NY Times Slanders Bolsheviks as “German Agents”: Bolshevik Party Was Funded By Russian Workers

The New York Times, the “newspaper of record” for the US’ east coast capitalist class, has always hated the workers movement.  As part of the US capitalist class’ bought-and-paid-for press, they have consistently excoriated the US workers movement from the time of its inception in the early 19th century to the present day.  They hate the working class and all it stands for and they go so far as to never credit the communist workers movement with any of its many achievements in the USA, from its creation of the modern civil rights movement to its leadership of the CIO during the major class battles of the 1930s that made the trade union movement a force that the US capitalist class had to reckon with.

2017 being the 100th anniversary of the heroic Russian Revolution led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, the capitalist press is attempting to once again slander the revolution in order to (hopefully) dissuade the 2017 US working class from taking the time to go back and revisit the background of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.  In the US especially, the working class have been taught from the cradle that “communism is bad” and “capitalism is good”.  The fact is that the Russian Revolution of 1917 for the very first time ever created a workers state where the working class was the ruling class, and the capitalist exploiting class was abolished.  It is for this reason only that the bourgeois press of 2017 seeks to bury the memory of the great 1917 Bolshevik workers socialist revolution under a mountain of lies and slander.

The ancient lie that Lenin’s Bolsheviks were “German agents” was never believed by anyone – including the agents of the bourgeois press – back at the time of the revolution.  The political exile Lenin accepted the Germans’  offer of safe passage of himself and his comrades from Switzerland to Russia in the midst of the carnage of WWI so that he and his comrades could take their rightful places as leaders of their parties’ factions in the new government that emerged upon the collapse of the hideous Tsarist regime had nothing at all to do with accepting a role as an agent of the Kaiser’s Germany: the Kaiser, desperate to extricate his regime from a war in which, with the impending entry of the USA into the conflict, could only end in his regime’s defeat, was grasping at straws by the spring of 1917.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks had righteously opposed WWI from its very beginning, and had called for the defeat of the Tsarist war machine and for workers revolution throughout Europe to end the war and overthrow capitalism which had created the conditions that led to the war.  The Kaiser in his vast ignorance and desperation only comprehended that the Bolsheviks had pledged that if they became the ruling power in Russia that they would immediately take steps to pull Russia out of the war; that was all that he cared about.  He saw the possibility of a Russian pullout from participation in WWI as an opportunity for his regime to reallocate his  military forces from the Eastern Front to the Western.  He eagerly lunged for what he believed was a slim chance of victory offered to him by the stupid Bolshevik party and their utopian dream of a socialist revolution in Tsarist Russia.  Never in his wildest dreams did the Kaiser believe that the Bolsheviks would actually follow through on the political program of socialist revolution which the Bolsheviks had expounded since the collapse of the Second International in August, 1914.  Wilhelm granted the Bolsheviks safe passage to Russia in the desperate hope that the Bolsheviks would take Russia out of the war; he calculated that if that happened, he could reallocate his military forces to the west where once he crushed the French and English he would have ample time to crush the Bolsheviks as well.  Lenin knew this from day one and he did not hesitate to take up the Germans’ offer.  “The capitalists will sell the rope that will be used to hang them” was one of Lenin’s basic beliefs; and the Germans’ shortsighted  offer to send Marxist revolutionaries to Russia to overthrow the Tsar in order to obtain a military benefit from a Russian socialist revolution was and is one of the most asinine moves ever made by a ruling monarch.  When Lenin arrived in Russia in April of 1917 he immediately organized his party to not only overthrow the Tsarist regime, but to take power in the name of the Russian working class and peasantry.  This was far more than the Kaiser had bargained for; and the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917 not only knocked the crowns off the heads of the Russian autocrats: it very quickly led to the collapse of the German monarchy as well.  No serious historian would state in 2017 that the Bolsheviks were nothing but “agents of the Kaiser”.  If that was true, what did the Bolsheviks do to defend their “benefactor” when he was facing his own deposition?  In fact, the Bolsheviks did all they could to hasten the collapse of Kaiserdom, organizing a revolutionary Bolshevik party in Germany with express orders to overthrow the capitalist system in Germany as soon as possible.  The Kaiser’s fate was sealed the moment he gave Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades safe passage to Russia in the vain hope that the collapse of Tsarism would lead to the building of a bulwark of support for Kaiserdom!  What a stupid ass he was!  Within a year after October 1917 the Kaiser was forced to abdicate his throne by the revolutionary workers of Germany. inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution!

The whole idea that the Bolshevik Party was funded by “German Gold” is refuted in the following article of 1914, in which Lenin lays out precisely where the financial support of the Bolshevik Party was coming from at that time.  The Bolshevik Party – like all Marxist parties around the world in 1917 – received the vast majority of its’ funding from party membership dues and from sales of the party newspaper.  In this article, Lenin breaks down the revenue his party was receiving in 1914 from the sales of the Bolshevik press and also breaks down what sections of Russian society were actively supporting the Bolshevik Party.  “German gold” was NEVER an important source of Bolshevik finances, ever in the history of the Bolsheviks.  Their money came primarily from the industrial workers of the major industrial centers of Tsarist Russia: from the trade unionists working in the big factories in Russia’s major cities.  The following article was filched from marxists.org.

