The publication of the new English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, is a major event for Marxists, as well as for scholars of Soviet history in the English speaking world. Originally published in Italian in 2008, Iskra Press has just released the first authorized translation into English, thanks to the translation work of Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro.

The late Domenico Losurdo was a first-rate philosopher, historian and scholar, and the author of many important works such as Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) and Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (2003). One of the most significant studies of Stalin ever written, English-speaking activists and scholars have long hoped that this important book on Stalin would be translated from Losurdo’s native Italian, but left-leaning publishers of Losurdo’s other books, such as Verso, refused to touch it.

It is noteworthy, as a bit of history about the translation, that when Henry Hakamäki wrote to Verso Books requesting that they publish Losurdo’s Stalin, Verso senior editor Sebastian Budgen responded, calling the book “one of Losurdo’s worst books” and insisted, “We will continue to publish the books by him that have intellectual merit and are based on real and serious research, but not these kinds of texts.” Hakamäki has noted, however, that the book contains at least “346 works cited in it, and has well over 1000 points of citation within the text.” Indeed, Losurdo is a world renowned scholar, whose research methodology in Stalin mirrors that of his other works. We can only assume, then, that by “these kinds of texts,” Budgen means that Verso will not publish books that challenge the anti-Stalin paradigm in scholarship, no matter how well researched.

Interestingly, this controversy regarding the book’s publication really cuts to the heart of what the book is about. The title of the book refers to the idea that a “black legend” has been constructed around Stalin with the intent of discrediting communism. This “black legend” regarding Stalin is the subject of the book. What does this mean? In historiography, which is the study of historical writing and research, a “black legend” refers to a sustained trend of fabrication, exaggeration, decontextualization, and distortion which aims to paint the subject as monstrous and without redeeming qualities.

In this sense, the book isn’t a biography. Losurdo’s book is a “history and critique” of the demonization of Stalin rather than a summation of the period of Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union, or an analysis of the figure of Stalin himself. The book breaks down this “black legend” in a systematic way, based on rigorous and well documented research. It shows how the history of Stalin and the Stalin era has been decontextualized, distorted, fabricated and exaggerated, in order to manufacture a political mythology of Stalin as a villain.

Stalin is a major figure in the history of the international communist movement, and both his theory and practice deserve careful study and summation, not just by scholars, but also by socialists and activists who are interested in building a better society. The demonization of Stalin has always been a cornerstone of anti-communism in the United States, and this demonization has been repeated by academics and even “socialists.” Some of these are indeed anti-communists, while others simply lack the courage to stand up to the anti-Stalin propaganda. Others still simply need to become better informed, which this book can help with.

But outside of the imperialist countries, Stalin is widely regarded as a great figure, who accomplished incredible things. Stalin is recognized for transforming the Soviet Union from a backwards, semi-feudal country to a world power, and for defeating Nazi Germany and saving the world from fascism. During the period of Stalin’s leadership of the USSR, the Soviet Union abolished illiteracy, did away with unemployment, provided universal healthcare and housing, and put an end to the cycles of economic crisis and famine that had plagued Russia for centuries prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.

While the Trotskyites had long shrieked impotently about “Stalinism,” the true origin of Stalin’s demonization in the West, according to Losurdo, is Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences.” The first chapter of Losurdo’s book, entitled “How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report” deals with dissecting the claims made against Stalin by Khrushchev in his “secret speech.” From there, Losurdo goes through the many charges against Stalin from then to now, looking at the historical, political and social context as a whole, and helps the reader to come to a fair conclusion about what really took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership. Through the course of Losurdo’s work, the picture we are left with is very different from the one we are usually taught.

Losurdo notes that as scholarship has progressed. “On the whole,” he writes, “the caricatured portrait of Stalin drawn first by Trotsky and then by Khrushchev no longer enjoys much credit.” He also explains that “it now becomes clear that the Secret Speech is entirely unreliable. There is no detail in it that is not contested today.” And yet it still remains a cornerstone of the anti-Stalin paradigm.

As the Communist Party of China wrote shortly after Khrushchev’s secret speech, “the question of how to evaluate Stalin and what attitude to take towards him is not just one of appraising Stalin himself; more important, it is a question of how to sum up the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the international communist movement since Lenin’s death.” This is why Losurdo’s Stalin is an important and valuable book. It is a work of scholarship destined to shake up the predominant, anti-communist history that is taught at every level of U.S. society. It is also important for activists and revolutionaries to read.

Stalin himself once said, “Theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” Losurdo has made an important contribution to our understanding and summation of that experience, and this translation helps to make it more accessible to readers in the United States and other predominantly English speaking countries. Today, people in the U.S are taking up socialist and revolutionary ideas in a way not seen in a very long time. Everyone who is interested in socialism’s history or its future should read this book.

This book is available from the Iskra Books website: https://www.iskrabooks.org/stalin-history-and-critique J. Sykes is the author of “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #MarxismLeninism #Stalin

The new book, The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, by Carlos Martinez and published by Praxis Press, is a valuable and important defense of socialism in the People’s Republic of China today. As the U.S. ramps up propaganda and aggression against China, this book addresses an important need, for everyone who wants a better world, to understand and defend China.

The book begins by acknowledging that there is a great deal of ignorance and confusion, especially in the imperialist countries, about China. Martinez writes, “Even among socialists and communists, there are misconceptions and important gaps in understanding.” He addresses these issues head on.

The first chapter focuses on the continuities of the revolution in China, from the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921 until today. Martinez gives an overview of the history of the Chinese revolution and defends that legacy of Mao Zedong, while giving a balanced account of Mao’s more controversial initiatives, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

For example, while acknowledging that the turmoil and disruption of the Cultural Revolution significantly impeded China’s development, he also points out that it “had a more directly useful outcome” in terms of preventing the “ideological decay that was taking place in the Soviet Union.” According to Martinez it “set the parameters of how far Reform and Opening Up could go” and “laid the groundwork for Deng Xiaoping’s Four Cardinal Principles, which the CPC continues to observe today: 1) We must keep to the socialist road; 2) We must uphold the people’s democratic dictatorship; 3) We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party; 4) We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

Furthermore, he explains that the movement to send young intellectuals down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution “was a crucial factor in the development of a new generation of young intellectuals with a close understanding of the needs of the peasantry and the situation in the countryside.” It is noteworthy that Chinese President Xi Jinping was himself sent to the countryside as part of this movement.

Looking at the post-1978 Reform and Opening Up period initiated by Deng Xiaoping, Martinez recognizes that many see this period as “a turning point in the wrong direction.” Martinez argues against this view. Instead, Martinez notes, “Deng Xiaoping’s strong belief was that, unless the government delivered on a significant improvement in people’s standard of living, the entire socialist project would lose its legitimacy and therefore be in peril.”

This is a point that Martinez revisits in the chapter “Will China suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union?” He argues that the combination of economic stagnation and ideological decay in the USSR led to the collapse of socialism in the USSR.

This point should be made clearer. Indeed, while the material basis of Soviet revisionism was rooted in the economic reforms of the Khrushchev period, which emphasized market reforms, profitability, material incentives, and so on, a deciding factor was the question of the class struggle in the superstructure and the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism by the Soviet leadership. Contrast the People’s Republic of China’s Four Cardinal Principles with Khrushchev’s revisionist theses of “state of the whole people” and “party of the whole people,” negating the class character of the USSR and Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and it is easy to see the gulf that stands between the two approaches.

Martinez rightly notes that the CPC’s reform period took a “grassroots” approach that was “patient, incremental, and results-oriented” while the Gorbachev “reforms” that brought about the final restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991, were undemocratically imposed on the Soviet people, rather than leveraging the creativity of the Soviet masses.

Martinez explains, “Although China’s reform process served to introduce market forces into the economy, the whole process was carried out under the tight control of the government and took place within the context of a planned economy.” Indeed, the commanding heights of the Chinese economy remain state owned, with state owned enterprises making up 60% of the economy; and most of the value created by the working class in China is socially distributed, going towards the betterment of society. And while the revisionists in the Soviet Union attacked the history of the USSR and spent 30 years dismantling the rule of the proletariat and its party, the opposite has taken place in China, where the CPC maintains its central, leading role, based on the scientific application of Marxism to Chinese conditions. In fact, when rightists in the CPC led by Zhao Ziyang tried to restore capitalism in 1989, the CPC stood firm in its commitment to the socialist road.

A highlight of the book is a careful and thorough analysis of “China’s long war against poverty.” The People’s Republic of China has eradicated extreme poverty. What does this mean? “At the start of the targeted poverty alleviation programme in 2014,” Martinez writes, “just under 100 million people were identified as living below the poverty line; seven years later, the number was zero.” The Chinese government defines extreme poverty alleviation in terms of what it calls the “two assurances and three guarantees.” As Martinez explains, “The two assurances are for adequate food and clothing; the three guarantees are for access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education.” He contrasts this to the advanced capitalist countries, where nothing is promised, where profit is more important than people, and where poverty and inequality are on the rise.

Likewise, the book highlights the People’s Republic of China’s commitment to ecological development. Martinez writes that, “Over the last decade in particular, China has emerged as the undisputed leader in the fight against climate breakdown, and the results of this leadership are reverberating globally.”

Against the charge from some, even on the Left, that China is imperialist, Martinez argues that “imperialism doesn’t look like this.” He explains the Leninist theory of imperialism as monopoly capitalism. According to Lenin, imperialism is based on the concentration of capital into monopolies, whereby the economy becomes dominated by a “financial oligarchy.” The export of capital takes center stage, and monopolist capitalist associations share the world among themselves, leading to the total division of the world among the imperialist powers. The October Revolution in 1917 ruptured this imperialist chain, and the other socialist countries, including China, followed suit.

Against the claim that China is imperialist, The East is Still Red emphasizes that China’s role in the developing world is qualitatively different from that of the imperialist countries. It acknowledges that imperialism has the function of locking in underdevelopment, while China’s role encourages development while respecting sovereignty. The book discusses this issue in terms of China’s role in “building a multipolar world.” The concept of “multipolarity” doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue, however, as Martinez himself acknowledges by saying that “the multipolar narrative doesn’t make explicit reference to anti-imperialism.”

