Fourth International 16th World Congress

The 16th World Congress of the Fourth International (United Secretariat) is meeting in Belgium this week.  Here are a collection of documents relating to the meetings.  Other documents are coming out of the Congress and I will post them as well.

Argentina:  Contribution fromto the debate on the international situation

SAP Denmark: Amendment to “Role and Tasks”

Response to SAP Amendments: Jette (Denmark)

Puerto Rico: Contribution on the Role and Tasks discussion

Building the anti-capitalist left: Thomas (IC, Denmark)

Youth: A central sector for the anticapitalists submitted for the youth comrades by Philomena (IC, France) and Thomas (IC Denmark)

The meaning of the 16th World Congress François Sabado

Towards a broad International at any price? RSB Germany

Contribution to the debate on the Role and Tasks of the FI in the form of amendments Yvan (France)

Socialist Action (USA): A contribution to the pre-World Congress discussion

Reject the draft “Role and Tasks of the FI” Brown (USA), Jette (Denmark), Andreas (Greece), Konstanitin (Germany)

Contribution on “Role and Tasks” from Argentina

Notes on the international situation: François Sabado

Climate change and our tasks: Daniel Tanuro

Amendments to the resolution “Role and Tasks of the Fourth International” Davies (Socialist Resistance, Britain)

Three LGBT amendments and a motion on sexuality Submitted by Peter (Netherlands) and Hall (Appeals Commission)

Contribution to the debate on climate change: Michael Löwy

Three minority amendments to the resolution on role and tasks of the Fourth International: Mathieu and Patrick (France)

Women and the crisis of civilisation submitted after the international women’s seminar by Hall (Appeals Commission, Britain) and Philomena (IC, France)

Amendment on the youth camp to the resolution “Role and tasks of the Fourth International” Thomas (IC, Denmark) and Philomena (IC, France)

Amendments on women to the resolution on Role and Tasks of the Fourth International international women’s seminar Submitted by Hall (Appeals Commission) and Philomena (IC, France)

Report on climate change: Daniel Tanuro

Role and Tasks of the Fourth International Draft Resolution from the International Committee

Cincinnati Socialist Dan La Botz For US Senate!

Dan La Botz, Cincinnati School Teacher, Socialist Party Candidate for U.S. Senate.  Article from The Cincinnati Beacon

Dan La Botz, a 64-year old Cincinnati school teacher, has filed petitions with the Ohio Secretary of State to become the candidate of the Socialist Party for the U.S. Senate. La Botz, who needed 500 signatures to get on the Socialist Party primary ballot, filed petitions with approximately 1,200 signatures on Thursday, Feb. 18. La Botz, a long time labor and social movement activist, is the candidate of the Socialist Party of Ohio which is the state organization of the Socialist Party USA.

Speaking in Columbus after turning in his petitions, La Botz said, “I believe we need an alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. We have to stop the banks and corporations from controlling our political system. We must stop the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We must bring our citizens single-payer health care. We must confront the environmental crisis, rejecting coal, petroleum and nuclear energy and prioritizing solar and other green solutions. We must create jobs for all at living wages. When private enterprise fails the government must step in to become the employer of last resort.”

La Botz said he sees a growing, though still embryonic movement for social change, a movement to which his Socialist candidacy will speak. “We can see the growing frustration, alienation and discontent with our political system. We see it in the Tea-Baggers. We see it in the demonstrations for immigrant rights. We see it in workers voting against contract concessions that give away wages and health plans. We see it in the LGBTQ movement for gay and lesbian marriage rights. People want an alternative, and that alternative is the idea of a democratic socialist society with health care, education, housing, and jobs and justice for all.”

Rejecting arguments that a third party cannot win and cannot have an impact, La Botz pointed out that given the political deadlock in Washington, one Senator in the U.S. Congress from a third party could exert enormous leverage on the political process. “But,” he said, “my job will be to inspire people to fight back not only politically, but by fighting for secure jobs, higher wages and health care, resisting attempts to foreclose on and seize their homes, and demanding free public higher education such as many states had in the 1960s. We need a political movement that is the expression of a social movement.“

“Working people make the country run,” said La Botz. “And working people—not the banks, corporations, and politicians—should run the country.”

