Vote La Botz, Socialist For US Senate!

A Socialist Alternative

By Dan La Botz, Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.

The following essay represents a distillation of my basic stump speech over the past nine months of the campaign. Visit my YouTube page to watch me giving speeches very much like this one around Ohio – or follow my campaign on Facebook.

WE IN AMERICAN TODAY face three great crises: the economy, the environment, and the wars abroad—and both the Republicans and Democrats are failing to address those crises. We must not only create jobs for the unemployed, we must create a full-employment economy. We must address the environmental crisis by ending the use of coal and dramatically reducing the use of petroleum. And we must bring all U.S. troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and stop the bombing of Pakistan.

The Republicans and Democrats cannot address these urgent issues because they represent the very corporations that have caused the crises. How can you address the crises when the banks, insurance companies, manufacturing corporations, service industries and agriculture pay for your campaigns, provide your candidates and staff, and write your legislation? Today, under Republican and Democratic administrations, the banks determine our economic policy, the insurance companies determine our health policy, agriculture and manufacturing corporations determine our trade policies and the oil companies determine our environmental and foreign policies.

Bush and Obama: Continuity

Download A Vision From the Heartland, Dan’s campaign book, and other literature at DanLaBotz.com

We have seen in the last two years a political continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. They saved the bankers, but not the homeowners. They saved the auto executives, boards and investors, but not the autoworkers’ jobs, wages, benefits and working conditions. They saved the health insurance companies, but failed to give us a single-payer healthcare system.Similarly with energy. Neither Bush nor Obama would take on the coal or oil companies. Coal remains on the energy agenda of both, while Obama opened up oil drilling on the Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf just before the BP geyser in the Gulf. The real oil spill was not in the Gulf, it was in the Congress—where oil money has purchased the Senators and Representatives of Republicans and Democrats.

And the wars? Obama has expanded the wars. The U.S. today has an occupying army of 50,000 in Iraq. There are 100,000 troops in Afghanistan carrying out the war there. And Obama has expanded the use of drone missiles to bomb Pakistan, often killing civilians. As a Pakistani-American woman said in Cleveland when I spoke there, “I have to explain to my co-workers and neighbors, ‘Your president is bombing my country.’”

Change the National Priorities

We need to change the priorities of the United States. All of the crises are the result of the corporate domination of our country. Today everything revolves around CEO salaries and bonuses, around corporate profits, and around stockholder dividends. We must the interests of working people, not of the CEOs, at the center of our policies. We might, for example, consider a working woman with a couple of children to support. (I think here of my own mother, a grocery checker who raised two children largely on her own.) What would she need to make her life livable?

She will need a good job at a living wage—with a union to give her a voice in the workplace. She will need good housing with a reasonable mortgage or rent. She will need good public transportation to get her to work quickly and cheaply—and to reduce carbon fuels and the destruction of the environment. She will need free health care for her children, with free hospitalization and pharmacy access. She will need free public education from K through college—because she wants her kids to go far, and so do we.

We take a working woman as the measure of our society, as the measure of a decent society. If you think about it, you can see that if we take care of her, we take care of all of us. For her needs are the common needs of all working people in the country.

How do we Pay for It?

How do we pay for all of this? We end the wars abroad and we close the 1,000 military bases abroad. We raise the taxes on the top bracket of millionaires and billionaires from 36 percent today to the 80 percent they were at in the period from 1945-1965. With the trillions saved by ending the wars and reducing the military budget and taxing the rich, we can begin to put all Americans to work at good jobs with living wages.

The American people step in and take charge of the corporations. We make the government create an enormous stimulus program, twice as big as Obama’s, aimed at creating jobs in all sectors. We force the government to take over the idle and low-capacity production plants and with government financing set them to work, but under the management of workers and communities to produce for a green economy. We demand that the government create a national economic plan and that all Americans have a voice in elaborating that plan.

Big Government?

Some ask, “Won’t this just create big government?” The real question, however, is not: “Is the government too big?” The real question is: “Whose government is it?” I am not simply talking about our current corporate, capitalist government simply nationalizing everything. I am not for that. If that happened we would not have socialism or economic democracy, but a state bureaucracy.

I am talking about building a movement among the American people which says that we need to transform our society and end the domination of the corporations and the anarchy of capitalism with its booms and busts. We need to build the consciousness, organization, and self-confidence of the American working people so that they, that is, we can take over these corporations and run them. We need to absorb the corporations into our society, to digest them and transform them by socializing them.

How do we Get There

How do we possibly accomplish such a job, that is, ending corporate domination and transforming American capitalism into a socialist society? First, we have to rebuild the power of labor unions and the social movements. The labor unions need to be transformed from within and from below into a fighting movement prepared to use its power to fight the bosses. We need to strengthen the environmental movement and encourage a resurgence of independent activism.