Indeed, it would be clearer to understand the place of China in relation to the four fundamental contradictions operating on a world scale: the contradiction between the working class and the capitalists, the contradiction between the imperialist powers, the contradiction between the imperialists and the oppressed nations, and the contradiction between the imperialists and the socialist countries. Of these, the contradiction between the imperialists and the oppressed nations is primary, meaning it is the contradiction that is driving things on a world scale. What China is doing is providing aid to the countries of the developing world that allows them to avoid the liberalization, privatization, domination and plunder that are central to the neo-colonialist approach of the imperialist countries. While this development isn’t sufficient to bring socialism to those countries, it does serve to further weaken imperialism.

Importantly, Martinez also discusses the growing drive for war against China from the imperialist powers, especially the United States. He explains how the U.S. attempts to manufacture consent for aggression against China, and answers the propaganda with facts. Against the “Third Camp” Trotskyites who say “Neither a Washington nor Beijing,” Martinez is clear that they are, in fact, playing right into the hands of the imperialists.

The bulk of Chapter 5 of The East is Still Red is devoted to debunking the imperialist accusations that the People’s Republic of Cina is committing human rights abuses against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. The book refutes the lie that the Chinese government is committing “cultural genocide” and is operating “concentration camps.” Similarly, it exposes the role of the U.S. in attempting to destabilize Xinjiang.

The book ends with a call to “unite to oppose the U.S.-led New Cold War on China,” and says that “All those that oppose imperialism must resolutely and consistently oppose the U.S.-led New Cold War in all its manifold forms.” This is certainly true, and this book makes a great contribution towards that effort.

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #China

Minneapolis, MN – The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, published by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, is a concise and fantastic book detailing the fundamentals of Marxism. Written by J. Sykes, the book is an excellent introduction for those looking to learn the science of revolution, the history, methods and outlook of scientific socialism. It breaks down complex questions of philosophy, organizing and others into easily understandable terms, making it good for beginners and an excellent primer for those who already have a grasp on Marxism-Leninism and are looking to sharpen their understanding. For those seeking to do away with capitalism and its system of corporate exploitation, class oppression and national oppression, this is the book for you.

Introducing the science of revolution

The book begins with an explanation, not only of the purpose of its publication, but of a brief history of Marxism-Leninism. Sykes makes clear that Marxism didn’t just fall out of the sky one day, it arose out of the three component parts: socialism, political economy, and philosophy, and was (and continues to be) refined over the course of the practical experience and application of it in the struggles of working and oppressed people the whole world over.

In addition to dealing with the basics of Marxism, the book addresses problematic bourgeois ideological currents like post-modernism, Sakai’s take on settler colonialism, and pragmatism, which are harmful to the efforts to construct a revolutionary movement in this country.

Theory and practice

As Sykes says,

“Practice is the sole criterion of truth”, continuing, “Revolutionary theory is a guide to action, and it changes and develops as the world changes and develops, building upon itself just as Marx and Engels built upon the advanced theory of their time. In the early part of the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin and the experience of the October Revolution and socialist construction in the Soviet Union further developed the science of revolution in many ways. Lenin’s analysis of the further development of capitalism into monopoly capitalism led to his development of the theory of Imperialism and the importance of anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation.”

This is why The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism doesn’t focus simply on communist theory in the abstract, separated from real world conditions and struggles, but in the source (practice) its application, and use of it in those struggles. It also doesn’t take Marxism as an unchanging dogma, but as a science that is constantly being developed and enriched in its source, practice, as a tool that becomes sharper, not duller, with use.

Sykes explains how knowledge and theory develops from practical experience, to be summed up and learned from, to apply again. The book as well explains the “mass line,” the communist method of organizing and leadership from and to the masses, and how not only we as revolutionaries learn with it, but how the people as a whole learn from the process of taking our felt needs, issues and demands, studying and breaking them down, and synthesizing them into actionable plans, demands and slogans, and so raising the consciousness of the people.

A book for revolutionaries new and old

Throughout the entirety of The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, important concepts such as imperialism, historical materialism and national oppression are all explained in an easily digestible manner. Questions of organizing, history and leadership are explained in clear and concise terms, and the book never steps away from discussing the practical use and understanding of each concept, and ties Marxist-Leninist theory firmly with the struggles of the masses that continues to develop and enrich it.

This book comes at a period of major importance today. As Mick Kelly, political secretary of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, states in the forward, “Not since the rise of the new communist movement in late 1960s and early 70s have we seen such large numbers of people arriving at the conclusion that monopoly capitalism is a failed system, and that revolution and socialism are necessities. Many new revolutionaries are making the leap and helping to build revolutionary organization.”

For those revolutionaries, new and old, looking to build such an organization, this book will undoubtedly be a vital and practical read.

The book can be purchased from FRSO organizers, or by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook.

#MinneapolisMN #BookReviews #MLTheory #redTheory

When legendary and prolific labor history researcher and author Phil Foner died in 1994, he left behind more than 100 meticulously researched and detailed histories of the U.S. labor movement. But Foner was not merely an historian in the usual university mold; he was a partisan, a lifetime communist, and he saw his work as not just chronicles of past events but serious guides to action for those still on the labor battlefront. His books in many ways became the untold stories of our class struggle.

Probably his most accomplished and massive work is the 11-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Such an enormous work would be enough for any individual to research in a lifetime, but this series is only a small portion of his life’s work. Reaching from our colonial period all the way up through the early years of the Great Depression, Foner tracks the emergence of the early U.S. labor movement, its growth and evolution, and he details its many battles with employers and state forces alike.

At his death almost 30 years ago the series ended with Volume 10. Accidentally I learned about a lost draft manuscript that apparently existed for a Volume 11 several years ago. With persistence, the support of a small collective of fellow communists, and the cooperation of International Publishers, we were able to finally bring Volume 11 into print.

Setting apart Foner’s scholarship from most other labor historians is the fact that he includes the internal union political context of the era under study. Including the contributions made by the left, particularly communists and militants, is a constant theme that runs throughout the enormous history. Leadership roles played by communists were in many ways the key force both initiating and sustaining the dramatic labor struggles of the past 100 years. The author also takes great care to include details of the destructive roles frequently played by the business union leaderships, and where needed he exposes the negative roles too often played by social democratic forces. Few other labor histories will delve into these internal matters. Foner instead lays bare the actions of these forces, required for anyone to grasp the real context of the history. Most labor historians are allergic to dealing with these matters, but not Foner.

Newly published Volume 11 covers the early years of the Great Depression, from 1929 through 1932. Here Foner explains the political and organizational roots of what became the great class struggle upsurge that ultimately gave birth to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He reports on the desperate Depression-driven fights in multiple industries as workers were confronted with both employers bent on union liquidation, along with business union “leaders” determined to do whatever it took to water down or kill the growing spirit among the workers to aggressively fight back. Battle after battle is detailed as the working class resisted as best they could the mass joblessness, starvation, destitution and homelessness experienced by many millions.

Large sections of Volume 11 are dedicated to reports on the wind-down of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) and the birth of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the federation of Communist Party-sponsored industrial unions in more than a dozen industries.

Foner offers intricate reports on the launch of new unions in steel and metal manufacturing, the needle trades, coal mining, food processing, tobacco, agriculture, auto, fur and other industries. With AFL unions then barely functioning, and with tens of thousands of communists and militants expelled from their unions by reactionaries in a “rule or ruin” maneuver, the Communist Party set in motion the TUUL experiment. Under Depression conditions the establishment of the TUUL was an against-all-odds proposition, but in just a few years most of the unions returned to the more established unions and bolstered the forces who soon comprised the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). Some academic critics have written off the TUUL legacy as some sort of Communist Party blunder, although given the circumstances nothing could be farther from the facts.

My favorite class-struggle skirmish documented in Volume 11 – one of many – is Foner’s report on the rank-and-file communist-led delegation of workers who appeared at the 1932 Cincinnati convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to demand that the AFL support unemployment insurance for the many millions then out of jobs and literally starving.

The early years of the Depression found the conservative AFL leadership furiously opposed to unemployment relief, ridiculing it as “the dole” or “a Moscow plot.” Led by communist Louis Weinstock from the Painters Union, the ordinary union members were denied entrance to the seating in the main hall of the non-union hotel but were instead directed to the balcony seating. High above in the balcony the workers presented no threat and had no chance of being heard by the union big shots conducting their business-as-usual affair. But, seeing his chance – and being accustomed to working at great heights as a painter – Weinstock leapt from the balcony onto one of the gigantic chandeliers swinging above the seated labor chiefs. There, safely out of the reach of the police, he delivered his entire speech demanding AFL support for the urgently needed unemployment relief legislation. Unbelievably, and virtually unknown to labor leftists today, it required several more years before the AFL offered its support to such a basic reform as unemployment compensation. Many other such surprises are found here.

Much can be learned by studying the labor movement in the early years of the Great Depression. Argument could be made that the bulk of the business union leadership today is equally conservative, frightened, corrupted, directionless and as unimaginative as were their counterparts at the onset of that calamity. It quickly becomes obvious to the reader that the failed formulas of the business unions will not deliver any better results today than in the Depression decade. Today, as we are witness to the Amazon, Starbucks, and other new organizing upsurges, the imminent UPS contract showdown, and Biden’s destruction of the rail union strike, we see growing numbers of trade unionists demanding something better than the old losing approaches. In this moment Foner’s labor history series takes on added urgency.

Order Volume 11 and you will soon find yourself soon buying the others. William Z. Foster observed early in his career that, “The left wing must do the work.” He refers to the elements both within and around the labor movement who bear responsibility for altering the disastrous course set by the business union misleaders. Transforming the current unions from what they are into radically different and aggressive vehicles for working class progress is our mission. This series is a guide for action to that end.

History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 11, The Great Depression 1929 – 1932, by Philip Foner. https://www.intpubnyc.com/browse/the-history-of-the-labor-movement-in-the-united-states-vol-11/ Chris Townsend was the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International Union Organizing Director. Previously he was an International Representative and Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE).

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #LaborMovement

Minneapolis, MN – Jon Melrod’s newly-published memoir, Fighting Times, is more than just a remembrance. It details his time as a revolutionary helping to build the fighting people’s movements – from the student movement of the 1960s in SDS and being part of the Revolutionary Union, to the solidarity struggle with the Menominee Warrior Society occupation in 1975, to building a fighting UAW local at an American Motors plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin – and the lessons learned from each fight. It is a book that class-struggle union militants, student organizers and activists from all the people’s movements alike would do well to read.

