Leon Trotsky: The Workers’ Militia And Its Opponents (1934)

As we’ve been going through the always inspiring and illuminating writings of Bolshevik revolutionary and founder of the Red Army Leon Trotsky searching for works that can illustrate the need for multiracial union-based workers defense squads to beat back the rising tide of fascism in the US, we have been learning and re-learning so much that it is amazing.  So many of the 1930s-era arguments against the creation of a workers militia to smash fascism are being repeated almost word-for-word every day on Twitter!  We know that in the USA, thanks to advertising and television and its inducement of short-attention-spans in way too many workers here, the idea that something written about political events of 70 years ago could remain relevant in 2017 seems absurd.  You want “NEW!” and “IMPROVED!” political science, right?  But just as the works of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are still considered to be among the finest examples of scientific writing on their subjects to date, so it goes with political science.  And as it is absolutely necessary for a doctor or a physicist to study the history of developments in her field of expertise in order to more fully understand the modern approaches and discoveries, in political science we can obtain a wealth of vitally important information from the writings of the top revolutionaries of the past two centuries and apply that information directly to today’s political challenges.  It may come as a surprise, but the fundamental class structure of a capitalist state hasn’t changed much in the past 175 years or so: we still have the working class majority, a smaller petit-bourgeoisie (middle class small business owners) and a relatively tiny capitalist class to whom the majority of the national wealth is funneled year after year.  The actors change but the roles do not; petit-bourgeois politicians and businesspeople have the same complaints and roles in 2017 as they had in 1917 – with relatively minor differences in scenery and plot.  It’s like seeing a modern production of a Mozart opera, in which the clothing of the 1700s is replaced by hip-hop fashion: it looks very different but the music and lyrics remain the same.  And we are sure that our very perceptive readers will find themselves surprised to hear Trotsky, writing in 1934 (in this case) making incisive comments which, if the names of the old politicians were replaced with current US politicians, you would imagine the article was written last week.

In political science, the famous warning that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” carries full force.  We assure those of you who laugh at us for using the events of 1934 as a warning in 2017 that you ignore these works at your peril.  The options for modern politicians – working class, petit-bourgeois and bourgeois – have NOT changed in the past century.  If the working class does not overthrow capitalism in 2017, and the fascists are allowed to grow, the result will be largely the same as what occurred in Germany in 1933.  The USA has a whole slew of would-be Hitlers jockeying to reprise his role in the 2017 production of “The Collapse of Bourgeois Democracy”.  The working class has its own contingent of feckless, class-collaborationist fake-socialists and pro-capitalist trade union “leaders” eager to show what they can bring to the roles of Scheidemann and Noske.  Today’s anarchists have their Bakunins, Berkmans, Makhnos and Goldmans; and the revolutionary socialists have their own up-and-coming Stalins, Kollontais, Lenins, Maos, Guevaras, and Trotskys.  All of these actors will be vying for the hearts and minds of the masses of workers, without whom there will be no play. 

“History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We do not intend to fall into the same traps that our ancestors fell into; more than that – we do not intend to lead YOU into those same traps YOUR ancestors fell into!   So that we do not do so, we must study the development of the various class forces in the past who were faced with essentially the same collapse of bourgeois democracy and essentially the same rise of fascism we are facing today around the capitalist world.  In Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Communist Party refused to make a united front with the Social Democrats and form armed workers brigades capable of smashing Hitler’s gangs, paving the way for the rise of Nazi Germany.  Fascism then rose in France as well, paving the political road to the wartime Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government.  Why did bourgeois democracy fail throughout Europe in the 1930s?  Was the rise of fascism inevitable?  Is it inevitable now?  By studying the historical record of the workers movement as it struggled to overcome the obstacles hurled into its path during the interwar period of 1918 -1939 we can answer these questions. These tragic errors of the 20th century need not – and must not be – repeated in the 21st century.

— IWPCHI

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THE WORKERS’ MILITIA AND ITS OPPONENTS

From Whither France?, 1934

To struggle, it is necessary to conserve and strengthen the instrument and the means of struggle — organizations, the press, meetings, etc.  Fascism [in France] threatens all of that directly and immediately.  It is still too weak for the direct struggle for power, but it is strong enough to attempt to beat down the working-class organizations bit by bit, to temper its bands in its attacks, and to spread dismay and lack of confidence in their forces in the ranks of the workers.

Fascism finds unconscious helpers in all those who say that the “physical struggle” is impermissible or hopeless, and demand of Doumergue the disarmament of his fascist guard.  Nothing is so dangerous for the proletariat, especially in the present situation, as the sugared poison of false hopes.  Nothing increases the insolence of the fascists so much as “flabby pacificism” on the part of the workers’ organizations.  Nothing so destroys the confidence of the middle classes in the working-class as temporizing, passivity, and the absence of the will to struggle.

Le Populaire [the Socialist Party paper] and especially l’Humanite [the Communist Party newspaper] write every day:

“The united front is a barrier against fascism”;
“the united front will not permit…”;
“the fascists will not dare”, etc.

These are phrases.  It is necessary to say squarely to the workers, Socialists, and Communists: do not allow yourselves to be lulled by the phrases of superficial and irresponsible journalists and orators.  It is a question of our heads and the future of socialism.  It is not that we deny the importance of the united front.  We demanded it when the leaders of both parties were against it.  The united front opens up numerous possibilities, but nothing more.  In itself, the united front decides nothing.  Only the struggle of the masses decides.  The united front will reveal its value when Communist detachments will come to the help of Socialist detachments and vice versa in the case of an attack by the fascist bands against Le Populaire or l’Humanite.  But for that, proletarian combat detachments must exist and be educated, trained, and armed.  And if there is not an organization of defense, i.e., a workers’ militia, Le Populaire or l’Humanite will be able to write as many articles as they like on the omnipotence of the united front, but the two papers will find themselves defenseless before the first well-prepared attack of the fascists.

We propose to make a critical study of the “arguments” and the “theories” of the opponents of the workers’ militia who are very numerous and influential in the two working-class parties.

“We need mass self-defense and not the militia,” we are often told.

But what is this “mass self-defense” without combat organizations, without specialized cadres, without arms?  To give over the defense against fascism to unorganized and unprepared masses left to themselves would be to play a role incomparably lower than the role of Pontius Pilate.  To deny the role of the militia is to deny the role of the vanguard.  Then why a party?  Without the support of the masses, the militia is nothing.  But without organized combat detachments, the most heroic masses will be smashed bit by bit by the fascist gangs.  It is nonsense to counterpose the militia to self-defense. The militia is an organ of self-defense.

“To call for the organization of a militia,” say some opponents who, to be sure, are the least serious and honest, “is to engage in provocation.”

This is not an argument but an insult.  If the necessity for the defense of the workers’ organizations flows from the whole situation, how then can one not call for the creation of the militia?  Perhaps they mean to say that the creation of a militia “provokes” fascist attacks and government repression.  In that case, this is an absolutely reactionary argument.  Liberalism has always said to the workers that by their class struggle they “provoke” the reaction.

The reformists repeated this accusation against the Marxists, the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks.  These accusations reduced themselves, in the final analysis, to the profound thought that if the oppressed do not balk, the oppressors will not be obliged to beat them.  This is the philosophy of Tolstoy and Gandhi but never that of Marx and Lenin.  If l’Humanite wants hereafter to develop the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil by violence”, it should take for its symbol not the hammer and sickle, emblem of the October Revolution, but the pious goat, which provides Gandhi with his milk.

“But the arming of the workers is only opportune in a revolutionary situation, which does not yet exist.”

This profound argument means that the workers must permit themselves to be slaughtered until the situation becomes revolutionary.  Those who yesterday preached the “third period” do not want to see what is going on before their eyes. The question of arms itself has come forward only because the “peaceful”, “normal”, “democratic” situation has given way to a stormy, critical, and unstable situation which can transform itself into a revolutionary, as well as a counter-revolutionary, situation.  This alternative depends above all on whether the advanced workers will allow themselves to be attacked with impunity and defeated bit by bit or will reply to every blow by two of their own, arousing the courage of the oppressed and uniting them around their banner.  A revolutionary situation does not fall from the skies.  It takes form with the active participation of the revolutionary class and its party.

The French Stalinists now argue that the militia did not safeguard the German proletariat from defeat.  Only yesterday they completely denied any defeat in Germany and asserted that the policy of the German Stalinists was correct from beginning to end.  Today, they see the entire evil in the German workers’ militia (Roter Frontkampferbund) [i.e., Red Front Fighters: Communist-led militia banned by the social- democratic government after the Berlin May Day riots of 1929].  Thus, from one error they fall into a diametrically opposite one, no less monstrous. The militia, in itself, does not settle the question.  A correct policy is necessary. Meanwhile,the policy of Stalinism in Germany (“social fascism is the chief enemy”, the split in the trade unions, the flirtation with nationalism, putschism) fatally led to the isolation of the proletarian vanguard and to its shipwreck.  With an utterly worthless strategy, no militia could have saved the situation.

It is nonsense to say that, in itself, the organization of the militia leads to adventures, provokes the enemy, replaces the political struggle by physical struggle, etc.  In all these phrases, there is nothing but political cowardice.

The militia, as the strong organization of the vanguard, is in fact the surest defense against adventures, against individual terrorism, against bloody spontaneous explosions.

The militia is at the same time the only serious way of reducing to a minimum the civil war that fascism imposes upon the proletariat.  Let the workers, despite the absence of a “revolutionary situation”, occasionally correct the “papa’s son” patriots in their own way, and the recruitment of new fascist bands will become incomparably more difficult.

But here the strategists, tangled in their own reasoning, bring forward against us still more stupefying arguments. We quote textually:

“If we reply to the revolver shots of the fascists with other revolver shots,” writes l’Humanite of October 23 [1934], “we lose sight of the fact that fascism is the product of the capitalist regime and that in fighting against fascism it is the entire system which we face.”

It is difficult to accumulate in a few lines greater confusion or more errors. It is impossible to defend oneself against the fascists because they are — “a product of the capitalist regime”. That means, we have to renounce the whole struggle, for all contemporary social evils are “products of the capitalist system”.

When the fascists kill a revolutionist, or burn down the building of a proletarian newspaper, the workers are to sigh philosophically: “Alas! Murders and arson are products of the capitalist system”, and go home with easy consciences. Fatalist prostration is substituted for the militant theory of Marx, to the sole advantage of the class enemy. The ruin of the petty bourgeoisie is, of course, the product of capitalism. The growth of the fascist bands is, in turn, a product of the ruin of the petty bourgeoisie. But on the other hand, the increase in the misery and the revolt of the proletariat are also products of capitalism, and the militia, in its turn, is the product of the sharpening of the class struggle. Why, then, for the “Marxists” of l’Humanite, are the fascist bands the legitimate product of capitalism and the workers’ militia the illegitimate product of — the Trotskyists? It is impossible to make head or tail of this.

“We have to deal with the whole system,” we are told.

How? Over the heads of human beings? The fascists in the different countries began with their revolvers and ended by destroying the whole “system” of workers’ organizations. How else to check the armed offensive of the enemy if not by an armed defense in order, in our turn, to go over to the offensive.

L’Humanite now admits defense in words, but only in the form of “mass self-defense”. The militia is harmful because, you see, it divides the combat detachments from the masses. But why then are there independent armed detachments among the fascists who are not cut off from the reactionary masses but who, on the contrary, arouse the courage and embolden those masses by their well-organized attacks? Or perhaps the proletarian mass is inferior in combative quality to the declassed petty bourgeoisie?

Hopelessly tangled, l’Humanite finally begins to hesitate: it appears that mass self-defense requires the creation of special “self-defense groups”. In place of the rejected militia, special groups or detachments are proposed. It would seem at first sight that there is a difference only in the name. Certainly, the name proposed by l’Humanite means nothing. One can speak of “mass self-defense” but it is impossible to speak of “self-defense groups” since the purpose of the groups is not to defend themselves but the workers’ organizations. However, it is not, of course, a question of the name. The “self-defense groups”, according to l’Humanite , must renounce the use of arms in order not to fall into “putschism”. These sages treat the working-class like an infant who must not be allowed to hold a razor in his hands.  Razors, moreover, are the monopoly, as we know, of the Camelots du Roi [French monarchists grouped around Charles Maurras’ newspaper, Action Francaise, which was violently anti-democratic], who are a legitimate “product of capitalism” and who, with the aid of razors, have overthrown the “system” of democracy.  In any case, how are the “self-defense groups” going to defend themselves against the fascist revolvers? “Ideologically”, of course. In other words: they can hide themselves.  Not having what they require in their hands, they will have to seek “self-defense” in their feet.  And the fascists will in the meanwhile sack the workers’ organizations with impunity.  But if the proletariat suffers a terrible defeat, it will at any rate not have been guilty of “putschism”.  This fraudulent chatter, parading under the banner of “Bolshevism”, arouses only disgust and loathing.

[NOTE: “The Third Period”: According to the Stalinist schema, this was the “final period of capitalism”, the period of its immediately impending demise and replacement by soviets. The period is notable for the Communists’ ultra-left and adventurist tactics, notably the concept of social-fascism.]

During the “third period”  of happy memory — when the strategists of l’Humanite were afflicted with barricade delirium, “conquered” the streets every day and stamped as “social fascist” everyone who did not share their extravagances — we predicted: “The moment these gentlemen burn the tips of their fingers, they will become the worst opportunists.”  That prediction has now been completely confirmed.  At a time when within the Socialist Party the movement in favor of the militia is growing and strengthening, the leaders of the so-called Communist Party run for the hose to cool down the desire of the advanced workers to organize themselves in fighting columns.  Could one imagine a more demoralizing or more damning work than this?

In the ranks of the Socialist Party sometimes this objection is heard: “A militia must be formed but there is no need of shouting about it.”

One can only congratulate comrades who wish to protect the practical side of the business from inquisitive eyes and ears.  But it would be much too naive to think that a militia could be created unseen and secretly within four walls.  We need tens, and later hundreds, of thousands of fighters.  They will come only if millions of men and women workers, and behind them the peasants, understand the necessity for the militia and create around the volunteers an atmosphere of ardent sympathy and active support.  Conspiratorial care can and must envelop only the technical aspect of the matter.  The political campaign must be openly developed, in meetings, factories, in the streets and on the public squares.

The fundamental cadres of the militia must be the factory workers grouped according to their place of work, known to each other and able to protect their combat detachments against the provocations of enemy agents far more easily and more surely than the most elevated bureaucrats.  Conspirative general staffs without an open mobilization of the masses will at the moment of danger remain impotently suspended in midair.  Every working-class organization has to plunge into the job.  In this question, there can be no line of demarcation between the working-class parties and the trade unions.  Hand in hand, they must mobilize the masses.  The success of the workers’ militia will then be fully assured.

“But where are the workers going to get arms” object the sober “realists” — that is to say, frightened philistines — “the enemy has rifles, cannon, tanks, gas, and airplanes. The workers have a few hundred revolvers and pocket knives.”