We must alert our working class readers to the fact that we have been studying the works of Lenin for 30 years and that we have NEVER found even a trace of duplicity or shady deaking in the writings of this heroic leader of the workers of the world.  Lenin’s writings can be taken at face value: he dedicated his entire life to fighting for the emancipation of the workers of the world from the misery of wage-slavery.  You will search in vain for another person who dedicated his or her life more selflessly to the service of he workers of the world.  In Lenin, the workers of he world of the 21st century will find an honest and stalwart advocate.

— IWPCHI

 

V. I.   Lenin

The Working Class and Its Press

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Published: Trudovaya Pravda Nos. 14 and 15, June 13 and 14, 1914. Symposium Marxism and Liquidationism, Part II. Priboi Publishers, St. Petersburg, 1914. Signed: V. Ilyin. Published according to the text of the symposium verified with that of the newspaper Trudovaya Pravda.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 20, pages 363-371.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Joe Fineberg
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2004). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README

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There is nothing more important to class-conscious workers than to have an understanding of the significance of their movement and a thorough knowledge of it. The only source of strength of the working-class movement—and an invincible one at that—is the class-consciousness of the workers and the broad scope of their struggle, that is, the participation in it of the masses of the wage-workers.

The St. Petersburg Marxist press, which has been in existence for years, publishes exclusive, excellent, indispensable and easily verifiable material on the scope of the working-class movement and the various trends predominating in it. Only those who wish to conceal the truth can ignore this material, as the liberals and liquidators do.

Complete figures concerning the collections made for the Pravdist (Marxist) and liquidationist newspapers in St. Petersburg for the period between January 1 and May 13, 1914, have been compiled by Comrade V.A.T.^[3] We publish his table below in full, and shall quote round figures in the body of this article as occasion arises, so as not to burden the reader with statistics.

The following is Comrade V.A.T.’s table. (See pp. 364–65.) First of all we shall deal with the figures showing the number of workers’ groups. These figures cover the whole period of existence of the Pravdist and liquidationist newspapers. Number of workers’ groups:

	Supporting the Pravdist newspapers	Supporting the liquida- tionist newspapers
For 1912 . . . . . . . . . .	620	89
For 1913 . . . . . . . . . .	2,181	661
1914, from Jan. 1 to May 13 .	2,873	671
Total	5,674	1,421

 

Collections for Marxist (Pravdist) and liquidationist newspapers in St. Petersburg from January 1 to May 13, 1914

Collections made by	St. Petersburg				Moscow				Provinces				Total
	Pravdist		Liquidationist		Pravdist		Liquidationist		Pravdist		Liquidationist		Pravdist		Liquidationist
	No.[1]	rubles[2]	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles	No.	Rubles
Workers’ groups . .	2,024	13,943.24	308	2,231.98	130	865.00	25	263.52	719	4,125.86	338	2,800.62	2,873	18,934.10	671	5,296.12
Total from non-workersincluding:	325	1,256.92	165	1,799.40	46	260.51	24	1,137.30	332	1,082.79	230	2,113.90	713	2,650.01	453	6,759.77
Student and youth groups	26	369.49	19	292.13	8	119.30	3	21.00	20	162.13	23	317.09	54	650.92	45	630.22
Groups of “adherents”, “friends”, etc.	8	164.00	14	429.25	6	42.10	5	892.00	28	252.72	35	1,129.35	42	458.82	54	2,450.60
Other groups	2	8.00	6	72.60	1	2.00	—	—	30	115.29	24	113.52	33	125.29	30	186.12
Individuals	281	650.96	120	966.72	29	63.61	14	197.30	221	332.05	132	443.80	531	1,046.62	266	1,608.32
Unspecified	8	64.47	6	38.70	2	33.50	2	26.50	33	220.60	16	110.14	43	318.57	24	175.34
From abroad	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	10	49.79	34	1,709.17
Total . .	2,349	15,200.16	473	4,103.38	176	1,125.51	49	1,400.82	1,051	5,208.65	568	4,914.52	3,586	21,584.11	1,124	12,055.89
1	/

The total number of groups is 7,095. Of course, there are groups which made several collections, but separate data for these are not available.

We see that only one-fifth of the total number of workers’ groups are in sympathy with the liquidators. In two-and-a-half years, Pravdism, Pravdist decisions and Pravdist tactics have united four-fifths of Russia’s class-conscious workers. This fact of workers’ unity can well bear comparison with the phrases about “unity” uttered by the various grouplets of intellectuals, the Vperyodists, Plekhanovites, Trotskyists, etc., etc.

Let us compare the figures for 1913 and 1914 (those for 1912 are not comparable, because Pravda appeared in April, and Luch five months later). We shall find that the number of Pravdist groups has grown by 692, i. e., 31.7 per cent, whereas the liquidationist groups have gone up by 10, i. e., 1.5 per cent. Hence, the workers’ readiness to support the Pravdist newspapers has grown 20 times as last as their readiness to support the liquidationist newspapers.

