Flint Sit-Downers to Join Republic Window Tour in Detroit

From Jobs With Justice:

When a large Chicago industrial company abruptly closed its doors and prepared to move out while leaving its 650 workers without their back pay, severance, or insurance benefits, the workers fought back by occupying the plant. For six days and nights in December, these modern-day sit-down strikers refused to leave until the company, Republic Windows and Doors, and its Bank of America financiers, agreed to pay the workers what was due them.

The sit-downers are now on a “Resistance and Victory” tour, bringing their story to workers across the U.S.  On Monday, February 9, two of the workers, Armando Robles and Raul Flores, will address a public forum in Detroit, where they’ll be joined by Geraldine Blankenship and Olen Hamm, two surviving Flint UAW-GM sit-downers, now in their nineties, who occupied GM plants for more than six weeks in 1937 before winning the first UAW contract with General Motors.

Their visit is sponsored by the Southeast Michigan chapter of Jobs with Justice, a local coalition of 35 labor, faith-based, and community groups; the Metro Detroit AFL-CIO; District 2 of the United Steelworkers, and other community groups.

The rally will start at 6 p.m. at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58 hall, 1358 Abbott, in Detroit. Admission is free. The Industrial Workers of the World’s Wobbly Kitchen will serve dinner, and the Detroit Federation of Musicians will provide entertainment for the rally, including performances by Motown artist and Detroit Councilperson Martha Reeves, jazz artist Bill Meyer, and others.

The Republic workers, who are members of United Electrical Workers Local 1110, will also share their experiences earlier in the day at a meeting with metro Detroit workers who face long-term layoffs and plant closings.  That event will start at 1 p.m. at USW District 2, 13233 Hancock, in Taylor and all concerned workers are invited to attend.

One goal of the workers’ tour is to emphasize the important role of unions in protecting the rights of workers.  Jobs with Justice, which actively supported the Chicago sit-down strike, is now campaigning to win passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in Congress.  Under EFCA, once a majority of workers signs union-representation cards, their employer would be required to recognize and bargain a contract with the workers.  EFCA would replace the current system which allows employers to use frivolous delaying contacts to block union elections for up to five years or more.

“In these harsh economic times, it’s important that workers who fought so hard for their rights, both in 1937 and in 2008, are coming together at this victory rally to inspire the many Michigan workers who today face plant closings or long-term layoffs,” said William Bryce, organizer for Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice.

MEET THE HEROES OF THE REPUBLIC STRUGGLE & MEET THE HEROES OF THE 1937 FLINT SIT-DOWN

EAT GOOD FOOD HEAR GREAT MUSIC

HEAR HOW TO SUPPORT “THE EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT”

WHEN: Monday Feb. 9 at 6:00 p.m.

WHERE: IBEW Local 58, 1358 Abbot (free secure lighted parking)

Further Information: William Bryce, Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice 313.961.0800

In Praise of “Infantile” Rebellions

A friend from back in the day recently sent this photo my way.  Here I am in 1989.  Now 20 years ago.   No, I am not going to tell you which one.  Friends will know and chuckle.   Nor am I going to name anyone else.  Anonymity in cases like these is preferred.  I lost touch with most of this crew a long time ago.  Most have moved on, some have not.  Some are dear friends and lifelong comrades.  Some are dead, some in jail.   Some were the biggest fools I ever knew.  And of course there was always a solid 15-20% full-on psychopath segment in any scene and ours was no different.

One day I am going to write some of our history in all this through Anti-Racist Action in the 1990’s.  The ISO initiated Anti-Nazi League would have broken up between the punk scene and the college scene (broadly speaking) a year or so before the photo was taken.  Cincinnati was and remains a city with “race issues.”  Racists organized openly and these were days of street fighting.  Real street fighting.

Not long after this photo was taken this crew wouldn’t  have existed.  I am at pains to remember what we called ourselves at this time. There was SHARP, but there was something else…help would be appreciated.  Some folks in this picture would be fighting each other not long after.  The scene was getting politicized.  The Syndicate happened (an important milestone in the history of what would become Anti-Racist Action years later).

If you wanted to exist in the, broadly speaking, punk counter-culture at that time you were confronted with fascists.  We had to beat them out of the scene if we weren’t going to give it to them.  Some of us looked beyond the geography of the scene and chose to fight them elsewhere and everywhere.  The cores of new groups and crews did come out of it, including what would become a half-dozen or so hardcore teenage Trotskyists.