In this objection, everything is piled up to frighten the workers.  On the one hand, our sages identify the arms of the fascists with the armament of the state.  On the other hand, they turn towards the state and demand that it disarm the fascists. Remarkable logic!  In fact, their position is false in both cases.  In France, the fascists are still far from controlling the state.  On February 6, they entered in armed conflict with the state police.  That is why it is false to speak of cannon and tanks when it is a matter of the immediate armed struggle against the fascists. The fascists, of course, are richer than we.  It is easier for them to buy arms.  But the workers are more numerous, more determined, more devoted, when they are conscious of a firm revolutionary leadership.

In addition to other sources, the workers can arm themselves at the expense of the fascists by systematically disarming them.

This is now one of the most serious forms of the struggle against fascism.  When workers’ arsenals will begin to stock up at the expense of the fascist arms depots, the banks and trusts will be more prudent in financing the armament of their murderous guards.  It would even be possible in this case — but in this case only — that the alarmed authorities would really begin to prevent the arming of the fascists in order not to provide an additional sources of arms for the workers.  We have known for a long time that only a revolutionary tactic engenders, as a by-product, “reforms” or concessions from the government.

But how to disarm the fascists?  Naturally, it is impossible to do so with newspaper articles alone.  Fighting squads must be created.  An intelligence service must be established.  Thousands of informers and friendly helpers will volunteer from all sides when they realize that the business has been seriously undertaken by us.  It requires a will to proletarian action.

But the arms of the fascists are, of course, not the only source.  In France, there are more than one million organized workers.  Generally speaking, this number is small.  But it is entirely sufficient to make a beginning in the organization of a workers’ militia.  If the parties and unions armed only a tenth of their members, that would already be a force of 100,000 men.  There is no doubt whatever that the number of volunteers who would come forward on the morrow of a “united front” appeal for a workers’ militia would far exceed that number.  The contributions of the parties and unions, collections and voluntary subscriptions, would within a month or two make it possible to assure the arming of 100,000 to 200,000 working-class fighters.  The fascist rabble would immediately sink its tail between its legs.  The whole perspective of development would become incomparably more favorable.

To invoke the absence of arms or other objective reasons to explain why no attempt has been made up to now to create a militia, is to fool oneself and others. The principle obstacle — one can say the only obstacle — has its roots in the conservative and passive character of the leaders of the workers’ organizations.  The skeptics who are the leaders do not believe in the strength of the proletariat.  They put their hope in all sorts of miracles from above instead of giving a revolutionary outlet to the energies pulsing below.  The socialist workers must compel their leaders to pass over immediately to the creation of the workers’ militia or else give way to younger, fresher forces.

A strike is inconceivable without propaganda and without agitation.  It is also inconceivable without pickets who, when they can, use persuasion, but when obliged, use force.  The strike is the most elementary form of the class struggle which always combines, in varying proportions, “ideological” methods with physical methods.  The struggle against fascism is basically a political struggle which needs a militia just as the strike needs pickets.  Basically, the picket is the embryo of the workers’ militia.  He who thinks of renouncing “physical” struggle must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without flesh.

Following the splendid phrase of the great military theoretician Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means.  This definition also fully applies to civil war.  It is impermissable to oppose one to the other since it is impossible to check at will the political struggle when it transforms itself, by force of inner necessity, into a political struggle.

The duty of a revolutionary party is to foresee in time the inescapability of the transformation of politics into open armed conflict, and with all its forces to prepare for that moment just as the ruling classes are preparing.

The militia detachments for defense against fascism are the first step on the road to the arming of the proletariat, not the last. Our slogan is:

“Arm the proletariat and the revolutionary peasants!”

The workers’ militia must, in the final analysis, embrace all the toilers.  To fulfill this program completely would be possible only in a workers’ state into whose hands would pass all the means of production and, consequently, also all the means of destruction — i.e., all the arms and the factories which produce them.

However, it is impossible to arrive at a workers’ state with empty hands.  Only political invalids like Renaudel can speak of a peaceful, constitutional road to socialism. The constitutional road is cut by trenches held by the fascist bands. There are not a few trenches before us.  The bourgeoisie will not hesitate to resort to a dozen coups d’etat aided by the police and the army, to prevent proletariat from coming to power.

[NOTE: Pierre Renaudel (1871-1935): Prior to WWI, socialist leader Jean Jaures’ righthand man and editor of l’Humanite. During the war, a right-wing social patriot. In the 1930s, he and Marcel Deat led revisionist “neo-socialist” tendency. Voted down at the July 1933 convention, this tendency split from the Socialist Party. After the fascist riots of February 6, 1934, most of the “neos” joined the Radical Party, the main party of French capitalism.]

A workers’ socialist state can be created only by a victorious revolution.

Every revolution is prepared by the march of economic and political development, but it is always decided by open armed conflicts between hostile classes.  A revolutionary victory can become possible only as a result of long political agitation, a lengthy period of education and organization of the masses.

But the armed conflict itself must likewise be prepared long in advance.

The advanced workers must know that they will have to fight and win a struggle to the death. They must reach out for arms, as a guarantee of their emancipation.

[Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p1   Corrected and emphasis added in bold type by IWPCHI]

 

Leon Trotsky: “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism” (1931)

The events of this past week in Charlottesville, VA have led us to call for the immediate formation of multiracial, union-based workers militias to smash the fascist threat now feeling the wind under its wings thanks to the support of the US’ new racist, immigrant-hating real-estate swindler president Donald “Andrew Johnson” Trump.

If the US Government is going to allow armed white supremacist scum to parade in the streets of US cities threatening to murder antifascist protestors then the working class must be organized to defend itself with the very same weaponry that is being brandished by the fascists.  We call for the immediate formation of  union-based workers defense guards.   Led by military vets who are union members these powerful workers battalions can harness the creative energy of the entire multiracial US working class to provide a reliable, trustworthy and  disciplined defense against the rise of the fascist scum, and can easily overwhelm any fascist mobilization that dares to make the mistake of attempting to march in the multiracial bastions of US trade unionism: our major US cities.

We are presenting the best revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist writings of the great revolutionary leaders of our movement who organized the global fight to smash fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.  It was not the belated Normandy invasion (undertaken only after it was clear that the Nazis would not defeat the USSR as the western imperialists had hoped) but the might of the USSR’s Red Army that crushed the Nazi hordes who tried and failed to overthrow the bureaucratically deformed Stalinist workers state in World War II.  The collapse of the Nazi Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1944 proved the inherent superiority of the socialist system – even one so poorly led as the Stalinist USSR was – on the battlefields of Eastern Europe, where the mightiest military force ever deployed by the capitalist world found itself overwhelmed by the superior organizational and economic power of socialism, backed by superior morale and internationalist ideals of global collective struggle to defend the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In this selection, Lenin’s right-hand man during the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the organizer and leader of the Red Army and leader of the anti-Stalinist Left Opposition in the Communist Party Leon Trotsky warns German communist workers in 1931 of the impending fascist coup that was bound to occur if the working class did not form an antifascist united front against Hitler and his Nazis.

Writing for the Bulletin of the Opposition in December of 1931, here is Trotsky’s analysis of the situation in Germany.  He accurately predicts that Hitler would provoke a civil war in and then come to power not through bourgeois-democratic means but through a coup.  He talks about the disastrous concept of voting for the “lesser evil” which is so sadly prevalent in the United States today; there is much here that will be food for thought for those who are serious about fighting fascism in 2017.  We hope you find this historical gem from the archives of Trotskyism to be helpful in answering your questions as to what must be done to smash fascism in the here and now.

— IWPCHI

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For a Workers’ United Front
Against Fascism

Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity, will depend for decades. If you place a ball on top of a pyramid, the slightest impact can cause it to roll down either to the left or to the right. That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces which would like the ball to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism. But it is not enough to want; one must know how. Let us calmly reflect once more: is the policy carried on at present by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany correct or incorrect?

What Does Hitler Want?

The fascists are growing very rapidly. The Communists are also growing but much more slowly. The growth at the extreme poles shows that the ball cannot maintain itself at the top of the pyramid. The rapid growth of the fascists signifies the danger that the ball may roll down toward the right. Therein lies an enormous danger.

Hitler emphasizes that he is against a coup d’état. In order to strangle democracy once and for all, he wants to come to power by no other route than the democratic road. Can we seriously believe this?

Of course, if the fascists could figure on obtaining an absolute majority of the votes at the next elections in a peaceful way, then they would perhaps even prefer this road. In reality, however, this road is unthinkable for them. It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such terrific contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow ceases to replace the ebb. This moment can arrive long before the fascists have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt for they will have nothing more to look for here. They will be forced to resort to an overturn.

But even apart from all this, the fascists are cut off from the democratic road. The immense growth of the political contradictions in the country, the stark brigands’ agitation of the fascists, will inevitably lead to a situation in which the closer the fascists approach a majority, the more heated the atmosphere will become and the more extensive the unfolding of the conflicts and struggles will be. With this perspective, civil war is absolutely inevitable. Consequently, the question of the seizure of power by the fascists will not be decided by vote, but by civil war, which the fascists are preparing and provoking.

Can we assume even for one minute that Hitler and his counselors do not realize and foresee this? That would mean to consider them blockheads. There is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy. But if Hitler is not unaware that the road to power leads through the most gruesome civil war, then it means that his speeches about the peaceful democratic road are only a cloak, that is, a stratagem. In that case, it is all the more necessary to keep one’s eyes open.

What Is Concealed Behind Hitler’s Stratagem?

His calculations are quite simple and obvious: he wants to lull his antagonists with the long-run perspective of the parliamentary growth of the Nazis in order to catch them napping and to deal them a deathblow at the right moment It is quite possible that Hitler’s courtesies to democratic parliamentarism may, moreover, help to set up some sort of coalition in the immediate future in which the fascists will obtain the most important posts and employ them in turn for their coup d’état. For it is entirely clear that the coalition, let us assume, between the Center and the fascists will not be a stage in the democratic solution of the question, but a step closer to the coup d’etat under conditions most favorable to the fascists.

We Must Plan According to the Shorter Perspective

All this means that even independently of the desires of the fascist general staff, the solution can intervene in the course Of the next few months, if not weeks. This circumstance is of tremendous importance in elaborating a correct policy. If we allow the fascists to seize power in two or three months, then the struggle against them next year will be much harder than in this. All revolutionary plans laid out for two, three, or five years in advance will prove to be only wretched and disgraceful twaddle, if the working class allows the fascists to gain power in the course of the next two, three, or five months. In the polity of revolutionary crises, the calculation of time is of just as decisive importance as it is in war operations.

Let us take another, more remote example for the clarification of our idea. Hugo Urbahns, who considers himself a “Left Communist” declares the German party bankrupt , politically done for, and proposes to create a new party. If Urbahns were right, it would mean that the victory of the fascists is certain. For, in order to create a new party, years are required (and there has been nothing to prove that the party of Urbahns would in any sense be better than Thälmann’s party: when Urbahns was at the head of the party, there were by no means fewer mistakes).

Yes, should the fascists really conquer power, that would mean not only the physical destruction of the Communist Party, but veritable political bankruptcy for it. An ignominious defeat in a struggle against bands of human rubbish – would never be forgiven the Communist International and its German section by the many-millioned German proletariat. The seizure of power by the fascists would therefore most probably signify the necessity of creating a new revolutionary party, and in all likelihood also a new International. That would be a frightful historical catastrophe. But to assume today that all this is unavoidable can be done only by genuine liquidators, those who under the mantle of hollow phrases are really hastening to capitulate like cravens in the face of the struggle and without a struggle. With this conception we Bolshevik-Leninists, who are called “Trotskyists” by the Stalinists, have nothing in common.

We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now, under the given conditions, in the coming months and weeks.

Thälmann Considers the Victory of Fascism Inevitable

A correct policy is necessary in order to achieve victory. That is, we need a policy appropriate to the present situation, to the present relationship of forces, and not to the situation that may develop in one, two, or three years, when the question of power will already have been decided for a long time.

The whole misfortune lies in the fact that the policy of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, proceeds from the recognition of the inevitability of a fascist victory. In fact, in the appeal for the “Red United Front” published on November 29, 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany proceeds from the idea that it is impossible to defeat fascism without first defeating the Social Democracy. The same idea is repeated in all possible shades in Thälmann’s article. Is this idea correct? On the historical scale it is unconditionally correct. But that does not at all mean that with its aid, that is, by simple repetition, one can solve the questions of the day. An idea, correct from the point of view of revolutionary strategy as a whole, is converted into a lie and at that into a reactionary lie, if it is not translated into the language of tactics. Is it correct that in order to destroy unemployment and misery it is first necessary to destroy capitalism? It is correct. But only the biggest blockhead can conclude from all this, that we do not have to fight this very day, with all of our forces, against the measures with whose aid capitalism is increasing the misery of the workers.

Can we expect that in the course of the next few months the Communist Party will defeat both the Social Democracy and fascism? No normal-thinking person who can read and calculate would risk such a contention. Politically, the question stands like this: Can we successfully repel fascism now, in the course of the next few months, that is, with the existence of a greatly weakened, but still (unfortunately) very strong Social Democracy? The Central Committee replies in the negative. In other words, Thälmann considers the victory of fascism inevitable.

Once Again: The Russian Experience

In order to express my thought as clearly and as concretely as possible I will come back once more to the experience with the Kornilov uprising. On August 26 (old style), 1917, General Kornilov led his Cossack corps and one irregular division against Petrograd. At the helm of power stood Kerensky, lackey of the bourgeoisie and three-quarters a confederate of Kornilov. Lenin was still in hiding because of the accusation that he was in the service of the Hohenzollerns. For the same accusation, I was at that time incarcerated in solitary confinement in Kresty Prison. How did the Bolsheviks proceed in this question? They also had a right to say: “In order to defeat the Korniloviad – we must first defeat the Kerenskiad.” They said this more than once, for it was correct and necessary for all the subsequent propaganda. But that was entirely inadequate for offering resistance to Kornilov on August 26, and on the days that followed, and for preventing him from butchering the Petrograd proletariat. That is why the Bolsheviks did not content themselves with a general appeal to the workers and soldiers to break with the conciliators and to support the red united front of the Bolsheviks. No, the Bolsheviks proposed the united front struggle to the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries and created together with them joint organizations of struggle. Was this correct or incorrect? Let Thälmann answer that. In order to show even more vividly how matters stood with the united front, I will cite the following incident: immediately upon my release after the trade unions had put up bail for me, I went directly to the Committee for National Defense, where I discussed and adopted decisions regarding the struggle against Kornilov with the Menshevik Dan and the Social Revolutionary Gotz [2], allies of Kerensky who had kept me in prison. Was this right or wrong? Let Remmele answer that.

Is Brüning the “Lesser Evil”?

The Social Democracy supports Brüning, votes for him, assumes responsibility for him before the masses-on the grounds that the Brüning government is the “lesser evil.” Die Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me – on the grounds that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself in particular demanded that the Communists vote for and support Brüning? We Marxists regard Brüning and Hitler, Braun included, as component parts of one and the same system. The question as to which one of them is the “lesser evil” has no sense, for the system we are fighting against needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution.