We need to rebuild the power of the African American, Latino, and women’s movements for freedom and self-determination. We can take some inspiration from the LGBT movement as it has fought for marriage rights and to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” We must revive the slogan “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” building solidarity among all of the discriminated against and oppressed in our society. Working people have tremendous economic power and organization and should provide leadership to this movement.

The labor movement and social movement alone, however, will not be able to transform American society, no matter how militant they become, if they don’t create a working people’s party. The labor upsurge of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s accomplished much, but ultimately their power was harnessed by the Democratic Party and then turned against them. We must build an independent political movement to the left of the Democratic Party, otherwise we will continue to sow and they will continue to harvest our work.

Why Vote for a Third Party

What is the role of my Socialist Party campaign today? What is its relationship to independent political action more broadly speaking and to that larger task of creating a working people’s party? Can a small group of activists creating a third party really make a difference?

I ask you to think back to those small groups of men and women, black and white, who in the 1830s and 1840s met in private homes and school houses, in churches and religious colleges in Ohio and in other states throughout the union. They were radicals who argued that the country could not develop economically, socially, or morally as long as it was blocked by the existence of the plantation and plantation slavery. They argued that the plantation must be abolished. Imagine that, at a time when the plantation was the very center of the American economy, both of “King Cotton” in the South and of the Northern textile industry.

From Radical Activism to Political Party

Those radicals circulated petitions. They marched and demonstrated. They engaged in civil disobedience. They broke the law: freeing slaves from the South and wrestling slaves away from slave hunters and federal marshals in the North. They built the abolitionist movement and then they created abolitionist parties such as the Free Soil Party.

The Free Soil Party played a catalytic role, helping to bring about a realignment of the U.S. political party system—and this led to the Republican Party, which would nominate Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Lincoln, of course, would prosecute the Civil War and create the Union Army in which abolitionists and the former slaves themselves would end slavery. A small group of far-seeing activists changed the country’s history.

Independent Political Action Today

Today, we who vote for the Socialist Party, the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and for independent progressives to the left of the Democratic Party are, I believe, in an analogous position to those abolitionists of the period from, say, 1830 to 1860. We are working to stake out a humanistic position on the left of the American political spectrum, one that rejects the corporate domination of America.

We are for the abolition of the corporation. We are for the abolition of capitalism. We are for turning the country upside down. What do I mean by that? I mean putting working people, the poor, the discriminated against, the downtrodden at the top of our society and having them and their needs set our course. I mean reorganizing our society around the needs of that working class woman I mentioned earlier.

Vote for me on November 2 because you think that that woman and her kids, that all of those working men and women and their children should have the power to make decisions that will benefit them and all of us. Vote for Dan La Botz. Vote for the Socialist Party. Vote for the socialist alternative.

Dan La Botz is a Solidarity (on whose website this was first published) member and longtime activist in the labor, immigrants rights, and antiwar movements in Cincinnati.

Some Strange Communists I Have Known

Anyone who has spent time in the far-left knows that, along with those you have become incredibly close to (comrade is a class of social relationship all its own), some of the people sitting in that branch meeting with you are folks you would never, in a million years, find yourself associating with if it weren’t for politics.  In the US particularly, I think it takes a bit of a social outcast to cast their lot with communism.  Seven out of ten times that’s a good thing; rebellion needs rebels.  However, three times out of ten (sometimes more, a lot more, depending on the tendency) it means you’ve made common cause with folks whose eccentricities would, in polite society, at the least be frowned upon and at the most be grounds for some sort of institutionalization.

I’ve often said that the very best thing about being in the movement are the honest-to-goodness, genuine heroes beavering away at the class struggle and filling their brains with the world around them that you get to learn from and get to know.  Without a doubt, the most interesting and intelligent people I know are Marxists.  Fact.  It’s also true that some of the strangest people I have ever met have also been Marxists.  Some of the odd is just fine, I’m plenty odd myself.  Human variation is rich; let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.  But some of the anti-social socialists I have met are characters that just couldn’t be made up.

At any number of meetings I have seen frothing mouths, wild eyes and heard things fall from damaged psyches that neither Marx nor Freud could account for.  Sometimes it leaves me scratching my head and lamenting the smallness of the movement where characters like these are on Central Committees, other times it has made me wonder what I was doing there at all.  Like a family, we find ways to accept the ways of others and like any family we like to keep certain things ‘in the family.’

I’ve been in a few left groups over the years and none has been free of strange.  The ones I left many years ago, where many of these vignettes come from, being by far the worst offenders.  I must say, though it may just be lost in translation, that on trips abroad the quotient of crazy seems to be much lower, but let’s face it – our species is strange.  It’s bound to manifest itself wherever we are and the left is hardly the only place where simple variation or complex social ills are seen, but it does seem to abound there, especially in down days.  I’ll not name names of people or groups, let me just assume that you know folks like these yourself.

