
American Revolution, a republic
was only worth its name in as
much as it was a republic based
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
on liberty and equality. They
were able to win the Bill of
Rights, but weren’t strong
enough to scrap it altogether and
start over. Since then, every
democratic right from the
abolition of chattel slavery to
women’s suffrage has had to be
tenaciously fought for by mass
movements, not granted from
above.
The
framers
purposefully crafted the
Constitution to frustrate the
popular will - “democracy” was
a term of disparagement for most
of our country’s history, equated
with mob rule. Its checks and
balances exist to subvert
democracy. We have so-called
“states’ rights” used as a cudgel
against women, workers and
people of color while local
government is disempowered. 40
states don’t even grant their
municipalities home rule.
We have a separate
executive branch given nearmonarchial powers: head of
state, chief administrator,
military Commander in Chief,
unbeholden to the legislature.
Veto power over legislation.
Chosen by the Electoral College,
not the popular vote, as anyone
who remembers the 2000
election will remember.
The President also
appoints lifetime members of the
Supreme Court - John Stewart
once said that their only
oversight is from the “icy scythe
of death.” SCOTUS and the
court system in general are given
broad reach to block laws that
threaten propertied interests.
That leaves Congress as
the most democratic
governmental branch, which is
really saying something. We
often talk about the number of
millionaires in Congress - a
majority as of last year - or their
total demographic imbalance
with the American population, or
gerrymandering. All good points.
But the problems go deeper than
that.
Bicameralism by its very
nature runs counter to the
democratic spirit. We have a
Senate that was created
specifically as an obstacle to the
will of the people; two Senators
for every state, slanting the
balance of power in favor of
smaller, more rural, typically
more conservative regions. The
name itself is an invocation of
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the Roman Senate, the negation
of Athens.
Every state except
Nebraska has a bicameral
legislature. Every state, plus the
federal government, uses a
“winner takes all” election
system - probably the most
obvious sign of our democratic
deficit today. Winner takes all
dilutes politics, breeds lesserevilism and effectively
disenfranchises tens of millions.
In fact fifty-eight percent of
Americans believe a third party
is necessary, showing that
feelings of alienation from the
political process run deep.
There is no silver bullet
here. Single-issue campaigns
aren’t fit for purpose. They limit
themselves to one core reform in
the name of being broad enough
to attract as many people as
possible in the short term, but
this robs them of the perspective
needed to actually develop and
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sustain a mass movement. We
need a holistic approach anything less is lying to
ourselves, lying to those we say
we want to empower. In the
Marxist tradition we call this a
democratic-republican program.
Throughout the history
of the working class movement,
Marxists have always stressed
the question of democracy.
Extreme democracy is the only
way we believe the working
class, the majority class in our
society, can exercise power - that
is the lesson from the Paris
Commune of 1871, the St. Louis
Commune of 1877, the 1919
Seattle General Strike and the
early years of the Russian
Revolution.
This isn’t an abstract
question, nor is it separated from
economic issues. Most of the
socialist left, in fact the nonsocialist left too, has forgotten
this. But in fact the two, political
and economic, are inseparable.
That is why we need a
movement that pushes through
the boundaries of formal
democracy, a movement that
fights to make democracy a
living, breathing process instead
of what Marx called “choosing
every few years which particular
members of the exploiting and
oppressing classes will exploit
and oppress us.”
So what form would this
democratic-republican program
LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
take? By no means am I trying
here to lay out a complete
blueprint, but there are some
general guidelines to work from.
Probably the most immediate
problem is the electoral system.
collectively organize our own
safety. The suffocating power of
mass surveillance, anti-union
laws and so-called free speech
zones must be brought to an end
as well.
P r o p o r t i o n a l
representation isn’t a panacea,
but it deserves to be a high
campaigning priority. You go to
the polls, you vote, and the
number of seats a party gets in
the legislature corresponds to its
actual level of support - so if the
Greens or the Socialists or, God
forbid, the Libertarians get ten
percent of the vote they get
roughly ten percent of the seats,
and so on. That would allow leftwing forces to better fight
campaigns where you vote for
i d e a s , f o r p o l i c y, n o t
personalities.
