Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Caterpillar: Iron mine no guarantee of those "thousands" of jobs Walker talks about
From Mike Wiggins, Chairman of the Bad River Band
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Are Robots Killing Job Growth? (60 Minutes Segment & Comments)
Daymon's intro comment resonates with the permanently under-employables...
Story link at bottom, below Daymon's comments. Besides being active in Occupy Detroit, Daymon is a frequent contributor to the radical newspaper People's Tribune.
------------------------>
------------------------>
RT Daymon J. Hartley, Occupy Detroit
Finally some of them are starting to get it.....this is the root cause of the global crisis....laborless production that is replacing both manual and mental labor as we know it.
Our present capitalist economic, social and political system is a victim of its own success. With the robotic and electronic revolution well under way we are replacing manual/mental labor as we know it.
And that is not a bad thing. We are producing untold abundance. If we can get machines to do the back breaking work in the factories, mines etc. then that should be a plus for humanity. But unfortunately they haven't figured out how to get the robots to buy back what they produce. And with a system still based on the premise that you have to have a job to earn a wage to buy the necessaries of life and there are no jobs....you have an irreconcilable contradiction. The profits and market system can no longer function to meet the needs of the majority of society.
With Globalization there is an evening up process with the spread of the technology. And rather then bringing the rest of the world's workers up to the living standard we have enjoyed...our standard of living is being driven down to theirs. Every economic system has its own objective motion and laws. The 1% have no control over this system as it implodes.
Democracy in this country has been reduced to merely casting a vote. Every 4 years they let us decide which of their leaders is going to mislead us for another 4 years. To enjoy the fruits of democracy the average person would have to have access to the tools of democracy. Television, print, radio. The only folks who have that access are the millionaires and billionaires. Dr. Martin Luther King was right in demanding economic democracy.
The democratic right to a job, house, food, healthcare and that elusive right to human happiness. You can call it socialism, communism, or a duck. Bring it on!
Friday, December 14, 2012
Statement on Michigan Right-to-Work
From Darryl, posted in Occupy Detroit's general assembly discussion group:
Monday, December 10, 2012
Flyer from Committee to Beat Back Right-to-Work
From http://beatbackrtw.org/
The attack on unions by Michigan’s governor and legislature is a declaration of war on the rights of poor and working people. Rallies alone won’t do. Wisconsin showed that even temporary occupations of the Capitol aren’t enough. This latest assault must be met with decisive action by organized labor and our allies.
The UAW Constitution gives us a weapon that can be used to fight and win. Article 50, Sec. 8 says:
The union busting “Right to Work” legislation certainly fits this description.
No general strike can be rushed into. Workers must be educated and the ground carefully prepared. Holding a referendum vote in every local union gives the opportunity to discuss this unprecedented attack and how to respond with every worker at every work place.
Along with the UAW, the State AFL-CIO can urge every affiliate to initiate discussions and hold referendums to authorize a general strike. Mass strikes are part of our history — in 1947 250,000 autoworkers in Detroit held a five-hour walkout to protest the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act.
The Michigan politicians are not acting alone. The legislation was openly demanded by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. We can be sure that the entire crowd of Wall Street bankers and corporate bosses, including GM, Ford, Chrysler and the billionaire Koch brothers are behind the push to break us in this stronghold and symbol of unionism.
After years of concessions the bosses thought we were ready to collapse. By moving methodically, vote by vote, toward a general strike, the working class of Michigan will send a message that will sow panic in their ranks. Let the big business news media, politicians, judges and others will scream that it is illegal. As the words of the union song Solidarity Forever says, “In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold.” That power is our ability to bring everything to a standstill.
Unions are not a “special interest” apart from our suffering communities and all workers -- unorganized, retired, young, immigrant or unemployed. Along with uniting all the unions we must bring in the many community groups affected. Labor must make their problems our own. “Social unionism” can take a big leap forward. While proceeding to authorize the general strike, unions and community groups should convene a huge assembly of the people in Michigan.
Community organizations, church leaders, people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, the education community, foreclosure victims, the unemployed, Occupy Wall Street movement, immigrants and all others who are under attack must be brought together to prepare for the general strike. Demands must be shaped to make the largest majority of the people of the state understand that we are fighting for everyone.
In a state where local and state politicians only represent the 1%, an assembly of the 99%, will have commanding authority!
An appeal to
the UAW and the Michigan AFL-CIO
Beat back “right-to-work”
Yes, WE CAN!
Beat back “right-to-work”
Yes, WE CAN!
The attack on unions by Michigan’s governor and legislature is a declaration of war on the rights of poor and working people. Rallies alone won’t do. Wisconsin showed that even temporary occupations of the Capitol aren’t enough. This latest assault must be met with decisive action by organized labor and our allies.
The UAW Constitution gives us a weapon that can be used to fight and win. Article 50, Sec. 8 says:
“In case of great emergency, when the existence of the International Union is involved, together with the economic and social standing of our membership, the International President and the International Executive Board shall have the authority to declare a general strike within the industry by a 2/3 vote of the International Executive Board, whenever in their good judgment it shall be deemed proper for the purpose of preserving and perpetuating the rights and living standards of the general membership … provided, under no circumstances shall it call such a strike until approved by a referendum vote of the membership.”
The union busting “Right to Work” legislation certainly fits this description.
No general strike can be rushed into. Workers must be educated and the ground carefully prepared. Holding a referendum vote in every local union gives the opportunity to discuss this unprecedented attack and how to respond with every worker at every work place.