-The potential psychopath who at meeting declared of an ‘opponent’ leftist organization, ‘I wish this were Beirut, then we could kill them and nobody would care.’

-A comrade who throughout the meeting picks his toenails and crumbles his finds on the conference table.

-The comrade who in an oral assault on Pabloite revisionism hits the table causing his pen to fly up and smack him in the face or the comrade who, in a tirade against sectarianism, gesticulated coffee right across the table.

-The frothing at the mouth bit mentioned above.  I’ve seen it a half-dozen times.

-A comrade who ends her incoherent 7 minute intervention from the floor of a union meeting by bah-ing like a sheep.

-The leading comrade who never leaves his house and has the personal hygiene to prove it, whose entire nutritional intake consists of diet soda and wheat germ and who hides his baseness behind the ‘dialectic’.

-The comrade who in front of a small crowd screams an entire 10 minute speech on health care into a bull horn (the bull horn is there so you don’t have to yell, comrades).

-The literary comrade who ends every single article, including movie reviews, with a sentence beginning with ‘Genuine Troskyists uphold….’.

-That comrade with an utterly unique, room enveloping, body odor who ate only raw root vegetables.

-The comrade who makes uncomfortable reference to bestiality when outlining his tactics in the union election, then makes additional uncomfortable references to bestiality when discussing tactics in the anti-war movement.  A theme has developed and sensing comrade’s twitchings of discomfort as chuckles of laughter continues with said references for length of discussion.

-A comrade whose sexual peccadillo was attempting to sleep with every new recruit then claiming, when they inevitably left the organization, that it was because they “were moving to the right.”

Tip of the iceberg, comrades. Tip. Of. Iceberg.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the left and the movement.  I’ve been a partisan now for 22 years of my young life and I’m for the long haul.  But on occasion it’s good to take a little step back, look at the weirdness around you and laugh if it’s funny and cry if not.

UAW Workers Picket The UAW Over Two-Tier

We will defend our Civil and Human Rights!

Solidarity with Lake Orion workers—no two tier, no more plant closings!

GM’s ultimatum: Your paycheck or your job

There is a war going on, and it’s not halfway around the world. What’s clear from the so-called “innovative agreement” being rammed down the throats of UAW members at GM’s Lake Orion assembly plant is that GM has declared war on its workers. The deal, forcing the 40 per cent of the laid off workforce with the lowest seniority to take a pay cut of almost 50 per cent, is hardly innovative. When have corporations not used intimidation tactics and threatened workers jobs in order to cut pay and benefits, tear up contracts and attack unions?

Plant by plant, GM is making dubious promises of job security as leverage to drop UAW wages to levels below the average hourly wage in the U.S. They did it in Saginaw—workers swallowed painful concessions to get another company to buy their plant and keep it open. They tried it in Indianapolis, but were caught off guard when a well-organized rank-and-file resistance shot down an illegally negotiated agreement with upstart supplier JD Norman to slash hourly wages to $15.50 for production and $23 for skilled trades.

These aggressive tactics are not unique to GM. Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is reported to have made a statement that UAW workers had to “get used to a culture of poverty,” while White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been quoted as saying “f—the UAW.” From Detroit to Wall Street to Washington there is a consensus at the top: wages must come down! No more “middle class” workers!

Stop the back-door deals!

The potentially devastating situation in Lake Orion is not only not “innovative”—it is not an “agreement.” Workers did not agree to this divisive expansion of the rotten two-tier structure. Members of Local 5960 have been told by the UAW leadership—which is claiming the right, under vague language voted on during the GM bankruptcy, to negotiate this back-door deal—that they have to accept it without a vote.

Every UAW member, working or retired, must stand with our sisters and brothers in Lake Orion and demonstrate our resolve to stop the cancer of non-union wages from spreading.

A JOB is a RIGHT

Rarely is it said that a big corporation is “lucky” to be making huge profits—in the case of GM $2.2 billion in the first six months—but so often we are told that we are “lucky” to have a job. We’re not supposed to think that a job—without which we cannot provide the basic comforts of life to ourselves and our families—is a basic right. Yet the UN Charter on Human Rights clearly states that every human being has a “right to work.” The early builders of our UAW believed unequivocally in the concept—they believed that we own our jobs. So if we own our jobs, then the companies have no right to eliminate them—or hold our jobs hostage to force more and more unjust concessions.

Moreover, the concessions demanded of workers at Lake Orion—affecting the non-trades workers with the lowest seniority—are discriminatory in that they will disproportionately hurt workers of color and women.

Our Civil and Human Rights are being violated! We must fight back and tell GM and our union leaders: no more ultimatums, no pay cuts, no two tier, no more plant closings.