Beyond that, we would
need root-and-branch overhaul of
the Constitution. There is
abolishing the Senate and the
office of the presidency. Tossing
out the Electoral College is a
worthwhile interim step here.
Annual elections for Congress,
the right to recall representatives
and payment limited to the
average worker’s wage in the
constituency - all measures to
hold elected representatives close
to those they’re supposed to
represent.
The governmental
bureaucracy, which wields a
great deal of official and
unofficial power, would need to
be streamlined and have its high
officials subject to the elective
principle. In the states, the
balance of power would slant
toward local control.
Popular militias in place
of the police forces and standing
army, which Patriot agitator
Mercy Otis Warren called “the
bane of liberty and the nurturer
of vice.” The power of the
capitalist state boils down to its
special armed bodies of men we must empower people to
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Of course, all of this is a
tall order. The program of
republican democracy would
require a socialist revolution - or
a Third Continental Congress, if
you will - to fulfill completely.
But if we think through the
question of democracy to its
logical end, if we are serious
about having a government “of,
by and for the people”, it’s hard
not to draw a revolutionary
conclusion. It falls to the
working class, which by its
nature is the only consistently
revolutionary class in society, to
fight the battle of democracy to
its end.
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Party Update
running a sharp exchange of views between Ben
Seattle, who is highly critical of our call for a
Socialist Alliance, and RP member Miah Simone. So
if any readers want to weigh in on this or another
question of importance to our movement, send those
letters in!
by Mari Pierre-Antoine
Last issue was a little more popular than
usual, with 336 downloads - that figure not
including individual articles or a modest number of
street paper sales. Hopefully the trend continues this
time, with this issue being an expanded one to
celebrate passing the one year mark. We’re also
Labor and the Iowa Caucuses
by David Smithers
The Iow a A F L-CIO
News May 2015 reports on a
Working Families Summit in
Ames on the 16th, sponsored by
the trade unions and the liberal
organization Progress Iowa.
Coincidentally or not, the small
city of Ames had been for
several cycles the site of the
Republican Presidential Straw
Poll held during spring /summer
the year before January’s Iowa
Caucuses. This year’s GOP
circus has moved west down
highway 30 and the next county
over, in Boone - population
12,000.
The summit promises
that “issues are what can unite us
against the money changers who
seem to be buying our
government and our future.
Whether you are a Democrat,
Independent, Republican or
Green party member, there is
broader agreement on many
more issues than you hear about
in the media. While the parties
seem to be interested in courting
the money, we need to take the
issues and make those who want
our votes address our issues.”
We hope so. But our
concerns are not a few. Will this
be a working class struggle or a
mourning for reviving the
fortunes of the “middle class”
that the labor leadership and the
Democrats talk about so often?
The new terminology distances
us from the class struggle. If
“middle class” just means “not
rich or poor”, it means nothing at
all. Talking about it only hides
the real class contradictions.
Instead of drumming up support
for liberal (and not so liberal)
Democrats, labor should spend
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its time organizing workplaces
and fighting in its own name for
issues that affect working people.
Electoral action is one
part of that. The Red Party has
endorsed the idea of united
socialist candidates against the
capitalist parties, including the
minor capitalist parties. The
Greens and Libertarians aren’t
even fully real parties, floating
back into the Democrats and
Republicans especially during
caucus seasons.
Socialists and militant
trade unionists should by all
means attend these events - but
be wary. They’re meant as a way
to lead activists into the
Democratic camp, but we can
use them as a way to push for
independent class politics.
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LIBERTY. EQUALITY. SOLIDARITY.
Letters
You Can’t Build Anything Real on a Foundation of
Sand
by Ben Seattle
My comrade Art and I read your articles “Is
an American Syriza in the Cards?” and “For a
Socialist Alliance in 2016″, and told you that we
would offer you our considered comments and
criticism before the end of this month. This letter
represents my fulfillment of this commitment.
I will start by briefly introducing myself.