Sometimes I blush a little in embarrassment at those more “extravagant” years of the late teens and early twenties.  Then I hear a song that was pounding through the air at the time and I am reminded of just how vigorous we all were then.  In many ways I’m more rebellious now than I ever was then, but it was in that scene that my rebellion was first fostered and encouraged if not entirely realized.

I have been known to spend a few late nights telling war stories with friends and comrades from those days and I won’t belabor this blog with that.  It was an awfully male environment. I would like to present a little soundtrack to those days as I remember them though.

So, hair styles aside, why can’t I be ridiculously proud of my “infantile” rebellions?  It was where I, and many thousands more, were first acquainted with a world beyond the little one we had been raised in.  This was no more true than with the world of politics.  One must learn to crawl if one is to walk, so it goes, and now I harbor an adult-sized rebellion; my poor mother might say a pathological one, but it serves a Marxist well.

Some songs then.  I saw all of these bands back then.  In praise of all rebellion; infantile and otherwise.

Fugazi proving why they are in a league all of their own with Waiting Room in ‘88

A smoking hot SS-20 with Radioactive at Sudsy’s

DC’s Government Issue plowing through the Blending In on the Crash tour

Ireland and Palestine Solidarity

John McAnulty of Ireland’s Socialist Democracy

25 January 2009

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in
chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the
chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are
equals before a court of morality!”

–Leon Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours,” 1938

The month of total war waged by Israel on Gaza has halted for the time being, although the struggle to crush the Palestinian people continues unabated.

The Gaza massacre generated deep revulsion across the globe. In Ireland, as in many other places, substantial protests took place. The protests didn’t involve the main body of workers but they did offer the opportunity of building a substantially stronger solidarity movement. That opportunity was not taken. There are many reasons for this, but a key reason is the mistaken ideas about building united action held by many militants.

The majority of activists believe that any movement should be as broad as possible, and that the way to achieve that is to rely on humanitarian sentiment. This apparently common-sense approach is actually profoundly mistaken at a number of levels and fails every time it is applied.

The point is that unity requires an object. The broader the movement, the weaker and more diffuse its aims. The agreement may fall far short of the needs of the situation and may be so loose that in practice there is only limited common action.

These are really organisational issues. For socialists there are deeper political issues. We believe that only the working class can resolve the major issues facing humanity. In each new struggle we seek to promote the self-organisation and self-activity of the workers. Class struggle doesn’t stop at the door of a new campaign, so there are political battles to be fought to establish the class interest that will dominate.

These issues were worked out long ago in the mass struggles of the working class. In sudden crises single issue campaigns, cutting across classes, can be established but these are inherently unstable.

United fronts are meant to unite different sections of the workers, and sometimes sections of the small farmers and small shopkeepers with the workers. The different sections unite around a common policy. They act together but continue to advance their own programs. A democratic structure allows the movement to change and advance new demands as the situation changes.

The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the working class led to the policy of popular fronts.   A good example of the popular front policy was the battle against fascism. Stalinists argued that this transcended class and was best advanced by an all-class alliance. They built alliances with the right and used savage repression against workers advancing demands of their own. The popular fronts, limited to the policy of the capitalists, were inevitably defeated.

Care must be taken in using the terms popular front and united front. As with all Marxist terms, they depend heavily on context. The working class in Ireland today is fragmented and demoralised by decades of social partnership and the defeat of the republican movement. Neither is there a dissident section of the capitalist class at whom a popular front could be aimed.

It makes more sense to talk about a popular front approach. In that way one can focus on the reality of the views of small groups rather than imagine we are talking about significant class forces. So what is the effect of this sort of thinking on the conduct of solidarity actions with Gaza?

The organisational effect is to establish a virtual movement, insubstantial as any other form of virtual reality. This had two effects. The first was to bring in essentially right-wing figures on their own terms, so platforms were crowded with speakers who did not oppose imperialism and with no real connection with a solidarity movement. The strongest example of this was the plethora of clerical speakers bolted on to the trade unions demonstration in Belfast in a vain attempt to defuse loyalist opposition.  It was quite bizarre to witness the Socialist Workers party intervention in Dublin They themselves had moved to the left under the pressure of events, but were totally  unable to obtain a response from the movement they had partially created.