Let us see how the workers in various parts of Russia are divided according to trend:

	per cent of total workers’ groups {
	Pravdist	Liquidationist
St. Petersburg . . . . .	86	14
Moscow . . . . . . . .	83	17
Provinces . . . . . . .	68	32

The inference is clear: the more politically developed the masses of the workers are, and the higher their level of class-consciousness and political activity, the higher is the number of Pravdists among them. In St. Petersburg the liquidators have been almost completely dislodged (fourteen out of a hundred); they still have a precarious hold in the provinces (32 out of 100), where the masses are politically less educated.

It is highly instructive to note that figures from an entirely different source, namely, those giving the number of workers’ delegates elected during the Insurance Board elections, tally to a remarkable degree with those of the workers’ groups. During the election of the Metropolitan Insurance Board, 37 Pravdist and 7 liquidationist delegates were   elected, i. e., 84 per cent and 16 per cent respectively. Of the total number of delegates elected, the Pravdists constituted 70 per cent (37 out of 53), and at the election of the All-Russia Insurance Board they obtained 47 out of 57, i. e., 82 per cent. The liquidators, non-party people and Narodniks form a small minority of workers, who still remain under bourgeois influence.

To proceed. The following are interesting figures on the average amounts collected by workers groups:

	Average amounts collected by work ers’ groups
	Pravdist (rubles)	Liquidationist (rubles)
St. Petersburg . . . . .	6.88	7.24
Moscow . . . . . . . .	6.65	10.54
Provinces . . . . . . .	5.74	8.28
Whole of Russia . . . .	6.58	7.89

The Pravdist groups show a natural, understandable and, so to speak, normal tendency: the average contribution from the average workers’ group rises with the increase in the average earnings of the working masses.

In the case of the liquidators, we see, apart from the spurt in the Moscow groups (of which there are only 25 in all!), that the average contributions from the provincial groups are higher than those from the St. Petersburg groups! How are we to explain this odd phenomenon?

Only a more detailed analysis of the figures could provide a satisfactory reply to this question, but that would be a laborious task. Our conjecture is that the liquidators unite the minority of the higher-paid workers in certain sections of industry. It has been observed all over the world that such workers cling to liberal and opportunist ideas. In St. Petersburg, the longest to put up with the liquidators were the printing workers, and it was only during the last elections in their Union, on April 27, 1914, that the Pravdists won half the seats on the Executive and a majority of the seats for alternate members. In all countries the printers are most inclined towards opportunism, and some grades among them are highly paid workers.

If our conclusion about the minority of the workers, the labour aristocracy, being in sympathy with the liquidators   is merely conjectural, there can be no doubt whatever where individuals are concerned. Of the contributions made by non-workers, more than half came from individuals (531 out of 713 in our case, 266 out of 453 in the case of the liquidators). The average contribution from this source in our case is R.1.97 whereas among the liquidators it is R.6.05!

In the first case, the contributions obviously came from lower-paid office workers, civil servants, etc., and from the petty-bourgeois elements of a semi-proletarian character. In the case of the liquidators, however, we see that they have rich friends among the bourgeoisie.

These rich friends from among the bourgeoisie take still more definite shape as “groups of adherents, friends, etc.” These groups collected R.458.82 for us, i. e., two per cent of the total sum collected, the average donation per group being R.10.92, which is only half as much again as the average donation of workers’ groups. For the liquidators, however, these groups collected R.2,450.60, i. e., over 20 per cent of the total sum collected, the average donation per group being R.45.39, i. e., six times the average collected by workers’ groups!

To this we add the collections made abroad, where bourgeois students are the main contributors. We received R.49.79 from this source, i. e., less than one-fourth of one per cent; the liquidators received R.1,709.17, i. e., 14 per cent.

If we add up individuals, “adherents and friends”, and collections made abroad, the total amount collected from these sources will be as follows:

Pravdists—R.1,555.23, i. e., 7 per cent of the total collections.

Liquidators—R.5,768.09, i. e., 48 per cent of the total collections.

From this source we received less than one-tenth of what we received from the workers’ groups (R.18,934). This source gave the liquidators more than they received from the workers’ groups (R.5,296)!

The inference is clear: the liquidationist newspaper is not a workers’ but a bourgeois newspaper. It is run mainly on funds contributed by rich friends from among the bourgeoisie.

As a matter of fact, the liquidators are far more dependent upon the bourgeoisie than our figures show. The Pravdist newspapers have frequently published their financial re ports for public information. These reports have shown that our newspaper, by adding collections to its income, is paying its way. With a circulation of 40,000 (the average for May 1914), this is understandable, in spite of confiscations and a dearth of advertisements. The liquidators, however, published their report only once (Luch No. 101), showing a deficit of 4,000 rubles. After this, they adopted the usual bourgeois custom of not publishing reports. With a circulation of 15,000, their newspaper cannot avoid a deficit, and evidently this is covered again and again by their rich friends from among the bourgeoisie.