I was originally a Maoist, starting about
1973. I had approached draft age in the late sixties,
as the war in Vietnam was heating up. Because of
the constant drumbeat of both the war, and the antimovement–and because I had the kind of education
normally reserved for the sons of the rich–I ended up
becoming deeply influenced by the politics of
revolutionary China. That is to say that, although I
had been groomed to become part of the
bourgeoisie, and a certain kind of leader–I ended up
making up my mind that I would go with the
proletariat. The news told us daily of the sacrifices
that our comrades in Vietnam were making. I made
up my mind in a crucible that I was here for a reason
and I did not fear death.
So I, so to speak, became a traitor at a time that the
best part of my generation recognized (on a level
that was never fully conscious) that nothing was
more cool than the courage to defy unjust
authority: If you were a well-educated and socially
awkward male at that time, and in my social milieu,
you understood, instinctively, that it was ok to
nourish thoughts of treason–because these thoughts
attracted feminine attention–something highly
desired.
Before Vietnam, coming home after fighting
in uniform was a pretty good way to get feminine attention. At the height of the antiwar movement it
was the opposite: “our boys” were the resistors.
And that, of course, is how it started, how the seed
planted in my young conscience by the 1960
movie, Spartacus (a deep historical allegory by and
about communists in the U.S. during the period of
McCarthyism) received water and sprouted.
(It was possible, by 1960, for Kirk Douglas
to make this movie–as long as certain changes were
made. What was removed: the string of nine
victorious battles in a row, over a period of two
years, in which the slaves ran through nine Roman
armies, one after the other, like a lawnmower, in the
entire territory of Italy from north to south, from the
Alps to within sight of Sicily. What was added:
idiot masochist slaves who would prefer days of
excruciating torture–to the opportunity for a quick
death standing on their feet.)
By the end of 1975, I had managed to make
contact with a maoist organization here in the
U.S. By the time I ran into them, they were known
as the Central Organization of U.S. MarxistLeninists. When I first heard of them, I assumed
(from their name) that there must be some kind of
network of U.S. marxist-leninist organizations, and
that this particular organization must logically be the
c e n t r a l o rg a n i z a t i o n i n t h i s n e t w o r k o f
organizations. This particular assumption, like much
of my thinking at the time (including, to say the
least, a greatly and wrongly magnified assessment of
the contributions of Mao Tsetung) had little basis in
reality.
The real meaning of this name, COUSM-L,
was that this organization was being created on the
basis of what would be called, today, a type
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of religion. There is a name for the kind of religion
that results from what is called impact shock. An
alien civilization, with advanced technology, but
utterly rapacious to its core, makes contact with a
civilization of far less advanced technology–and this
impact results in a kind of religion called a cargocult, where the inhabitants of the impacted society
attempt to organize their resistance around their
extremely fragmented knowledge of this invader
technology.
The COUSM-L became the MarxistLeninist Party in 1980. In my humble opinion, the
MLP was the best of the (great many) cargo
cults. But the MLP collapsed in 1993 in a gigantic
implosion, because it finally reached a point (after
reaching heights of struggle that had a permanent
life-changing effect on all of us) where it could
neither figure out what was to be done–nor even
how to talk about what was to be done. By 1995,
the only political survivors of the “great
demoralization” which had caused the organization
to collapse were: (1) a small grouping calling itself
the Charlatan Voice Organization, and (2) me.
From that time, I have done a lot of
theoretical work–all related to the central role that
information (and what I call “information war”–
understood as a war of ideas organized on a mass
scale) will play in radically transforming the terrain
of the class struggle in this century.
Every major theoretical question related to
how the proletariat will create its own organization
and win victory over its class enemy–will be shaped
in, and sculpted by, information war.
Most of my major theoretical work can be seen at:
http://struggle.net/ben/
My more recent work, which includes analysis during
(and in the wake of) the Occupy movement, can be seen
on my blogs here:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?u=15414
http://WarForQuadrantTwo.wordpress.com/
Your Articles
That concludes my introduction. Now I
must keep in mind that this is about you–not me. So
I want to tell you what I think about your two
articles on Syriza and “Socialist Alliance 2016″ [1].