Along with the UAW, the State AFL-CIO can urge every affiliate to initiate discussions and hold referendums to authorize a general strike. Mass strikes are part of our history — in 1947 250,000 autoworkers in Detroit held a five-hour walkout to protest the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act.
The Michigan politicians are not acting alone. The legislation was openly demanded by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. We can be sure that the entire crowd of Wall Street bankers and corporate bosses, including GM, Ford, Chrysler and the billionaire Koch brothers are behind the push to break us in this stronghold and symbol of unionism.
After years of concessions the bosses thought we were ready to collapse. By moving methodically, vote by vote, toward a general strike, the working class of Michigan will send a message that will sow panic in their ranks. Let the big business news media, politicians, judges and others will scream that it is illegal. As the words of the union song Solidarity Forever says, “In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold.” That power is our ability to bring everything to a standstill.
Unions are not a “special interest” apart from our suffering communities and all workers -- unorganized, retired, young, immigrant or unemployed. Along with uniting all the unions we must bring in the many community groups affected. Labor must make their problems our own. “Social unionism” can take a big leap forward. While proceeding to authorize the general strike, unions and community groups should convene a huge assembly of the people in Michigan.
Community organizations, church leaders, people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, the education community, foreclosure victims, the unemployed, Occupy Wall Street movement, immigrants and all others who are under attack must be brought together to prepare for the general strike. Demands must be shaped to make the largest majority of the people of the state understand that we are fighting for everyone.
In a state where local and state politicians only represent the 1%, an assembly of the 99%, will have commanding authority!
Issued by: Committee to Beat Back
"Right to Work"
To support this statement contact:
David Sole, Past-Pres. UAW 2334
Phone: (313) 680-5508
email: BeatBackRTW@gmail.com
facebook group: Committee to Beat Back “Right to Work”
David Sole, Past-Pres. UAW 2334
Phone: (313) 680-5508
email: BeatBackRTW@gmail.com
facebook group: Committee to Beat Back “Right to Work”
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
League of Revolutionary Black Workers - League of Revolutionary for a New America: from League to League.
(Darryl Mitchell had this posted on his facebook "wall" so we asked if we could archive it here, and did so, with permission. There's some insights here into the rise of a radical rank-and-file labor union movement that lasted from around 1968 with the autoworker strikes in Detroit, and lasted until around the time of the beginning of the Clinton-Gore-Bush era.)
---------------------------------------
League of Revolutionary Black Workers - League of Revolutionary for a New America: from League to League.
Darryl Mitchell
Supplement to “Detroit I Do Mind Dying.”
Saturday October 13, 2012 Detroit’s African American museum presented a showing of the film “Finally Got The News,” with presentations by General Baker Jr. and professor John Bracey, both former members of the League. This coming Thursday October 18, 2012 Detroit’s Wayne State University will feature a Labor Conference chronicling the labor movement in Detroit from 1920 – 1970, featuring Dan Georgakas, Author/Journalist, Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Columbia University; Dara Walker, Rutgers University and Commentator: General Baker Jr. Dan Georgakas is one of the authors of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying.”
With the reissuing of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” August 2012, a new generation can read an account of the struggle of revolutionaries in the late 1960’s and 1970’s Detroit. “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” is an excellent historical recollection worthy of reading and owning as a historical text. Its limitation is that it does not convey and express “our” voice and narrative. “Our voice” is a narrative expressed and organized around the workers and student component of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) or what consolidated as a General Baker, Chuck Wooten and John Williams grouping. “Our voice” and narrative is one that connects the rise and demise of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with a time frame from the 1965 Watts rebellion, to outbreak of “Black Power,” through the various groupings calling themselves the new communist movement in the mid-1970s to collapse of the new communist groups in the mid-1980s. The old workers-students core of the LRBW exists forty-four years late - today - in the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
Movements don’t just happen. The spontaneous striving of the African American Liberation Movement was reaching a crescendo during the nineteen sixties. Dr. Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision, gigantic personality and immense gravity as an organic intellectual, could not contain the surge of Birmingham Alabama black steel workers, who with their backs to the wall lashed out in self-defense violence against Klansman, terrorist reactionary bombers and garden variety Southern fascist. The response of the masses increasingly supplemented by black soldiers trained in jungles of Vietnam added to the WW II and Korean War veterans’ militancy aggressive opposition and armed resistance to lynch rope violence and the second class citizenship status of blacks. Birmingham 1963 set the stage for 1965 Watts.
The individuals to lead the formation of the LBRW were profoundly influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the plight of Robert Williams (Brother Rob).
Quote
But the figure who best embodied black traditions of armed self-defense was Robert Williams, a hero to the new wave of black internationalists whose importance almost rivaled that of Malcolm X. As a former U.S. Marine with extensive military training, Williams earned notoriety in 1957 for forming armed self-defense groups in Monroe, North Carolina, to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Two years later, Williams’s statement that black people must “meet violence with violence” as the only way to end injustice in an uncivilized South led to his suspension as president of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP.