Liberal-labour politicians like to drop hints about an “open workers’ party”, but they do not like to reveal to genuine workers their actual dependence upon the bourgeoisie! It is left for us, “underground” workers, to teach the liquidator-liberals the benefit of open reports….

The overall ratio of worker and non-worker collections is as follows:

Collected by	Out of every ruble collected for
	Pravdist newspapers	Liquidationist newspapers
Workers . . . . .	87 kopeks	44 kopeks
Non-workers . . .	13 ”	56 ”
Total	1.00 ruble	1.00 ruble

The Pravdists get one-seventh of their aid collections from the bourgeoisie and, as we have seen, from its most democratic and least wealthy sections. The liquidationist undertaking is largely a bourgeois undertaking, which is supported only by a minority of the workers.

The figures concerning the sources of funds also reveal to us the class status of the readers and buyers of the newspapers.

Voluntary contributions are made only by regular readers, who most intelligently sympathise with the trend of the given newspaper. In its turn, the trend of the given news paper willy-nilly “adapts itself” to the more “influential” section of its reading public.

The deductions that follow from our figures are, first, theoretical, i. e., such as will help the working class to understand the conditions of its movement, and secondly, practical deductions, which will give us direct guidance in our activities.

It is sometimes said that there is not one working-class press in Russia, but two. Even Plekhanov repeated this statement not long ago. But that is not true. Those who say this betray sheer ignorance, if not a secret desire to help the liquidators spread bourgeois influence among the workers. Long ago and repeatedly (for example, in 1908 and 1910), the Party decisions clearly, definitely, and directly pointed to the bourgeois nature of liquidationism. Articles in the Marxist press have explained this truth hundreds of times.

The experience of a daily newspaper, which openly appeals to the masses, was bound to disclose the real class character of the liquidationist trend. And that is what it did. The liquidationist newspaper has indeed proved to be a bourgeois undertaking, which is supported by a minority of the workers.

Moreover, let us not forget that almost up to the spring of 1914 the liquidationist newspaper was the mouthpiece of the August bloc. It was only lately that the Letts with drew from it, and Trotsky, Em-El, An, Buryanov and Yegorov have left, or are leaving, the liquidators. The break-up of the bloc is continuing. The near future is bound to reveal still more clearly the bourgeois character of the liquidationist trend and the sterility of the intellectualist grouplets, such as the Vperyodists, Plekhanovites, Trotskyists, etc.

The practical deductions may be summed up in the following points:

1) 5,674 workers’ groups united by the Pravdists in less than two-and-a-half years is a fairly large number, considering the harsh conditions obtaining in Russia. But this is only a beginning. We need, not thousands, but tens of thousands of workers’ groups. We must intensify our activities tenfold. Ten rubles collected in kopeks from hundreds of workers are more important and valuable, both from the ideological and organisational point of view, than a hundred rubles from rich friends among the bourgeoisie.   Even from the financial aspect, experience goes to prove that it is possible to run a well-established workers’ newspaper with the aid of workers’ kopeks, but impossible to do so with the aid of bourgeois rubles. The liquidationist under taking is a bubble, which is bound to burst.

2) We lag behind in the provinces, where 32 per cent of the workers’ groups support the liquidators! Every class-conscious worker must exert every effort to put an end to this lamentable and disgraceful state of affairs. We must bring all our weight to bear in the provinces.

3) The rural workers are apparently still almost untouched by the movement. Difficult as work in this field may be, we must press forward with it in the most vigorous manner.

4) Like a mother who carefully tends a sick child and gives it better nourishment,, the class-conscious workers must take more care of the districts and factories where the workers are sick with liquidationism. This malady, which emanates from the bourgeoisie, is inevitable in a young working-class movement, but with proper care and persistent treatment, it will pass without any serious after effects. To provide the sick workers with more plentiful nourishment in the shape of Marxist literature, to explain more carefully and in more popular form the history and tactics of the Party and the meaning of the Party decisions on the bourgeois nature of liquidationism, to explain at greater length the urgent necessity of proletarian unity, i. e., the submission of the minority of the workers to the majority, the submission of the one-fifth to the four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia—such are some of the most important tasks confronting us.

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Notes

[1] Number of collections. —Lenin

[2] Sums collected (rubles) —Lenin

[3] V. A. T.—initials of V. A. Tikhomirnov, a member of the Pravda staff.

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Works Index   |   Volume 20	|	Collected Works   |   L.I.A. Index
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A Revolutionary Trotskyist Memorial Day – Honoring the Heroes and Martyrs of the Revolutionary Workers Movement

May 30th, 1937:  Memorial Day Massacre during “Little Steel” strike: Chicago Police open fire on striking steelworkers trying to unionize steel plants on Chicago’s south side. 10 workers were murdered (many shot in the back) and 30 seriously injured. Source: Wikipedia, US National Archives

In the United States, Memorial Day is a time for remembering our family members and friends who have passed away;  and for honoring them and sharing  our memories of them with everyone who still remembers them – and for passing on the stories of their lives to our children who either never got to know them or whose memories of them are only faint memories from their earliest years.