There are seven keys in the musical scale. The question as to which of these keys is “better” – do, re, or sol – is a nonsensical question. But the musician must know when to strike and what keys to strike. The abstract question of who is the lesser evil – Brüning or Hitler – is just as nonsensical. It is necessary to know which of these keys to strike. Is that clear? For the feeble-minded let us cite another example. When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a “lesser evil” in comparison with the revolver.

The misfortune consists precisely of the fact that the leaders of the German Communist Party have placed themselves on the same ground as the Social Democracy, only with inverted prefixes: the Social Democracy votes for Brüning, recognizing in him the lesser evil. The Communists, on the other hand, who refuse to trust either Braun or Brüning in any way (and that is absolutely the right way to act), go into the streets to support Hitler’s referendum, that is, the attempt of the fascists to overthrow Brüning. But by this they themselves have recognized in Hitler the lesser evil, for the victory of the referendum would not have brought the proletariat into power, but Hitler. To be sure, it is painful to have to argue over such ABC questions. It is sad, very sad indeed, when musicians like Remmele, instead of distinguishing between the keys, stamp with their boots on the keyboard.

It is Not a Question of the Workers Who Have Already Left the Social Democracy,
But of Those Who Still Remain With It

The thousands upon thousands of Noskes, Welses, and Hilferdings prefer, in the last analysis, fascism to Communism. [3] But for that they must once and for all tear themselves loose from the workers. Today this is not yet the case. Today the Social Democracy as a whole, with all its internal antagonisms, is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists. It is our task to take advantage of this conflict and not to unite the antagonists against us.

The front must now be directed against fascism. And this common front of direct struggle against fascism, embracing the entire proletariat, must be utilized in the struggle against the Social Democracy, directed as a flank attack, but no less effective for all that.

It is necessary to show by deeds a complete readiness to make a bloc with the Social Democrats against the fascists in all cases in which they will accept a bloc. To say to the Social Democratic workers: “Cast your leaders aside and join our “nonparty” united front” means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is-the struggle against fascism. There are and doubtless will be Social Democratic workers who are prepared to fight hand in hand with the Communist workers against the fascists, regardless of the desires or even against the desires of the Social Democratic organizations. With such progressive elements it is obviously necessary to establish the closest possible contact. At the present time, however, they are not great in number. The German worker has been raised in the spirit of organization and of discipline. This has its strong as well as its weak sides. The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped. We must help the Social Democratic workers in action – in this new and extraordinary situation – to test the value of their organizations and leaders at this time, when it is a matter of life and death for the working class.

We Must Force the Social Democracy into a Bloc Against the Fascists

The trouble is that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party there are many frightened opportunists. They have heard that opportunism consists of a love for blocs, and that is why they are against blocs. They do not understand the difference between, let us say, a parliamentary agreement and an ever-so-modest agreement for struggle in a strike or in defense of workers’ printshops against fascist bands.

Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party. The Anglo-Russian Committee was an impermissible type of bloc of two leaderships on one common political platform, vague, deceptive, binding no one to any action at all. The maintenance of this bloc at the time of the British General Strike, when the General Council assumed the role of strikebreaker, signified, on the part of the Stalinists, a policy of betrayal. [4]

No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother, and even with Noske and Grezesinsky. [5] On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.

It is necessary, without any delay, finally to elaborate a practical system of measures – not with the aim of merely “exposing” the Social Democracy (before the Communists), but with the aim of actual struggle against fascism. The question of factory defense organizations, of unhampered activity on the part of the factory councils, the inviolability of the workers’ organizations and institutions, the question of arsenals that may be seized by the fascists, the question of measures in the case of an emergency, that is, of the coordination of the actions of the Communist and the Social Democratic divisions in the struggle, etc., etc., must be dealt with in this program.

In the struggle against fascism, the factory councils occupy a tremendously important position. Here a particularly precise program of action is necessary. Every factory must become an anti-fascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions. It is necessary to have a map of the fascist barracks and all other fascist strongholds, in every city and in every district The fascists are attempting to encircle the revolutionary strongholds. The encirclers must be encircled. On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade-union organizations is not only permissible, but a duty. To reject this for reasons of “principle” (in reality because of bureaucratic stupidity, or what is still worse, because of cowardice) is to give direct and immediate aid to fascism.

A practical program of agreements with the Social Democratic workers was proposed by us as far back as September 1930 (The Turn in the Comintern and the German Situation), that is, a year and a quarter ago. What has the leadership undertaken in this direction? Next to nothing. The Central Committee of the Communist Party has taken up everything except that which constitutes its direct task. How much valuable, irretrievable time has been lost! As a matter of fact, not much time is left. The program of action must be strictly practical, strictly objective, to the point, without any of those artificial “claims,” without any reservations, so that every average Social Democratic worker can say to himself. what the Communists propose is completely indispensable for the struggle against fascism. On this basis, we must pull the Social Democratic workers along with us by our example, and criticize their leaders who will inevitably serve as a check and a brake. Only in this way is victory possible.

A Good Quotation From Lenin

The present-day epigones, that is, the thoroughly bad disciples of Lenin, like to cover up their shortcomings on every occasion that offers itself with quotations – often entirely irrelevant. For Marxists, the question is not decided by a quotation, but by means of the correct method. If one is guided by correct methods, it is not hard also to find suitable quotations. After I had drawn the above analogy with the Kornilov insurrection, I said to myself: We can probably find a theoretical elucidation of our bloc with the conciliators in the struggle against Kornilov, in Lenin. And here is what I actually found in the second part of Volume XIV of the Russian edition, in a letter from Lenin to the Central Committee, written at the beginning of September 1917:

“Even at the present time, we are not duty-bound to support the Kerensky government That would be unprincipled. It is asked: then we are not to fight against Kornilov? Of course we are. But that is not one and the same thing. There is a limit to this; it is being transgressed by many Bolsheviks who fail into ‘conciliationism’ and allow themselves to be driven by the current of events.

“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky; we are uncovering his weaknesses. The distinction is rather delicate, but highly important and must not be forgotten.

“What does the change of our tactics consist of after the Kornilov insurrection?

“In this, that we are varying the forms of struggle against Kerensky. Without diminishing our hostility to him even by one single note, without taking back one word from what we have said against him, without giving up the task of overthrowing Kerensky, we say: we must calculate the moment. We will not overthrow Kerensky at present. We approach the question of the struggle against him differently: by explaining the weaknesses and vacillations of Kerensky to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov).”

We are proposing nothing different. Complete independence of the Communist organization and press, complete freedom of Communist criticism, the same for the Social Democracy and the trade unions. Only contemptible opportunists can allow the freedom of the Communist Party to be limited (for example, as in the entrance into the Kuomintang). We are not of their number.

No retraction of our criticism of the Social Democracy. No forgetting of all that has been. The whole historical reckoning, including the reckoning for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg [6], will be presented at the proper time, just as the Russian Bolsheviks finally presented a general reckoning to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for the baiting, calumny, imprisonment and murder of workers, soldiers, and peasants.

But we presented our general reckoning to them two months after we had utilized the partial reckoning between Kerensky and Kornilov, between the “democrats” and the fascists – in order to drive back the fascists all the more certainly. Only thanks to this circumstance were we victorious.

When the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany adopts the position expressed in the quotation from Lenin cited above, the entire approach to the Social Democratic masses and the trade-union organizations will change at once: instead of the articles and speeches which are convincing only to those people who are already convinced without them, the agitators will find a common language with new hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. The differentiation within the Social Democracy will proceed at an increased pace. The fascists will soon feel that their task does not at all consist merely of defeating Brüning, Braun, and Wels, but of taking up the open struggle against the whole working class. On this plane, a profound differentiation win inevitably be produced within fascism. Only by this road is victory possible.

But it is necessary to desire this victory. In the meantime, there are among the Communist officials not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them. These creatures are very much inclined to spout ultraradical phrases beneath which is concealed a wretched and contemptible fatalism. “Without a victory over the Social Democracy, we cannot battle against fascism!” say such terrible revolutionists, and for this reason … they get their passports ready.

Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!

[Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm

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Postscript by IWPCHI:

Liberals and fake-socialists denigrate the revolutionary Trotskyists’ adherence to dialectical materialism, the scientific method of analyzing the class basis for every political movement which, if properly utilized in a Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist manner, enables us to predict – not perfectly, but with a high degree of accuracy – the roles which will be played by every political actor presently on the historical stage.  The apologists for bourgeois democracy, lovers of “common sense” laugh at us – but what bourgeois politician, Stalinist blowhard or social democrat in Germany or anywhere else in the world saw as clearly what the future would bring as did Trotsky?  He urged the Communist Party of Germany to abandon their idiotic Stalinist programme that equated the Social Democrats and the Nazis as one and the same; he urged the Communists to form a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis.  By the time the CP tried at the last minute to steer the ship of workers revolution away from the fascist shoals lying dead ahead it was too late.  The Stalinized Communist Party of Germany bears a large degree of the blame for the rise of Hitler;  the Stalinized Comintern’s zigzagging political programs of the 1920s and ’30s that had disoriented their party to such a degree had simultaneously created a breach in the working class forces which Hitler was able to bludgeon his way through, enabling his long rise to power.  If we are to successfully stop the rise of fascism in the US today, we must learn the hard lessons of the failure of the revolutionary workers parties to do so in Germany in the 1930s.  We, too can not count on the rise of fascism in the US to be a long, gradual ascent; fascism is far more prone to sudden leaps forward as we saw this past weekend in Charlottesville, VA.  The fascists have leaped far ahead of the level of development of the antifascist forces.  Unless we immediately begin to organize and build revolutionary socialist parties and workers defense brigades to smash the rising fascist threat, we might very well face the same dire penalty our revolutionary worker-ancestors faced in Germany in the 1930s.  Small, disorganized groups of even the bravest anti-fascist workers are no match for heavily-armed fascist killers backed by the cops, courts and government.  We need to organize the power of the entire multiracial US working class to stop the rise of fascism and to fight ultimately to overthrow the capitalist system which gives rise to the fascist gangs.  Once the working class is in power the fascists will be denied the ability to ever raise their heads again, just as the monarchists were never able to show their faces after the American Revolution.

Hero of the USSR, Sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko: Fascism – What It Is And How I Fought It

Soviet History: The Great Patriotic War
Lieutenant Liudmila Pavlichenko to the American People

From “Soviet Russia Today”; volume 11, number 6 (October 1942).

These simple, strong words of Liudmila Pavlichenko bring home to us in America the epic struggle that our great Russian allies are waging for us today. I wish you could hear them in Lieutenant Pavlichenko’s own ringing voice. I wish you could see that beautiful face with its warm brown eyes that glow with such love when she talks of her comrades that have fallen before Odessa and Sevastopol, that burn with such hatred when size talks about our enemies and their beastly deeds. I wish you could see hat sturdy, valiant figure—a figure that has been a shield to us. This girl has stood alone, in deadly danger, day after day from dawn till after dark, picking off our enemies—309 of them. Four times she has felt in her own flesh the steel of our enemy. Her wounds only stiffen her will. I wish you could feel the warm clasp of that firm hand whose unerring aim has meant so much to us. I wish you could see what happens when she pronounces the word Fritz.” Her whole being is filled with outrage against the monstrous crimes she has seen committed, and with the determination that unites her countrymen today in the flaming purpose to wipe the horrors that Hitlerism has brought on humanity forever from the earth.

Liudmila Pavlichenko knows that her visit here is a contribution to the winning of the war. But she does not feel very good about being safe and comfortable over here while her comrades keep on fighting. And I am afraid she does not feel very good about our part in the war. She knows it is our war. She knows that the heroic defenders of Stalingrad are fighting for us as well as for themselves, that their defeats are our defeats, their victories our victories. But she is not sure we know this. We must help to make her visit here worth while—these precious weeks she is spending away from the fighting front where she feels that she should be. We can do that first and foremost by multiplying n hundredfold our efforts toward the immediate opening of a Second Front—the only way we can discharge our debt to our allies, to ourselves, to the future. We can do it, each one of us, by multiplying a hundredfold our efforts in. whatever sphere of work we are making our contribution to the war. Not many of us are called upon for as difficult a task as Liudmila Pavhichenko’s. Let us dedicate ourselves to winning the war as wholly as she and her people have done.

We salute you, Liudmila Pavlichenko, for all that you have done and will do in our common cause. The strength and inspiration we draw from your presence among us will help each one of us to be a better fighter against the enemies of mankind. Your visit here, with your fellow—heroes, Lieutenant Pchelintsev and Lieutenant Krasavchenko, is a new link in the friendship between our two countries which is so essential to winning the war and building an enduring peace. To your victory—and ours!

JESSICA SMITH

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You ask me first of all to say something about the urgency of the Second Front. Of course there is nothing more important. The opening of a Second Front is the only way we can be sure of a speedy victory over the enemy who threatens the freedom not only of my country, but of America, England, China—all the United Nations. There is much talk about a Second Front. Our people are still hoping and counting on it—but they are wondering when the talk will be translated into action. One thing must be clearly understood. We urge a Second Front not because we are weak, not because we lack confidence in our own strength, but because we want to bring this bloody war to an end more quickly. Think of how much blood has been shed, how much destruction and horror has been spread, how much cruelty and torture inflicted on innocent people— on old people and children. The sooner the monster fascism can be destroyed, the less blood will be shed—and that means your blood as well as ours.

Every day that passes without a Second Front increases the danger to you, increases the cost you will have to pay later for the defeat of Hitlerism. Remember that right now nine-tenths of all the armies of Hitler are engaged in our country—and not only the German armies. Hitler gathers his troops from all of Europe—from Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Rumania, Finland. Now, before our armies are further weakened, is the time to strike in Europe.

Stalingrad is a vital point for us and for you. I know our people are fighting and will keep on fighting as they did before Odessa, before Sevastopol, before Leningrad. Do not forget what each day of fighting means to our common cause. All the roads to all these cities were heaped with German corpses—the dead and the dying. The Germans do not rescue their wounded quickly from the battlefield, as we do. They advance over the bodies of their own wounded. It is that way at Stalingrad. It is important to you in America that we are killing so many of the enemy. Yes—we shall keep right on. But do not expect miracles of us. Our people are dying by the thousands too. The blow from the West must be coordinated with ours without any delay. Of course we have received help from your people, war supplies and medicines, for which we are very grateful. But the scale of the battles that are going on is very great history has never seen anything to compare with them. And the help we have received from outside is not enough. It is not only technical and material help that is important today. We need the help of people—of the armies of our allies fighting in the field.

I can’t help feeling that the American people are still too indifferent to the war and what it really means. I do not believe the American people as a whole entirely understand what war is like. Most of you so far only feel it as an inconvenience—doing without gasoline, being a little limited in the amount of sugar you use. You do not know what it is to have bombs falling all around you. You do not know what it is to see babies murdered, women and girls ravished by the Hitlerite beasts. You do not know what it is to find the charred bodies of your own comrades burned and tortured beyond recognition, to see rows of brave, fine people—people you knew—hanging along the roadside. You do not know what it is to walk into a home for old people won back from the Germans, as I did on the Sovkhoz Ilyichka, near Odessa. It was early morning, and the sun was just rising, and we went in to set the people there free. But what we found were the bodies of 108 old people, shot and tortured, slashed to pieces, blown up by grenades .