Williams’s break with the NAACP and his open advocacy of armed self defense pushed him further Left and into the orbit of the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, and among some members of the old CPUSA. However, Williams had had contact with communists since his days as a Detroit auto worker in the 1940s. He not only read the Daily Worker but also published a story in its pages called “Some Day I Am Going Back South.” Williams was also somewhat of an intellectual dabbler and autodidact, having studied at West Virginia State College, North Carolina College, and Johnson C. Smith College. Nevertheless, his more recent Left associations led him to Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Upon returning from his first trip in 1960, he hoisted the Cuban flag in his backyard and ran a series of articles in his mimeographed publication, the Crusader, about the transformation of working peoples’ lives in Cuba as a result of the revolution. In one of his editorials published in August 1960, Williams insisted that African Americans’ fight for freedom “is related to the Africans,’ the Cubans,’ all of Latin Americans’ and the Asians’ struggles for self-determination.” http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/red-china-and-black-revolution/
Further
Quote
“Meanwhile, the Progressive Labor movement (PL) had begun sponsoring trips to Cuba and recruited several radical black students in the East Bay to go along. Among them was Ernest Allen, a UC Berkeley transfer from Merritt College who had been forced out of the Afro-American Association. A working-class kid from Oakland, Allen was part of a generation of black radicals whose dissatisfaction with the civil rights movement’s strategy of nonviolent, passive resistance drew them closer to Malcolm X and Third World liberation movements. Not surprisingly, through his trip to Cuba in 1964 he discovered the Revolutionary Action Movement. Allen’s travel companions included a contingent of black militants from Detroit: Luke Tripp, Charles (“Mao”) Johnson, Charles Simmons, and General Baker. All were members of the student group Uhuru, and all went on to play key roles in the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Incredibly, the RAM leader Max Stanford was already on the island visiting Robert Williams. When it was time to go back to the states, Allen and the Detroit group were committed to building RAM. Allen stopped in Cleveland to meet with RAM members on his cross-country bus trip back to Oakland.”
http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/black-like-mao-red-china-black-revolution-part-2/
While in Cuba these young men played basketball with Fidel and Che according to General Baker. During lengthy discussion by Fidel and Che Baker was won over to a communist-socialist orientation.
In the aftermath of the August 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, a variety of black equality organizations were formed ranging from the US Organization and the Black Panther Party to Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Republic of New Africa (RNA). (RAM was actually organized in 1962).
Quote:
“The Black Panthers Karenga met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in a study circle in the early 1960s. While the US Organization’s cultural nationalism emerged in Los Angeles, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale developed revolutionary nationalism as the forceful political style of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Actually, Newton and Seale were not the first Black Panthers; there were earlier groups organized by the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in the aftermath of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voting rights experiment in Lowndes County, Alabama, led by Stokely Carmichael. In 1965, one year before the Black Power slogan emerged, the independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization stood up to white terror in the Deep South, using a black panther to symbolize its defiance. A number of black activists from northern cities provided material support for self-defense to the Lowndes County Black Panthers and asked Stokely Carmichael for permission to form Black Panther organizations in their urban centers. Consequently, Black Panthers developed in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. In New York, alongside Eddie Ellis, Ted Wilson, Donald Washington, and Walter Ricks, one of the leaders of the Harlem Panthers was Larry Neal, a cofounder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School.
“In July 1966, with the public endorsement of Stokely Carmichael, the Harlem Party established headquarters at 2409 Seventh Avenue, near 140th Street, and a Malcolm X Liberation School. By September 1966 twelve Panthers were arrested in Harlem during a school boycott, their first direct-action campaign. The New York Times estimated their membership at one hundred. In San Francisco, the Black Panthers were in communication with Robert F. Williams, the exiled leader of RAM, in Cuba. Between the Watts uprising in August 1965 and San Francisco unrest in September 1966, Newton and Seale began discussing the need for a new kind of organization of their own in Oakland; those exchanges resulted in the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. Although Black Panther organizations emerged in other cities before the Oakland Panthers, the revolutionary grassroots party established by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale quickly developed a militant stance that propelled its members into the forefront of the Black Revolt. The definitive political style of the legendary Oakland Black Panther Party soon eclipsed the earlier Panthers in New York and San Francisco, expanding to a base of more than sixty cities with a membership of more than two thousand people.” http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africanaage/essay-black-power.html
After Watts 1965, the Newark and Detroit Rebellions of July 1967 shook American society to its foundations. These were the greatest uprising against the state since the Civil War. Detroit surpassed Newark in scale, with at least 43 deaths and 7,000 arrested. During the first wave of unrest in the 1960s, 329 major rebellions unfolded in 257 different cities; after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, there were another two hundred uprisings in 172 cities. Another wave of youthful activists took to the streets in five hundred (500) street confrontations in 1969.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) was formed in the wake of Detroit 1967 and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The LRBW was formed based on the DRUM organization – Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement – that grew out of the May 1968 Dodge Main strike in Detroit. This strike took place during the period of formation of SDS; it’s splitting and formation of “Revolutionary Union,” apparently in homage to the Detroit Revolutionaries.
The LRBW expressed the historic struggle of “labor in the black,” as this struggle passed through all stages of development of the industrial system. In broad strokes this struggle began under slavery in the South and development of Jim Crow in the North, then Emancipation and the founding of the African American People’s Convention in the post-Civil War era. The defeat of Reconstruction set the condition for “equal rights organizations” based on the color factor and finally the various forms of African American Labor Councils, spanning from the 1920s to the opening era of “Black Power.” Specifically, the DRUM movement and the LRBW were immediately thrown into a struggle over political and ideological hegemony amongst labor in the black facing TULC – Trade Union Leadership Council. TULC was formed by black trade unionists in the wake of the House Un-American Activity Committee attack against Detroit’s African American Labor Council.
Quote:
“The National African American Labor Council (1950 - 1955) was a labor union dedicated to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. In 1951, black workers formed the National African American Labor Council (NNLC), which was brought about to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. This organization was there to do certain tasks that the National African American Congress could not do since its failed return after the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Labor_Council
Black Power was an electoral movement demanding inclusion of blacks into the political superstructure. Black Power erupted as the final stage of the fight against Jim Crow and last stage of an all class movement of the black community based on the color factor. The years 1967/1968 were the time for black power, black power conventions and mass entry of blacks into the political system. Proposed during the 1967 National Black Power Conference in Newark, and organized by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, U.S. Representative Charles Diggs and poet Amiri Baraka the convention attracted politically engaged blacks of all persuasions, from Democrats and Republicans to socialists, Marxists and revolutionaries of all types.