It is also a celebration of the lives of the millions of worker-soldiers who died fighting the endless wars fought by US armies, all of which – since the U.S. Civil War – have been imperialist wars fought not in defense of the United States but in pursuit of the profit-mad dreams of the U.S. capitalist class.

The U.S. capitalist class and its owned-and-operated propaganda outlets known to Marxists as “the bourgeois press” cynically “salute” the worker-soldiers who have given their lives in imperialist wars – wars which did not make the workers’ lives one bit easier but only heaped even more wealth into the bank accounts of the top 5% of the population: the U.S. capitalist class. The blood of millions of worker-soldiers around the world has been harvested by the capitalists for the capitalists’ own benefit – they whose own sons and daughters more often than not have found ready-made legal “loopholes” allowing them to escape endangering their own lives on the front lines of the U.S.’ bloody imperialist wars. The capitalist class always makes certain that its bought-and-paid-for politicians provide the sons and daughters of the rich with ways to avoid military service in wartime. Yet they all have the nerve to trumpet their phony patriotism on days like this by wrapping themselves in the flag and disgustingly pretending to “honor” the memories of those they have sent to early graves in pursuit of profits for the wealthiest 5% of US citizens.

Meanwhile, the victims of their bloodthirstiness – the worker-soldiers who have had their bodies and minds battered and broken during their descent into the horrors of modern warfare – are thrown away as so much trash; and tens of thousands are left to suffer from the physical and psychological damage that is the “reward” every soldier receives for military service in shooting wars.

Thousands of homeless veterans are forced to roam the streets of U.S. cities, abused every day by the racist, vicious police thugs of the U.S. capitalist class. The families of worker-soldiers who are on active duty – and even elderly retired vets – are forced to beg for assistance to keep a roof over their heads while dad or mom are off brutalizing U.S. imperialism’s “enemies du jour”. It is disgusting that so many families of active U.S. soldiers must rely on charity for their basic needs, like food and clothing – while mom or dad risk their lives so that the numerically tiny billionaire class of the US can amass even greater wealth.  Why do we allow this to go on?

U.S. parents eagerly encourage their children to accept the Pentagon’s blood money so they can attend college.  “All they ask” is that your kids help murder other workers’ kids overseas for a few years.   Source: US Army

For revolutionary Trotskyists, we respect ALL of the victims of U.S. imperialism and its endless wars, not just the worker-soldiers who are driven into the bloody arms of the U.S. war machine in order to find a job or pay for college. We honor the so-called “enemy” workers who are always the victims of imperialist war, slaughtered in the millions by our own sons and daughters.  Yes it is our own sons and daughters who serve the aims of US bankers and war profiteers by serving in the military of the mortal enemies of all the world’s workers – the U.S. capitalist class.

Arkansas chapter of American Bar Association alludes to massive abuses of legal rights of active-duty, retired and disabled veterans. Source: American Bar Association “Arkansas Access to Justice Commission 2007 Annual Report”

We do not honor or support the cynical memorials for US soldiers that are organized by the professional killers of workers in the Pentagon, or by their capitalist masters. They spend millions of dollars every Memorial Day to fly U.S. flags from every flagpole and to place them on the graves of every soldier they sent to their deaths in pursuit of war profits. But when it comes time to pay for rent for the families of soldiers on active duty or for clothes for their kids or for housing for homeless vets, or for drug treatment centers or medical care for vets who have returned home suffering from effects of the wars they fought in, these phony capitalist “patriots”, wrapped in the flag every Memorial Day, are nowhere to be found!   We do not support the imperialist armed forces of the US capitalist state, whose role is to crush every workers’ rebellion that occurs anywhere in the world so as to “keep the world safe for the U.S. capitalist class and their corporations”.  The soldiers in the armed forces of the US capitalist class, though they are our own sons and daughters – are not “our troops”: they are THEIR troops; the troops of the US capitalist class and their imperialist war machine.  They answer to orders given by the US capitalist class, not to orders given by us.  It is a sad fact that many US workers encourage their own children to join the military forces of the very capitalist class that exploits workers at home and murders them overseas!  Our sons and daughters are being sent all over the world to murder their working class sisters and brothers – and we allow the US capitalist class to do this, while at the same time we shed tears over the thousands of dead US worker-soldiers who have given their lives so a handful of filthy rich US capitalists can continue to live like kings!  This is what happens when workers are so politically ignorant that they can not tell their friends from their mortal enemies.

Memorial Day is a time for those of us in the revolutionary Trotskyist workers movement to remember and honor the lives of the tens of millions of worker-socialists and communists who have died fighting for a world in which no one’s sons or daughters will ever have to fight in an imperialist war again. We honor the memories of these millions of worker-communists who sacrificed their own personal comfort by dedicating their lives not to a cozy but vacuous debt-ridden “middle class” dream but to the emancipation of all of the world’s workers from exploitation at the hands of the capitalists, and who gave their lives fighting not for the 1% but for the benefit of the workers of the entire world. These heroic worker-communists led every successful workers revolution in history – and died fighting in the many unsuccessful revolutions as well. They have been slandered and abused by the capitalists of the world who first sought to drown their struggles for the emancipation of the working class in blood and then falsified the history of what they fought and died for so that workers today don’t even know that these worker-heroes ever lived or what they fought and died for. From the coal mines of Kentucky to the copper mines of Arizona; from the cotton fields of the South to the oil fields of Alaska, courageous workers who fought against slavery and then fought to organize unions to defend the rights of workers were brutally attacked and many killed at the hands of the cops and company gun thugs and hired strikebreakers unleashed against them by the ancestors of today’s U.S. capitalist class.  On every Memorial Day the Trotskyists remember them all!