Students stand up, fight back

Attending school in Madison, Wisconsin in 1968, during the time of the Vietnam war, Melrod was quickly swept up into student activism, particularly as part of the resident chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He readily participated in the disruption of ROTC recruitment on campus and helped to build the broad fight among students. During this time, he also got his start in union organizing, joining up to help the Obreros Unidos, a union of agricultural workers led by of Jesus Salas, building support for the Delano Grape Strike called by the United Farm Workers.

In the fight on campus, Melrod and Madison SDS joined up with the Black People’s Alliance, a group formed by Black students on campus to challenge the administration’s refusal to address racism on campus, taking part in a student strike in support of the BPA’s 13 demands, which eventually the National Guard was called in to suppress. In response, as Melrod explains, “The BPA and SDS issued a clarion call for a mass march on the domed state capitol – home to the Wisconsin state legislature and the seat of state power. According to news accounts, twelve thousand students – over one-third of the student body – gathered as the sun set.” Going on to say, “Never had such a powerful force of humanity gathered under one banner in Madison’s history.”

In 1970, after a brutal attack by the police on a street party, the murder of Fred Hampton, the trial of the Chicago seven and the announcement of Nixon beginning of the invasion of Cambodia, Melrod and the rest of the Madison SDS chapter – many of whom had joined the Mother Jones Revolutionary League – led up another fight on campus which would grow to encompass many organizations in a United Front Against the War. Together they kicked off another mass student strike centered on the Army Math building.

Melrod at that time joined the many young people – steeled by their experience organizing in the student movement and realizing the need for revolutionary change – in becoming communists, and in joining the Revolutionary Union. That summer he spent time in Oakland organizing with the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, the predecessor of the RU, participating in the Los Siete de la Raza Defense Committe and more. After this last year of student activism, Melrod moved on, heading from campus to Milwaukee, intent on joining up with the working class struggle.

Class struggle in Kenosha, no contract, no work

Upon leaving campus, and after working for a time in a paint factory, Melrod got a job at an American Motors Company plant in Milwaukee and joined the resident United Auto Workers local. There he played a role in building a rank-and-file caucus on the shop floor to stand up to the petty rule of supervisors and constant company attacks. The “Fight Back” caucus, as it first came to be called, published a shop floor newsletter and quickly set to galvanizing workers against the bosses’ attacks and the concessionary outlook of the local’s executive board that got in their way of fighting back.

The caucus gained a leading position among workers on the shop floor and led the charge in fighting speed-up and forced overtime. After being defeated, the bosses responded by firing Melrod and another worker, Al Guzman. The campaign for rehire was fierce and drawn out with more than half the union local prepared to strike to win their brothers back their jobs, but the local president derailed the effort.

With few other options, Melrod filed a complaint with the NLRB, and spent the next 1008 days waiting for a response, while continuing to try to organize in other workplaces. After being reinstated, Melrod and other caucus activists on the trim line and other departments soon found themselves being transferred to the Kenosha plant as production was moved and layoffs kicked in.

In Kenosha, Melrod and other militants developed a newsletter and caucus know as Fighting Times. They again built up ties on the shop floor, distributing newsletters, buttons and shirts on each campaign, as well as trying to tie the movement at the plant to the working-class fight and progressive struggles going on all around.

Fighting Times organized militant walkouts on contract expiration dates, raising the call of “No contract, no work” and fought racism and male chauvinism on the shop floor. They allied themselves with reformers in the union to replace the leadership that was in the company’s pocket.

Melrod was eventually elected steward, then chief steward, and eventually on to the local’s executive committee. He continued to mobilize rank-and-filers for a long time to come, especially during the fight against concessions in the 80s, and for the fight for “one man, one vote” against the UAW international leadership who were more interested in securing board memberships at Chrysler and AMC than in waging a concerted fight.

Continuing the fight at home and abroad

After leaving AMC and the UAW local, Melrod went on to practice law, opening a practice which particularly defended refugees fighting for legal protections in the U.S. This led him to become involved in the solidarity movement with the people of the Philippines against the brutal rule of the Marcos and Duterte regimes, fighting to free the hundreds of political prisoners being held, as well as with the Lumad people in the southern Philippines in defending their lands against attacks from foreign corporations. He continues this activism with his wife today. In California, when a Sonoma County sheriff murdered 13-year-old Andy Lopez in 2013, Melrod went back to law to represent families of Chicano and Latino youth murdered by police in California.

At the end of the introduction, Jon Melrod expresses hope that “The chapters that follow, I hope, will answer many questions, point today’s new generation of organizers in the right direction, and maybe inspire a few young people to join the struggle.” At the end of the day, Jon Melrod’s book is truly a new movement classic. Activists and organizers from all over the people’s movements would take something away from reading it.

To purchase Jon Melrod’s Fighting Times, go to https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1349

#MinneapolisMN #SDS #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #RevolutionaryUnion

Minneapolis, MN – Dee Knight’s My Whirlwind Lives is both a memoir and manifesto – chronicling more than five decades of anti-imperialist resistance and revolutionary engagement. “Being a revolutionary is like being a midwife for the future,” he writes. “While there is blood and pain, its essence is hope and excitement for a future we can begin to see ahead of us.”

Knight’s first “whirlwind” started in the 1960s: “threats of nuclear catastrophe, rednecks with dogs terrorizing freedom marchers, Vietnamese children fleeing from napalm flame.” His memoir is a response to current stormy events and trends that are changing history. Knight places them in the context of “decades of turmoil in the U.S. and overseas, and decades of movement building against war, injustice and destruction of the planet,” as Medea Benjamin says. It tells of witnessing and supporting revolutions in Portugal and Nicaragua and building a socialist movement at home.

Gerry Condon of Veterans For Peace, Knight’s long-time comrade in resistance, says the story “shares much with that of thousands of young people whose lives and world views changed when they were pushed to participate in unjust U.S. wars.” In his last year of high school in small-town eastern Oregon, Knight supported far-rightist Barry Goldwater for president over the “peace candidate” Lyndon Johnson. But it didn’t take long for the struggles of the mid-sixties to change his mind, and his life.

Knight writes of meeting Clarence Thomas, the well-known leader of the International Longshore Workers Union, when he was a student in 1966 at San Francisco State College. Thomas was part of daily campus rallies led by the Black Students Union, denouncing the student draft deferment as a class and race inequality. Knight later met Walter Collins, a founding member of the Student National Coordinating Committee, who fought intense repression for his refusal to be drafted to go to Vietnam. Both Thomas and Collins helped mobilize a generation of young people to resist, in the streets. They were good teachers for a naïve but fast-learning young person whose life in resistance was just beginning.

As Knight tells it, the story of Clarence Thomas and the San Francisco longshore workers was an object lesson of the huge impact – and revolutionary potential – of militant trade unionists. “In 1984 they shut down the port of San Francisco rather than unload cargo from apartheid South Africa,” and “In 2011 ILWU joined hands with the Occupy movement to shut down the West Coast. Nearly every May Day the San Francisco dock workers take the day off to march. It recalls the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, when ILWU shut down the ports on the west coast for 83 days.” “This historic action, along with the Teamsters’ strike in Minneapolis, and others in Ohio and Michigan, nearly all led by communists or socialists, forged the Congress of Industrial Organizations – the CIO.”

“This can happen again,” Knight writes, “and it can spread like wildfire.” This is an example of how the memoir is also a manifesto – a kind of polemic for revolutionary optimism. He relates the surge in teacher strikes that began in 2018 and has spread across the country – with and without official union backing, and the struggles of nurses, fast food and retail workers that have become unstoppable. He adds in the prison strikes that emerged in 2018, which in at least one case commemorated the historic Attica rebellion of 1971 and the heroic leadership of George Jackson. He also pays tribute to iconic resistance fighters Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier.

Life in exile, and the fight for amnesty

Knight’s resistance took him to exile in Canada after “the battle of Chicago” in 1968. The first third of the book tells that story: how life outside the U.S. opened new possibilities – a chance, among other things, to learn about Marxism and socialism. The memoir tells how Knight became a leading organizer for amnesty for war resisters, in alliance with anti-war Vietnam veterans. That campaign culminated at the 1976 Democratic convention in New York, with a Gold Star Mother nominating a war resister for vice president, seconded by disabled Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. This electrifying display of solidarity became part of a movie, Born on the Fourth of July. These efforts didn’t win the complete amnesty for draft resisters, but they did force a broad “pardon” from Jimmy Carter in his first act as president in January 1977. Knight tells how they continued organizing in defense of veterans with “less than honorable” discharges for years after. The point was to justify all types of resistance, in and out of the military: “Amnesty for the future – not just the past!”

After returning from Canada, Knight went to Portugal to witness the Carnation Revolution of 1974-75, then to Sandinista Nicaragua for three years in the 1980s, living the realities of revolution in a poor Central American country, and opposing Ronald Reagan’s illegal efforts to crush it. This part of the story includes a defense of the Nicaraguan revolution against continued U.S. efforts to strangle it.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, when President George W. Bush declared “endless war” against terrorists, Knight helped organize giant mass protests, so big a New York Times report said the anti-war movement was a “new super-power.” Knight then takes us through the mass popular reactions to the crash of 2008 – organizing a large “Bloombergville” camp-in near New York’s City Hall in a precursor to Occupy Wall Street. Closer to the present, he contrasts the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 with the fake insurrection of January 6. He says the 2020 uprisings “hark back to the giant civil rights and anti-war protests of decades past, and are a harbinger of real change on the horizon.”

A “right turn” or a polemic for struggle?

In the context of its roots in the rebellious storms of the 1960s, seventies, and even the present, it’s a bit surprising to see Knight’s memoir turn to focus on Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Socialism and the Green New Deal.” Knight gives credit to Sanders for popularizing socialism and calling for “a political revolution.” But he then goes on to explain that “we should be realistic. Such a revolution would also have to transform the old state apparatus – the military, cops and courts. We would need to take over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy… to expropriate the banks, insurance, energy and rail transport industries, as well as the military-industrial complex and big pharma.”

Knight admits that “getting all this might take a miracle,” but then paints a picture of how it can happen: “Strikes and sit-ins by young people will spread and intensify. Workers can mobilize on a large scale, shutting down or taking over work places, ports, and entire cities. They can join with farmers, unemployed people and youth – everyone – in massive marches to demand change. Soldiers can shut down military bases across the country and around the world. That would have some impact!”