108 people, all of them old and ill. And so depraved are those Hitlerites that the old women had all been raped. Things like this could sometime happen to you if Hitler wins more victories.

And yet so many Americans still think of the war as something going on somewhere a long way off, where Russians and Germans are fighting each other. But we fight for your freedom too, we fight for the freedom of all the countries of Europe, of all the United Nations. And we are fighting alone.

Some people with whom I have talked seem to think the ocean is an obstacle of some kind. I think it is like a road—like your good American asphalt roads—perhaps better. You can go under it as well as over it. Look at all the submarines Hitler has sent to your shores. You have the great stretches of the ocean itself, you have the air above it to fly through, and the undersea passageway. I think you have a broad highway to a Second Front in Europe.

We have always admired you Americans for your great fighting qualities. You fought gloriously for freedom in your Revolution and Civil War. It is good to have such fighting traditions. But we feel that now also you must wish to fight for freedom as you fought in the past. Hitler threatens not only the USSR, he threatens you. I read your papers, and I do not see anything written there about the great danger to your country. It is all about the danger to Stalingrad. But that is your danger, too. How can we make the American people understand? It is not enough to write and talk—cry out at the top of your voice, tell about those children and old people, the millions of Hitler’s victims and what they have suffered.

And you must learn to hate the enemy as we did. Hatred did not come to us all at once. We are a peace—loving people, and we had to learn to hate. But fierce hatred rose within us after we saw with our own eyes what the Hitler beasts could do. Now we hate the enemy too much to fear him. When you are out there at your post you know that it is either you or your enemy who is killed. Our whole people know that today.

I have been asked often since I have been here how I feel when I kill a German. The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can be trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind.

I have been asked to write something about my own life. If this will help in any way toward a better understanding of our people and our present struggle, I am glad to do this. Here is my story.

I am a Ukrainian. I was born twenty—six years ago in the town of Belaya Tserkov near Kiev. I have a younger sister, Valentina, who is now working in a munitions factory. I am proud to say she is reckoned as one of the best workers on the staff. My mother was a teacher. My father was a worker in a St. Petersburg factory when the revolution occurred. He took part in it and also in the Civil War. After we won and the country settled down, he was given an executive position which required traveling from place to place in the Ukraine. We all traveled with him. Every year of my early schooling was spent in a new school in a new city. But all this traveling around taught me a lot, and I finished school a year and a half ahead of the average. And this in spite of my being a tomboy and rather unruly in the class room. I’m afraid I was a trial to my teachers.

I was keen on sports of all kinds, and played all the boys’ games and would not allow myself to be outdone by boys in anything. That was how I turned to sharpshooting. When a neighbor’s boy boasted of his exploits at a shooting range I set out to show that a girl could do as well. So I practiced a lot.

When I was eighteen we finally settled down in Kiev. I had a choice of continuing my studies or going to work. I chose factory work and got a job in an arms plant, becoming a skilled turner. While at the factory, I continued my athletic activities and kept up my marksmanship. A funny incident occurred at this time, when my friends dragged me off to a nearby shooting gallery one day. Twelve prizes were offered. There were the usual stationary and moving targets. I bought fifteen bullets and won all the twelve prizes. The man who ran the place turned pale with alarm and astonishment as he unfastened one prize after another, and piled them up beside me. After letting him hand me the twelfth, I felt sorry for him and gave him back all the prizes.

After a few years in the factory, I was given an opportunity to enter the Military Engineering School. But war and military affairs were far from my thoughts in those days. I was interested in history and entered Kiev University in 1937. I dreamt of becoming a scholar, a teacher.

At the university I continued my athletic activities as before. I was a sprinter and a pole vaulter as well as a marksman. To perfect myself in shooting, I took courses at a sniper’s school.

I was in the city of Odessa when the war broke out. I had gone there to complete researches on my diploma thesis on Bogdan Khrnelnitsky, a great Ukrainian patriot and an important figure in the history of my country. At the very moment of the German invasion I was in a sanitarium where I had gone to recover from an illness. The moment I heard the news I stopped feeling ill. When I applied to the doctors of the sanitarium for a discharge, they refused. I didn’t feel that the time could be spared for arguments and appeals. I knew the war had done more to cure me than they could. So I took French leave.

They wouldn’t take girls in the army, so I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get in. But I finally managed it. I served first with one of the volunteer detachments called “destroyer squads” organized in cities and districts close to the front, to dispose of German paratroopers. My detachment was later merged with a regular Red Army unit. I was a member of the 25th, the Chapayev Division.

Two Rumanian mercenaries of the Nazis helped me to become a sniper. To prove that I could qualify I was told to show my skill on a group of Rumanians. When I picked off the two I was accepted. They are not figured in my score total because they were test shots.

I have to admit I was scared in my first real baptism of fire. I was in range of hot German fire and I cried out to our machine gunners to cover me with return fire and save me. But I soon learned the steadiness and coolness required of our snipers. My sniper’s score began when I intercepted a German scouting party of three men. The Germans had laid down annihilating fire on a certain spot that they were determined to sweep bare. When they thought nothing there remained alive they sent out these scouts to reconnoiter to see if they could safely occupy the place. I spotted them and asked for the assignment to pick them off. Receiving permission I crawled to a spot from which I could cover them. I got two of the three. They started my score which now stands at 309.

Sniping is dangerous because we are hunted as well as hunters. The presence of a sniper can demoralize troops and everything is done to get rid of him with concentrated fire from all arms, even artillery, when his exact position is known; or by setting snipers of their own against him. A considerable part of my action has consisted of duels with enemy snipers.

It requires great endurance and willpower to be in exposed and difficult positions for fifteen or twenty hours at a stretch. And when you are in your position you must be under rigid self—control not to waste a shot or a movement. The slightest start may mean death. Your day begins before dawn, so that you can reach your position and build up your camouflage before there is light, and it ends after nightfall so that you can return under cover of darkness.

The Nazi hunters have often stalked me. One duel with a German sniper lasted three days. It was a hunt to the death. If either of us had a suspicion that the other had detected his position that position was shifted. That was one of the tensest experiences of my life. Finally he made one move too many.

Another time they assigned a squad of five Tommy gunners to get me. They camouflaged themselves and decided that they had set a clever trap for me on a road they thought I would pass on. They were right but I had my own way of using the road. I detected the trap, got into a position where their bullets couldn’t reach me and poured lead into what became a trap for them. I got three and when the two survivors ran for it, I got one of them. I searched the four bodies for the papers of the men and brought them back together with four tommyguns.

Once another sniper, Leonid Kitsenko, and I got quite a haul of Nazi officers. Following their communication wires to a dugout we took a position that commanded that particular field headquarters. Two officers came along to submit reports. Our shots dropped them. A man ran to their aid and we got him. An officer dashed out to see what the shooting was about and he joined them. The others fell into panic and for a while offered us perfect targets, as they milled around. Finally they concentrated protective fire around the spot while they abandoned the dugout, lugging out their files, and other equipment.

Our chief quarries were the enemy scouts. They and their snipers used many tricks to fool us or to get us to reveal ourselves. A German tin hat would appear, just a fraction of it, and we would think “I’ll get that Fritz !” Then the tin hat would waggle like the head of a toy elephant and disappear. We soon learned not to fall for this. One of their scouts whom I was hunting, after trying the helmet trick sent a cat out, either to distract me or to fool me into belief that nobody would be around where a cat could parade by so unconcernedly. Finally the scout tried his last trick. A dummy of a German soldier, in full uniform and even with a rifle in position, was raised and dangled before me. Then I knew that my man was there. I kept the spot covered but held my fire. The puppeteer now felt safe. He put his field glass to his eye. I shot at the flash of the lens. And that one had his last look at Soviet soil.

Yes, it is dangerous work, but things went better as I got used to the fire and German tactics. I have been wounded four times, twice rather heavily. I carry a scar, over the bridge of my nose, from the fourth wound, which I received during the evacuation of Sevastopol. In addition to the four wounds I suffered shell-shock which temporarily affected my hearing, but I was able to take treatments right on the front lines, and stayed in action.

Odessa and Sevastopol will remain in my memory forever. We defended Odessa till October. Then orders came to evacuate. We took positively everything with us aboard ship. The airmen took all the old airplane parts they could carry with them, and the cavalry took even old horseshoes. So we went aboard and started for Sevastopol.

Much has been written about Sevastopol. The history of wars can show nothing to compare with its defense. We were but one Russian to every ten Germans. Fifteen hundred planes flew over the long-suffering town every day. The air shook with incessant cannonading, exploding shells and bombs. The sun was blotted out by clouds of dust and earth. We hadn’t enough shells or food, but we hung on. The city had ceased to be—there was nothing save a heap of ruins—but still we hung on, battling from our stand on the ruins, shooting from behind every building, every elevation or mound.

Not a clod of Sevastopol ground was given up without a fierce fight not a step did we retreat without orders! We mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain. Drunk with blood as with ,vodka they swept headlong to death. Fresh German divisions were driven in to take the place of those fallen—there was no end to them! The Germans had to pay a high price —too high—for the heaps of brick and ash, the ruin that was once Sevastopol. Our 150 snipers alone accounted for a 1,080 of them. By that time I had trained a considerable number of snipers. Up to now I have trained eighty snipers and their combined score is well over the two thousand mark. By that time even the Germans knew of me. With their German stupidity they tried to bribe me. Their radios blared into our lines: “Liudmila Pavlichenko come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer.” When they got no answer to that, they turned to threats. Their last message to me was: “Liudmila Pavlichenko, you will not escape us. When we catch you we will tear you in 309 pieces.” They even knew my score!

They might have known that they would not have that opportunity. Ten Germans managed to ambush a comrade of mine, Nikolai Koval. They didn’t get him alive. He blew himself up with a hand grenade and took six of the fascist beasts with him. Now I have come to America, the country which my people admire as one of the most advanced and democratic countries of the world. We are proud to be united with the American people in the fight against fascism.

Pavlichenko during her American tour, Washington, D.C., 1942.

There is a long tradition of friendship between our two countries. The United States and the Soviet Union have never fought against each other. This friendship must be deepened and strengthened after Hitlerism has been defeated by our common efforts. I think our country has understood America better than America has understood us. Our people have always been interested in the Americans, in studying their history and their life. I have studied quite a lot of American history myself, and I do not feel strange here.

I have come to your country as the representative of Soviet youth. I hope my visit may have some useful results. I am troubled to be idle now when everything and everyone is required by my country in the fight against the Hitlerites. I am impatient to be back. Later, when peace comes, I want to visit your beautiful country and see many things there is no time to see now—and enjoy myself a little and get to know your people better.

There isn’t time now. Perhaps then your people will get to know me better, too. Now I am looked upon a little as a curiosity, a subject for newspaper headlines, for anecdotes. In the Soviet Union I am looked upon as a citizen, as a fighter, as a soldier for my country. Yes, I am impatient to be back. I have 309 Hitlerites on my score. But the score is not finished, my work is not over.

In closing I have a special message for American women. I would like them to know first about our mothers. Soviet mothers love their children enormously. I know how much my mother loves me—and yet she writes to me: “I want to see you more than anything—but don’t come home until you come with victory.” And when their sons are killed our mothers do not stop to mourn—they work all the harder. Soviet mothers send their sons to the front, and if necessary their daughters too, without tears in their eyes. They know that it is necessary. While women are not regularly a part of our armed forces, many are fighting in one way or another. There are many, many cases where mothers whose sons are at the front become guerrilla fighters. Our women were on a basis of complete equality long before the war. From the first day of the Revolution full rights were granted the women of Soviet Russia. One of the most important things is that every woman has her own specialty. That is what actually makes them as independent as men. Soviet women have complete self-respect, because their dignity as human beings is fully recognized. Whatever we do, we are honored not just as women, but as individual personalities, as human beings. That is a very big word. Because we can be fully that, we feel no limitations because of our sex. That is why women have so naturally taken their places beside men in this war. We have a tradition, too, to live up to. There was Durova, the Russian woman guerrilla, who fought against Napoleon’s invading armies in 1812, and Dasha Sevastopolskaya who fought in the heroic defense of Sevastopol in 1854-55. So in today’s war our women have carried on these traditions—and added something. The names of many of them have already been immortalized Lisa Chaikina, Tanya (Zoya) Kosmodemianskaya, Maria Baida, Nina Onilova, Valya Phillipova—and scores of others. Our women have proved that we can master machines and technique as well as men can, that we can have as much will and determination as men can, that we can kill our enemies as well as men can. It seems strange to many Americans that women go into battle. They seem to think the war has changed them into some strange kind of creature between a man and a woman. But we are still feminine beings. We can still wear nice clothes and have polished fingernails in the proper time and place. We remain women and human beings as before. The war has made us tougher, that’s all.

Women behind the lines have almost entirely taken the place of men at machines. They are locksmiths, turners, locomotive engineers, miners. Now they do all the things that used to be men’s specialties—and they even manage to increase productivity 500 to 1,000 per cent. They know they are working as we are all working for our victory, for our army, for our freedom.

And on behalf of all these Russian women fighting in our common cause, I express the wish that American women should replace the men at the machines as our women do, that American women should understand as our women do that their sons and husbands at the front are fighting for universal freedom. That they should hurry and help defeat our common enemy—and do away with Hitlerism—and that such help can come only through opening the Second Front! American women must understand that if the Second Front is not opened now, the United States will face much greater suffering and losses later.

SOURCE: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pavlichenko/1942/10/x01.htm

Fascism: What it Is and How to Fight It

Fascist scum surround small group of antifascist protestors at Univ. of VA, Charlottesville on 11 Aug 2017.

In the aftermath of the monstrous fascist mobilization in Charlottesville, VA this past weekend, we are searching the archives of Marxism for the most important writings on the subject of how to effectively fight the fascist menace.  The New York Times reports that the fascists, emboldened by their “victory” in Charlottesville are now planning to run for political offices across the nation, primarily under the banner of the Republican party.

We have sought from the inception of our organization to impart to the workers of the US the vital importance of organizing a revolutionary vanguard party of the working class as the indispensable weapon of self-defense of the workers against the capitalist system and against its fascist attack dogs.  Without a political party of our own, the working class is left to stand by, impotently begging the paid agents of the capitalist class in both the Republican and Democratic parties to “do the right thing” for the workers.  This cowardly posture of “speaking truth to power” effectively eliminates the working class – the vast majority of the population in any capitalist country – to sitting on the political sidelines as the “rightful rulers” of the capitalist class rob us blind and pave the road for a fascist regime in which the workers organizations will be completely destroyed.  Under fascism, there will be no future for the trade unions or for any working class revolutionary organization of any kind.  Unless we build a revolutionary workers party that has as its ultimate goal the overthrow of the capitalist class and its decrepit, dying capitalist economic system which is the growth medium in which fascism thrives, the working class is doomed to destruction.  The experiences of workers in Italy and Germany under their fascist regimes provide ample evidence of this reality.