The U.S. Civil War was the last time the U.S. armed forces were employed in a revolutionary cause that advanced the rights of the working class.

We remember the worker-revolutionaries of the Civil War era who came out of the struggle against slavery and became beacons of freedom to workers and peasants and slaves all over the world: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown and his brave wife and family. We honor the memory of the ex-slaves, free blacks and abolitionist workers who volunteered to fight in the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War and who did so specifically to overthrow the slave power of the Confederacy, arms in hand!  The U.S. Civil War was the LAST time that the US military fought on the progressive side of a war.  Ever since then every US war has been an imperialist war fought primarily to increase the personal wealth and political and economic power of the U.S. capitalist class!

In Chicago we honor the memories of those brave worker-communists and trades unionists who were shot down in cold blood by the Chicago Police under the orders of the steel bosses at what has become known as “The Memorial Day Massacre” of 1937.  This was the blood-price demanded by the “Little Steel” bosses for the workers daring to organize steel unions here in the “Land of the Free”(TM).

We honor the memories of the Haymarket Martyrs, anarchist and socialist workers executed by the capitalists of Chicago for daring to fight for the rights of workers and an 8-hour day. We honor the memory of Lucy Parsons, who kept the spirit of the Haymarket Martyrs alive to the last day of her life. We honor the memories of the civil rights workers who gave their lives fighting for rights for black workers and who died so often at the hands of the hired killers of the US capitalist class – the cops, the FBI and their Klan and Nazi henchmen.  We remember and honor the memory of Medgar Evers, Robert F. Williams, Viola Liuzzo – and so many others whose names the world will never know.

We honor the great worker-revolutionaries who rose from the ranks to become leaders of the workers of the US, and who paid for their honesty, self-sacrifice and dedication to the cause of the working class with long prison terms: Socialist Party leader, opponent of the military draft in WWI and defender of the Russian Revolution Eugene Debs; Trotskyist leader James Cannon;  Marine Corps veteran and Black Panther Party leader Geronimo Pratt; black Communist Party member, movie star, athlete and legendary opera singer Paul Robeson; heroic US Communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – to name but a few. How many U.S. workers even know these names? The US capitalist class has made sure that their names are never mentioned in the bourgeois press or memorialized by Hollywood. It is up to the revolutionary socialists to keep their memories alive!

We remember and honor the heroic workers and peasants who fought to overthrow Tsarism and then had the courage to forge ahead and overthrow capitalism as well in the great Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the Civil War that followed! Thousands of these brave workers and peasants were butchered at the hands of the counterrevolutionary White Guard armies, sponsored by the United States, Great Britain and other imperialist powers of the “free world”. Many lived through the horrors of the Civil War in Bolshevik Russia only to be later brutalized at the hands of Stalin and, later, Hitler and their executioners. And yet they continued to fight to put the Stalinized Soviet Union back on the road of Lenin and Trotsky to the end of their lives!

Of course we honor the great syndicalist and communist leaders from all over the world who gave their lives fighting for the emancipation of the working class internationally: “Big Bill” Haywood,  John Reed, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin, Abram Leon – and the millions of communist women and men whose names will forever be unknown to the world – who fought for the working class forces in every workers revolution, from the Paris Commune to the failed revolutionary movements in China in 1927, Indonesia in the 1960s, the Philippines, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, South Africa – to name but a few; we honor the millions of worker-communists and their friends butchered by the US capitalist class in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea and the victims of US imperialism being murdered by our deluded sons and daughters every day in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and so many other countries. We honor the men and women of the Trotskyist Left Opposition imprisoned and executed in the Stalinist USSR, who carried the banner of Lenin and Trotsky in the face of brutal persecution until death closed their eyes forever! Their names will never be known to history but their heroic struggles will never be forgotten so long as there is a revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist workers party in existence!

Capitalism must die so that the working class may live! Workers of the World, Unite!

— IWPCHI

Chicago’s Democratic Party-Controlled Union “Leadership”: No-shows at Huge #FightFor15 Union Rally in Chicago

Huge Midwest Rally for the #FightFor15 Kicks Off – 23 May 2017. Of course no one gave a moment’s thought to picketing the huge building in the background that houses the racist, capitalist Democratic Party criminals who run Chicago like a slave plantation.  (Photo by IWPCHI)

(23 May 2017) –  There was a large and very spirited rally of thousands of union workers from across the Midwest held in Chicago today in support of the #FightFor15 movement.  Unions from Kansas City, Cleveland, and Detroit all showed up in large numbers; but there was one group conspicuously missing: the unions from Chicago itself!  They were M.I.A.  And not one Chicago politician or Chicago AFL-CIO union piecard dared to mount the speakers’ platform at the end of the rally, either.  Frankly, we don’t think anyone missed them; but their absence was an insult to the thousands of mostly black (and Hispanic) workers from throughout the Midwest who spent hours on buses traveling to Chicago to attend the rally, who probably expected to be welcomed by their union sisters and brothers here in Chicago.  Sadly, almost certainly due to Chicago Democratic Party machinations, it was not going to happen.  The so-called “friends of labor” Democrats are scared to death of any manifestation of class solidarity among workers from across the region; and they’ll do anything to prevent “their” Chicago unions from meeting union militants from other Democratic Party-controlled cities in the Midwest.  To the Democrats, union solidarity spells “big trouble down the line.”