More often than not, “the League” is confused with the union caucus formed as the Revolutionary Union Movement. DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) and ELRUM (Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement) were not the LRBW or reducible to the league. The reason RUM groups were formed primarily at Chrysler and not at Ford is bound up with the mass hiring of blacks by the Ford Motor company in the 1920s. The reason RUM’s formed at Chrysler rather than Ford was because of the early communist organizing at Ford Rouge and the role of black communists in winning the battle for unity amongst blacks and whites. This was not the case elsewhere.
Blacks always found themselves in the absurd position of advocating for unions while fighting to be allowed in them and then against being discriminated against. This circumstance was the reason for black caucuses of all kinds. Even though Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Dodge, Packard, Hudson, and many other manufacturers had signed collective bargaining agreements many areas had yet to fully form local unions, ratify the agreements, or cease Jim Crow policies and practices. Many local unions had segregated divisions and some plants had altogether separate segregated local unions. Blacks faced “hate strikes.” On June 3, 1943 25,000 white workers went on strike at Detroit’s Packard Motors Company when three black workers were promoted to the assembly line.
Thus, the purpose of the RUM was the battle for equality on the job; for blacks to be treated as equals by the company and within the union, rather than an abstract “class struggle” or anarcho-syndicalist vision of “workers against bosses.” The RUMs organizations and the LRBW existed on a continuum whose immediate predecessors were Trade Union Unity League, National African American Labor Council, and League of Struggle for African American Rights, National African American Council.
The LRBW was a federation of diverse organizations rather than a “big” RUM caucus. This federation shared resources to aid its organization in mobilizing and fighting on various “fronts of struggle.” For instance “Parents and Students for Community Control” was formed as a league component to battle in the electoral arena to elect local black school board members, expressing the concerns of their neighborhood. North Woodward Interfaith organization, United Community (UNICOM), West Central Organization (WCO) and International Black Appeal (IPA) were incorporated into the league. The Black Student Voice and later Black Student United Front were high school students, many who would distribute literature at plants. There was a period when the Southend newspaper came under the direction of the League members.
A complex of issues is attributed to the split and disintegration of the LRBW. The LRBW was formed during the final stage of American Revolution 2.5 - the Civil Rights Movement and in a larger historical sense expressed the last phase of organizational unity between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism. With the shattering of the wall of de jure – legal – segregation, the LRBW could no longer evolve as a revolutionary organization based exclusively on color. In a country such as America, with its huge multinational majority white working class, a majority black organization of revolutionaries, striving for a Marxist approach and method is an impossible contradiction.
The LRBW was not a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist organization, although Marxist and Marxist-Leninist were members of the league. The league would later declare itself in favor of forming a Black Marxist Leninist party. Due to the principled stand of the Communist League demanding a multinational Communist Party, all sections of the old LRBW were won over to the Communist League vision of a revolutionary Communist party.
Every single revolutionary group in American “courted” the LRBW and all of their material was read critically. One should ask why the largest grouping of the LRBW rejected the outlook of the Revolutionary Union and its Red Papers along with the October League, which grew out of the Revolution Youth Movement II.
(See Revolution in the Air pages, 70, 71, 72.)
The reason the LRBW was won over to the California Communist League (CCL) and then the Communist League (CL) is their theory basis in Marxism and living connection in the long struggle for an American Marxist narrative. The Communist League approach to the issues of the day and description of the social revolution made more sense than all the new communist groups combined, at least to a broad section of revolutionaries in Detroit. The Motor City Labor League, fragments of Detroit Organizing Committee (DOC), Revolution Per Minute (RPM), People Against Racism (PAR) and groups of independent Marxist would join CL and become part of the Communist Labor Party.
The proposition that the LRBW and others joined CL because Nelson Peery, its Chairman is African American is absurd and insulting. The LRBW did not join the CL because Peery is African American. The LRBW was recruited into the CL by a revolutionary from the Bay area sent to establish an educational forum for the workers and student component.
Nelson Peery became Chairman of CL because he was best qualified. It is a feature of our society that a revolutionary group must express a historical continuity and the salient feature of the social movement to be relevant. Peery’s history evolves through the CPUSA and the long struggle for a revolutionary position on the African American Question; against the anti-Stalin form of anti-communism, against Khrushchev revisionism and for the building of a Leninist party along the lines pioneered by Lenin. Thus, Peery (along with his wife Sue Ying who created CL’s study program and Blue Book) expressed the salient feature of the social process in the same way the Slavic workers constituted the driving core of the CPUSA during the drive for industrial unionism. The revolutionary driving core of the industrial union movement was the unskilled Slavic workers rather than the Western European English workers. In an earlier period the CPUSA was composed of various ethnic associations, which revolutionaries from the various European ethnic groups joined.
End part 1
---------------------------------------
League of Revolutionary Black Workers - League of Revolutionary for a New America: from League to League.
Darryl Mitchell
Supplement to “Detroit I Do Mind Dying.”
Saturday October 13, 2012 Detroit’s African American museum presented a showing of the film “Finally Got The News,” with presentations by General Baker Jr. and professor John Bracey, both former members of the League. This coming Thursday October 18, 2012 Detroit’s Wayne State University will feature a Labor Conference chronicling the labor movement in Detroit from 1920 – 1970, featuring Dan Georgakas, Author/Journalist, Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Columbia University; Dara Walker, Rutgers University and Commentator: General Baker Jr. Dan Georgakas is one of the authors of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying.”