All that being said, we must make clear that the Trump administration, though it has fascists in its top positions is NOT A FASCIST GOVERNMENT!  If the Trump government was fascist, we would not be able to write and publish this article, and anti-fascists would not be able to march against the fascist hordes as they did in Charlottesville this past weekend.  We would all be in concentration camps – or dead!   It is imperative that workers understand the qualitative difference between a conservative, worker-hating capitalist political party and its state and a fascist party and its state.  The Trump administration is a neo-fascist bourgeois government, not a FASCIST government.  We can see even now the tremendous splits that have taken place within the Trump administration over the events in Charlottesville.  Even the hideous Confederacy-apologist Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has come out publicly denouncing the fascist mobilization in Charlottesville: this would not happen in a fascist government.

But the fascists are inside the Republican party and are preparing to take it over.  They are supported financially by the most right-wing elements of the US capitalist class who are tired of having their hands tied by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights when they would like to just go out and smash every union and socialist/communist/anarchist political organization in the land!  It is this powerful but still minority fascist fringe of the US capitalist class that is pushing the nation towards fascism.  They have a large portion of the ruling class, the cops and courts and military on their side.  BUT THEY HAVE NOT TAKEN POWER YET.  If we confuse the semi-fascist Trump with the REAL fascist threat we will be directing our defensive attacks at the puppet rather than at the master.  We saw who the fascists are this weekend.  They are the usual scum: the Klan, the Nazis organized by David Duke and all of that syphilitic gutter scum attached to them like lampreys on a shark.  THESE ARE THE FASCISTS WE MUST CONFRONT AND DEFEAT.  They are organizing their ignorant hordes of lumpen and petty-bourgeois thugs to rampage across the campuses and cities and towns across the USA this fall.  We can and we must organize now to overwhelm them numerically whenever and wherever they appear, and we must ignore the appeals from their allies in the Democratic and Republican parties and among the clergy of all denominations who tell us to “turn the other cheek” against those who seek to kill us!  The working class must be organized through the trade unions into massive, highly disciplined battalions trained and led by union members who are military veterans to defend ourselves effectively in a military fashion against the nazi gangs.  If we do this – and ONLY if we do this can we send these fascist scum scurrying back to the holes they emerged from! The next time these filth try to organize a torchlight parade they must be crushed by the full weight of the integrated working class!  The next time they try to launch a provocation in broad daylight as they did in Charlottesville they must be met with the full weight of the entire integrated working class, led by strong, determined trade union contingents and they must be crushed!  They must have their heads acquainted with the pavement and be sent crawling home to lick their wounds.  This is the only “debate” the fascists understand!

Workers must come to understand the scientific, revolutionary Trotskyist definition of what fascism is and what it isn’t and what must be done to stop it.  If we do not understand fully what we are up against, where it comes from and who supports it we are powerless to stop it.  So in the interest of furthering your education on the subject of fascism, we offer these insights from the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.  If you have questions or comments on this material you can post your comments here and we will be happy to respond; otherwise contact us directly at iwpchi@gmx.com.

Workers of the World – Unite to Smash Fascism!

-IWPCHI

********************

Excerpts from Leon Trotsky’s writings on fascism and how to fight it.  We have lightly edited Trotsky’s polemics in order to bring them up-to-date for the present situation in the US without (we hope) dulling in the slightest way their surgically sharp edge. Our edits are in brackets [ ].  — IWPCHI

“The [people of the United States] for a long time thought that Fascism had nothing whatever to do with them. They had a republic in which all questions were dealt with by the sovereign people through the exercise of universal suffrage. But on [August 11th and 12th, 2017], several thousand Fascists […]  armed with [shields, clubs and firearms descended on Charlottesville, Virginia]. What does tomorrow hold?

Of course in [the United States], as in certain other European countries (England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries), there still exist parliaments, elections, democratic liberties, or their remnants. But in all these countries the class struggle is sharpening, just as it did [in the 1920s and 1930s] in Italy and Germany. Whoever consoles himself with the phrase, “[The United States] is not Germany”, is hopeless. In all countries the same historic laws operate, the laws of capitalist decline. If the means of production remain in the hands of a small number of capitalists, there is no way out for society. It is condemned to go from crisis to crisis, from need to misery, from bad to worse. In the various countries the decrepitude and disintegration of capitalism are expressed in diverse forms and at unequal rhythms. But the basic features of the process are the same everywhere. The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of assuring the people neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order. It is forced to smash the workers by the use of physical violence. The discontent of the workers and peasants, however, cannot be brought to an end by the police alone. Moreover, it is often impossible to make the army march against the people. It begins by disintegrating and ends with the passage of a large section of the soldiers over to the people’s side. That is why finance capital is obliged to create special armed bands, trained to fight the workers just as certain breeds of dog are trained to hunt game. The historic function of Fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.

“The Fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie [small businesspeople]. The [small business owner] has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other. Its dissatisfaction, indignation and despair are diverted by the Fascists away from big capital and against the workers. It may be said that Fascism is the act of placing the petty bourgeoisie at the disposal of its most bitter enemies. In this way big capital ruins the middle classes and then with the help of hired Fascist demagogues incites the despairing petty bourgeois against the worker. The bourgeois régime can be preserved only by such murderous means as these. For how long? Until it is overthrown by proletarian revolution.
[Source: Leon Trotsky, “Whither France?”, November, 1934]

” The capitalists arrive at Fascism not at their own whim, but through necessity: they cannot any longer preserve the private ownership of the means of production save by directing an offensive against the workers, save by strengthening the oppression, by sowing misery and despair around them. At the same time, fearing the inevitable resistance on the part of the workers, the capitalists, through the medium of their agents, arouse the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat and, while accusing the latter of prolonging and aggravating the crisis, they finance Fascist gangs to annihilate the workers. Should the resistance of the workers to the offensive of capital increase on the morrow, should the strikes become more frequent and important, Fascism […] will not evaporate but instead grow with redoubled force. The growth of the strike movement will impel the mobilization of strikebreakers. All the ‘patriotic’ thugs will participate in the movement. Daily attacks against the workers will be put on the order of the day. To close our eyes to this is to walk toward certain defeat.

“‘Do you mean to say […] that there must be no resistance?” No. It is necessary to resist.

“We are [not] adherents of that school which thinks that the best means of safety lies in silence, retreat and capitulation. ‘Don’t provoke the enemy!’ ‘Do not defend yourselves!’ ‘Don’t arm yourselves!’ ‘Roll over on your backs and play dead!’  Theoreticians from among this school of strategy should be sought not among ourselves but among the editors of [the bourgeois and fake-socialist press].  It is necessary for the workers to resist if they do not wish to be annihilated. But in that case no reformist and pacifist illusion is permissible. The struggle will be ferocious. It is necessary to foresee beforehand the inevitable consequences of resistance and to prepare for them.

“By its present offensive the bourgeoisie invests with a new and incommensurably more acute character the relation between the economic conditions and the social situation of capitalism in decay. Just so, the workers must invest their defence with a new character which corresponds to the methods of the class enemy. In defending ourselves against the economic blows of capital, we must know how to defend at the same time our organizations against the mercenary gangs of capital. It is impossible to do this save by means of the workers’ militia.

“In particular we must say to the trade unions: comrades, your branches and your publications will be pillaged, your organizations reduced to dust, if you do not immediately proceed to the formation of trade-union defence squads (“trade-union militia”), if you do not demonstrate by actions that you will not surrender a single inch of Fascism without a struggle.”

[Source:  Leon Trotsky, “Once Again, Whither France? Part I” March, 1935

“The armed organization of the proletariat [scientific term for ‘working class’], which at the present moment coincides almost entirely with the defence against Fascism, is a new branch of the class struggle. The first steps here too will be inexperienced and maladroit. We must expect mistakes. It is even impossible to escape completely from provocation. The selection of the cadres will be achieved little by little and this all the more surely, all the more solidly, as the militia is closer to the factories where the workers know one another well. But the initiative must necessarily come from above. The party can and must provide the initial cadres. The trade unions must also take to this same road – and they will inevitably take it. The cadres will become fused and strengthened all the more rapidly as they meet with an increasing sympathy and increasing support within the workers’ organizations, and afterwards within the masses of the toilers.

“What are we to say about those gentlemen who, in the guise of sympathy and support, vilify and poke fun at or, worse yet, depict to the class enemy the detachments of working-class self-defence as detachments of ‘insurrection’ and of ‘putsch’? […] It is impossible to give these gentlemen any other name save that of direct enemies of the proletarian revolution.”

[[Source: Leon Trotsky, “Once Again, Whither France? Part II” March, 1935

— IWPCHI

In the Wake of Charlottesville: US Working Class Must Organize Now to Smash the Fascist Threat

We mourn the murder of our brave working-class sister Heather Heyer, run down by a fascist coward as she participated in the massive antifascist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017.

We salute all the heroic workers who confronted one of the largest manifestations of fascist scum to dare to walk the streets of the USA in decades.  The workers of Charlottesville gave a pretty good account of themselves in standing up to the fascist provocation of this past weekend.  But we must do better next time; we have allowed the fascist scum to take the life of one of our bravest sisters – Heather Heyer.  As we join with her family and friends in mourning the murder of this courageous woman at the hands of a deranged fascist, we vow that her murder will not go unavenged.  That she should have lost her life to a fascist coward is a tragedy and a disgrace to the workers movement of the USA!  Dozens of other antifascist workers were left with more or less serious injuries as well.  This did not have to and should not have happened!  We need to organize, organize, organize!

If this weekend’s major battle in the ongoing class war between capital and labor  that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia proves anything at all it proves that the fascist threat here in the USA is not fictional or the product of paranoid elements of the far-left but is a very real and present danger to the forces of the integrated working class of the US.

How the hell did this happen? WHERE were the unions? Fascist scum march virtually unopposed in classic Nazi torchlight parade through campus of University of Virginia, Charlottesville, on night of 11 August 2017.  Photo: Shurtleff, Charlottesville ‘Daily Progress’.

That the fascists were able to successfully carry out a classic, Nazi-style racist torchhlight parade on the campus of the University of Virginia virtually unopposed on Friday, August 11, 2017 is a disgrace to the working class of Charlottesville, all of Virginia and the entire USA – ourselves included.  Where were the battalions of union workers when this deadly provocation occurred?  Where were the students?  Where were the communists, socialists and antifa?  It was because this racist provocation was carried out with virtually no opposition on Friday night that the fascist scum were emboldened to launch an even larger provocation on Saturday, which culminated in one of their vermin using his car to run down dozens of workers prematurely celebrating their “victory” over the fascist scum, killing one of our brave sisters.  If the torchlight parade had been confronted by thousands of trade unionists from Washington, D.C. and throughout the region – and stomped into the ground – the murder of our brave sister, paralegal worker Heather Heyer – would probably never have occurred.  The full responsibility for her death, and for the large number of antifascist protestors who were injured falls on all of us, and on the lack of a properly organized and led antifascist response to the Klan/Nazi provocation, particularly on Friday night but also on Saturday.  If the working class forces had been well-led and deployed in an organized fashion, the only blood that would have been spilled would have been that of the Klan/Nazi vermin themselves.

Small group of brave antifascist protestors allow themselves to be completely surrounded by fascist mob on campus of University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 11 August 2017 – like a scene from Germany in 1933!  HOW did this happen? Photo: Alejandro Alvarez

On Saturday, the antifascist forces, atomized and poorly led, took on the much better organized and better armed fascist forces, who generally maintained a level of military discipline that the antifascist forces did not display.  Individual antifascists attacked groups of fascists and got beaten down.

In a well-organized and led antifascist demonstration, individual activists would not be left isolated so fascists can attack them with impunity. This man is lucky he wasn’t murdered by the fascist scum.  Photo: @zdroberts

This should not happen in a well-organized anti-fascist rally.  The Klan and Nazis are rabid, psychotic killers who are known for their tactics of ganging up on isolated individuals.  They must be confronted by well-organized battalions of union workers who are capable of both self-defense and powerful offensive assaults on the fascist gangs.  The fascists can not be defeated by loosely-knit groups of worker-militants confronting the fascists individually.  The liberals and anarchists who try to substitute themselves for disciplined battalions of union workers will get their asses beat by the fascists whose military posture and superior weaponry allowed to them by their allies in the police forces.  And every time the antifascist forces get beaten down by the fascists it emboldens the fascists to attack again and again.  To successfully smash the fascists, the working class must be organized into large battalions of union workers whose integrated membership, when it stomps the fascists, will send a powerful message to the white supremacist scum that their “good old days” are long gone – and they aren’t coming back.  The fascists’ “heads must be acquainted with the pavement” in Trotsky’s memorable phrase.  Anything less than a complete rout of the fascist forces must be looked upon as a lost opportunity to send these racist scum scurrying back into the holes they crawled out of.

It has been reported that the antifascist demonstrators were prematurely “celebrating” their “victory” over the fascist gangs when the psychotic nazi drove his car right into a contingent of socialist workers – from behind, of course.  The demonstrators should have been on high alert, not “celebrating”;  what were their parade marshals doing?  Did they even have any?  So long as live fascists remained in the area the parade marshals should have been on the lookout for random attacks from the fascists – and the cops.  That a crazed nazi was able to drive his car right into the midst of the demonstration is proof that whoever were in charge of the demonstration at the point where the attack occurred were asleep at their posts!  Your lack of preparation and watchfulness cost that young woman her life, comrades!  Do not ever forget this!  And how the fuck is it that this fascist pig who ran down dozens of antifascist protestors lived to go to jail where he was photographed with not a scratch on his face?

How the fuck did this fascist pig – James Alex Fields, Jr. – walk away from the scene of the murder of Heather Heyer unscathed?  Photo: Charlottesville Police Dept.

The revolutionary socialist movement of which we are a part has been calling on the working class to organize revolutionary socialist workers parties in order to build up the revolutionary leadership that can smash fascism in the egg and that can lead the powerful integrated US working class to the ultimate victory of overthrowing the capitalist class and their system which is the growth medium for these fascist scum.  The capitalist system needs the fascists as their front-line extra-legal attack dogs carrying out the wholesale physical assaults on the working class that the cops would love to do but can not do without giving the whole game of the capitalist class away.  The fascists are sponsored by the most rabid anti-communist elements of the capitalist class and are being trained to launch deadly assaults on the most self-sacrificing elements of the workers movement.  Today, they drive a car into a contingent of socialists; tomorrow they intend to attack union meetings and, once they have terrorized the unions into submission to rampage through the major cities of the USA.  If we don’t crush these scum now when they are relatively small it is just a matter of time before we have thousands of fascists marching down the streets of New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles – to name but a few.