Soldiers of Solidarity

No Vote Allowed on Half Wages in Detroit-area Auto Plant

By Jane Slaughter. Published in Labor Notes

Oct 7 2010 - 

The United Auto Workers have signed an agreement to let General Motors pay half wages to 40 percent of its employees at a suburban Detroit assembly plant. The “Tier 2” workers would make roughly $14 working alongside so-called “legacy” or Tier 1 workers making the current production wage, about $28.

GM and the UAW apparently learned a lesson from a recent defeat at an Indianapolis stamping plant [1], where workers voted 457-96 not to accept half pay. Members at the Lake Orion, Michigan, plant were not allowed to vote on their new wages.

Instead, they were told, the germ of the idea had been included in the national contract [2] ratified in 2009 when GM was on the verge of bankruptcy and seeking government help. The national contract contained language saying the UAW would help GM produce a small car profitably by “looking for innovative ways to staff the plant,” said Mike Dunn, shop chair at UAW Local 5960. The language, in fact, says only that: that company and union “will work together…to arrive at innovative ways ways to staff these operations” (page 100). Lake Orion was chosen as the lucky plant and is now being retooled to produce the subcompact Aveo and compact Verano.

Automotive News [3] quoted veteran auto consultant Ron Harbour’s estimate that the move will save GM all of $112 per car.

Union Meeting in Shock

At a large October 3 union meeting, workers were told they could not vote but would have options. The first 800-900 production workers called back would work at the full wage and benefits. The rest of the 1,588-person workforce could come back as Tier 2 workers (with full benefits), wait for an eventual Tier 1 opening created by retirement, or hope to get hired at another GM plant elsewhere.

Deb Malott, who hired in 10 years ago, said the meeting was full of “a lot of angry people, a lot of disbelief. We were in shock. We had no idea.” Malott came home and began contacting all her friends on Facebook. Production workers have been laid off from the idled plant since last November.

Dawn Maturen, the wife of a Lake Orion worker, said different groups within the plant are organizing to figure out a response, including an October 16 rally. “Men and women that have the same mortgages, the same amount of children, doing the same work, but one group will be for half pay—we think that goes against human dignity,” she said.

Working for Less

Malott hired in at $15.60 a decade ago, “a good wage,” she said. “But my lifestyle has changed since then. I took out loans to send my kids to college based on $29 an hour.”

Asked what it would be like in the plant with members working at different wages, Malott said, “I would still go in and do my job and do a good job, but some people would probably not put the extra step in it to make sure the job is done right.

“I’m sure there’ll be resentment there, especially the way it’s gone down. GM doesn’t make you feel like you’re worth anything. They want the cheaper people in there.”

Nick Waun said low-seniority workers like him had been “lied to for an entire year. They repeatedly told us ‘there’s no way you can be booted down to two-tier wages.’ We sat waiting for an entire year to go back to work, and they spring this on us at the last minute.”

Malott is not hopeful about other work. In the last 10 months of layoff GM has offered her only “flex” jobs of one or two days a week.

Maturen’s spouse is on his third plant, 70 miles away from their home, as he’s bounced around the GM system. They’ve got three kids. Her husband has 11 years seniority, and she thinks he’ll be in Tier 2. “Eventually Tier 1 workers will all be Tier 2,” she says. “We’ve realized in watching how things have worked that if we don’t stand up now, no one will have good-paying jobs.”

Thirty-two-year veteran Tom Hopp, who transferred to Lake Orion from the now-shuttered Saturn plant, called the move “more of the same from the UAW. It’s a form of discrimination. Those people won’t forget that we didn’t stand up for them when we needed to.”

Congressman Gary Peters issued a press release taking credit for the reopening of the plant but neglecting to mention the concessions.

Maturen is among those organizing a rally at the UAW’s Solidarity House headquarters in Detroit October 16 to protest the new plan and show the “human face of auto workers” demonized in the media. Their leaflet [4] says, “Real solidarity isn’t tiered!” Rank and filers are designing buttons with messages like “Why do all of your solutions involve my money?”

Dan Theisen, an electrician at Lake Orion, circulated his thoughts on the subject:

An injury to one—An injury to all!

An injury to 40%… Just business.

It’s A Hard Rain Thats Gonna Fall

The Rustbelt’s Radical Civil War Sesquicentennial Survey Begins!

This November will see the midterm elections, it will also be the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s election and the Southern secession crisis. The sesquicentennial of the Civil War, far and away the most important period in the life of this country, is upon us.  Expect many memorials, living history exhibitions, celebrations, symposiums and events of all kinds to mark the anniversary (I have a long standing commitment to take my young nephew to the 2013 Gettysburg reenactment).  How we view that period in our history, which we’ll say begins with the crisis in Kansas of 1854 and ends with the Compromise of 1877 and the collapse and reversal of Reconstruction, has changed dramatically over the years.  Each fifty years a new generation looks at those days of conflict, of liberation and, finally, of defeat from their own perspective.  This is quite natural of course, but it also provides a telling glimpse into the view the nation has of itself, the official nation and the critical nation, the competing nations.