So in fact this memoir is indeed a manifesto – an impassioned argument that we do have what it takes to bring about the change we need. Knight makes it seem both exciting and possible. That’s good news.

\_\_\______

Excerpts of My Whirlwind Lives can be found at DeeKnight.blog. It’s due for release from Guernica World Editions on June 1. Advance copies are available at Mayday Books in Minneapolis and online from 1804Books in New York.

#MinneapolisMN #BookReviews

Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China & the U.S. - originally published last year and penned by dozens of writers from the U.S. and around the world – will now be translated and distributed in China. It will be available for sale by late September.

The book’s secondary title – An anthology of social justice activists discussing a global choice: cooperation vs. competition - describes the stark choice facing humanity.

“It’s been an honor for our book to be published in China,” said Lee Siu Hin, national coordinator of the China-U.S. Solidarity Network and the National Immigrant Solidarity Network, as well as a writer and editor of the book, “and a great opportunity for U.S. activists to meet and build solidarity with Chinese academia and activists. We hope to continue this work for peace and friendship.”

The authors detail the decisive, comprehensive steps taken by the Chinese government to break the chain of infection, as opposed to the chaotic U.S. response which ranged from outright denial to chaotic bungling, to racist blame games.

Events have borne out the message of the book, published in July 2020 when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll was 150,000. That number has since quadrupled, reaching well over 600,000 in a country of 350 million. By contrast, since that time the number of deaths in China, a country of 1.4 billion, has remained below 5000.

Capitalism on a Ventilator also puts into perspective the ridiculous campaign to use the “lab-leak theory” to blame China for the coronavirus. It was China which, in January 2020, tried to warn the U.S. about the virus, through phone calls, public announcements and early sequencing of the virus, mounting the world’s most comprehensive and successful campaign against the novel disease.

“Despite China’s many accomplishments, a dangerous war drive against China is gaining momentum in the U.S.,” said Sara Flounders, director of the International Action Center and co-editor of the book. “Hopefully this book will introduce voices who are resisting this pull and urging science, cooperation and solidarity as the only alternative.”

Fight Back! editor Mick Kelly states, “This important book includes a chapter from one of our writers, Robert Hayes, that shows the superiority of socialism in combating COVID-19. Every activist should get this book and read it.”

In September of last year, union-busting Amazon tried to ban Capitalism on a Ventilator from its all-powerful platform, claiming the book did not “comply with [Amazon’s] guidelines” and falsely listing it as “out of print.”

While an outcry forced Amazon to carry the title on its megasite, even now it cannot be found on Kindle, the publishing giant’s e-book format.

The chapters include articles by many authors including: Ajamu Baraka, Monica Moorehead, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Margaret Kimberley, Margaret Flowers, Vijay Prashad, Max Blumenthal, Lee Siu Hin, Sara Flounders, Carlos Martinez, Kevin Zeese, Deirdre Griswold and more.

The book can be found online at these locations:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/capitalism-on-a-ventilator https://world-view-forum.myshopify.com/products/capitalism-on-a-ventilator https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Ventilator-Impact-COVID-19-China/dp/0895671964

#NewYorkNY #CapitalismAndEconomy #Culture #Asia #Healthcare #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #China #Socialism #COVID19

Beachgoers stumbling on human femur bones in the sand – just a few feet from world-class resorts. Families sifting through corpses, decayed beyond recognition and piled up on the beach, in search of missing loved ones. Roadways littered with human heads impaled on bamboo spears. Ordinary homes and buildings converted into charnel houses of unspeakable torture. Parents ripped from their beds in the middle of the night and led deep into the jungle by their captors, for all-night, around-the-clock execution sessions.

These are not scenes from some horror movie. They really happened in Indonesia.

Beginning with a military coup on September 30, 1965, right-wing generals, religious fanatics and their followers carried out a genocide against the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), its supporters and anyone they suspected of supporting them. More than a million people died in this savage bloodbath, which all but annihilated the largest non-ruling communist party in the world at the time.

If you haven’t heard much about this anti-communist genocide, that’s by design. At every step – from the inception of a coup plot to the killing fields across Indonesia’s many islands – the United States trained, armed, coordinated and supported this mass murder. It should come as no surprise. Just a few hundred miles away, another anti-communist mass murder campaign was also unfolding in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – this one carried out directly by U.S. warplanes, napalm and M-16 rifles.

But both the U.S. government and Indonesia’s fascistic military regime worked hard to conceal, deny and erase their anti-communist genocide from history books. To this day, Indonesia’s government denies this one-sided carnage ever took place – even in the face of undeniable evidence – and severely represses those who speak out.

I remember reading about these disturbing events for the first time many years ago. The unparalleled scale of the brutality alone possessed me to learn more, but I found it difficult to track down a decent, comprehensive history in English.

This year, that changed with the release of The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. Written by Vincent Bevins, a journalist who worked in Indonesia for several years as a Washington Post correspondent. This book is a deadly serious, sobering examination of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, the role played by the United States, and the profound impact it had on vicious anti-communist massacres around the world – from Brazil to Sudan to Central America.

Bevins’ central argument is that the ghoulish events in Indonesia became a blueprint for right-wing anti-communist forces during – and after – the Cold War. While the story centers on Indonesia, Bevins traces the evolution of the so-called ‘Jakarta Method’ – as it came to be known in Washington – from the emergence of the Soviet Union and through World War II. Whether rigging elections against the Communist Party in Italy in 1947, overthrowing democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, or aiding the exterminating of communists in Iraq at the dawn of the 1960s, the CIA constantly intervened to protect the profits of Wall Street and giant corporations.

Indonesia gained its independence from the Dutch Empire at the end of World War II, leading to the emergence of a progressive national democratic government under President Sukarno. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), one of the oldest in Asia, saw explosive growth in their newly independent country, drawing millions of workers and peasants into its ranks. Sukarno was a nationalist, not a communist, but he increasingly came to lean on the PKI for support as Indonesia came under siege from their former colonial masters in Europe and the new imperialist powerhouse: the United States.

The Jakarta Method excels in describing the complex relationship between Sukarno and the PKI. It’s clear on the significant differences between the two, along with the many ways Sukarno’s nationalist program, which tried to paper over class conflict, allowed the far-right elements that would overthrow him to ferment. Drawing from interviews with former members of the PKI, the book also shows how the communists became increasingly dependent on Sukarno for leadership at the expense of their own independence. That is important because it’s one of the biggest errors that the surviving PKI leadership summed up in a 1966 self-criticism after the massacres.

But Bevins also shows why and how genuine communists – people who read and sincerely believed the teachings of Marx and Lenin – made these errors. After all, Indonesia under Sukarno hosted the Bandung conference, which brought together anti-colonial, anti-imperialist forces from around the world to support one another. Sukarno himself welcomed the PKI as an ally, and under the relatively democratic conditions of the time, communists continued to grow and win larger shares of the vote in elections. The trade-off – the PKI becoming a mass party, focused on elections and committed to gradual, peaceful moves towards socialism, in exchange for working as Sukarno’s junior partner – proved deadly. Thankfully though, Bevins treats their error with a level of humility and respect so often lacking in the sanctimonious writings of some on the U.S. Left.

The Jakarta Method follows Indonesian exiles who fled the genocide to the United States, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Central America, Brazil and more. Tragically, he shows how the horrors inflicted on communists and suspected sympathizers in Indonesia followed them too, as the U.S. made anti-communism into a bloody, international movement. Bevins’ look at the meetings, the mutual aid and the exchanging of ‘best practices’ between anti-communist groups on different continents is one of the book’s many high points.

Bevins was a journalist for a well-known, corporate newspaper in the United States that leans liberal. He writes with genuine sympathy for the Indonesian communists and their political objectives, along with other left-wing movements. He’s very clearly not a Marxist himself, and his broad overview of the Cold War period includes a couple of very tired – but also very typical – distortions of history, particularly when it comes to the Soviet Union and China. But two things impressed me about Bevins’ take:

First, the book explicitly refuses to make the bogus ‘both-sides-are-equally-bad’ argument about the Cold War. Drawing truth from facts, Jakarta Method makes clear the one-sided nature of the genocide in Indonesia – the idea that the PKI was armed and ready to overthrow the state is, in fact, the very lie that Suharto’s military coup told to justify the slaughter – as did countless other countries.

In the last chapter, Bevins anticipates liberal and anti-communist objections that his book more or less glosses over the alleged crimes of socialist countries. He gives one of the best answers I’ve ever heard on this point: We’re not living in a world today shaped primarily by the purges in the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall. We live in a world shaped by U.S. imperialism, which became the world’s dominant superpower at the end of the Cold War. Bevins is right when he says that capitalism’s victory in the Cold War – and the liberal world order we’ve lived under since – was built on the mass graves of tens of millions of people in countries like Indonesia. Genocide, not ideas like freedom or democracy, won the Cold War for the U.S.

Second, Bevins’ evaluation of the successes and errors of the PKI more or less fall in line with the party’s own summation. It’s not terribly surprising, given the depth of research that Bevins put into this book. He interviewed plenty of former PKI members, among others. But while Jakarta Method is principally a book about the anti-communist offensive during the Cold War, Bevins writes with an eye towards strategy in the present.

Frankly, a lot of socialists and revolutionaries around the world would do well to familiarize themselves with this period of Indonesian history. Some parallels jump off the page into the present world, like the obviously made-up, ludicrous claims by Suharto’s military that feminist ‘witches’ were planning to castrate men and sacrifice their children to Satan. It probably sounds a lot like the bullshit ‘fake news’ that unhinged right-wingers, from tin-foil-hat conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to President Donald Trump, peddle about ‘Antifa.’ And yet in 2020, it’s becoming easier to see how fantasyland trash like that gets turned into justifications for very real violence against activists, organizers and supporters.

The PKI self-criticized for losing view of the question of state power. It’s not some neutral battleground to duke it out with the capitalist class. It’s a weapon that one class uses to dominate the others. In the final analysis, the state is an instrument of armed, organized violence – either your class has it, or they don’t. Even as they grew and did better in elections, their mistaken view of the state – and their role within it – led them to downplay the dangers up ahead, focusing on legal organizing rather than organizing armed self-defense. No one in Indonesia deserved the ghoulish hell they experienced at the hands of Suharto’s regime, but without arms and independent class organization, how could they have stopped it from happening?