With the reissuing of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” August 2012, a new generation can read an account of the struggle of revolutionaries in the late 1960’s and 1970’s Detroit. “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” is an excellent historical recollection worthy of reading and owning as a historical text. Its limitation is that it does not convey and express “our” voice and narrative. “Our voice” is a narrative expressed and organized around the workers and student component of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) or what consolidated as a General Baker, Chuck Wooten and John Williams grouping. “Our voice” and narrative is one that connects the rise and demise of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with a time frame from the 1965 Watts rebellion, to outbreak of “Black Power,” through the various groupings calling themselves the new communist movement in the mid-1970s to collapse of the new communist groups in the mid-1980s. The old workers-students core of the LRBW exists forty-four years late - today - in the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
Movements don’t just happen. The spontaneous striving of the African American Liberation Movement was reaching a crescendo during the nineteen sixties. Dr. Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision, gigantic personality and immense gravity as an organic intellectual, could not contain the surge of Birmingham Alabama black steel workers, who with their backs to the wall lashed out in self-defense violence against Klansman, terrorist reactionary bombers and garden variety Southern fascist. The response of the masses increasingly supplemented by black soldiers trained in jungles of Vietnam added to the WW II and Korean War veterans’ militancy aggressive opposition and armed resistance to lynch rope violence and the second class citizenship status of blacks. Birmingham 1963 set the stage for 1965 Watts.
The individuals to lead the formation of the LBRW were profoundly influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the plight of Robert Williams (Brother Rob).
Quote
But the figure who best embodied black traditions of armed self-defense was Robert Williams, a hero to the new wave of black internationalists whose importance almost rivaled that of Malcolm X. As a former U.S. Marine with extensive military training, Williams earned notoriety in 1957 for forming armed self-defense groups in Monroe, North Carolina, to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Two years later, Williams’s statement that black people must “meet violence with violence” as the only way to end injustice in an uncivilized South led to his suspension as president of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP.
Williams’s break with the NAACP and his open advocacy of armed self defense pushed him further Left and into the orbit of the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, and among some members of the old CPUSA. However, Williams had had contact with communists since his days as a Detroit auto worker in the 1940s. He not only read the Daily Worker but also published a story in its pages called “Some Day I Am Going Back South.” Williams was also somewhat of an intellectual dabbler and autodidact, having studied at West Virginia State College, North Carolina College, and Johnson C. Smith College. Nevertheless, his more recent Left associations led him to Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Upon returning from his first trip in 1960, he hoisted the Cuban flag in his backyard and ran a series of articles in his mimeographed publication, the Crusader, about the transformation of working peoples’ lives in Cuba as a result of the revolution. In one of his editorials published in August 1960, Williams insisted that African Americans’ fight for freedom “is related to the Africans,’ the Cubans,’ all of Latin Americans’ and the Asians’ struggles for self-determination.” http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/red-china-and-black-revolution/
Further
Quote
“Meanwhile, the Progressive Labor movement (PL) had begun sponsoring trips to Cuba and recruited several radical black students in the East Bay to go along. Among them was Ernest Allen, a UC Berkeley transfer from Merritt College who had been forced out of the Afro-American Association. A working-class kid from Oakland, Allen was part of a generation of black radicals whose dissatisfaction with the civil rights movement’s strategy of nonviolent, passive resistance drew them closer to Malcolm X and Third World liberation movements. Not surprisingly, through his trip to Cuba in 1964 he discovered the Revolutionary Action Movement. Allen’s travel companions included a contingent of black militants from Detroit: Luke Tripp, Charles (“Mao”) Johnson, Charles Simmons, and General Baker. All were members of the student group Uhuru, and all went on to play key roles in the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Incredibly, the RAM leader Max Stanford was already on the island visiting Robert Williams. When it was time to go back to the states, Allen and the Detroit group were committed to building RAM. Allen stopped in Cleveland to meet with RAM members on his cross-country bus trip back to Oakland.”
http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/black-like-mao-red-china-black-revolution-part-2/
While in Cuba these young men played basketball with Fidel and Che according to General Baker. During lengthy discussion by Fidel and Che Baker was won over to a communist-socialist orientation.
In the aftermath of the August 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, a variety of black equality organizations were formed ranging from the US Organization and the Black Panther Party to Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Republic of New Africa (RNA). (RAM was actually organized in 1962).
Quote:
“The Black Panthers Karenga met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in a study circle in the early 1960s. While the US Organization’s cultural nationalism emerged in Los Angeles, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale developed revolutionary nationalism as the forceful political style of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Actually, Newton and Seale were not the first Black Panthers; there were earlier groups organized by the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in the aftermath of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voting rights experiment in Lowndes County, Alabama, led by Stokely Carmichael. In 1965, one year before the Black Power slogan emerged, the independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization stood up to white terror in the Deep South, using a black panther to symbolize its defiance. A number of black activists from northern cities provided material support for self-defense to the Lowndes County Black Panthers and asked Stokely Carmichael for permission to form Black Panther organizations in their urban centers. Consequently, Black Panthers developed in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. In New York, alongside Eddie Ellis, Ted Wilson, Donald Washington, and Walter Ricks, one of the leaders of the Harlem Panthers was Larry Neal, a cofounder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School.