After the Civil War, the Democratic Party was led by American racists in order to smash the enfranchisement of black workers after the destruction of the Confederacy in the Civil War.  To expect the Democrats to be the leaders of an anti-fascist struggle is as idiotic as expecting angels to come down from heaven to save us from the fascist scum.  The Democratic Party has never once organized an effective antifascist rally anywhere in the USA; it has always been the revolutionary socialists who have done so.  The Democrats and Republicans are the bought-and-paid-for servants of the US capitalist class which is organizing the fascists as we write this.  The Democrats run the racist police departments of the USA which have been shooting black workers like dogs; Democratic Party States Attorneys have refused to indict their Killer Kops of Kapital and when they have been forced to bring charges they always seem to find a way to lose the case!  It is up to the working class to immediately organize its own political parties, 100% independent of any kind of support from or for the capitalist class as the necessary precursor to waging effective class warfare to crush the fascist scum in the egg.  If we do not successfully do this, we will see the fascist gangs growing larger and becoming bolder and bolder until the probability of a fascist takeover of the US Government becomes a certainty.  Anyone who vacillates in the face of this mortal threat to every decent working class man, woman and child in this country is a traitor to the working class!  The unions must be mobilized to bring their power in full force to smash this growing menace. If the pro-Democratic Party misleadership of the unions refuses to do so, it must be kicked out and replaced by intelligent, militant workers who understand the existential threat represented by the rise of fascism in the USA.  The next time we confront these fascist scum we must drive them so far into the ground that they dare not show their faces again.

If you agree with us, join us!

Workers of the World, Unite!

Independent Workers Party of Chicago

 

 

 

On Anniversary of US War Crimes Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Trump Threatens to Nuke North Korea

Source: Asahi Shimbun

Once again the United States Government – a ruthless, racist dictatorship of the numerically tiny WASPy US capitalist class, representing less than 10% of the US population – is threatening to use its nuclear arsenal to annihilate a tiny country of non-white people.  On the anniversary of two of the worst war crimes in world history, committed by the US against the Japanese workers on August 7th and 9th, 1945 – the completely unjustifiable nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed over 200,000 people – the ignorant, criminal real-estate swindler President of the United States, Donald Trump threatened tiny North Korea with nuclear annihilation for daring to defend itself from US imperialism.

The dark green area is North Korea. The smaller the country, the more the cowardly US capitalist class wants to attack it. [Source: Wikipedia]

Still humiliated by the fact that tiny socialist North Korea has not only successfully defended itself against the most powerful military on Earth for over 50 years, and that it has now – in spite of brutal economic sanctions – been able to deploy an effective nuclear deterrent which has stopped US invasion plans dead in their tracks – the racist worker-hating real estate swindler President of the United States Donald Trump has “gone ballistic” this week.  After the North Koreans once again successfully tested a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and then – after the US flew nuclear-armed stealth bombers right along the North Korean border (just imagine how the US would react if the Russians or Chinese did this along the US border!) – the North Koreans threatened to use their nukes to defend themselves against the US if they dared to attack the North, Trump lost his tiny, money-worshipping, college-student-robbing mind.  Speaking like the filthy rich lunatic that he is at a press conference called to discuss the “opioid crisis” in the USA (held, characteristically, at “Trump National Golf Club” in Bedminster, NJ) he blurted out:  “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He [North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un] has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”  [Source: “Remarks by President Trump Before a Briefing on the Opioid Crisis”, 8 August 2017, whitehouse.gov]   We’re certain that Trump could not have been more dimly aware of the effect such a monstrous threat would have on US allies like Japan, which was in the middle of the annual commemoration of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when notorious racist Trump threatened a similar attack on a neighboring Asian country!  If the US nuked North Korea – guess where the fallout would be likely to land?  To put it mildly, the South Korean and Japanese workers are not amused.

During ceremonies, commemorating the 72nd anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, “[a]tomic bomb survivor Koichi Kawano put Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the spot by asking him sternly, ‘What country’s prime minister are you? Are you going to abandon us?'”  The right-wing scumbag Abe’s has openly defended Trump’s nuclear threat against North Korea and he and his government was denounced by the Japanese “Hibakusha” (nuclear bomb survivors) for refusing to sign the UN “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” back in July.

“A petition compiled by five hibakusha groups in Nagasaki and submitted to Abe also read, ‘It is extremely regrettable that (when the nuclear weapons prohibition treaty was adopted at the United Nations), representatives of Japan, the only country that suffered atomic bombings in a war, were not there. We, hibakusha in Nagasaki, strongly protest against the government with burning anger.’

“In the ceremony held prior to the meeting to mark the 72nd anniversary, Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue also said in the city’s Peace Declaration, ‘I urge the Japanese government to reconsider the policy of relying on the [US’] nuclear umbrella.’ Hibakusha applauded the declaration.

“Shigemitsu Tanaka, 76, vice chairman of the council of atomic bomb sufferers in Nagasaki, complained about the way in which government officials always repeat the same platitudes.

“‘They could have brought a tape recorder with them,’ he said.

“Tamashii Honda, 73, chairman of the association of bereaved families of atomic bomb victims in Nagasaki, said, ‘Japan should talk to the United States in a forceful manner.'”  [Source:  Asahi Shimbun, “A-bomb survivor asks Abe, ‘What country’s leader are you?’” 10 August 2017]

In South Korea, an editorial in the Dong-A-Ilbo bluntly pointed out the fact that it is the constant war provocations launched against it by the US military forces in South Korea and Guam that provoked the North’s visceral reaction:

“[T]he North had never specifically stated where to attack on the continental U.S. The U.S. military operates a launching base in Guam for strategic weapons and long-range strategic bombers that will fly to the Korean Peninsula in an emergency, a pain in the ass to the North.

[…]

“The extended deterrence of the U.S. lies at the foundation of the trust among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan, and if the trust vanishes, it will lead to weakening of the alliance between South Korea and the U.S. and the alliance among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan. Against the backdrop, South Korea and Japan will start considering nuclear armament and China’s influences will increase. Probably, this is what the North is hoping for.

“Hawkish politicians in the U.S. talk about a war on the Korean Peninsula at the expense of mass civilian sacrifice in two Koreas.”

[Source:  Dong-A-Ilbo, “North Korea should not be a game changer”  10 August 2017]

The Joongang Daily of Seoul also cited US war provocations against N. Korea as legitimate complaints, publishing a photo of two US Air Force B1-B Lancer stealth nuclear bombers flying on a mission from Guam across the Korean Peninsula just miles from the North Korean border on 8 August 2017:

Source: Source: Joongang Ilbo, Seoul, S. Korea

Idiotically, Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson – another arrogant member of the US capitalist ruling class, with an estimated net worth of $245 million – when asked by a reporter if the workers of the US should be worried about the escalating threats against North Korea stated:  “I think Americans should sleep well at night”!  Tell that to the tens of thousands of US soldiers stationed in S. Korea and on Guam, and to their families back home!  And of course he doesn’t give a damn about whether or not Korean or Japanese workers sleep well at night – to Tillerson and the rest of the filthy rich US capitalist class they’re all just expendable pawns in the US capitalist chess game being played against the working classes of the world.

A Brief History of the Korean War

The US capitalist class and its government is terrified that the tiny, defiant North Korean workers state has in its possession a modest but strategically significant nuclear arsenal fully capable of short-range defense of its country from US military aggression.  Since 1945, the United States has engaged in one military threat after another against the North Koreans and was responsible for launching the Korean War – a 3-year shooting war which left over 36,000 US, an estimated 3 million Korean civilians and soldiers and as many as 900,000 Chinese soldiers dead!  The Korean War was an imperialist war crime launched by the US capitalist class in order to “save Korea for capitalist exploitation”.  It was a failed attempt to crush the working class and peasant revolution that swept the entire Korean peninsula in the wake of the defeat of Japanese fascism which had brutally occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945.  At the end of the war, the Korean peninsula was partitioned along an arbitrarily-selected demarcation line into a northern, Soviet Union-controlled zone and a southern US-controlled zone.  In the North, the Korean communists who had been the leading forces in the long struggle against the Japanese fascist occupation took power; in the South, the Korean communists created workers and peasants committees that seized power in all the cities and towns throughout the south.  But instead of allowing the Korean workers and peasants to create their own working class and peasant based government, the United States created a puppet South Korean client state composed of right-wing Korean exiles living in the USA as well as thousands of Koreans who had collaborated with the fascist Japanese occupying forces!  When the “South Korean” workers and peasants rose up against this US puppet government of fascist scum, the US and their fascist “South Korean” allies slaughtered them!

In 1949, the Chinese workers and peasants – aided by a strong contingent of Korean communist leaders in the Chinese Communist Party – overthrew capitalism in China in the great Chinese Revolution.  Now, the North Koreans were backed not just by the tremendous power of the USSR, but by the brand-new power of the revolutionary Chinese working class and peasantry.   With the US puppet government in “South Korea” slaughtering communists all over the country and with negotiations getting nowhere between the North and South over repatriation of imprisoned and tortured communists in the South, tensions rose to the breaking point.  Both the North and South had long engaged in small-scale cross-border attacks, with the US military actively involved in the military operations of the puppet “South Korean” military forces.  On 25 June, 1950 the North Korean forces, having endured years of provocations, launched a massive invasion of the South, seeking to complete the struggle which they had fought for since 1910: to bring the Korean peninsula under Korean rule.  If it hadn’t been for the presence of US imperialist forces being deployed into the Korean peninsula – where they clearly did not and do not belong – the Korean War would have been over in just a few weeks.  Instead, the war dragged on for 3 years, with the US involvement increasing rapidly to the point where the US ended up dropping more bombs on Korea than they deployed in all of WWII.  In just three years the US had killed an estimated 3 million Koreans plus nearly 1 million Chinese soldiers who had fought to defend their Korean working class and peasant sisters and brothers.  The US bombing was so savage that not a single building over two stories tall was said to have been left standing between Seoul and the Chinese border.  US forces committed many atrocities against Korean civilians, slaughtering thousands simply because the style of clothing they wore was supposedly indicative of their allegiance to the North.  One of the US war crimes, committed against defenseless South Korean civilians hiding from attacking US forces at the No Gun Ri bridge has become world-renowned for its senseless brutality – but it was just one of many, many others.

This 2008 photo shows a concrete abutment outside one of the twin underpasses of the No Gun Ri railroad bridge, where investigators’ white paint identifies bullet marks and embedded fragments from U.S. Army gunfire in the 1950 massacre of South Korean refugees trapped beneath the bridge. Others are similarly marked inside the tunnel. Still other evidence lies beneath the level of the road, built years after the killings.
한국어: 노근리 양민 학살이 벌어진 다리 밑 사진. 총알 자국이 하얀 원으로 그려져 있다.     Photo by Cjthanley   Source: Wikipedia, “No Gun Ri Massacre”

The slaughter unleashed against the Korean workers and peasants by US imperialism was the direct precursor to the equally hideous Vietnam War in which another 3 million workers and peasants were slaughtered by the US.  But unlike the Vietnam War, which was ended by agreements negotiated in 1975, the Korean War never ended!  Since 1953 an armed truce has left the North and South in a state of war, with North Korea’s once stalwart defenders in the USSR now gone and a pro-capitalist criminal Chinese “Communist Party” leadership gradually backing away from its long-time ally.  Now, tiny North Korea – a nation-state with a population of just 25 million (roughly equal to that of Texas), whose land area equals the size of Pennsylvania, with an estimated gross domestic product equivalent to that of Vermont! – is left to defend itself almost alone – and is obscenely being portrayed as a “military threat” to the United States! 

It is a savage example of the extent to which the US working class has been brainwashed by the wall-to-wall propaganda of the US imperialist bourgeois press that today, in spite of all the physical and historical evidence to the contrary, US workers believe that NORTH KOREA – poses some kind of existential threat to the USA – and not the other way around!

In order for the numerically insignificant US capitalist class to rule the world they must make sure that not even the tiniest nation-state obtain the only modern military weapon capable of effectively defending any nation-state from attack by a larger imperialist power: intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the “homeland” of any aggressor nation.  North Korea – a small workers state that overthrew capitalist class rule in 1946 – has developed its own nuclear capability and has recently completed real-world tests of its own continental – not “inter”continental – ballistic missiles (CBMs, not ICBMs); it has previously tested nuclear weapons.  Experts now believe that North Korea possesses a handful of nuclear bombs and that is well on its way to developing and deploying long-range ballistic missiles – although whether or not North Korea has the technology to combine the two elements into an effective nuclear ICBM capability remains an open question.  So far, the North Koreans have not tested a single long-range ICBM; their long-range missiles might be able to barely reach cities in Alaska, according to military experts – but no one knows for sure because the North Koreans have never actually proven this capability.  They still have to prove that they can protect any nuclear warhead on one of their missiles from the intense battering encountered by an ICBM when it makes its re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere on the way to the target.  So all the US blathering over the “threat” posed by the North Korean mini-arsenal is just that: scare-mongering propaganda designed to frighten US workers into supporting the US capitalist class revenge fantasy against the workers of North Korea.

It is the duty of every class-conscious revolutionary socialist worker on this planet to oppose every attempt by any imperialist capitalist state to overthrow any workers state – from North Korea to China to Cuba and Vietnam.  The revolutionary victories achieved by the workers and peasants in these successful revolutions – though under attack now by the fake-“communist” parties running all of these bureaucratically deformed workers states – represent the high-water mark of the long struggle of workers and peasants to emancipate ourselves from brutal exploitation by the capitalist classes of the world.  As Trotsky explained when talking about the defense of the USSR – now no longer in existence thanks to the betrayals of the Stalinists – “Those who cannot defend old victories will never achieve new ones”.   The US attacks on North Korea are part of their long-range goal to roll back the gains of EVERY workers and peasants revolution!  They have their sights set on launching capitalist restoration through counter-revolution in China as their main objective; that is why it is so criminal for the leadership of the pro-capitalist Chinese “Communist Party” to conspire with the US Government to sell North Korea down the river!  That is why we say: Defend North Korea!  US Imperialism: Keep Your Bloody Hands Off the World!  And this is why we say that the top priority for US workers right now is to join us in building a revolutionary Trotskyist workers party that will organize the overthrow of the most despotic and bloodthirsty terrorist organization in the world: the US capitalist class.   Until the workers do this, the US capitalist class and their military machine will go on threatening and murdering thousands of workers each and every year.  Unless the US working class rises up and puts an end to the bloody class rule of its capitalist “masters” the workers of the whole world will have to join together to crush US imperialism – destroying every major US city in the process, just as was done to Nazi Germany in 1945!

Workers of the World, Unite!

Independent Workers Party of Chicago

Democratic Socialists of America: “Democratic” Party? Yes; Pro-US Imperialism? Yes; “Socialist”? Not So Much

In the United States things are often sold under false labels – especially when it comes to politics. SOURCE: dsausa.org

6 AUGUST 2017 – This weekend, Chicago, IL has had the “honor” of hosting what has been billed as the largest convention of socialists in the history of the United States.  Please believe us when we say we wish that was actually the case.  While it is indeed true that thousands of mostly young working-class youth and college students flocked to the 3-day soiree of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the hope that the DSA represents a fighting socialist alternative to the Wall St. owned-and-operated Democratic Party, we are obliged to be the bearers of bad news: the Democratic Socialists of America are actually nothing less than a left cover for that Democratic Party you have grown to hate with a passion.