Kansas City, Presente! (Photo by IWPCHI)

Detroit union workers brought a large contingent of the pride of black Detroit and their fine banner. (Photo by IWPCHI)

This is a small part of the large group of trade unionists from Cleveland. (Photo by IWPCHI)

The rally was directed by the Democrats leading the AFL-CIO unions that participated (particularly the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU); the main targets of their anger were (of course) Donald Trump and the McDonald’s Corporation, which has been fighting against #FightFor15 ever since the campaign was launched.  But for whatever reason the Democratic Party-controlled Chicago unions were complete no-shows at the march and on the podium at the end of the rally.  We attended the march and rally and did not see a single Chicago union banner!  What a disgrace!

Hispanic workers from Chicago and throughout the Midwest were well represented – as usual! (Photo by IWPCHI)

The rally assembles at Daley Plaza, 23 May 2017. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Our very modest abilities to intervene politically in the rally were limited by our organization’s small size;  our slogans were: “Dump the Democrats and Build A Workers Party” and “$15 an HR?  NOT ENOUGH!  We Need a $25 an HR Min. Wage in Chicago!”

Why “dump the Democrats”?  Because the Democrats are one of the two political parties owned and operated by the US big business interests – the capitalist class – who create their wealth by robbing workers of the product of workers’ labor.  In the capitalist system, all profits are squeezed from the labor of the workers; the capitalists are always trying to devise new ways to increase their profits by cutting wages and benefits  and by eliminating as many workers as possible and making the remaining workers do their own  jobs as well as the jobs of those who were fired.

“Get up! Get Down! Chicago Is a Union Town!” Yes it is but thanks to the Democrat-controlled union “leadership” you’ll rarely see Chicago union workers hitting the streets – especially when union sisters and brothers from throughout the Midwest are in town. (Photo by IWPCHI)

March assembly point: ready to hit the streets of Chicago. (Photo by IWPCHI)

The Democratic Party politicians are essentially hired directly by the capitalists through campaign contributions to those politicians.  All Democratic Party politicians get the majority of their campaign funding from the capitalist bosses.  This means that the loyalty of the Democratic party politicians – just like the Republican politicians – it to the capitalist class, not the working class.  The Democrats are the bought-and-paid-for representatives of the capitalist class just as the Republican Party politicians are.

As workers, members of the working class, we can not expect to have our  interests represented by politicians who are in the pay of the capitalists who exploit us!  That is why we place so much importance on the slogan “build a workers party”.  In order for the workers to have honest political representation at city hall, the state house, and in Congress, we have to create workers parties of, by and for the working class that are completely independent of the capitalist class in every way.  If we want to have control of the direction taken by local, state and national government, we must build workers parties based on the trade union membership and fully funded by the workers through donations and party dues payments (just like union dues).  The US working class is 175 million strong; if each worker gave just one dollar a month to an independent workers party, we’d have enough money to run candidates for every local, state and national representative body and soon WE would be deciding what legislation gets passed and what legislation gets dumped in the trash where it belongs!  Until the working class builds its own fully independent workers parties, working people will continue to have to beg the bought-and-paid-for politicians owned by our class enemies – the capitalists – to toss us a few crumbs every once in a while!

Communities United contingent gets ready to march. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Ready to roll! “Whose streets? OUR STREETS!” (Photo by IWPCHI)

“There is power in a union”. Yes but not when the union is on a leash held by the capitalist class through the agency of the Democratic Party. Dump the Democrats and Build a Workers Party! (Photo by IWPCHI)

That is why we have created the Independent Workers Party; we want to be YOUR party.  It is 100% independent of the capitalist class and is fully funded by workers.  As it grows, it will train its members in working-class history and prepare rank-and-file workers to become the honest political leaders the working class desperately needs in order to fight for workers’ rights until we become the majority party in the US and then we can give the entire capitalist system the funeral it has deserved for more than a century and create a revolutionary socialist workers government!  A workers government would pass a modern workers Constitution and Bill of Rights that would “outlaw” racism, sexism, homelessness, poverty and war.  Food, clothing, housing, education and medical care would become permanent “inalienable rights”.  No one could ever be evicted from their home for inability to pay the rent; no one could be denied medical treatment or food because they couldn’t afford it.  College education would be free.  Workers who lost their jobs would get 100% of their pay as unemployment benefits until they got back to work.  Daycare services would be free and available 24/7/365.  This is what 21st century socialism looks like!