The last big anniversary was in the 1960s during the struggle against Jim Crow and the very real consequences of Reconstrcution’s failure.  That period saw a flowering of Civil War scholarship and welcome revisionism.  Expect much, unwelcome revisionism, to be made of Obama’s Presidency this time around; though the social conflict in this country may belie the Progress We, As A Nation, Have Made business.  I am a radical Civil War nerd as readers of this blog will have picked up with a knowing chuckle.  Since I was ten and asked for a subscription of Civil War Times magazine until now, my interest only grows as I learn more. In France comrades get to wax on, along with so much else, about the san culotte stalking the aristocrats in the streets of Paris and singing La Marseillaise, here we get to talk about armed former slaves marching into Charleston singing John Brown’s Body.  A comrade has to have something to hang their hat on when they swim, half digested, in the belly of the beast.

This is our Revolution; imperfect, glorious, incomplete, explosive, half-hearted, contradictory and confused and, most importantly for our purposes, even now unfinished business.  It is simply impossible to understand what this nation is and how it became without understanding its greatest conflict and I am convinced that all future conflicts, dare I say revolutions, will make reference to it and, in some ways, unfold beneath its shadow.  So expect an abnormal, and admittedly irregular, amount of inexpert Civil War posts over the next period – a sort of Civil War survey for radicals and reds.  I welcome and invite any guest contributions and will undoubtedly be posting some uncovered esoterica of interest limited to real heads.  This being a US Marxist blog, I figure that just comes with the territory.

We’ll say we started the project with the previous post, but begin officially today and mark early October.  The time of year in 1855 when John Brown, our failed, but every bit as potent Spartacus, first arrived in Kansas to join his sons in the struggle to win the state from slavery.  Brown whose legacy evoked Eugene Debs to ask/demand, “And who will be the John Brown of wage slavery?”  From a certain perspective that remains the question today. But we wont begin with Brown, we’ll start at the end of the war in the summer of 1865, before the promise of emancipation was replaced by a re-invigorated white supremacy, before Reconstruction and before its fall.  Much must have seemed possible, because it was.

Written in response to his former owner’s request that he rejoin him in Tennessee from which he fled during the war, this brilliant response dictated by a man only recently chattel, Jourdan Anderson then living in Ohio, says as much as any document of the true nature of the revolutionary upheaval that was the American Civil War.  It should be required reading in our public schools.  The destruction of the chattel system in the South was only one of the consequences of that period; its most glorious, but not its only.  For a moment, a brief moment, the ‘bottom rail on top now, massa.’

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To my old master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.

Sir,

I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than any body else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in a better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particulary what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy. The folks here call her Mrs. Anderson, and the children Milly, Jane, and Grundy go to school and are learning well. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves down in Tennesssee.” The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshall-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for 32 years, and Mandy 20 years. At 25 dollars a month for me, and 2 dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,608. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adam’s Express, in care of V. Winters Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the Good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Surely, there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die, if it comes to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when your were shooting at me.

From you old servant,

Jourdan Anderson

“Ferro Iis Libertas Perveniet”

This is the medal given to nearly two hundred black soldiers in General Butler’s Army of the James. Inscribed in Latin “Ferro Iis Libertas Perveniet” means “Freedom will be theirs by the sword.”  General Butler began the war as a Democrat and a political appointee.  While his generalship was mediocre at best, he developed into a Radical Republican.  Much of his change is attributed to the influence the actions of the black troops under his command.  After the war as a member of congress he sponsored the most far-reaching anti-racist legislation of the Reconstruction era; the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act) and, with Republican Senator Charles Sumner, the Civil Rights Act of 1875.  The latter was over-turned with the collapse of Reconstruction.

The black regiments in the Army of the James included the 7th, 8th, 9th, 45th, 4th, 6th, 5th, 36th, 89th, 1st, 22nd  and 37th U.S.C.T. and fought with distinction at Fort Harrison, Chaffin’s Farms (where 14 Colored Troops won the medal of honor), New Market Heights and on this day, October 7th, in 1864 on Darby Town Road.  Many hundred fell and thousands were wounded in the bitter campaign below Richmond in the waning days of the war.  For Colored Troops no quarter was received and little given.  The 5th United States Colored Troops was raised in Ohio early in the process of black recruitment, of the 550 members of the 5th that went to battle at Chaffin’s Farm 146 years ago this week, 85 were killed and 248 wounded, in addition to 9 officers wounded.