“In July 1966, with the public endorsement of Stokely Carmichael, the Harlem Party established headquarters at 2409 Seventh Avenue, near 140th Street, and a Malcolm X Liberation School. By September 1966 twelve Panthers were arrested in Harlem during a school boycott, their first direct-action campaign. The New York Times estimated their membership at one hundred. In San Francisco, the Black Panthers were in communication with Robert F. Williams, the exiled leader of RAM, in Cuba. Between the Watts uprising in August 1965 and San Francisco unrest in September 1966, Newton and Seale began discussing the need for a new kind of organization of their own in Oakland; those exchanges resulted in the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. Although Black Panther organizations emerged in other cities before the Oakland Panthers, the revolutionary grassroots party established by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale quickly developed a militant stance that propelled its members into the forefront of the Black Revolt. The definitive political style of the legendary Oakland Black Panther Party soon eclipsed the earlier Panthers in New York and San Francisco, expanding to a base of more than sixty cities with a membership of more than two thousand people.” http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africanaage/essay-black-power.html
After Watts 1965, the Newark and Detroit Rebellions of July 1967 shook American society to its foundations. These were the greatest uprising against the state since the Civil War. Detroit surpassed Newark in scale, with at least 43 deaths and 7,000 arrested. During the first wave of unrest in the 1960s, 329 major rebellions unfolded in 257 different cities; after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, there were another two hundred uprisings in 172 cities. Another wave of youthful activists took to the streets in five hundred (500) street confrontations in 1969.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) was formed in the wake of Detroit 1967 and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The LRBW was formed based on the DRUM organization – Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement – that grew out of the May 1968 Dodge Main strike in Detroit. This strike took place during the period of formation of SDS; it’s splitting and formation of “Revolutionary Union,” apparently in homage to the Detroit Revolutionaries.
The LRBW expressed the historic struggle of “labor in the black,” as this struggle passed through all stages of development of the industrial system. In broad strokes this struggle began under slavery in the South and development of Jim Crow in the North, then Emancipation and the founding of the African American People’s Convention in the post-Civil War era. The defeat of Reconstruction set the condition for “equal rights organizations” based on the color factor and finally the various forms of African American Labor Councils, spanning from the 1920s to the opening era of “Black Power.” Specifically, the DRUM movement and the LRBW were immediately thrown into a struggle over political and ideological hegemony amongst labor in the black facing TULC – Trade Union Leadership Council. TULC was formed by black trade unionists in the wake of the House Un-American Activity Committee attack against Detroit’s African American Labor Council.
Quote:
“The National African American Labor Council (1950 - 1955) was a labor union dedicated to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. In 1951, black workers formed the National African American Labor Council (NNLC), which was brought about to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. This organization was there to do certain tasks that the National African American Congress could not do since its failed return after the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Labor_Council
Black Power was an electoral movement demanding inclusion of blacks into the political superstructure. Black Power erupted as the final stage of the fight against Jim Crow and last stage of an all class movement of the black community based on the color factor. The years 1967/1968 were the time for black power, black power conventions and mass entry of blacks into the political system. Proposed during the 1967 National Black Power Conference in Newark, and organized by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, U.S. Representative Charles Diggs and poet Amiri Baraka the convention attracted politically engaged blacks of all persuasions, from Democrats and Republicans to socialists, Marxists and revolutionaries of all types.
More often than not, “the League” is confused with the union caucus formed as the Revolutionary Union Movement. DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) and ELRUM (Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement) were not the LRBW or reducible to the league. The reason RUM groups were formed primarily at Chrysler and not at Ford is bound up with the mass hiring of blacks by the Ford Motor company in the 1920s. The reason RUM’s formed at Chrysler rather than Ford was because of the early communist organizing at Ford Rouge and the role of black communists in winning the battle for unity amongst blacks and whites. This was not the case elsewhere.
Blacks always found themselves in the absurd position of advocating for unions while fighting to be allowed in them and then against being discriminated against. This circumstance was the reason for black caucuses of all kinds. Even though Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Dodge, Packard, Hudson, and many other manufacturers had signed collective bargaining agreements many areas had yet to fully form local unions, ratify the agreements, or cease Jim Crow policies and practices. Many local unions had segregated divisions and some plants had altogether separate segregated local unions. Blacks faced “hate strikes.” On June 3, 1943 25,000 white workers went on strike at Detroit’s Packard Motors Company when three black workers were promoted to the assembly line.
Thus, the purpose of the RUM was the battle for equality on the job; for blacks to be treated as equals by the company and within the union, rather than an abstract “class struggle” or anarcho-syndicalist vision of “workers against bosses.” The RUMs organizations and the LRBW existed on a continuum whose immediate predecessors were Trade Union Unity League, National African American Labor Council, and League of Struggle for African American Rights, National African American Council.
The LRBW was a federation of diverse organizations rather than a “big” RUM caucus. This federation shared resources to aid its organization in mobilizing and fighting on various “fronts of struggle.” For instance “Parents and Students for Community Control” was formed as a league component to battle in the electoral arena to elect local black school board members, expressing the concerns of their neighborhood. North Woodward Interfaith organization, United Community (UNICOM), West Central Organization (WCO) and International Black Appeal (IPA) were incorporated into the league. The Black Student Voice and later Black Student United Front were high school students, many who would distribute literature at plants. There was a period when the Southend newspaper came under the direction of the League members.
A complex of issues is attributed to the split and disintegration of the LRBW. The LRBW was formed during the final stage of American Revolution 2.5 - the Civil Rights Movement and in a larger historical sense expressed the last phase of organizational unity between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism. With the shattering of the wall of de jure – legal – segregation, the LRBW could no longer evolve as a revolutionary organization based exclusively on color. In a country such as America, with its huge multinational majority white working class, a majority black organization of revolutionaries, striving for a Marxist approach and method is an impossible contradiction.