Ohio once had a history as a Socialist Party stronghold, with Socialists elected by their labor union and working class constituencies to lead city government in Dayton, Hamilton, and other Ohio cities and towns. During the twentieth century railroad union leader Eugene V. Debs in the 1910s and 20s and former Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas in the 1930s and 1940s served as the presidential candidates of the Socialist Party.  END.

It’s Hard To Be Human…

Rustbelt ♥ Mekons

Policing And Justice

Here are some statistics I noticed on the eirigi website that haven’t got much play outside of small republican circles: “the PSNI stopped and searched 28,420 people under so-called ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation in 2009. The figure for 2004 was just over 14,000…24,541 of those detained last year were stopped under Section 44 of the British government’s ‘Terrorism Act’…Between July and September 2009…over 12,000 people were stopped and searched by the PSNI under Britain’s Terrorism Act and Justice and Security Act…of this figure, only 49  led to arrests.”

Huh?  I thought peace had descended on that blighted land to the sound of trumpets and the flap of angel’s wings on Good Friday over a decade ago.  What gives?  Even by the estimation of the British government the so-called dissidents have a membership roll that runs in the dozens, and these spread across three or four groups.  If you stop twelve thousand people on suspicion of terrorism and make only 49 arrests (not necessarily for “terrorist” offensives either) then I would say that your intel is profoundly deficient…or you are terrorizing a community yourself.

Are the Brits genuinely worried about the potential of unreconstructed republican militarists to disrupt the state, or are they worried about the potential of an undemocratic, neo-liberal and sectarian “settlement” to reconstruct a militant opposition?  My guess is they are hedging their bets and with an utterly acquiescent nationalism, a cul-de-sac republicanism and a toothless and confused left offering the potential “opposition” the game is more than a little rigged.

There are all kinds of peace.  The peace of the grave and the peace of a well-run prison are two.  We live in a world where war criminals routinely receive prizes for peace.  More often than not by “peace” is meant not the absence of conflict, but the absence of resistance.  In a world dominated by imperialism injustice and “peace” are complimentary.  That most of us genuinely desire to live without conflict in our lives is testimony to how unnatural a society governed by the rule of capital, a rule defined by conflict, is.

Of course the Brits see any attack on the St. Andrews penitentiary as an attack on peace, no matter the form of opposition.  Imperialism can brook no resistance, it is essential that they be the only game in town.  It was precisely in accepting a framework also agreeable to imperialism that made the Provos acceptable themselves.  There Is No Alternative and all that.

The Brits (and the Provos) want to conflate all opposition to the settlement with a futile and unpopular return to war.  To prove the point the Brits make war on any opposition.  With a few, very few, salutary exceptions the left in Ireland and Britain have largely ignored the ongoing assault on nationalist working class communities in the North.  While there have been many demonstrations against repressive legislation in Britain, very few of these reference Ireland, where much of the repression is.  Perhaps the thought is that by opposing continued repression in Ireland the left will be associated with the supposed object of that repression, republican militarists, and therefore greatly discredited.  But isn’t it obvious given the numbers quoted above that the real target is the nationalist working class?

With the Provos now signed up to a Policing and Justice deal I predict a lot more policing and very little justice are in store.

Haiti, Music, Solidarity

Which Side Are You On?

Peter “Whiskey” Sheffer, Miguel Hernandez, Adriel “Captain Moonlight” Hernandez and my old comrade Dylan Wilkerson are Los Duggans of Los Angeles.  Readers of this site are not required to check them out, but it is suggested.

Weekend Notes

Canada will be celebrating itself as a fully fledged, if somewhat junior, member of the imperialist fraternity this weekend.  The winter Olympics begin in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Protests have already begun against the corporate festival.  Where the Olympics go police repression, privatization and gentrification are sure to follow.