Above is one of those 5th USCT warriors who received the Medal of Honor at Chaffin’s Farm, Powhatan Beatty of Cincinnati, Ohio (my home town).  He took command of his company after all the officers were killed or wounded leading them in the day’s fierce combat.  After the war he returned to Cincinnati where he lived at Serman Avenue and McNeal Street in Norwood. Originally from Richmond, Virginia where he would return to fight to overthrow the system from which he once fled, this freedom fighter was a cabinetmaker, janitor, a porter on a steamboat and a semi-professional actor and playwright who once appeared before Frederick Douglass.  A working class hero of black liberation.  Freedom will be theirs by the sword, indeed.

Goodbye Comrade Tiziano Bagarolo

I first met Tiziano at an international conference 13 years ago, since then we met a couple more times at conferences, in the mean time we exchanged many emails and articles, mostly on our mutual interest of Marxism and ecology and jazz.  His life was lived in service to a genuinely communist project; a fighter not, as per Trotsky, afraid ‘…to swim against the stream in the deep conviction that the new historic flood will carry them to the other shore.  Not all will reach that shore, many will drown, but to participate in this movement with open eyes and with an intense will – only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being!’  Tiziano was such a ‘thinking being.’

The link on his name is his blog, Red & Green (long in my blog roll) where he continued his pioneering work on ecology which he began many years before the movement caught up with him, it is still catching up with him.  Sadly, his books on the subject are unavailable in English, particularly his work on the ecological undertakings of the early Soviet Union.  I know Italian comrades and friends will miss his voice and his hands, as will those who knew and worked with him around the world.  Here is the notice of the Communist Workers’ Party (PCL), of which he was a leading member, on the sad news of his untimely passing at only 54.  I hope comrades will take the time to paste the article into a translating service and get a sense of Tiziano’s political life and work.  The Coltrane is for Tiziano.  Always too early, never too late; farewell comrade.  Rustbelt.

Tiziano Bagarolo, Presente!

E’ scomparso il compagno Tiziano Bagarolo

(7 Ottobre 2010)
Tiziano

E’ con grandissimo dolore che informiamo i compagni e le compagne del partito, i/le suoi/e simpatizzanti e tutti i compagni e la compagne che seguono la nostra attività, della repentina, inaspettata e assolutamente precoce scomparsa del compagno Tiziano Bagarolo, membro della Direzione del PCL e validissimo teorico marxista, in particolare, ma certamente non solo, sul terreno della questione ambientale.

Il compagno Tiziano è morto a causa di quella che è stata diagnosticata come un’ipertrofia cardiaca, poco dopo essersi sentito male in un supermercato ed essere stato ricoverato d’urgenza in un ospedale di Milano, nella mattina di mercoledì 29 settembre. Incredibili intoppi burocratici hanno fatto sì che i parenti di Tiziano, che vivono nel Veneto e in Friuli, e tramite loro noi, siamo stati informati solo oggi del decesso.

E’ una grave colpo per il nostro partito e per il Coordinamento per la Rifondazione della Quarta Internazionale.

Ritorneremo più ampiamente sulla figura di Tiziano Bagarolo, sulla sua militanza e il suo contributo al marxismo, limitandoci qui ad una prima esposizione.

Nato 54 anni fa in una famiglia proletaria della provincia di Pordenone, Tiziano si accostò giovanissimo al marxismo rivoluzionario, aderendo in Friuli alla gruppo locale dei Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari (GCR), l’allora sezione Italiana del Segretariato Unificato della Quarta Internazionale. Fin da allora sviluppò, con altri compagni, posizioni critiche rispetto all’adattamento dei GCR alle forze centriste e movimentiste allora imperanti nell’estrema sinistra. Dopo la crisi di tale sinistre con il 1977, che si riverberò sui GCR, Tiziano fu uno dei protagonisti della loro ricostruzione come Lega Comunista Rivoluzionaria. Si trasferì allora a Milano, diventando funzionario dell’organizzazione, componente del suo Ufficio Politico e, per un periodo abbastanza lungo, direttore del suo giornale quindicinale Bandiera Rossa. Gli impegni di funzionario gli impedirono di completare gli studi universitari classici alla statale di Milano, in cui pure eccelleva. Terminato l’impegno gravoso e sottopagato di funzionario, pur restando dirigente nazionale della LCR, Tiziano trovò lavoro come istitutore presso il Convitto Longoni di Milano, struttura pubblica di insegnamento con annesso collegio. A questo suo lavoro dedicò, per circa 25 anni, tanta parte del suo impegno, in un rapporto umano ed educativo profondo con i suoi allievi.

Nell’attività politica Tiziano fu sempre sia un militante che un teorico, che passava dal volantinaggio mattutino davanti ad una fabbrica ad un saggio di analisi dell’AntiDhuring di Engels o dalla vendita del giornale di partito in una manifestazione ad una disamina delle più recenti teorie sull’evoluzione o sull’ambiente. Su questo tema particolare divenne un profondissimo teorico marxista, certo il migliore in Italia (e non solo), sapendo sempre combinare interesse a e attenzione alle novità analitiche e scientifiche e fermezza del metodo e del progetto marxista.