I heard of your Syriza article by way of Art. And, as
I read it, I felt like a famished man who stumbles
onto a twelve course meal–right up until I got to the
last course–which, unfortunately, turned out to be
dogshit.
Not to put too fine a point on it–but
announcing at the end of your article that you
believe the best way to kick things off is to try to get
into Congress–reminded me of how I felt when LBJ
explained that he was trying so darn hard to achieve
peace in Vietnam.
Oh, sure!
Your article appears to be completely
schizophrenic–with the materialist analysis that
constitutes its bulk being flatly contradicted by the
Congressional dogshit at the end.
Your article looks to me like it was written
by two different people, with two different
ideologies and two different worldviews. One of
you is my comrade and one is not, if I may be
allowed to be so blunt.
I would like to talk to my comrade. I don’t
really care who else hears me. Ninety-nine of a
hundred will tune me out. One out of a hundred will
hear me. That is the only person I am interested in:
the hundredth man (or woman). If you are my
comrade–you will hear me. If you are not–I will go
my way and continue to sing my song. I am at peace
that this is how the universe works and I have no
reason to doubt her wisdom. Because, call it what
you will, my song is her song.
Running for Congress is bullshit.
Running for Congress, by itself, stripped of
context–reinforces bourgeois illusions concerning
how the proletariat will come to power.
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What context are you hoping to add to this
obscene act? Oh, you will (supposedly) do it to
“unite the left”! So–you propose to “unite the left”
around an illusion? And you are asking, *me*, Ben
Seattle what I think about this? What I think is that
you can’t build anything real on a foundation of
sand. Elections are nothing but sand.
What is real? A news service.
Everyone who understands how things work
knows that the real struggle for power only begins
as the proletariat builds something that is real.
That something will be a news service.
The news service will concentrate, on a
single universal democratic platform, all the most
important political news, analysis, discussion and
debate.
The news service will be:
▪ independent,
▪ democratic,
▪ open/public
▪ centered around the need to
overthrow the rule of capital
▪ the single unifying
project that will unite all the
best (ie: most independent,
militant, dedicated and
conscious) activists in the
movement and connect them to
the working class and oppressed
in their millions.
the first four points play out (like the blades of a
blender) in the minds of millions. Advanced ideas,
in the mind of the proletariat, will be transformed
into a material force which, by its nature, is in
service to its inevitable destiny.
I believe this project is going to get off the
ground. I am not sure how much of it I will live to
see. I have been around enough to know that clear
insight into what is ahead–is not the same as a short
distance.
What I Want From You
What do I want from you guys (who *may*
be my comrades)? I want you to stand up and be
counted. Right now. I am not saying that you have
to use your real name (retaliation from potential
employers and landlords is real and is likely to
become more so). But find a way to let me know
that you are listening. Call me names if you want. I
don’t mind. I have had the best people call me
the worst things–you cannot imagine.
And I
consider it an honor.
So let me hear back from you–yes, you!–just
in case you are listening. Let me know if you are in
the world to fight. What I want, is your attention.
All the best,
Ben Seattle — April 19, 2015
Link to Original PDF:
http://tinyurl.com/kjow7mz
The news service will be structured in such
a way that it will (first, foremost, and always)
remain (1) independent, (2) democratic, (3) open and
(4) centered around a single idea–that the overthrow
of the rule of capital (and its human representative
on earth–our class enemy–the bourgeoisie, the one
percent in Occupy language) is possible, necessary
and inevitable.
How about point 5? That will
follow, automatically, as the contradictions between
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Reply: Service à la Russe by Miah Simone
for the Central Committee of the Red Party
splitting on the basis of theory rather than program)
is elections.
Since you began with an introduction I
thought I would as well. My name is Miah, and I
have been a communist for four years this upcoming
August. My first encounter with the organized left
was with the International Socialist Organization. I
ended up dedicating about two years to that
organization before I started to wise up to how
undemocratic it was. I have since moved away from
Trotskyism and found my organizational home in
the Red Party.