The insubstantial nature of the movement also left it open to adventures. Again the Belfast demonstration was a good example, with republican activists staging stunts in local stores, making no attempt to discuss tactics with other groups in the campaign.

But the real weakness of a popular front approach is political. Any serious solidarity movement should demand an end of Israeli occupation and the siege of Gaza and the West Bank. As it was, the main demands were for a ceasefire, balanced in many cases by demands that Hamas should not respond with rockets. Calls were made for the ‘international community’ to intervene, ignoring the fact that it had already intervened decisively on the side of Israel. A number of the speakers were the left face of imperialism, supporting the aims of the massacre while bemoaning the bloodshed.

A humanitarian campaign cannot survive a ceasefire. Activists gravitate towards individual moralism, either in the form of charitable donations or individual boycott of Israeli produce. The political demands of the boycott remain unclear.

And it is here that the fundamental weakness of the Irish solidarity movement lies. One of the main organisations declaring solidarity with Gaza is Sinn Fein, closely followed by the trade union leadership and the left organisations. In practice they all support the Irish peace process and the partitionist solution it produced. It follows as night follows day that the Middle East peace process and the two-state solution represent the way forward. We should all be dancing in the streets at the news that heros such as Tony Blair and George Mitchell are to lead the Middle East process forward!

Of course this is all nonsense. The peace process in the Middle East is imperialist policy, with its main aim the crushing of Palestinian resistance. The two state solution is what we see already in Gaza and the West Bank – open prisons, constantly at the mercy of Israeli aggression. The difficulty for many is that to admit this would be to cast new light on the Irish peace process and the sectarian sewer formed in the North.

Just as solidarity with Gaza requires the self-organisation of workers, so to does a genuine peace and justice in Ireland.

Greece: Farmers Enter the Fray

Savas Michael January 25, 2009

A new explosive element entered the situation, already destabilized both economically and politically in Greece, particularly after the December revolt: the peasants, who in their vast majority in Greece are small proprietors of land, (owing about 42 acres each peasant family), have rebelled and paralyzed all traffic throughout the country by their road blocks. All the main routes from North to South and from East to West, have been blocked by thousands of tractors. The borders with neighbor countries have blocked too. The peasants of Serres have blocked the border with Bulgaria, the peasants of Kilkis the border with the former Yugoslav Macedonia, the peasants of Evros the land, borders with Turkey.

The cause of the peasant revolt is the collapse of the prices of agricultural products (cotton, wheat etc.) because of the world capitalist crisis and its deflationary trends. Between the Greek small farmers and the market, an oligarchy of middle men and multinational food industries is reigning, buying very cheap from the farmers and selling in very high prices to the consumers in the cities. The collapse of the prices commodities under the impact of the current world capitalist crisis opened the “scissors” between the low prices paid to the producers and the high prices (and profits) of the middle men and the food industries. Until recently the gap was filled by subsidies provided by the EU. Now, the crisis drives a drastic cut in subsidies.  Furthermore, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has as a target to diminish the space occupied by agriculture in countries like Greece. While at the end of the 40s the peasantry was the majority of the Greek population, now it is less than 18 per cent and continues to shrink; the EU target for Greece is to reduce the peasantry to a 5 per cent of the working population.

The peasants in revolt demand that the gap of prices, the enormous costs and accumulated debts of their production should be subsidized by the State- something forbidden by the EU and CAP. The demanded sum amounts to 4-5 billion euros.  The Karamanlis government, already shaken by a huge economic/political crisis and by the recent popular revolt following the assassination of young Alexis, has promised to the peasants to give them half a billion euros. For that sum the government will take a new loan from the international banks in conditions of credit crunch. Such a move cannot satisfy the peasants, it will add more burdens on an over-indebted capitalist economy virtually bankrupt, and it will be followed by heavy fines by the EU because of the break of regulations. The ruling class is divided on that issue. The peasants themselves have rejected so fat this governmental offer.

It is important to notice that the large majority of these peasants in revolt have supported in the last two elections the right wing New Democracy, as they had clashed in the last decade with the agricultural policies of the previous PASOK governments. So, it is the political bases of both bourgeois parties alternating in power that are disintegrating.  What we have here is a regime crisis.