Canada’s First Nations and supporters are protesting that no treaties, even those signed under duress, have ever been agreed to ceding native territory in British Columbia to the Canadian state.  The Olympics are being held on, legally speaking, stolen land.  The Canadian Olympic Committee has brought in certain native community leaders to provide window dressing by allowing native cultural symbols to be exploited in the promotion of the games and Canada.  Celebrating your “national identity” by promoting victims of your genocide is pretty rich Canada.

As someone who has paid keen attention to the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the Irish revolution over the years I couldn’t help at being a little stung with the news that one of the chants during this week’s general strike in Greece was: “we are not Ireland, we will resist!”  Ouch.  Well, true enough I suppose.  The Irish trade union misleadership was faced with a similar situation in which the ruling class sought to make the working class to pay for its crisis through massive public cuts.  They made some noises, held a rally where they ensured their members they would fight…and then rolled over and gave it all up with a wink.

The Greek working class is more conscious and the left there is, by Irish standards (or the standards of just about anywhere else), big, well-organized and militant.  Not that the leadership of the left and the trade unions in Greece aren’t without their own problems; Stalinism and Social Democracy still hang on in Greece to play their pernicious role, but it has been heartening to see a militant working class put its foot down and say den ypervaínei!  The next day of general strike will be on February 24th.  I think it should have begun Wednesday and lasted until victory or defeat.  This, as the ruling class knows all too well, is a battle with major stakes.  The working class in Greece is perhaps better equipped than any other in Europe to engage in this battle.  A whole lot depends on it.

With what is going on in the British far left blogosphere you would think that the central questions of the European class struggle weren’t being played out on the streets of Athens, but in the Central Committee of the SWP as there is all kinds of hullaballoo over the resignation of long-time leader of the Socialist Workers Party Lindsey German.  Apart from the actual politics of the split, which are buried in references to various goings on in Britain over the years that I don’t get, what has been illuminating is the glimpse into the internal regime of the SWP allowed by the crisis.

It’s been a long while since I was in the kind of left group where one member could say to another member, without tongue firmly in cheek, something like “I’m Central Committee and what I say goes.”  Oy vey.  That any “leader” of a self-described socialist organization would believe that the discipline of a revolutionary implies a docile acceptance of “leadership” is not becoming of a Marxist or a revolutionary.  It should be said that this kind of leadership is apparently the practice of both parties of the dispute.

For those interested Socialist Unity, Belfast’s Splintered Sunrise and the SWP’s own Richard Seymour have gigabytes of discussion on the topic.  Madam Miaow, at the receiving end of the SWP’s organizational practice some years ago, would rather watch baboons fuck.   I know it’s a big deal and the SWP is an important group, but I can’t say I blame her.  A little lower-primate promiscuity beats the hell out of the violent screwing of our fellows we Great Apes get up to on occasion.  Here’s hoping something positive can come of it all, because there is no joy in watching a once formidable leftist organization fall in on itself.

At The Coffin Of Franz Schuhmeier

Franz Schuhmeier, an outstanding working class figure in the Austrian socialist movement, was assassinated on this day in 1913.  This son of a laundress and leather worker met the socialist movement at the paper mill where he worked.  After losing his job due to repeated arrests for his political activity he began to write for an Austrian workers’ paper.  He would become editor of the Volkstribune in 1894.  In 1900 he was elected to the Vienna city council, the year later he was elected to the Imperial Diet, a position which he retained.  In those chambers he was a champion of universal suffrage, public health and education.  But this was a man most at home organizing in the streets and workplaces; on strike or at a boisterous workers’ meeting.  Hated for his militant and effective organizing as well as for his wit delivered in the accent of  the Viennese suburb, the Austrian ruling class heaped scorn of Schuhmeier.  They surely approved, whether they ordered it or not, of his murder on leaving a party rally by a brother of the founder of the competing “Christian” labor movement.  His funeral cortege was followed by up to half a million Viennese workers.  Leon Trotsky, long an exile in Vienna, wrote this appreciation in the days following.  Franz Schuhmeier, Presenté!