We're very glad that you enjoyed the first
eleven courses and very sad that the dessert was not
to your taste. I have discussed with the author and
we both agree that we could have added a cherry or
two but the bulk would have remained. We wish to
see a united party-movement and one of the clearest
paths we can see to this is common action. The only
arena for common action that most of the left
adheres to, does not have a presence in, and would
not be splintered by sectarian theory-mongering (the
Your idea to start a revolutionary news
service is commendable and we would likely support
such a thing if asked. We would like to clarify a few
things involving this idea of yours though.
1. News services, the great ones at least, have had
organizational backing of some form so we must
ask independent in what sense? From the two
parties, from the sects, from what?
2. Now we appreciate the idea of a democratic
publication and strive towards it with our policy
of open publishing of all letters sent to us. We
must ask is this your idea of democratic in this
context or is there something more we do not
see?
On all the others points for your news
service we would not disagree. Though we do add
that it should be open about being socialist (not sure
if that is what you meant by number 4).
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WHAT WE STAND FOR
The Red Party is a U.S. political
organization that fights for
working class unity in a single
socialist party-movement. A
united organization, based on a
Marxist program, would turn
politics as we know it upside
down, injecting the labor and
social movements with a
renewed sense of confidence and
strength.
* A united workers’ partymovement would combine
political action with economic
and social action, including
running socialist candidates for
office, protests, strikes, cooperatives and mutual aid
societies.
* Our organization has the word
party in its name, but we
recognize that in the worldhistoric sense there is no
revolutionary party in the U.S.
today. Instead we have a
fractured array of competing
sects organized on a
bureaucratic basis. Their work
is hampered by hyper-activism
with little to no long-term
strategy, lack of internal
democracy and lack of deep
roots in the working class. The
Red Party organizes day-today resistance against
injustices spawned by
capitalism within the context
of strengthening working class
organization and building
support for socialism.
* Marxists operate through
democratic centralism.
Through ongoing debate we *
*
*
*
seek to achieve unity in action
and a common world outlook.
As long as they support agreed
actions, members have the
right to speak openly and form
factions to advance their
views.
Marxists oppose all imperialist
wars and interventions, from
Iraq to Syria, but recognize
that ending war permanently
means ending capitalism.
Marxists are internationalists.
We strive for the closest unity
of the working class and
oppressed peoples everywhere.
We oppose nationalism in all
its forms. We advocate a new
revolutionary workers’
International. Without an
International (a world party),
the struggle against Capital is
weakened. Capital organizes
across borders; so too must we.
Marxists support industrial
unions (organizing workers by
industry) rather than the more
narrow trade union structure.
We s u p p o r t t h e h i g h e s t
possible level of pan-American
union coordination for
workers’ rights. Bureaucratic
leadership and class
collaboration, particularly
support for the Democratic
Party, in the unions must be
replaced with democratic
revitalization and class
independence.
Marxists are champions of the
o p p r e s s e d . Wo m e n ’s
oppression, racism, national
oppression and LGBT/QI LABOR DONATED
oppression are just as much
working class questions as are
higher pay, union rights and
struggles for quality health,
housing and education.
Marxists demand selfdetermination for American
Indian nations, Hawaii, Puerto
Rico and all other territories.
* World capitalism, based on
exploitation and a reckless
quest for profit, is increasingly
putting the future of humanity
at risk through war and climate
change. World capitalism must
give way to world socialism - a
society based on freedom,
solidarity and a radical
extension of democracy.
* Marxists oppose Stalinism, a
system of bureaucratic
dictatorship that rules in the
name of socialism the same
way the capitalist class claims
to rule in the name of liberty.
* Socialism itself is the first
stage of the global transition to
communism - a society where
war, exploitation, money,
classes and states exist only as
museum pieces. Communism
is the negation of class society
and provides the maximum
individual and collective
freedom.
If you agree with these
principles, join the Red Party!
red-party.com | (319) 654-4621
[email protected]
facebook.com/redpartyusa
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