That’s something socialists and election-focused social-democrats have to reckon with. Other communist parties at the time certainly did. Bevins interviewed Jose Maria Sison, the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and includes his thoughts at length. Sison and other Filipino revolutionaries carefully studied the lessons of Indonesia, rightly concluding that disarming and disbanding the CPP’s New People’s Army would be a serious mistake. To paraphrase, if legal channels for class struggle open up, by all means, organize and make use of them too, but the armed struggle for state power remains primary.

The Jakarta Method is bone-chilling reading, but I couldn’t put it down. Coming in a little under 300 pages (minus footnotes), it’s thorough but not overwhelming. Bevins follows a few of his interviewees through the decades as events unfold. It has a quasi-narrative feel at times, which may help readers who have trouble with more big-picture histories get hooked easier. Thankfully, the writing avoids the exploitative – and often racist – clichés that pepper a lot of Western non-fiction. The author has also done several terrific interviews on left-wing podcasts like Chapo Trap House and Radio War Nerd, which some readers might find helpful before starting the book.

Scoop it up and give it a read.

#UnitedStates #International #AntiwarMovement #InJusticeSystem #OppressedNationalities #Asia #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #anticommunism #PoliticalRepression #Socialism #Antifascism #TheJakartaMethod #Indonesia

Chicago, IL – I have lived into my sixties without giving really serious thought to 19th century English literature. My Catholic school teachers like Sister Irene and Sister Bridget continuously tried, but 45 years ago I was living the life of Eric Forman from That 70s Show. Younger and hipper lay teachers successfully introduced me to African American authors like Claude Brown, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. As a result, at the time I consumed Charles Dickens’ literature largely through a series of second-rate movies, cartoons and uneven theatrical performances that typically undermined the author’s work.

Over the years, I have found that liberals and many progressives like Dickens. He highlights class distinction while exposing the evil of poverty in his time. And there is no question that Dickens can tell a story.

I work closely with English teachers every day as an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, and many are moved by Dickens. I wanted to have a deeper understanding of why. So now as an aging trade unionist working from home during this pandemic, I finally sat down and read A Tale of Two Cities.

A Tale of Two Cities takes place at the time of the French Revolution (1792-94) in the cities of London and Paris. It is a story of love, politics and hope. No – scratch that. Not hope, or at least not much hope. Many of Dickens' characters have to overcome personal struggle. Dr. Manette, a physician, struggles to maintain his sanity after 18 years of imprisonment in the Bastille. Charles Darney has to decide whether to leave his family and risk his life to free a functionary jailed over a misunderstanding. Sydney Carton, a brilliant English barrister with a serious drinking problem, sacrifices all for love.

The list goes on. Notably, Dickens presents the desperate plight of the working class and peasantry. The acts of the aristocracy are limited only by their own personal morality, which is often lacking. The despicable acts of the aristocratic Marquis St. Evremonde are counterposed to the higher morality of his heir and “our hero,” Charles Darney. Similarly, the self-absorbed acts of the attorney Mr. Stryver are counterposed to the highly “moral” acts of a mid-level bank employee Jarvis Lorry.

What’s surprising is that the working-class characters have little agency. They tend to be ignorant, sometimes shiftless and blindly loyal, as in the case of the English bank messenger Jerry Crutcher or the French mender of roads. It Is the petty-bourgeoisie and the professionals who have agency. They lead the blind and sometimes mob-like working class throughout the story.

Moreover, Dickens' treatment of women is a disappointment. The first problem is that there are so few women in the story. He magnifies his crime by making the women characters that are present rather shallow. Miss Prosser is a servant who refuses to learn any French while living in Paris as her way to remain loyal to the English king. The “villainous” Madame Defarge, while a strong revolutionary is depicted by Dickens as a sociopath. And finally, Lucie Manette represents a loving, kind and airheaded virtue that cannot be contaminated with worldly affairs.

In the end, even with the hindsight of more than 60 years, Dickens is at best neutral in his view of the French Revolution. The real argument presented is that while the aristocracy is bad, the revolutionaries are probably worse. The working class and peasants are ignorant, so we need professionals of “moral character,” such as Dr. Manette, Charles Darney and Sydney Carton to deliver them.

Dickens portrays the French revolutionaries as primarily blood thirsty. They are represented by the petty bourgeois Madame Defarge and her husband. The revolutionaries are bent on wiping out an entire class and thus their class rule. For Dickens, this is probably worse than the hedonistic indifference of the aristocracy.

So, how are we to sum up this Dickens 19th century novel? An enticing story of love, drama, struggle, reawakening and ‘morality?’ Yes. Still, it is disappointing that such a classic novel takes the wrong side in the struggle between feudalism and capitalism.

The French revolution was at a time when feudalism had run its course. Under this system the function of peasants and workers was to serve the aristocracy. The revolutionaries in France fought a righteous fight to eliminate this feudal oppression. They succeeded. Capitalism, still in its infancy, represented a step forward. Just as today socialism represents a step forward. But now, it is time for capitalism, like COVID-19, to be extinguished.

#ChicagoIL #Labor #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #TeachersUnions #CharlesDickens #ATaleOfTwoCities

Why review a book that the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin began in 1901 and finished in 1902? The short answer is the book is just that good and it has endured the test of time, and the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth is a good occasion for it.

A more complete answer is as follows – we are in a period where monopoly capitalism has shown itself to be a failed system. Not only has it failed to deal with the challenges of a pandemic, capitalism is a people-destroying economic system that is making the pandemic worse. Add on the facts that we are in the onset of a large-scale economic crisis and millions of people, including a section of the working class are turning towards socialism. So, a book that laid the ideological basis for the political party that organized and led the first successful socialist revolution is timely to say the least. It helps us figure out what we need to do in the U.S. today.

Some might object by saying what relevance could a polemic have – whose target audience was an illegal, underground movement that did battle with Russia’s Czar, capitalists and landlords a century or more ago? The answer to that question can be found in looking at the overall lessons and conclusions Lenin makes in his trailblazing work. So, here’s some of the main points Lenin addresses.

Lenin starts out What is to be Done? by talking about the importance of the theoretical struggle, of the need for debate and clarity around fundamental questions of political and ideological line. Some people don’t like this and see it as disunity or ‘left infighting’ that needs to be overcome. Veterans of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), and other Marxist-Leninist organizations know better from our own experience.

In the case of FRSO, we had a struggle with right opportunists in our ranks 20 years ago. We faced a group of petty bourgeoisie radicals who claimed to be Marxists but rejected Marxism-Leninism, the need for a working class revolution, and the socialist countries. We debated with them until it became clear we did not really agree on anything, and they split from our organization. That struggle for Marxist clarity and the break with opportunism allowed us to build a U.S.-wide Marxist-Leninist organization that is multinational and growing rapidly.

In What is to be Done? Lenin uses a wonderful literary construction – “the marsh.” Lenin stated, “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there.”

To put this another way, Lenin was saying let’s not head into the swamp of right opportunism and do battle with all who say we should, concluding, “Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are ‘free’ to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”

Theory matters. For example, let’s take the issue of fighting for reforms. We fight for reforms because it creates a favorable context for people to learn about society, what laws govern its development and what kind of change is needed. Reforms can improve people’s lives, but are limited. We live in the heart of a declining imperialist power where our way of life, our very mode of existence is going to get worse.

But one thing for sure is that we cannot reform our way to socialism, where the working class is in charge. For that you need a revolution – not a Bernie Sanders ‘political revolution', but a real one, where one class takes away the power of another. Examples include the French Revolution, where the aristocrats met the guillotine or more recently, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions.

Revolution will be a practical question in the U.S. to be sure, but it also deals with questions of theory, such as what the nature of the capitalist state is. The capitalist state cannot be reformed into a socialist one; Lenin’s prescription is that it needs to be “smashed to atoms.” How one answers basic issues of theory like these are critical to what kind of organization we should build and what strategy we should employ.

In What is to be Done? Lenin does battle with a confused political tendency in the Russian socialist movement known as the Economists. As it was not a label they picked for themselves and the issue of ‘Economism’ still peppers debates around socialist strategy, it is helpful to be clear about who Lenin was talking about. He wasn’t talking about workers fighting for economic gains or a general trade union problem. He was talking about a trend, a group of people in the socialist movement made up of some workers and quite a few intellectuals. The Economists viewed themselves as socialists, but in practice they were not.

Trade unions are great, and we need more of them. The problem with the Economists was they made trade unionism – which is in essence getting a better deal for workers under capitalism – their everything. To them, politics was not overthrowing the Czar and his ruling-class backers, nor revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or socialism. Instead it was legal rights for unions or protective measures for labor. As a result, they saw no real need for a tight, centralized revolutionary political party, and they advocated for a form of political organization that was a hodgepodge mix of labor union and socialist organization that in fact was not socialist at all.

That a trend like this could get any traction might seem odd at first but it wasn't that strange at all. At the time, all forms of trade union activity could land you in jail, as could passing out a leaflet, or organizing study groups. So, all these activities were underground, and, when you combine inexperience with ‘socialists’ who made a fetish of their ignorance of what actual tasks of socialists are, you get forms of organization that are not good for trade unions and are not revolutionary either.

When the Economists thought about the international socialist movement, they tended to identify with the most conservative, non-revolutionary sections of it that said the “movement as everything, and the goal as nothing.”

In What is to be Done? Lenin points out that at the root the Economists’ right-opportunism was their worship of the spontaneous movement and the belittling the role of socialist consciousness. And Lenin forcefully made the point that a socialist understanding of the world, or Marxism, arose outside the working class and had to be taken to its proletarian home.

Here is how Lenin put it in What is to be Done?: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.”

Marxism is a science, a science of revolution that built itself on most advanced currents of thinking at the time it arose. Science is not something that spontaneously pops into people’s heads. It never has been and never will. We all live in the physical world; to understand it we need to study some physics. Likewise, if we want to change the society, we need to study some Marxism. Scientific socialism uncovered the principles by which human society developed and the inevitability of a society without classes: communism. It is a road map forward for the struggle of our class.