The solution to the problems of the impoverished labouring peasantry could come only from the workers in the cities in a common struggle to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, not the rural and urban poor; to expropriate the middle men and the food private companies, nationalize the land and forming real peasants cooperatives connected with workers’ committees in the cities, planning the economy according to social needs. Against the CAP and the EU only a revolutionary struggle of workers and poor peasants can be effective, to finish with this imperialist alliance of big capital, for the Unites Socialist States of Europe.

In other fronts, now: a General Strike and demonstration of the public sector workers will take place on January 28.

Turmoil in Universities continues particularly in defense of the right to asylum, to forbid intrusion of the police in the university space.

Last but not least, the campaign in solidarity to Kostandina Kuneva and against the super-exploitation of immigrant and local workers escalates and expands beyond the borders of Greece. In France and in Europe a petition for Kostandina is signed by personalities of the intelligentsia such as the well known philosopher Alain Badiou. A new march for Kostandina will take place in Piraeus on January 30^th.

The Internacionalista and The Internationale

Bob Doyle died this week.  He was the last of the Irish volunteers who went to fight in Spain against fascism.  Indymedia in Ireland has some interesting remarks, photos and videos, including of his last interview, of Doyle here.  There is rarely a mention when these old heroes die of the perfidious role of Stalinism in the Spanish revolution.  That is not for the here and now, but it should be noted.

As I have sat here most of the weekend hovering under a blanket and drinking warm beverages to hold back the aches and shakes of the flu I watched and read of Doyle’s life.  One video of a recent unveiling of a Internacionalista monument in Belfast where Doyle was present included a rendition of the Internationale in Irish.  I had never heard it in Irish before and it made me search out other relatively obscure renditions.

So here’s a few- for Bob Doyle who remained an activist his entire life, for the genuine internationalists who fought and died in Spain and for the present internationalists organizing around Gaza and so much else.  Some of these are downright strange, some are strangely wonderful and some are just wonderful.  We are a world movement comrades and let’s not forget it!

A stadium rock version by the Chinese metal band “Tang Dynasty”!

A Japanese version…maybe by the Chipmunks?

The version in Irish from the Belfast unveiling song by Pól Mac Adaim.

By Mongolian Tuvan throat singers!

From the roof of the world…in Nepalese!

In Yiddish

And finally in Catalan

The First Dail Eireann 90 Years On

We declare in the words of the Irish Republican Proclamation the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be indefeasible, and in the language of our first President. Pádraíg Mac Phiarais, we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, and with him we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.

We declare that we desire our country to be ruled in accordance with the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice for all, which alone can secure permanence of Government in the willing adhesion of the people.

We affirm the duty of every man and woman to give allegiance and service to the Commonwealth, and declare it is the duty of the Nation to assure that every citizen shall have opportunity to spend his or her strength and faculties in the service of the people. In return for willing service, we, in the name of the Republic, declare the right of every citizen to an adequate share of the produce of the Nation’s labour.

It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.

The Irish Republic fully realises the necessity of abolishing the present odious, degrading and foreign Poor Law System, substituting therefor a sympathetic native scheme for the care of the Nation’s aged and infirm, who shall not be regarded as a burden, but rather entitled to the Nation’s gratitude and consideration. Likewise it shall be the duty of the Republic to take such measures as will safeguard the health of the people and ensure the physical as well as the moral well-being of the Nation.

It shall be our duty to promote the development of the Nation’s resources, to increase the productivity of its soil, to exploit its mineral deposits, peat bogs, and fisheries, its waterways and harbours, in the interests and for the benefit of the Irish people.

It shall be the duty of the Republic to adopt all measures necessary for the recreation and invigoration of our Industries, and to ensure their being developed on the most beneficial and progressive co-operative and industrial lines. With the adoption of an extensive Irish Consular Service, trade with foreign Nations shall be revived on terms of mutual advantage and goodwill, and while undertaking the organisation of the Nation’s trade, import and export, it shall be the duty of the Republic to prevent the shipment from Ireland of food and other necessaries until the wants of the Irish people are fully satisfied and the future provided for.

It shall also devolve upon the National Government to seek co-operation of the Governments of other countries in determining a standard of Social and Industrial Legislation with a view to a general and lasting improvement in the conditions under which the working classes live and labour.