Questo si può vedere nel volume “Marxismo ed ecologia”, pubblicato dalle Nuove Edizioni Internazionali negli anni ’80, che pur nel suo grande significato non rappresenta che una piccola parte del contributo di Tiziano. Contributo che si esprimeva anche su una importante e raffinata rivista storico-teorica, indipendente nel quadro della sinistra, intitolata “GIANO” di cui egli fu a lungo componente del comitato di redazione.

La sua coerenza di marxista rivoluzionari trotskysta lo spinse, di fronte al processo della nascita di Rifondazione Comunista, ad unirsi al nucleo della precedente Lega Operaia Rivoluzionaria (confluita nella LCR nel 1984 e da allora sua minoranza di sinistra) ed ad altri pochi compagni, per difendere la prospettiva di un ingresso in tale partito riformista di sinistra, finalizzato alla costruzione nel tempo, per rottura organizzativa da tale forza, di un vero partito operaio marxista rivoluzionario; ciò in contrasto con la maggioranza della LCR (diventata nel frattempo Associazione Quarta Internazionale- AQI), che concepiva il futuro della sua azione in termini di pressione politica sui dirigenti riformisti apparentemente più radicali, sperando in una evoluzione sostanzialmente spontanea del PRC.

Furono quindi gli anni prima della Tendenza Leninista dell’AQI, poi, con la separazione da quest’ultima, della rivista Proposta e dei/lle compagni/e organizzati intorno ad essa, infine dell’Associazione Marxista Rivoluzionaria (AMR).

Di Proposta Tiziano fu al contempo direttore politico, redattore capo e grafico, utilizzando anche su questo terreno le sue peculiari capacità.

Dell’AMR Tiziano fu, per quasi tutto il suo percorso, componente della segreteria nazionale, contribuendo in maniera significativa alla elaborazione della sua linea politica, che certo portò ad alcuni significativi successi (basti pensare che quando il PCL nacque, nonostante alcune traversie finali dell’AMR, aveva più di 10 volte il numero di militanti del nucleo iniziale raccoltosi, in rottura con l’AQI, intorno alla rivista Proposta).

Su Proposta Tiziano Bagarolo scrisse moltissimi articoli di grande valore politico e teorico. Ci permettiamo di ricordarne solo tre. Una analisi storica dell’esperienza dell’”Unidad Popular” di Allende in Cile e della sua tragica sconfitta nei primi anni ’70 e, collegato ad esso, una storia del MIR, la principale organizzazione, centrista, dell’estrema sinistra cilena in quegli anni (i due testi sono stati recentemente ripubblicati in opuscolo dalla nostra sezione di Firenze) e un saggio sulla questione ecologica nella rivoluzione russa, eccezionale nella informazione e nell’analisi di una pagina nascosta della storia, cioè la battaglia ambientalista di Lenin e dei bolscevichi al potere (distrutta dal successivo falso efficentismo dello stalinismo).

La nascita del PCL fu il coronamento della battaglia politica pluridecennale di Tiziano. E anche se aveva scelto di avere un ruolo leggermente meno prominente che negli anni di Proposta o dell’AMR, Tiziano ne restava sempre uno dei principali dirigenti, come componente della sua direzione nazionale ed animatore di tante battaglie particolari , ma centrali, come, ultimamente, quella dei referendum in difesa del carattere pubblico dell’acqua.

Né mancò mai a Tiziano l’aspetto dell’impegno non solo internazionalista, ma anche internazionale.

Così negli anni ’90 fu delegato alle conferenze internazionali della Opposizione Trotskista Internazionale (OTI) cui l’AMR aderiva; e, al momento della confluenza politico-organizzativa che diede vita al Coordinamento per la Rifondazione della Quarta Internazionale (CRQI), Tiziano fu uno dei delegati al suo congresso costitutivo, svoltosi a Buenos Aires nel 2004.

Moltissimo altro ci sarebbe da dire su Tiziano. Ci limitiamo ad aggiungere solo che le capacità e la correttezza di Tiziano gli hanno procurato il rispetto e la sima non solo di tutti i/le militanti e gli/le iscritti/e al PCL, ma dei compagni e compagne di tutta la variegata sinistra che lo ha conosciuto.

Da atei militanti, come era ovviamente Tiziano, sappiamo che la morte rappresenta un punto finale e che non vi è nulla per qualsiasi essere umano oltre ad essa.

Oggi noi siamo a lutto per quello che abbiamo perso, come persone e come partito, con la scomparso del compagno Tiziano Bagarolo. Su alcuni terreni sarà assolutamente insostituibile.