What is to be Done? Is a book that is filled with important insights about a range of topics including how to fight the forces of repression, and methods of work to raise the level of understanding of working people. But if you want to do a thumbnail sketch of what the book is all about here it is. Socialist theory, or scientific socialism, arose independently of the workers’ movement, the task is to fuse the two, to unite them, to bring them together. And this union of Marxism and the working-class movement shows itself organizationally in the creation of revolutionary socialist, or what we would now call a communist, organization. Lenin then lays out a plan to build that organization, the party that came to be known as Bolsheviks, who decisively shaped the course of world history.

For revolutionaries in the U.S., What is to be Done? is super relevant because we still have the task of fusing Marxism-Leninism and the workers’ movement. We are trying hard to build a new communist party that can lead a successful fight for socialism. This means helping the advanced of our class, the activists and leaders, take up Marxism-Leninism.

FRSO is working to do that day in and day out by carrying out three tasks. First, we are building the day-to-day struggle of the masses of people, be it on the job or in the communities. Second, we are trying to raise the general level of political understanding and organization. And finally, just like Lenin was talking about in What is to be Done? we are trying to build a serious organization of working and oppressed people that has the capacity to contend for power.

Given that many people are considering alternatives to the existing order of things and exploring the implications of what it means to be a socialist who really wants change, let’s talk (or better, let’s work) together to put our ideas into practice.

When Lenin wrote What is to be Done? the Economists could see nothing more than a growing trade union movement. Three years later, in 1905, workers were fighting in the streets to bring down the Czar. In less than a score of years proletarian political power would be established in what was the Russian empire. Lenin was right about what our class can do.

One thing about monopoly capitalism is that it is good at producing oppression and better at producing enemies. So, here is what needs to be done. We need to build a new communist party to get rid of this monster. We need to unite all who can be united to do so. The U.S. holds African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native peoples in the chains of inequality, so at the core of this united front against monopoly capitalism, we need a strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities.

Is all this easier said than done? For sure. But reading a book like What is to be Done? and putting Marxism-Leninism into practice makes it all possible.

Mick Kelly is an editor of Fight Back! and a leading member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).

#MinneapolisMN #Imperialism #Socialism #BookReviews #frso #Lenin #WhatIsToBeDone

Chicago, IL – Frank Chapman’s new book, The Damned Don’t Cry: Pages from the Life of a Black Prisoner and Organizer, is getting a great reception. About 30 people attended a book signing at the office of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, July 2. Chapman’s autobiography is available here.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #AfricanAmerican #FrankChapman

Chicago, IL – I’ve been waiting for this book. I first read an earlier draft of Frank Chapman’s memoirs in 2014. I thought then and now that this needed to get published, first and foremost, because the revolutionary movement needs it. As a result of the prison abolition movement, there is a broad awareness of the injustice of mass incarceration, but this book sees the revolutionary side of the misery.

There’s a specific section of society which needs this book: those in prison. Chapman relates how becoming a communist led him not into his frustration, but out of it. The book belongs in the genre with the Autobiography of Malcolm X and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother as a work that needs to get inside the prisons, because the meat of Chapman’s book is his politicization while in prison from 1961 to 1975.

Reading the book, I thought of the poem by Ho Chi Minh made famous in the U.S. when George Jackson said, “The dragon is coming” in his last dying words, after being gunned down by a prison guard. Ho’s poem reads:

Prisoners loosed from prison can build their country

From great misfortune arises true fidelity

The most troubled souls are the most virtuous

When the prison doors open, the real dragons emerge.

Frank Chapman is one of those dragons.

Imprisonment as a young man

The first chapters walk through the experience of the community and culture of Black, working-class Saint Louis in the 1940s and 50s. Born in 1942, the oldest child of 12, the indomitable spirit of his mother and the bebop musical genius of his father are the juice that formed his personality. He describes the life of hustle he developed to deal with the poverty that resulted from his father’s drug addiction and imprisonment. His engaging writing style draws you in, so that his tale of surviving the penal and mental health system, his own addictions and criminality doesn’t read like a tragedy.

In 1961, Chapman was involved in a robbery in which a man died. He had been hospitalized several years earlier for addition to drugs and alcohol and had escaped from the treatment center. Had he been white, the court would have taken that into account. Instead, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life plus 50 years in prison. There was never a presumption of innocence. As he put it, for him and the other Black prisoners awaiting trial, “Your very life is in the balance and like it or not we were all being legally hung, it was just a question of whether they were going to hang us high or low.”

Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, noted that time in prison is not lost because you have time to study and to write. Although not sent to prison for political activity, shortly after arriving at the Missouri maximum security penitentiary in Jefferson City, at the end of 1961, Chapman desired to read law in order to get out of the hell he found himself in. He spent over a year getting the administration to allow him to go to school full time. Then, in less than another year, he had his GED. He began to read voraciously, and soon became one of the jailhouse lawyers.

He also inhaled science, soon deciding he was an atheist, seeing “… human beings as a force of nature governed by the same physical and chemical laws that govern the sun, moon and stars.” A white, working class communist – in prison for blowing something up during a Teamsters strike – gave him his first Marxist literature, a book called A Marxist Handbook. This was an introduction to the philosophical, political and economic writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

He said reading the Communist Manifesto played the critical role. “I was no longer helpless, now I could consciously be part of a revolutionary movement designed to empower the wretched of the earth.”

Soon he was organizing a Marxist-Leninist study group. Not just a debating society, what they called the “Collective” “took on certain practical tasks such as fighting to desegregate the prison facilities, to unite Black and white prisoners around issues of common concern, to get Marxist literature in the prison through legitimate channels and start PE (political education) classes among the prisoners, to fight for higher education programs for prisoners and establish strong links to the progressive movements on the outside.”

Segregation in prison

The system of racist national oppression followed Chapman into Jefferson City. In the Black halls, there were four to six men in cells, but white men were in cells of one or two. Black prisoners had the worst jobs, and the terrible conditions in the segregated areas led to more Blacks dying.

Chapman didn’t just help inmates file lawsuits for their own cases. He learned the relationship between civil rights, civil liberties and criminal justice. In his first initiative, Frank drafted a complaint based on the First Amendment right to pursue knowledge and an education; to express your beliefs in writing without fear of reprisal; but also the issue of racial discrimination and segregated facilities. Soon after filing it, the U.S. district court issued an order to the warden to respond.

This was met with stiff resistance by the warden. In the ensuing years, the warden unleashed violence to punish the Black prisoners, to get the racist white prisoners to attack them, and the Blacks and racist whites to fight each other. A number of Black prisoners and some whites died in the violence stoked by the warden. The drama unfolded until there was an uprising in the prison, which was put down with beatings, mace and the threat of the National Guard. The prisoners were able to emerge with a victory in part because the whites joined together with the Blacks against the warden. In later years, the warden unleashed another assault by guards on Chapman, breaking three ribs and other bones. Today, he suffers from arthritis as a result of that beating.

Chapman proved it was possible to win victories even inside that prison: the actions taken led to the end of segregation and over-crowdedness; the winning of First Amendment rights to read literature on national liberation and socialism; and the right to pursue college education.

The impact of the Black Liberation Movement

Through Freedomways magazine, started by leading Black Communist Party (CP) members Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O’Dell and others, Chapman established movement contacts in the outside world. Over the years in prison, Freedomways and the Daily World, the CPUSA’s paper, published a number of his writings. Herschel Walker, the Black CP district organizer in Saint Louis, was the living link to the movement in Missouri, and started a defense committee to free Chapman.

Chapman is very clear that it was the massive movement to free Angela Davis which paved the way to freedom for him and other political prisoners. From the CP, he learned about Davis leading the founding of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The National Alliance said Chapman was a political prisoner because he had started advocating for civil rights while in prison. Clearly, he suffered attacks by the prison for his efforts.

The National Alliance took up his case, and after they had helped free him, he became the leader of the Saint Louis chapter, building it up through community and labor struggles to becoming one of the largest chapters in the country. Eventually he became the executive director and moved to New York City. Years later, the CP leadership had the Alliance dissolved as a national group, but several chapters – including Louisville, Kentucky as well as Chicago – refused. When Frank moved to Chicago in 2011, he found the organization here still continuing under the leadership of Josephine Wyatt, Clarice Durham and Ted Pearson. He joined in with them, and today has helped rebuilt the movement here and nationally. As a result, this fall the National Alliance will be re-founded in Chicago.

The Black liberation movement and the socialist movement freed Frank Chapman, and in turn he has made a lifelong commitment to those intertwined struggles. After leaving the CP ten years ago, Chapman has joined a newer Marxist-Leninist group, Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He has joined our central committee and is helping to guide and train a new generation of Black communists.

Working with Frank over the past five years, I have seen something that highlights the importance of this book. In his role leading the struggle for community control of the Chicago police, Frank instantly commands the respect and trust of those in and around the movement who have been wrongfully convicted or who have wrongfully convicted family members in prison. When he points the way forward, they believe in him. This book will only cement further the status he has in their struggle.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #BookReviews #AfricanAmerican #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #FrankChapman

Fight Back! interviewed Aaron Leonard, who, along with Conor Gallagher, wrote two pathbreaking books that largely deal with the government repression employed against one of the largest groups of the new communist movement, the Revolutionary Union (RU).

During the late 1960s and 1970s, many young people became revolutionaries. Inspired by the revolutionary process in China, they worked to apply Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought to the conditions in U.S. The RU was one of most successful of those groups.

Fight Back!: You have coauthored two books, A Threat of the First Magnitude, FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974, and Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, the Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980, that deal largely with repression directed against the Revolutionary Union (RU). What was it about this organization that made it a high priority target for the government?

Aaron Leonard: The Revolutionary Union, begun in 1968, quickly became the largest Maoist organization in the U.S. While its founders included a core of people who had come through the Communist Party and the Progressive Labor Party – Leibel Bergman being the most prominent – it was able to attract a significant number of radical youth, especially students. Unlike the Black Panther Party, to say nothing of the Weatherman, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, which by 1970-1971 were rapidly contracting, the RU was expanding. It was able to gather together radical collectives throughout the US – including elements of SDS – into a single cohesive national organization.

The group also, for a time, held what has been called the “China franchise” – the support of the Chinese Communist Party – because of its adherence to Maoism. This in turn put them firmly on the FBI’s radar. China, the largest communist country in the world, was a major geopolitical adversary of U.S. As a result, the Bureau saw the RU/RCP as a threat to U.S. internal security of the “first magnitude” – their actual words – and acted accordingly.