In order for the class interests of the working class to be represented at city hall, in the state legislatures or in the national legislature a true working class party must first be created that is completely funded by and led by a revolutionary socialist workers party that is 100% independent from the capitalist system and its class representatives.  That means that not one penny of funding for that workers party can be derived from donations from the capitalist class or any of their many front groups.  If the workers do not organize a workers party of their own, they have no way to independently put forward a working class program or to participate in local, state or national politics at all and must instead be reduced to begging other parties’ politicians to throw a few legislative crumbs to the workers once in a while (which is the case right now in the USA).  A real workers party must be a party of, bay and for the workers, which fights for the rights of the working class in the USA and internationally; it must not defend the capitalist system – which is fundamentally based on the exploitation of the working class – in any way, shape or form.  It must not support the cops, the criminal justice system or the military forces of the imperialist United States of America at all.  The ultimate goal of an actual revolutionary socialist workers party is not to keep the decrepit and senile, racist, warmongering, exploitative capitalist system alive and to patch it up so it can stagger forward until it finally launches World War III; the ultimate goal of a revolutionary socialist workers party is to overthrow the capitalist class and their system and to put the working class in power.  THAT is the program of revolutionary socialism: it was the program of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky – and it is the program of the Independent Workers Party of Chicago.  That is what the word “independent” means in our name: complete independence from the influence of bourgeois ideology and complete dedication to the fight for the emancipation of the working classes of the world through workers socialist revolution.

For the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, this program of complete independence of their party from the forces of capitalism is anathema.  The DSA is a thoroughly class-collaborationist pressure group (“we are not a political party” they declare) literally steeped in the reactionary, pro-capitalist principles of the Second International – the renegades from Marxism who betrayed the working class in 1914 by repudiating the program of revolutionary class struggle in favor of defending “their own” bourgeoisie by voting for war credits in their respective countries, which drove the working classes of the world into bloody conflict against each other in World War I.

The DSA wants you to believe that its party represents the ideals of the great US socialist leader Eugene Debs, who went to jail for his stalwart opposition to WWI.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  The DSA’s leadership and its program has ALWAYS repudiated what Eugene Debs stood for; they have been supportive of the United States Government since the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC – immediate predecessor of the DSA) was founded by Michael Harrington in 1973.  From the very beginning, Harrington declared to the world that the new party was dedicated to the principle that “the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party.”  This is the bright red-white-and-blue thread that runs throughout the program of the DSA from 1973 to this very day.  The DSA was founded on the principle of reforming the capitalist system to make it “more democratic”, not in overthrowing it.  Harrington to the day he died worked assiduously to defend US imperialism against the degenerated Stalinist workers states of the USSR, Cuba and China – and the DSA even went so far as to support the United States capitalist class in their genocidal Vietnam War!  Harrington and the DSA always urged their party’s members to vote for the Democrats – and his ideological children like Cornel West follow in his footsteps, urging youth to vote for the fake socialist (and real Democrat) Bernie Sanders in the last presidential election!  If you are a young worker or student who hates the Democratic Party of war criminals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the DSA is not an organization you want to be a member of!

We do not expect nor do we want you to take our word for this; as Lenin said “in politics, anyone who ‘takes another’s word for it’ is a hopeless idiot.”  And if you are looking for alternatives to the Democratic Party and the capitalist system you are obviously not a “hopeless idiot”.  You want answers and you want the truth and you deserve both.  One of the hallmarks of a true Trotskyist party like ours is that we are dedicated to the principle of telling the working class the truth no matter how painful it may be – even about our own party.  Our goal is to win over the trust of the working class by steadfastly telling the truth about the capitalist system and the capitalist class and its many devious ways of entrapping workers politically.  The DSA is one of those political traps laid for the unsuspecting workers who are just starting to check out the various socialist parties and  who are trying to sort the real socialists from the fake ones.  Unfortunately there are quite a few political parties that call themselves socialists and even revolutionary socialists who are in fact anything but what they pretend to be.  To help you do this we are going to use the written program and the public statements of the DSA’s leadership itself.  This is how Trotskyists determine the class nature of a political movement.

If we visit the DSA’s website at http://www.dsausa.org/, we can begin to see immediately that the DSA is a reformist organization, not an actual alternative to the Democratic Party at all:

Trotskyists analyze the writings of our political opponents to determine what they really stand for politically. The DSA reveals its true nature right on the front page of its website. SOURCE: dsausa.org

“Continue the political revolution!”  What does this refer to?  Obviously, it refers to the phony “political revolution” the reformists falsely claim was led by the Democrat Bernie Sanders during the last US Presidential election, in which Sanders played the old “bait-and-switch” con, pretending to run for President on a “socialist” party program in order to lure unsuspecting youth into the Democratic Party’s circus tent, only to abandon his campaign and to throw his support to the hideous Hillary Clinton.  This was no “revolution”: it was a cheap con game which has been played over and over by the Democrats.  Jesse Jackson perfected this scam back in the late ’70s and early ’80s.  We spent a great deal of time during the election warning Sanders supporters that they were being played.

A lot of Sandernistas hated us then for telling the truth about the phony Sanders campaign; but when he pulled the old switcheroo just as we predicted we had a good number of them come back and admit that we had told the cold truth – just as we promise we will always do to the very best of our ability.  It was a tough lesson in the sleazy, underhanded methods the capitalist-owned politicians work their campaigns.

What else can we learn from just this first glimpse of the DSA’s website?  Take a closer look at this “Who we are & what we do” paragraph:

A closer examination reveals some surprises: the DSA is *not* a political party!  This means that the DSA relegates itself to the status of a mere pressure group on – guess who? – the Democratic Party!  SOURCE: dsausa.org

Every word of this declaration tells a Marxist volumes about what the DSA is and what it isn’t.  “Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few”.  Here is what they mean with the missing words put back in the sentence:  “Democratic Socialists believe that both the existing capitalist economy and the existing bourgeois democratic society should be run democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few capitalists.”  This means that the DSA is a reformist, and pro-capitalist organization, and not revolutionary or even socialist at all.  They don’t explicitly say it (because that would give the game away) but they are clearly talking about not the organization of a better, socialist, future society but are speaking in the present tense – they are describing the fact that it is their program to limit their demands to mere reforms of the capitalist system.   And since racism, poverty, homelessness and war are all endemic to the capitalist system – as anyone can easily prove by examining the existence of ALL of these horrors in EVERY capitalist nation-state on Earth – when the DSA declares that it merely seeks to reform capitalism instead of overthrowing it they are declaring to the world that as far as they are concerned, racism, poverty, homelessness and war have always been part of the human condition and always will be – and so the best we can hope for is to put a few bandages on these gaping wounds of the capitalist system and hope for the best!

We don’t want to go on like this all day long; this article is getting to be too long already.  So we will cut to the most revealing self-exposure of their fundamental commitment to the US capitalist class and the capitalist system that the DSA website proudly announces to the world.

One of our discoveries in the past year has been that practically every single charity group and non-governmental organization (NGO) in the United States and around the world is actually funded by some capitalist class-run charity or foundation or other!  From the fake environmentalist organization 350.org (funded and run by the oil company money of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) to the “Black Lives Matter”-allied  “Black Youth Project” are actually sponsored by major capitalist foundations and charitable organizations – and guess what?  SO IS THE DSA!  Amazing but true!  We just found this out today ourselves and we can hardly believe how easy it was, once again, for us to discover this fact.

All of these fake NGOs have two things in common: they are funded by the capitalist class, and they OPPOSE THE FORMATION OF A THIRD POLITICAL PARTY IN THE USA!  Why? Because the capitalists who fund these organizations have a wonderful phony “two-party system” here in the US already – and they OWN BOTH OF THE PARTIES!  The US capitalist class thinks that “democracy” is the cat’s ass – so long as THEY run all of the political parties themselves!  They know that as soon as the working class organizes a successful workers party, their days of class rule will be numbered!  So they make DAMNED SURE that NO ONE runs so much as an NGO unless THEY sponsor it!

How did we do it?  EASY!  Every NGO website – well almost every one – some of them hide the identity of their financial supporters for very good reasons – but nearly every one of them has a section or two on their website that reveals who their primary staff and chief advisers and donors are.  We’ll show you how to do this with the DSA website and then you can try it on any NGO website you can find.  You’ll quickly see that all reformist roads lead to the corporate boardrooms of the USA’s Fortune 500 companies!

OK.  DSA website, homepage.  Sometimes this info is located at the top of the page, sometimes at the bottom of the page; sometimes in both locations.  But you usually can navigate to the sponsor pages through the tabs or buttons at the top of the homepage.  Here they are on the DSA website:

As usual, if you want to know who runs the show at ANY organization, you have to follow the money!  Which button will reveal the truth about who funds the DSA?

Let’s click on the “About DSA” button:

Nope. Looks like the wrong page, although this certainly reinforces our characterization of the DSA as pro-capitalist and reformist. Apparently the DSA wants to wait until the capitalist system dies a natural death – hopefully before WWIII occurs.  What if we look at the bottom of the page…?

This is all very interesting and reveals that our original evaluation of the DSA as pro-capitalist and reformist was right on the money.  But where is the financial info?  Let’s take a glance at the bottom of the page.  Hmm.  Lots of white space… doesn’t look promising… wait!  We may be on to something!  BINGO!  “The DSA Fund”!

Here it is – the DSA Fund – a 501c3 swindle. Like most NGOs, this link is hidden all the way at the bottom of the page where very few people will notice it.

This looks promising!  But before we click on the link, check out that disclaimer in tiny lawyer’s print at the very bottom of the page:

DSA professes it was ‘Shocked! Shocked!’ to “discover” that it somehow shared the same website developer – revealingly named “NationBuilder” (thus dovetailing with DSA’s political strategy for the capitalist USA) – as the Trump campaign. They promise to fix this sometime soon.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to do it!

That is rich isn’t it?  So the tail of the Democratic Party donkey – the DSA – hired the same people to develop their organization’s website as did the Trump campaign.  How eerily similar to the Hillary campaign’s brilliant strategy to build up Trump during the primaries – so that they would have an opponent that would be easier to defeat!  How’d that work out for them?  It would be hilarious… if so many workers lives did not hang in the balance.

OK let’s click on the “DSA Fund” link and see where it takes us…

Let’s see – we found the Fund – where are the financials? Let’s check the “Donate” button…

Click on that “Donate” button and…

There’s nothing here! No list of sponsors, just a desperate claim that they really really never take money from corporations or from the government. Let’s keep looking.

Well we seem to have come to an end.  There are no financials on the website!  No IRS statements as to who gets paid how much and who made the top donations – no transparency at all!  They claim that all their funding comes from memberships.  “We receive no corporate sponsorships or government money”.  Keep that claim in mind as we continue our search.

Let’s see if we can find a list of their top staff and advisers and see if we can find any clues as to who’s really running the show at DSA.

If we go back to the home page and click on the “Resources and tools” button what do we get?

Another dead end. Nothing here. Let’s take a look at the bottom of the page…

Hmm.  we didn’t notice this before: in the red box to the right… “Our Leadership and Structure”.  Click on that link…

Nice! Here’s a list of the famous Democratic Party stalwarts who are “Honorary Chairs” of the DSA. Ex-CIA agent Gloria Steinem; Cornel West, famous pal of US war criminal Barack Obama; and other fascinating loyal servants of the US capitalist class.

This is all fascinating and completely predictable – though you might wonder why the DSA keeps the leading lights of their organization hidden under such a huge barrel!  Why don’t they have this list of the most famous people in their organization on the masthead of their homepage?  Probably because it would let all the young workers and students know right away that the DSA is a cozy home for some of the most tiring, long-sold-out Democratic Party donkeys of all time – like the famous Democratic Party donkey Cornel West and the execrable “ex”-CIA “asset” and forever Democrat Gloria Steinem.

Good old Cornel West, ‘secret’ DSA member and open, fawning sycophantic fanboy of then-future US war criminal Barack Obama, shucks and jives for Obama at Harlem’s Apollo Theater during Obama’s first election campaign.

… and here’s West again during the second Obama run for President… only this time he’s being slapped down by his Commander-in-Chief for West’s tepid criticism of war criminal Obama. After this public slapdown, West sulkily started to denounce Obama saying he was “disappointed” in him.  In this picture you can almost actually see the moment when West’s little Obama-worshipping heart breaks into a million little pieces.  Cornel West’s hopelessly compromised political compass can’t find political magnetic North.

OK, well, this is all in good fun.  Oh… by the way… are you surprised we called Gloria Steinem a CIA agent?  This famous bourgeois feminist proudly admitted it and you can read all about her “work” for the Agency in books like “The Mighty Wurlitzer” by Hugh Wilford.  And you can read about it  here and here  as well.  Or maybe just watch this:

So beware, young socialist workers and students in the DSA: your organization has as one of its leading lights a “former” CIA agent who actually ratted out socialist students to the CIA – setting them up for political persecution, torture or murder when they returned to their respective countries!

It has been reported that Gloria Steinem tried to recruit the DSA’s Michael Harrington to join her CIA operation but for some reason he declined.  We wonder: what made Steinem think Harrington was good CIA material?  Had her CIA handlers asked her to attempt to recruit him?  In “The Mighty Wurlitzer” Hugh Wilford says that Harrington had originally been penciled in as one of four CIA recruits being sent to disrupt the USSR-sponsored Vienna Youth Festival that was held in Austria in July of 1959 (fellow anti-communist and future National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski would have been one of his traveling companions).  Harrington suspected that the free trip  being dangled in front of him by the physically attractive Steinem was being bankrolled by the U.S. State Department, which in his mind would have been a deal too good to pass up.  Wilford quotes Harrington as saying, cryptically: “Had I dreamed that the CIA was involved there would have been no issue.”  After discussing the opportunity with the leaders of the Socialist Party’s youth group (of which Harrington was then a member) it was decided that, after all, “Lenin had accepted railroad transportation from the Kaiser when he went from Switzerland to Russia in 1917” – so he should accept the offer from the “State Department” while making it clear that he would criticize both the capitalist and communist bloc nations at the festival.  “The offer of help was withdrawn formally” Harrington said, “and I paid my own way, having nothing to do with what turned out to be the CIA’s dirty games.” (Source for Harrington quotes and description of Steinem and Brzezinski’s activities: “The Mighty Wurlitzer” by Hugh Wilford; Harvard University Press, 2008, pages 141-148)

That may be the truth or may not be.  But it still doesn’t explain why the fully exposed ex-CIA agent Steinem is given a leading role in the DSA of 2017 as one of its celebrity members.  Her role at the Vienna Youth Festival is well-known: she coordinated the anticommunist propaganda operation via her CIA-front news organization the “Independent Research Service”.  Meanwhile her fellow CIA plant Brzezinski – a Polish nationalist – enjoyed himself by strutting through the USSR section of the festival deliberately bumping into Russians and yelling “Out of my way, Russian pig!” in an attempt to provoke a fight between the Russian and Polish delegates.  Steinem was a crucial part of a typical CIA dirty tricks team out to do all it could to disrupt a youth festival – but that only endears Steinem to the anti-communist DSA leadership all the more.