At the coffin of Franz Schuhmeier by Leon Trotsky

NATURE had given him a fiery, inextinguishable temperament and the sacred ability to rebel again and again, to love, to hate and to curse. Birth had given him a vital and never weakening bond with the suffering and struggling masses. The party had given him an understanding of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat. All this taken together formed this magnificent personality, well-known and cherished, but now mourned, far beyond the limits of Vienna and Austria.

The working class needs leaders of different casts of character. Such leaders as those sons of the bourgeois classes who have broken their old social fetters, rebuilt themselves internally and who have identified the meaning of their life with the movement and growth of the working class play a great role in the history of the working class. First came the great Utopians: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen; then the founders of scientific socialism: Marx, Engels and Lassalle all of whom had sprung from the bourgeois classes. How could one conceive of our German party and its development without Wilhelm Liebknecht and without Singer? Or without Kautsky? Of Austrian Social-Democracy without Victor Adler? Of French socialism without Lafargue, Jaurès and Guesde? And of Russian Social-Democracy without Plekhanov?

Through these brilliant dissidents the possessing classes return willy-nilly to the proletariat a particle of that scientific culture which through the efforts of centuries they had amassed amid the gloom of the oppressed popular masses.

And the proletariat can be proud that its historical mission like a mighty magnet attracts to itself noble minds and powerful characters from out of the propertied classes. But as long as the leadership of the political struggle lies only in the hands of these figures the workers cannot get away from the feeling that they are still under a political tutelage. Confident self-consciousness and class pride can fully penetrate them only when into the first rank of leaders they put forward their own people who have grown up with them and who embody in their personalities all the political and spiritual conquests of the working class. The proletariat can then look into such leaders as into a mirror where it can see the best sides of its own class “self”.

For the Vienna proletariat, as far as I can judge from five years observation, Franz Schuhmeier was above all such a class mirror.

Only very rarely did I come to meet Schuhmeier on a personal footing. But more than once I heard him at mass meetings, in parliament and at party congresses. It was enough to see and hear Schuhmeier several times to know him. For he least of all resembled a “riddle”, a person wrapped in himself. He was a man of action, skirmishes, appeals, of the streets and of impetus: in himself he was the embodiment of action and it was in action that he revealed himself. Of him one could say in the words of the Greek philosopher that he “carried his all with him”. That is why when we listened to him we not only heard his thought arrayed in living words which were always pointed and always his own but we would see all Schuhmeier in action in an athletic contest for the soul of his audience.

When you imagine to yourself standing behind the back of this splendid figure made of energy and daring that other miserable dark figure of the “Christian-Social” murderer with a Browning in his hand, the tragic sense of what has happened shakes you from head to foot.

We shall leave aside the question of what immediate motives guided the murderer. But who this unfortunate was, not as an individual but as a type we do know: he was a proletarian, but a renegade, a class defector. He did not want to join his class along its great historical road. It was amongst historically hostile forces, the state, the church and capital, whose existence is erected upon the physical enslavement and spiritual stultification of the masses that the murderer sought allies against his class when the latter was striving to impose its collective discipline upon him. Archaic prejudices which surround the cradle of the proletariat, the instincts of servility and miserable egoism meet together in this renegade – he personifies all the worst in the past of the labouring masses just as Schuhmeier personifies the best features of their future. And so the dark slavish past rises up in a wild frenzy against the future.

Who knows? Perhaps even in this miscreant there lived a festering inner wound, and a consciousness of apostasy, and this self-contempt turned into blind hate and mortal envy for everything that is lofty and fine in the socialist movement – for its contempt for all inherited superstitions, for its freedom from all servile instincts, for its moral courage and for its buoyant confidence of victory. And wild hate discharged the Browning.

What the guardians of law and order will now do with the murderer, who of course also considered himself a man of law and order, makes in the final analysis no difference to us. Along that path we will find no moral satisfaction. We shall leave the dead to bury this corpse.

But Franz Schuhmeier remains with us. We shall bury only what was mortal in him. For his spirit lives on in our hearts – the irreconcilable spirit of the tribune of revolution.