Fight Back!: In researching your books, you make extensive use of FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Based on this, how extensive was the surveillance of the RU?

Leonard: There was an enormous amount of attention paid to the RU. As it was moving beyond its base in the Bay Area the FBI sent memos to its field offices throughout the country to audit whether the RU was active or was trying to get a foothold so they could implement counterintelligence measures. As we document in the books, they were able to place an informant on the leading body of the RU’s Bay Area organization by the group’s third meeting. They followed this up by inserting informants into the mid-level leadership of the San Jose branch of the RU and eventually got another informant onto the group’s central committee and then its secretariat, the group’s day-to-day leading core. We spend a good deal of time in the second book making the case that that person was Don Wright, an African American, ex-military informant who used the cover of having been in the FBI’s fictitious Maoist sect, the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist Leninist Party, as his bona fides of being a revolutionary communist.

Fight Back!: Are you still uncovering more information about the government’s war on the RU?

Leonard: We are awaiting certain key files, especially the records on Leibel Bergman – who likely had the largest FBI file of anyone in the New Communist Movement. We are also awaiting Darrell Grover’s file, who we argue was the earliest informant in the RU. There are also 15,000 plus pages of the FBI’s Ad Hoc Committee stored in the National Archives that will be released in small increments over the coming years. It is my sense that within these are a good many secrets, which may upend our understanding not just of the RU, but quite a few other groups that were active in that period.

Fight Back!: Are you planning to write more on this?

Leonard: At this point I am done writing about the RU exclusively – and you can already see a shift in focus with the second book. Saying that, if we discover important information we will find the ways to share what we learn.

Fight Back!: How has the reception been to your latest book?

Leonard: For those who are aware of it and have read it the reception has been quite positive. We have had some very thoughtful reviews, including from your publication, and people seem generally appreciative of what we have to offer, including accepting the hard truths of informants operating in high places. However, it is my sense that both books have not been seen by enough of the people who could really benefit from them. And here I have in mind those who are in one way or another fighting for a better world. While I’m no longer a partisan of any group or even much of a political activist, I do not want folks who are to be victimized by the same antagonistic forces and mistakes that have been made in the past. In that respect I hope more people will become aware of our work.

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #FBI #PoliticalRepression #Socialism #RevolutionaryUnion #RevolutionaryCommunistParty #AaronLeonard

Richard Aoki. Morris Childs. D.H. (Don) Wright. Darrell Grover. Betty and Larry Goff. The “Ad-Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party.” Carl Freyman. Herbert K. Stallings. John McCaffrey.

Who are they and what do they have in common?

They are the subjects of an important new book, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974 by Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher.

They were also all FBI handlers or their informants who infiltrated the Revolutionary Union (RU), the Communist Party (CPUSA), and other groups in the U.S. communist movement.

Most people – even left-wing activists – don’t know most of these names. With A Threat of the First Magnitude, Leonard and Gallagher have done an important service in teaching us about who these people are and the methods the FBI used to infiltrate the Revolutionary Union – the largest Marxist-Leninist organization to emerge from the radical movements of the 1960s – as well as other revolutionary organizations of that period and the CPUSA before them.

It is incumbent on serious leftist activists to understand as much as possible about how the government has attacked political movements in the past, because there is no reason to believe those efforts have stopped. On the contrary, in today’s post-911 national security environment and social media-saturated world it seems logical to assume that government surveillance and operations against dissenting individuals and organizations are probably greater than ever.

In fact we don’t just have to guess about that; there is plenty of recent experience with informants in left-wing movements. One of the most important recent experiences on the left is an infiltrator who went by the name of “Karen Sullivan” who joined the Anti-War Committee and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in Minnesota to spy on them as they helped organize protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC). After the RNC protests were over, “Sullivan” then stayed on for a couple more years to continue spying, lying, and secretly trying to build a case against the groups. This led directly to coordinated FBI raids on several activists’ homes in Chicago and Minneapolis on September 24, 2010, as well as 23 activists receiving grand jury subpoenas in a witch hunt against international solidarity activists. So we know the FBI still uses informants to infiltrate and attempt to repress leftist movements and organizations. This is not just an obscure curiosity only of interest to ivory tower historians.

Drawing largely on internal FBI documents – many heavily redacted – that book’s authors have struggled to get access to via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the book does a thorough examination of several FBI informants in the communist movement. And importantly for a deeper understanding of what was really going on, the book also goes into some detail about the informants’ FBI handlers, particularly focusing in on the FBI Chicago field office and in particular on the role of FBI agents Carl Freyman and Herbert K. Stallings.

It would seem that the Chicago FBI office was the most successful in its development of informants who rose to the top leadership levels of the Communist Party and the Revolutionary Union, and in even creating an entire fabricated shadowy factional organization working inside the Communist Party – the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party. But Chicago was by no means the only FBI office handling informants in the RU and other groups; the book makes clear that the FBI attempted to place informants in the Revolutionary Union throughout the country. The Chicago office did, though, handle prized informants in the CPUSA and RU. It is notable that the FBI’s top informant in the RU, Don Wright, advocated moving the group’s headquarters from the Bay Area to Chicago – which the group in fact did – conveniently moving them to the home turf of the most sophisticated FBI office in infiltrating the communist movement.

The spotlight that A Threat of the First Magnitude shines on the key role of informants in U.S. government repression against the left is important. The book demonstrates the crucial role that informants have played for the FBI in gathering information that would be hard for them to acquire by other methods due to the precautions that Marxist-Leninist organizations usually take precisely to prevent the kinds of disruption the FBI was intent on carrying out.

Informants working inside an organization not only give the government entities access to internal matters of an organization that aren’t visible to the public, but they also give them the opportunity to spread lies and confusion, cast aspersions on legitimate members, cause and exacerbate tensions and conflicts, and even to encourage people to engage in foolish activities. The information that infiltrators gather directly aids the state in carrying out more severe repression when they decide to drop the hammer.

The book makes the case that the FBI saw their informants in communist organizations as their most sensitive and important operations, so they fiercely guarded the identities of their infiltrators and the operations they were part of. Some informants in the RU went public and testified against the group, such as Betty and Larry Goff, who testified to a congressional committee about the RU in 1971.

But for the most part the FBI seems to have managed to conceal the identity of their key informants and operations, even from the watershed Church Committee hearings on government intelligence overreach in 1975. So today, more than 50 years after many of the events covered in this book took place, relatively little is still known about the FBI informants and the operations they carried out. In fact, many leftists and historians still haven’t concluded that all of the people talked about in A Threat of the First Magnitude even were in fact FBI informants. The book intends to make the case that they were, based on a close study of internal documents they’ve been able to pry out of the FBI, while exploring the damage these particular informants did.

A sequel that packs a punch A Threat of the First Magnitude is a sequel to the authors’ 2015 book, Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, the Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980. That book attempted to fill a hole in the histories that have been published thus far about the New Communist Movement in the 1970s, most of which understate the importance of the RU and also understate the role of state repression against the group and the broader movement they were part of.

In their research for Heavy Radicals, the authors requested many FBI files via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But the FBI is notoriously stingy with what it releases, and they often release documents at a glacial pace and usually only after much back and forth. When the FBI finally does release documents, they are often heavily redacted.

Heavy Radicals included information gleaned from some of the first FBI documents Leonard and Gallagher received. But after the book was published, they continued to receive more FBI files that shed light not only on the RU and the groups they interacted with, but groups that preceded them as well. Drawing on those documents, A Threat of First Magnitude goes deeper on the FBI’s operations against the CPUSA and Progressive Labor Party (which preceded the RU), and the direct links between those operations that morphed into operations against the RU as they emerged and grew.

The Ad-Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party or the FBI’s committee to promote division in the communist movement?

A major contribution of the book is its examination of the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party. This was a secret grouping within the CPUSA that ostensibly argued for the pro-Soviet CPUSA to instead adopt a pro-China, anti-revisionist line in the context of the Sino-Soviet split. The Ad-Hoc Committee’s only public presence was the appearance of a newsletter from time to time, which the FBI made a point of surreptitiously mailing to CPUSA leaders around the country to maximize suspicion and confusion. According to documents cited in the book, mail sent to the PO Box listed on the Ad-Hoc Committee’s newsletter ended up in the hands of the FBI, who then contemplated opening up investigations against the people who wrote to the group.

Leonard and Gallagher uncover enough evidence to conclude that that the Ad Hoc Committee was an FBI creation in its entirety. While they may have recruited some sincere communists along the way, the group was controlled by the FBI, which used it for its own disruptive purposes. This is something that more than a few people have suspected or thought might be the case. But A Threat of the First Magnitude has assembled enough evidence to make the case convincingly.

FBI memos cited in the book discuss ways the Ad-Hoc Committee should respond to world events. The FBI responds happily to reports of the CPUSA expelling members they thought might have been involved in the Ad-Hoc Committee. The FBI also used the Ad-Hoc Committee as a cover to spin people off to infiltrate other groups, who would then use the Ad-Hoc Committee to establish a credible reference of a revolutionary group they were involved in before. This is exactly what Don Wright did when he joined the RU, for example, to build credibility with RU leader Leibel Bergman, a former long-time CPUSA member. This is one of the several links the book explores that directly connect FBI repression against the CPUSA to later efforts against the RU.

Morris Childs: FBI informant on a first-name basis with Soviet leaders

While FBI repression against the Black liberation movement and American Indian movement of the 1960s and 70s is fairly well known on the left, the much longer-running and larger-scale FBI operations against the CPUSA over the course of several decades during the 20th century is probably less understood among activists today. A Threat of the First Magnitude explores one of the most important of those FBI operations against the CPUSA, which had an informant at its heart – Morris Childs.

A CPUSA member since the 1920s, by the mid-1930s Childs was a member of the Party’s highest body, its Central Committee. In the 1940s in the aftermath of his mentor Earl Browder being expelled from the CPUSA for liquidating the party organizationally and politically, and while Childs was dealing with serious health problems, the FBI approached him and he agreed to become an informant against the CPUSA in exchange for the FBI paying for top-notch medical care for his health problems. For years he passed along information on the party to the FBI.

Even more damaging, while an informant, Childs had international responsibilities. In this capacity he was on a first-name basis with – and passed on intelligence about – top leaders of the Soviet Union including Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and other central figures. So as the split between the Soviet Union and China was unfolding, the FBI had an inside guy in the CPUSA with access to top Soviet leaders. He had access to information and documents that were very difficult to get, not to mention invaluable intelligence on how the top leaders of the USSR were thinking and acting. This information was so valuable that they mostly stopped having Childs do other informant work, just focusing on this international goldmine he was handing them.