You campaigned for Hillary? No problem: the DSA welcomes you with open arms!  Hillary really stood up for the rights of workers by backing her husband’s “get tough on crime” legislation that destroyed the lives of millions of black and Hispanic workers and their kids and by overseeing the destruction of Libya as Secretary of State.  Whatever you say, Delores.

Lifelong Democrat and United Farm Workers union leader Dolores Huerta – who counts among her BFFs war criminals Bill and Hillary Clinton – is also listed as a DSA celebrity.  She has spent her entire life luring workers into the clutches of their enemies in the Democratic Party – from vicious anti-communist Robert F. Kennedy to vicious war criminal Barack Obama to vicious war criminal Hillary Clinton – Huerta has campaigned for all of them.  Huerta and UFW leader Cesar Chavez led farm workers in endless capitalist-friendly grape boycotts rather than lead hard class struggle on behalf of farm laborers in California, even going so far as to organize anti-immigrant picket lines that physically attacked migrant farm workers and reporting “illegal” workers to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service!  THIS is why the worker-hating Democratic Party politicians love having their photos taken with Dolores Huerta!

What else did we find out?  Well, he won’t  mention that he’s a DSA member in his own political autobiography but ‘secret’ DSA member Harold Meyerson –  editor of the liberal rag “The American Prospect” (which he co-founded with Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich) – is on the list as well.  If he’s not a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, who is?

But let’s get back to who actually funds the DSA.  Remember how the DSA claimed that they never took money from corporations or governments?  Well, they lied.  Since 1980 the DSA has organized several major public conferences that were financed not by membership dues but by some infamous US Government-backed foundations like the “German Marshall Fund” whose current board of directors includes the former head of the US Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and former CIA head Michael Morell.  We know these guys weren’t sitting on the board of the German Marshall Fund back in 1980 – god knows what US government criminals were – but it is a true sign of the depravity of the leadership of the DSA today that they proudly and fondly brag about their connection with this sinister organization even to this day.

DSA still brags about how its 1980 conference – which featured such repulsive Cold Warriors as former French “Socialist” President Francois Mitterrand and German Social-Democratic Party Chancellor Willy Brandt – and was financed by the “German Marshall Fund” which is an organization that is so close to the CIA it is indistinguishable from it to this very day.

“Democratic Socialists of America Fund (DSA Fund) endeavors to demonstrate how an awareness of social democratic and democratic socialist values and policies would strengthen the quality of policy debates in the U.S. The Fund also works to introduce young activists to the history and traditions of democratic socialism […]  In December 1980, IDS organized a three-day conference, ‘Eurosocialism and America’ that brought over 2000 U.S.-based activists to D.C. to meet with the leaders of social democratic and democratic socialist political movements from Europe and the developing world to explore how democratic socialist policy alternatives could benefit the U.S. Speakers included Willy Brandt, Francois Mitterrand, Olaf Palme [sic], and Michael Manley. Temple University Press published a volume of conference papers. The German Marshall Fund supported the organizing of the conference with a grant of $95,000.”

What a rogues’ gallery!  What a fine example of “democratic socialist values” are embodied in such hideous creatures from the black lagoon of the Second International as Francois Mitterrand,  and Willy Brandt!  And if that is not enough, the DSA accepted a grant from the “German Marshall Fund” – one of the most right-wing organizations in Washington D.C. which is today populated with such stellar proponents of “democratic socialist values” as

German Marshall Fund Advisory Council Member: former US Dept. of Homeland Security honcho Michael Chertoff.  SOURCE:

former Dept. of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and

Conservative pundit Bill Kristol, ex-CIA chief Michael Morell: these are the kinds of people the DSA “socialists” call their friends. SOURCE: German Marshall Fund/Alliance For Securing Democracy website.

former CIA head Michael Morell!   If the DSA had any decency they would have buried the memory of this monstrous gathering of Cold War criminals out in their political back 40.  But no; there it is, proudly placed on their website in 2017 as the pinnacle of their past achievements as an organization!

Now we know that back in 1980 these people were not heading up the GMA/AFSD Advisory Council.  But the organization hasn’t changed its stripes, just its personnel.  At the time that the DSA accepted the grant from the German Marshall Fund it was headed by one Robert Gerald Livingston: a lifelong servant of the US capitalist class and its imperialist government who had worked on Nixon’s National Security Council under then- Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1972/73 – at the time when Kissinger and the CIA were working hand-in-glove with Chilean General Augusto Pinochet and his fascist allies to overthrow the “socialist” government of Salvador Allende.  During that coup – and the subsequent political terrorism against leftist and union workers that followed it – tens of thousands of people were murdered.   But what did that mean to Cold Warrior/State Department Socialist Michael Harrington?  When it comes to defending the capitalist system from actual revolutionary socialists the DSA is more than willing to throw down with some of the most vicious enemies of the working class.

We don’t have time to research the rest of the organizations that have funded the DSA’s proudest achievements of the past 40 years; now that you see how we ran down all this information on the funding of fake NGOs like the DSA maybe you can take a whack at uncovering some more of their strange bedfellows.  All we can say to those of you who are considering the DSA as a potential viable alternative to predatory capitalism is: you are wasting your time.  If you really want to fight for the interests of the working class get in touch with us.

—  IWPCHI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Epic FAIL – Big “Surprise”: Republicans, Democrats Betray Workers, Refuse to Vote for Repeal of Obamacare Ripoff

Giving the game away: Republican Senator John McCain tells reporter to “wait for the show” as he walks onto US Senate floor to vote down Republicans’ promise to US workers to shut down ripoff Obamacare swindle.   Credit: guardian.com/us

Forget the ridiculous, breathless stories spewing from the bourgeois news media about the alleged “drama” that took place in the US Senate last night. Forget about the “heroic” stand taken by the deeply cynical Sen. John McCain, who, like a Roman Emperor, cast his vote against his own party’s most important promise to the workers of the United States during the election last year. Just before the vote, as he was making his way to the Senate floor to cast what was to be the deciding vote torpedoing the primary reason why the Republicans took over control of the Congress and the White House last year.  McCain  told a reporter who eagerly asked what he was going to do to “wait for the show”.  And that is precisely what it was that was going down in the Senate last night: like a bad sitcom, the latest, sickening episode of “Washington Swamp Farce”, in which the lives of 200 million Americans were sacrificed at the altar of American Capitalism so that the health care industry could be assured of a monstrously profitable swindle of the American public.

The scene was repulsive: not one representative of the US working class was present to cast a vote for or against legislation that held the lives of the entire working class in the balance. Every Senator there was a hired lackey of his or her state’s capitalist class, a bought and paid for servant of the 3% of the population who own over 50% of the national wealth. Many of the men and women in the room casting votes were themselves members of that wealthy capitalist elite, and when they were done voting they had done absolutely nothing to change the current swindling Obamacare ripoff which is literally forcing US workers – on pain of fines and possible imprisonment – to buy expensive health care plans they cannot afford to use. In the boardrooms of the Pharmaceutical companies and HMO’s there was rejoicing and the champagne no doubt flowed freely: the investments they had made on their bought-and-paid-for politicians had paid off once again. In the houses and apartment of the working class there were tears being shed and fists being clenched: “the bastards fucked us again!”  There would be no repeal of the Obamacare program which has destroyed what little savings millions of people could afford to scrape together even after working one, two or even three jobs; they would continue to be forced to buy health insurance they could not afford due to the ever-increasing premiums and could not afford to use because of the absurdly high deductibles built in to their diabolical insurance plans.

How could this come to pass – in a country that never tires of bragging to the world that it has the most fair, free and democratic political system ever devised? How can hundreds of millions of workers be completely locked out of the debate on something as vitally important to ourselves as health care for our children and our families?

The reason this happened is that almost alone among industrialized nations the United States working class has allowed itself to be tricked into believing that it did not need to build its own working class political parties in order to have working class interests protected. From the union misleadership of the AFL-CIO to the pro-Democratic and pro-Republican Party preachers in the pulpits of churches around the nation, workers have been brainwashed to believe that all they had to do was to vote for the “friends of labor” in one of these two parties and everything would be taken care of. “Sure”, they said, “we might have to make a trip or two to Washington in large numbers to put the ‘fear of God’ into those slimy politicians, but so long as we do that, we can ‘force’ them to do what we elected them to do”.

These liars, who profit from this two-party system through bribes and pathetic social service handouts from the politicians, have led the working class of the United States into a dead end politically. Thanks to our following their bad advice, all we can do when something as important as the future lives of our children is being debated in the legislative bodies of the land is sit in front of the TV, fingers crossed, hoping and praying that “this time” these bribed, corrupt politicians won’t sell us out. But they do, over and over and over again. And again the hucksters load us on to buses and send us to Washington to impotently “speak truth to power”; and again we are ignored by the politicians who prove to us again and again that they do not feel that they owe their jobs to the workers who voted them into office but to the rich capitalists who bought their votes when they financed their campaigns.

The United States is the only major industrialized nation-state in the world in which the working class have not one representative at the state or national level of government sworn to defend the interests of the working class unto death.  What kind of parties will make such a vow to the workers? Only the revolutionary socialist workers parties.  That is because only the revolutionary socialists have consistently been at the forefront of every struggle in the fight for the rights of workers ever since capitalism began to overthrow feudalism back in the late 1700s.  In every important fight for workers rights – the eight-hour day, the right to form unions, the right for women and people of color to be counted as human beings, the opposition to slavery, the right to free speech and association, compulsory socialized education for children, the end to child labor and the right to bear arms – and free nationalized health care for all – it has been the working class, led by revolutionary socialists that have forced the government to adopt these demands and to make them the law of the land.  There is simply NO OTHER WAY for the working class to have their rights turned into law unless we build workers parties to take over governmental power and force these issues in the legislative bodies of the land! Until the workers of the United States realize this their future will remain in the hands of this cabal of capitalist greedheads who play with our lives like little girls and boys play with dolls and toy soldiers.

In every single major industrialized nation in the world the working class has built its own political parties: socialist parties, communist parties, dedicated (more or less – but that’s ANOTHER story) to defending the rights of the working class first, foremost and under all conditions! And in every one of the major industrialized states of the world the workers through their independent political struggle and the building of these parties has been able to force the capitalist class to disgorge a portion of the national wealth and to dedicate it to a state-run socialized health care system in which every citizen gets cradle-to-grave health care FOR FREE! The cost of the insurance is of course derived from income taxes; but since it is a nationalized plan it is kept partially insulated from the capitalists insane lust for huge profits. This is why health care in countries with socialized medical care is so inexpensive compared to the tremendous ripoff of Obamacare. NO ONE in Europe or Canada or Cuba or China has to pay thousands of dollars in deductibles to have major health issues taken care of. NO ONE in these countries is forced to pay sky-high prices for life-saving medicine! And it is because of the tremendous pressure brought upon those capitalist classes of those countries by the workers organized into socialist and communist workers parties that this is the case. If they did not have a militant revolutionary working class movement organized into political parties and threatening to take over the government on behalf of the workers if their demands were not met, every one of these countries’ workers would be in the same boat we are now here in the USA. US workers have got to understand that until we build our own revolutionary socialist workers parties and until we start sending working-class representatives into the state and national legislative bodies we will continue to be ignored by the capitalist class and their corrupt, bribed political lackeys! It should be obvious even to a dog that it is better to represent yourself in Congress than to have some bought-and-paid-for rich asshole pretend to represent you.

And the US working class has been brainwashed there, too, by the same trade union and religious swindlers to believe that “socialism is bad” and that “capitalism is good”. Well we just saw what a capitalist-owned and operated Senate whose members worship capitalism above all else think about workers’ right to health care! They think it’s a joke! What will the AFL-CIO union piecards and the sky pilots of our land tell us to do now? They will tell you to get on yet another bus and take yet another trip to Washington to once again stand in front of an empty White House and an abandoned Congress and yell at the deaf, empty buildings: this is what their political program of “speaking truth to power” consists of! Nothing could make the capitalists happier than if we take their advice and continue to limit all working class political activity to this impotent, idiotic “program” of “speaking truth to power”! The capitalists love it! They are laughing all the way to the bank (to deposit the money they’ve stolen from us through taxes and raw capitalist exploitation of workers) – and back again!

“Speaking truth” to a “power” that isn’t listening is useless because by following this idiotic advice we have allowed the greedy capitalist class to LOCK US OUT of the legislative bodies at the state and national levels! By not building working class parties and financing them ourselves and dedicating our lives to the conquest of political power by the working class we have allowed our voices to become COMPLETELY IGNORABLE.

The only time these bought-and-paid-for political servants of the 1% deign to “hear” us is at election time. We should say the only time they deign to PRETEND to hear us is at election time; and they hate the fact that every four or six years they have to go through the motions of pretending to care what we have to say just so they can con enough of us to vote for them so they can go back to Washington and start filling their, their friends and their capitalist masters’ pockets with our hard-earned tax money! Every four or six years they must put on – as John McCain revealed again last night – “a show” so they can fool enough of us to cast ballots for them… so that they can then go serve their true masters who financed their campaigns for them. They capitalists buy the politicians’ offices for them through campaign donations and then promise them tremendous riches once the voters throw the bums OUT of office so long as the politicians serve their masters well while they are IN office. And serve them well they do, as we all saw in the disgusting, cynical, stage-managed “Republicrat Brothers Three-Ring Political Circus” we saw last night – with John McCain as ringmaster! What a great “show” it was: truly “the greatest ‘show’ on Earth”! Weren’t you all impressed by it? It made us want to puke. And the pure propaganda coming out of the capitalist news media today portraying this repulsive spectacle as some kind of “high political drama” with an outcome “no one could have predicted” makes us want to puke some more. But they have had quite a few of you fooled haven’t they? Well it is time for you to wake the fuck UP sisters and brothers because until you do we are all going to continue to get raped by these swindling pirates of the capitalist class! Our lives and the lives of our children are at stake! We can not afford to continue going through the motions of this asinine pantomime democracy where the vast majority of the citizens – the working class – are relegated to the politically castrating “programme” of “speaking truth to power”! Only complete idiots would continue to run on this exercise wheel of this fake democracy like a herd of gerbils. It’s high time that we as workers got off our knees and stood up like the women and men that we are and threw off this yoke of fealty to two political parties that are dedicated to the crushing of our unions, our families and ourselves! We need to throw off our loyalty to a capitalist system that only promises us lower wages, declining standards of living and endless war for the benefit of a handful of wealthy families. We desperately need to start TODAY to build up the decent revolutionary socialist workers parties that exist here in the US – and there are two or three that are worthy of our support right now – or, if we are not satisfied with those parties, to build new ones like our own Independent Workers Party. Until we have the courage to take that bold step we will remain a nation of hamsters on 250 million exercise wheels running faster and faster every year in the delusional hope that if we run fast enough, we’ll eventually escape from our self-imposed political cages.

Independent Workers Party of Chicago