The LRBW was not a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist organization, although Marxist and Marxist-Leninist were members of the league. The league would later declare itself in favor of forming a Black Marxist Leninist party. Due to the principled stand of the Communist League demanding a multinational Communist Party, all sections of the old LRBW were won over to the Communist League vision of a revolutionary Communist party.
Every single revolutionary group in American “courted” the LRBW and all of their material was read critically. One should ask why the largest grouping of the LRBW rejected the outlook of the Revolutionary Union and its Red Papers along with the October League, which grew out of the Revolution Youth Movement II.
(See Revolution in the Air pages, 70, 71, 72.)
The reason the LRBW was won over to the California Communist League (CCL) and then the Communist League (CL) is their theory basis in Marxism and living connection in the long struggle for an American Marxist narrative. The Communist League approach to the issues of the day and description of the social revolution made more sense than all the new communist groups combined, at least to a broad section of revolutionaries in Detroit. The Motor City Labor League, fragments of Detroit Organizing Committee (DOC), Revolution Per Minute (RPM), People Against Racism (PAR) and groups of independent Marxist would join CL and become part of the Communist Labor Party.
The proposition that the LRBW and others joined CL because Nelson Peery, its Chairman is African American is absurd and insulting. The LRBW did not join the CL because Peery is African American. The LRBW was recruited into the CL by a revolutionary from the Bay area sent to establish an educational forum for the workers and student component.
Nelson Peery became Chairman of CL because he was best qualified. It is a feature of our society that a revolutionary group must express a historical continuity and the salient feature of the social movement to be relevant. Peery’s history evolves through the CPUSA and the long struggle for a revolutionary position on the African American Question; against the anti-Stalin form of anti-communism, against Khrushchev revisionism and for the building of a Leninist party along the lines pioneered by Lenin. Thus, Peery (along with his wife Sue Ying who created CL’s study program and Blue Book) expressed the salient feature of the social process in the same way the Slavic workers constituted the driving core of the CPUSA during the drive for industrial unionism. The revolutionary driving core of the industrial union movement was the unskilled Slavic workers rather than the Western European English workers. In an earlier period the CPUSA was composed of various ethnic associations, which revolutionaries from the various European ethnic groups joined.
End part 1
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Occupy Wall Street's "rolling jubilee" to cancel (some) debts
You can watch tonight's event at Le Poisson Rouge via
livestream at
the Rolling Jubilee website. The
telethon features Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum, members from Sonic Youth,
Fugazi, and TV on the Radio, Lee Ranaldo, Tunde Adebimpe, David Rees, Lizz
Winstead, and Janeane Garofalo.
How does a ‘Jubilee’ roll? Jesus explains.
Occupy DC demonstrators protest as they try to block the guest entrance to the Alfalfa Dinner at the Capitol Hilton in Washington on Jan. 28, 2012. An Occupy DC organizer says they have hundreds of protesters lined up outside a prestigious Washington hotel where President Barack Obama, other political leaders and business moguls are meeting. (AP)“Jesus had an economic plan,” as I write in “#OccupytheBible: What Jesus Really Said (and Did) About Money and Power,” my new book on how what Jesus really said about money, and on the power dynamics of what he did about economic issues in his own time.
Jesus’ economic plan is called the
“jubilee.” Jesus starts his ministry (Luke 4:
16-19) by
standing up in the synagogue in his hometown and reading from one of the key
texts of his Hebrew scriptures that announces a jubilee, a time of debt
forgiveness.
What Jesus thought needed to be done
about debt in the first century is also what needs to happen for indebted
Americans in the 21st century, at least that’s the view of some of the folks who
brought us Occupy Wall Street.
Rolling Jubilee has just been launched, another brilliant “let’s
not do business as usual” kind of
idea from the Occupy movement.
By donating at Rolling Jubilee, individuals can give money to buy up distressed
consumer debt that is normally sold to debt collectors for pennies on the
dollar. But instead of acting like debt collectors, hounding folks for the full
payment, you are giving to cancel the debt, that is, forgive
it.
I believe what we do (or do not do)
about money is the most pressing moral issue of our time. Our economic system is
still only working for a few people in this country, and the rest are
flat-lining or falling behind as the famous Congressional Budget Office chart shows. Income of the top 1 percent
spiked 275 percent from 1979-2007.
Surely Christians who read the
Gospels would be protesting that inequality, right?
Well, for several decades the
Christian Right in this country has tried to make Jesus into a “free-market
capitalist” who believes you just ‘let the market take care of it’ and there’s
no need to worry about gross economic inequality and people falling into
excessive debt. As Tony Perkins of
the Family Research Council opined,
“Jesus was a free marketer, not an Occupier.”
Nothing could be farther from the
biblical truth.
One of the Jubilee texts in the Bible
about the cancellation of debt and gets very, very specific. “Every seventh year
you shall grant a remission of debts.” (Deuteronomy 15:1-6) It’s a pretty
radical plan for how to get to economic equality in a community, not only in the
early Hebrew history, but also in Jesus’ time, and even today.
But what Rolling Jubilee has done is
take that biblical plan and help us realize we need a “reboot” of 21st century
debt-ridden American economy.
Occupy “won” the debate on the
economy in 2011 and into 2012 by changing the American idea of our economy. The
contribution of the language of the 1 percent and the 99 percent simply entered
American political discourse as a given. Suddenly, the huge accumulation of
wealth by a very few in the last three decades became a scandal not an
achievement in the United States.