Darrell Grover: Encouraging the RU to attack PL A Threat of the First Magnitude pieces together various FBI reports to conclude that the RU was infiltrated from the very beginning, even before it went public as an organization. The book concludes that one early FBI informant in the RU was Darrell Grover. Grover was in charge of political education in his city, and by 1969 was the RU’s treasurer and on its executive committee. He appears to have played an important role in the RU’s early decision about whether to publicly criticize the Progressive Labor Party (PL). PL was the first pro-China Marxist-Leninist group in the U.S. which had been formed by former CPUSA members who left over the CPUSA’s growing reformism. While initially promising, by 1969 PL was becoming more critical of revolutionary China, of the Vietnamese liberation movement and of the Black liberation movement in the U.S. This alienated them from many young revolutionaries at the time.

In the RU’s internal debate about whether to go on the attack against PL for these erroneous positions or not, FBI informant Darrell Grover apparently personally convinced some of the most important skeptical leaders in the RU that they should publicly attack PL. And so it was; the RU’s first publication, Red Papers 1, includes a lengthy polemic against PL. Politically, the substance of the RU’s critique of PL is on point and provided much-needed clarity in the movement about what was wrong with PL’s politics and why young revolutionaries needed to build something new. Even so, the FBI was nonetheless pleased with the public display of disunity among Marxist-Leninist forces and quickly jumped into action, making sure to send the publication to all addresses they had for PL to maximize the impact.

Torpedoing steps toward unity: Taking down the National Liaison Committee

The information that Leonard and Gallagher compile compels a reexamination of some other key moments in U.S. left history in the 1960s and 70s as well, to incorporate a deeper understanding of how the FBI, principally via its informants infiltrated in communist groups, intentionally and strategically derailed left movements at critical junctures. A key example is the book's treatment of the National Liaison Committee (NLC).

The NLC was an ambitious but failed effort in 1973 to form a new, multinational revolutionary communist party out of the upsurge of the 1960s by uniting the Revolutionary Union with several new communist organizations rooted in oppressed nationality communities: the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), the Black Workers Congress (BWC), and I Wor Kuen (IWK). The failure of this unity effort mirrors many failed attempts at multiracial/multinational unity on the left throughout U.S. history, so in one sense its failure could be seen as yet one more example of the ongoing political difficulty of building multiracial/multinational unity on the left in the context of a society rooted in national oppression and wracked with white chauvinism.

Such failures have often been chalked up to shortsightedness or ego or personality quirks on the part of specific leaders, or chalked up to white chauvinism or otherwise bad political lines that made unity difficult. Those are important factors in analyzing the failure of the National Liaison Committee to unite several formidable organizations to form a new united party out of the upsurge of the 1960s and early 70s.

But A Threat of the First Magnitude makes a strong case that the intentional effort of a well-placed FBI informant to wreck things played a larger role than people realized at the time in derailing unity between these organizations. Specifically, the book establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Don Wright was an FBI informant while he served as one of the four members of the RU’s top leadership body and as the RU’s representative on the National Liaison Committee that was supposed to be working to unite the RU with these other organizations to form a party.

It’s hard to see it as just a coincidence that in a process intended to build unity, Wright did the opposite: his actions created extreme confusion, disruption and disunity – not only within the RU and between the RU and the other organizations, but also even reaching inside the other organizations to stir up those groups’ internal conflicts. The book explores Wright’s role and the FBI’s role generally in exacerbating conflicts within the PRRWO, whose leader Wright actually got married to during this process (!), as that group shrunk and internal conflicts in the PRRWO turned increasingly sharp and even violent. The book also explores the conflicts that developed within the Black Workers Congress and the intense FBI campaign against BWC leader James Foreman, who ended up being expelled from the BWC in 1973 in the midst of the National Liaison Committee process.

On that note, A Threat of the First Magnitude examines the FBI’s ongoing intensive efforts to discredit and neutralize important legitimate leaders like the BWC’s Foreman and RU’s Leibel Bergman, both of whom have incredibly large FBI files which mostly have still not been released. While both of them were aware of the FBI’s campaign against them, they almost certainly weren’t aware of the scope, and particularly could not have been aware of the depth of infiltration by FBI informants in their projects and the damage those informants helped cause.

Richard Aoki – Samurai among Panthers, or FBI informant among revolutionaries? A Threat of the First Magnitude has a very interesting chapter on Richard Aoki. While Richard Aoki was not part of the RU or CPUSA, he was a key figure on the left in the Bay Area at the time when the RU emerged there, and he interacted with them. As it turns out, many released FBI documents now show that he informed on them as well as many other left organizations in his reports to the FBI over decades.

Aoki, who committed suicide in 2009, was best known for being a Japanese-American who was a ‘secret member’ of the Black Panther Party who helped them get their first guns. He was also a top leader in the student strikes at UC-Berkeley to establish ethnic studies programs there. Before his involvement with the BPP, Aoki had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and after his time with the Black Panthers he related to many different groups. Aoki, when he died, was generally held in high esteem on the left.

But soon after, the Richard Aoki that leftists thought they knew began to unravel. At first a few FBI documents that were released seemed to show that Aoki was an FBI informant; many on the left were reluctant to believe it at first. Then more and more FBI documents were released that made that fact harder to deny.

Leonard and Gallagher cite many documents in concluding that Aoki was in fact an FBI informant and that his identity as a revolutionary activist over decades was all a lie. Leonard and Gallagher cite the case of Aoki to make the point that many on the left underestimate the FBI’s technique of using informants against leftist movements.

What is to be done?

In going through the above examples and others, A Threat of the First Magnitude asserts that the left needs to do better at identifying and countering state repression, particularly informants. They assert that while leftists of the 1970s New Communist Movement were generally very aware that the FBI and other government agencies were spying on them, they still generally underestimated how informants intentionally seized on contradictions in the movement to try to prevent the movement from uniting or advancing.

Revolutionaries aim to build parties and mass organizations and movements that can challenge capitalism for power and build a new, socialist society. To do this requires constantly bringing new people into political activity, since it is ultimately the masses of working people in their millions that make history, not small groups. But this necessary openness also gives an opening to the FBI and other government agencies to infiltrate left movements and organizations. This is an unavoidable contradiction.

The way communist movements have tended to deal with that is three-fold. First, while maintaining broad and open mass organizations, Marxist-Leninists build a tighter, ideologically unified organization at the movement’s core that can maintain a solid and coherent political line and can also vet members before joining to keep as many infiltrators and others who may cause problems out of the core of the movement as possible. Second, Marxist-Leninist organizations practice democratic centralism, which means that all members have to carry out the line and activities of the organization and only express disagreements internally. This puts limits on the amount of disunity an infiltrator can cause, since to publicly advocate against the group’s line would be easily identified as a violation of the rules of the organization. And third, understanding the inevitability of government infiltration despite the best countermeasures, compartmentalization of information, only sharing sensitive information on a need-to-know basis, and refusing to engage in idle gossip about organizations, movements and individuals is another line of defense against informants. Such an approach aims to prevent infiltrators from getting information that could harm more than a small area of an organization’s work since an infiltrator would not be able to access information beyond what’s needed for their assigned tasks.

Having said that, both the RU and the CPUSA were democratic centralist, Marxist-Leninist organizations that were still infiltrated up to the highest levels in ways that ultimately caused harm. While it may be impossible for a revolutionary movement to stop government infiltration entirely, it is important for the movement to work to minimize the impact by always keeping politics in command, and by raising the political understanding of those involved about the dangers of informants, some of their frequently used methods, and signs to watch for that something may not be quite right.

Many of the examples cited in the book show that the government aims to create and fan the flames of disagreements on the left. This shows the importance of being very cautious about publicly attacking other individuals and organizations and giving the government an opening to opportunistically latch onto legitimate disagreements and make them more antagonistic. Recent efforts such as the ‘Saint Paul Principles’ developed among various groups protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention are important in upholding the principle of groups mutually agreeing not to criticize each other in public, and instead to work to resolve any differences face-to-face. This can render many FBI tactics unworkable, such as those aimed at stoking conflict through spreading misinformation and public criticism.

While acknowledging the seriousness of the state’s efforts at repression, we need to also remember that the state is not all-powerful. While the FBI heavily infiltrated the CPUSA, that didn’t stop the party from growing to thousands and organizing some of the most consequential struggles of the 20th century. Similarly, with the RU: despite infiltration from the beginning, the RU was still able to cohere a national organization and grow into the largest group of the New Communist Movement that the FBI considered a ‘threat of the first magnitude’. That ultimately didn’t last, but it shows it’s not impossible to defeat the state’s goal of dividing and neutralizing credible left organizations and movements.

A Threat of the First Magnitude begins with a discussion of Roman Malinovsky, an infiltrator who made his way into the top leadership of the Bolsheviks in the years before the 1917 Russian revolution. He did serious damage, including bearing direct responsibility for the jailing of prominent Russian revolutionary leaders. Until opening the state’s archives after the February 1917 revolution, leaders such as Lenin vehemently denied accusations that Malinovsky was an infiltrator. But even with an infiltrator as part of their leadership, the Bolsheviks were still able to lead a revolution, then consolidate power and build socialism for seven decades, defeating the Nazis along the way to turning the most backward part of Europe into one of the most powerful nations on earth.

That example from 100 years ago on the other side of the world shouldn’t serve as an excuse to say the left in the U.S. today doesn’t need to learn more and do more to lessen the effectiveness of state repression. On the contrary; publicly acknowledging and exposing repression rather than hiding in fear or sweeping it under the rug when it happens is the first necessary step to counteracting state efforts that depend on secrecy and depend on isolating and intimidating people to be effective.

A Threat of the First Magnitude is an important book in shining a light on government repression and specifically the role of informants against the left in the 1960s and 70s. Protest movements will inevitably face state repression; it is only through taking that fact seriously, better understanding it and publicly exposing the shadowy, undemocratic methods of state repression that the left has a chance to advance despite those obstacles toward greater victories.

#UnitedStates #BookReviews #FBI #PoliticalRepression #CommunistParty #RevolutionaryUnion #RevolutionaryCommunistParty