Noi inchiniamo le nostre bandiere a lutto, ne preserveremo la memoria e l’importante contributo al marxismo, e saremo fedeli al metodo politico, di fermezza sui principi e flessibilità nella tattica per realizzare le condizioni della rivoluzione socialista, che Tiziano ha contribuito a dare al nostro partito.

Comitato Esecutivo del Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori

I funerali di Tiziano si svolgeranno, in forma strettamente familiare, in Friuli. A Milano lo saluteremo al momento della partenza del feretro per Pordenone. Al momento, in attesa di alcune decisioni dei familiari, non siamo ancora in grado di indicare luogo, giorno ed ora precisa. Appena possibile, presumibilmente nella giornata di domani, giovedì, invieremo la comunicazione precisa.

Comitato Esecutivo del Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori

LGBT Suicides: The Fire This Time

I don’t know whether to call it a rash or not, but the recent reporting of the suicides of young gay men should certainly raise alarm bells.  I would be interested to know if this was a cluster or just an average that is finding the light of day because of the higher profile of some of these tragedies.  In any case, it stands in stark contrast to the popular version that official Hollywood, the mainstream Gay movement and the present administration currently pedal where gays are widely accepted and on their way (if not in this election cycle, the next) to full equality.

It was only a few years ago where films like Boys Don’t Cry, a surprising breakthrough at the time, were out there setting some of the tone.  The years of demonization combined with the heroic and radical movement of the 80s and early nineties (ACT-UP and many others) forced the issues.  The issues (well, some of them), surprise surprise, have been appropriated, including, hesitatingly to be sure, by leading elements of the Democratic Party. DADT?  Don’t ask.

But it is in Hollywood that has become the epicenter of the zeitgeist of a (catered) coming out party this last decade.  The gay and lesbian market is now a normal consideration for advertisers; capitalism is loathe to turn down a new market.  And with the market comes all things base, venal and superfluous.  Now the gay experience has, not in all cases for sure, been reduced to slightly sassy banter and an obsession with what people are wearing à la Sex In The City or a hyper-sexuality (though mostly devoid of actual sex) designed to make straight men squirm (for ‘comedic’ effect) à la Brüno.  The latter likes to see itself as “challenging” when it only reinforces, while the former sees itself as promoting and “humanizing” when it really neuters (or spays as the case may be) gay experience(s).  We remain, with a few salutary exceptions, in the realm of caricature (and crude caricature at that) in the public mind melded by the mass media.

It should also forcefully point out to those of us who are activists the seriousness with which we should take such attitudes that still pervade too much of our culture when they apparent themselves in our movement and organizations (especially in our own revolutionary outfits), in workplaces, our unions, neighborhoods, etc.  Any environment which makes life deemed too difficult for LGBT folks to speak, work, study, date, fuck, love, to live for Christ’s sake, is an environment not worthy of any members of our species; it’s not a society for human beings as we really are.  If we can’t find ourselves standing forthrightly with LGBT brothers and sisters against intimidations and prejudice then what right do we have to claim to speak for any of the oppressed, the oppressed class entirely included (which, incidentally and of course, includes many millions of gay brothers and sisters)?

I think back to the gay jokes and ribbing and sometimes worse that were everywhere in my junior high and high school in those years when ACT-UP was first challenging the country.  To my great regret and shame; sometimes engaged in by a young and ignorant me as well.  What kind of damage was done? I don’t know, but I am sure it was done.  My god; I’m a straight guy, and white at that, and I know how derision and general teenage evilness directed my way left me in a torrent of pubescent doubt and self-hate; not entirely recovered from, I might add.  For gay and lesbians of my generation and before, and so painfully obvious, the latest one as well, such things carry enormous weight and consequences; socially, economically, psychologically, with their family and friends.  It can and does kill.  It may kill suddenly; suicide or murder, or it may kill slowly; the accumulated daily violence and humiliations afforded to the oppressed in too great a measure.

One of my responses to the posting of the video that led to the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi was just how normal we think such an egregious invasion of privacy has become; even our private lives are to be publicly consumed, along with the increasingly widespread commodification of sex and sexuality in all of its form (along with every decent thing we humans might get up to).  A maelström of false-consciousness and exchange values where ‘all that is sacred is profaned’.  A multiplicitously sick, alienated and enslaved society.  Oh that we could say, with confidence and in chorus, never again.  But it will happen; again and again.  Rights may be won, they have been won, and with enough struggle more can be won (a reminder- rights can also be taken away); but liberation requires something more and something quite different.

The roots of this cancer run deep.  Back before capitalism surely, but as it lives now, this bigotry is a thoroughly modern problem.  One based in the family, gender roles and labor divisions developed and developing under capitalism.  This is not to reduce LGBT oppression to some sort of political economy of the family, the web of our enslavement is so much more complexly weaved than that.  However, as with all things, roots matter.  Weeds can be trimmed, but to kill them they must be rendered from the earth; root, stem and branch.