We have built an economy on selling
debt (and hamburgers). There is the 1 percent, the “megarich” who benefit from
this debtor economy, and then there is the rest, the 99
percent.
That was a huge shift in American
ideas on wealth and poverty in 2011-2012.
Rolling Jubilee works the same way,
that is, to change our ideas of how economies should work. Rolling Jubilee turns
the morality of “debt” upside down.
It used to be that it was considered
“immoral” not to pay your debts. Now, Occupy has exposed the illegitimacy of
debt production as an economic strategy. It also begins to shine a light on the
institutionalized violence of debt collection including the harassing tactics of
those who are usually the ones who buy up bad debt, and the related tactics of
seizing assets, garnishing wages, denying employment or housing or even the
revival of imprisonment.
Rolling Jubilee does
both.
This “Jubilee” rolls because those
who are now freed from debt are liberated to contribute to forgiving the debt of
others, making this Jubilee roll on.
This is truly in the prophetic
tradition, as “Justice shall roll down like water, and righteousness like an
ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)
On Thursday, there is a telethon that
you can watch live on streaming video on the Web site, to raise funds. Rolling Jubilee has already raised
nearly $200,000 in donations, at last count on the website, and thus has
“forgiven” nearly $4,000,000 in debt.
It is a testimony to the deep
religious meaning of Rolling Jubilee thatneighbors are
coming together at
places like Hope Central Church in the Boston area to watch, give and Strike
Debt out.
Roll, Jubilee,
roll.
But there’s a lot more in Jesus’
teachings on money and power in addition to the moral crisis of debt. There’s
women and power, why greed leads people into temptation, and on the practical
values of treating each other decently. I hope you will want to #OccupytheBibleand check it out.
Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary
(1998-2008), the Rev. Susan
Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at
Chicago Theological Seminary and a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress
Sunday, November 11, 2012
America the Third-World Nation in 4 Easy Steps
This piece by By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Edarchived on Truthout is our latest edition to our collection of readings on why "job creation" isn't working: the self-destruction phase of capitalism.
Besides the fact that the "insourcing" of American manufacturing that seems to be a trend in this story isn't elevating workers' living standards, there's the additional fact of the ongoing automation and robotization of the manufacturing (and service) sector. Each recession seems to bring forth more "rationalization" of production, using more expensive machinery funded by massive borrowing from the capital markets--which means jettisoning more workers, who now appear as just expensive "headcount" in the corporation's annual report.
The thing that makes all this so self-destructive to capitalism is that both of these historical trends are converging to create a USA that is not the consumer growth economy that the CEOs may tell us it is. You can decide whether you agree that's a "third-world nation" status. Some of these quotes illustrate the point, and you should read the whole article, link below.
<READ MORE of America the Third-World Nation in 4 Easy Steps
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed
Besides the fact that the "insourcing" of American manufacturing that seems to be a trend in this story isn't elevating workers' living standards, there's the additional fact of the ongoing automation and robotization of the manufacturing (and service) sector. Each recession seems to bring forth more "rationalization" of production, using more expensive machinery funded by massive borrowing from the capital markets--which means jettisoning more workers, who now appear as just expensive "headcount" in the corporation's annual report.
The thing that makes all this so self-destructive to capitalism is that both of these historical trends are converging to create a USA that is not the consumer growth economy that the CEOs may tell us it is. You can decide whether you agree that's a "third-world nation" status. Some of these quotes illustrate the point, and you should read the whole article, link below.
"Foxconn workers live in over-crowded dorms that are located on the factory grounds. They work 12-hour shifts, and are routinely exposed to dangerous working conditions. Recently, 137 Foxconn workers fell ill after they were forced to use toxic chemicals to clean iPads. And in the last five years, 17 Foxconn workers have committed suicide on the job. Nets have since been installed around the factory to catch workers jumping out of windows.
"So why the heck would Foxconn look beyond their Libertarian paradise of no labor laws to come to the United States and employ a bunch of Americans?"
" ...Today upwards of fifty million Americans are living in poverty and depend on food stamps. The middle class devolved into the working class, which further devolved into the working poor class.
"Local economies are collapsing, states are going bankrupt, and workers are being tenderized for colonization in the near future.
Step 3: Export American Wealth
There's a hefty price tag associated with transitioning from the world's largest exporter of manufactured goods to the world's largest importer of manufactured goods. That price comes in the form of trade deficits.
Step 4: Recolonize
"...Ikea recently opened up a factory in Virginia, which just so happens to be a right-to-work for less state that's not hospitable to labor unions. In Sweden, where Ikea is based, workers earn at least $19 an hour and enjoy a minimum of 5 weeks paid vacation every year. Those are fairly high labor costs. So executives at Ikea have come to the United States, where they can pay workers just $8 an hour and give away just 12 days of vacation a year."
"But given the agenda of House Republicans, that tragic reality may not be so far-fetched. Generations of labor law that produced a minimum wage, a forty-hour workweek, workplace safety laws, and child labor laws are all under attack by Republicans in Congress. And if they succeed, then there is absolutely nothing protecting American workers from suffering the same fate as sweatshop workers overseas.
"...The reason why this fourth stage is terminal is because there are few treatment options available anymore. If the United States were to suddenly rethink its trade policies and enact tariffs again, they would have little impact since these foreign corporations have already implanted their manufacturing centers here in the United States. The profits would continue to go overseas rather than being circulated in the local economy.
"...The United States is rapidly un-developing in a way never before witnessed in the history of the world.".
<READ MORE of America the Third-World Nation in 4 Easy Steps
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed
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