Heading north on Michigan Avenue towards the Chicago River – and Trump Tower. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Trump Tower. Chicago home of the new Killer Clown in the White House. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Why do we say “$15 an HR? NOT ENOUGH”?  Because $15/hr is not enough money to live on in any major US city!  Economists say that in order for anyone to be making enough money to live comfortably, their rent should not be more than roughly 1/3 of their monthly take-home pay.  In Chicago, a decent 3-bedroom apartment (for a family with 2 kids) in one of the better neighborhoods costs $1500/mo or more (not including utilities!).  This means that a worker needs to make approximately $4500/mo or $1125/wk., which amounts to approximately $28.25 an hour!  So how can anyone pretend that a $15 minimum wage is going to be anywhere near enough to provide a decent standard of living for a person supporting a spouse and 2 kids?

A few years ago, a group of researchers calculated the minimum wages necessary for workers to live decently in every state in the US.  Here are their results:

Wages necessary to afford just a 2-bedroom apartment in the USA; these figures are several years old. The figures are statewide averages and do not show the much higher “housing wages” necessary to live decently in big cities like Chicago, New York City or Los Angeles.

With the rate of inflation running at around 2% a year, real wages are steadily declining unless workers receive at least the same percentage in a pay raise.  We say that not only is $15/hr not enough for Chicago; but unless the minimum wage is backed up by a full cost-of-living increase indexed to inflation annually, any increase in the minimum wage will quickly be eroded as inflation eats away at the new wage.

The goal of the Democrats and Republicans, working together to represent the best interests of the capitalists who paid them to run for office, is to take their sweeeet time before they raise the minimum wage.  By the time they finally pass the $15 minwage for the country (if they ever do that) it have depreciated so much that it will not be enough to sustain a small family at all.  When the greedheads like McDonald’s Corporation claim that workers are being “too greedy” asking for $15/hr, they are consciously lying.  They know that in fact $15/hr is easily doable – which is why the Democratic Party-affiliated #FightFor15 organization is supporting the inadequate demand of a mere $15/hr.  But they intend to draw out the implementation of this badly needed minimum wage increase for as long as they can, so their wealthy benefactors can rake in their megaprofits for as long as possible before the minwage increase hits them in their pockets!

Heading up N. LaSalle Dr. towards the Rock and Roll McDonald’s for the rally. Taken from the back end of the march, showing the huge numbers of workers who participated.  The cross-street closest to us in this photo is Kinzie; obviously the march stretches down four to six city blocks.  (Photo by IWPCHI)

Arriving at the “Rock and Roll McDonald’s” in Chicago. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Workers were only allowed to stand on two sides of the McDonald’s building, and were not allowed to block the entrances or exits.  The McDonald’s was closed during the rally. Oh, yeah: did we mention that it rained like hell for most of the march?  No? Well it rained like hell for most of the march – but like good union workers everywhere, these Midwestern trade unionists were prepared for any eventuality.  (Photo by IWPCHI)

Chicago Police blocked the exits… (Photo by IWPCHI)

…and entrances to the McDonald’s building – this car appeared to be an employee leaving the site. (Photo by IWPCHI)

Speakers addressed the rally from the back of a flatbed truck. (Photo by IWPCHI)

It appeared that this speaker read a statement from “Patriotic Millionaires” in “support” of the #FightFor15 campaign! Workers, who make up around 75% of the US population, do not need the “help” of millionaires – “patriotic” or otherwise – who represent less than 7% of the population.  (All we must ask of the millionaires is that they please don’t try to stand in the road in front of the workers movement lol)  (Photo by IWPCHI)

Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry was the only top trade union official who addressed the crowd. All of the Chicago union “leaders” seemed to have boycotted the event. A disgrace for them and “their” unions! (Photo by IWPCHI)

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry gave a rousing speech in which she denounced McDonalds’ corporate greed and pledged that her union, at least, would stand up to defend US workers and also staunchly defend immigrant and refugee rights.  Immigrant and refugee rights are indeed under severe attack from the Trump administration – just as they were under the Obama administration.  This too proves that the differences between the Democrats and Republicans are far outweighed by the similarities.  In the final analysis, the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same capitalist coin.  Workers must never allow our enemies in the capitalist class (and their government stooges) to divide the working class aginst itself.  We say: “Full citizenship rights for all immigrants and refugees – NOW!”  Immigrants and refugees are the allies of the US working class, not our enemies.  Our enemies are the in the US capitalist class which exploits all workers and attempts to create divisions amongst workers in every way they can: along religious, ethnic, sexual and every other line.  Unions are our first line of defense against this crap.  “An injury to one is an injury to all!  Workers of the World, Unite!”

— Independent Workers Party – Chicago

 

Malcolm X Birthday Tribute: “The Democrats are Dixiecrats” and “The Ballot or the Bullet” Speech

Malcolm X after 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca.  Source: Wikipedia, “Malcolm X”

On this celebration of what would have been the great US civil rights leader Malcolm X’s  92nd birthday we honor his memory by publishing a transcription of a speech he gave around 1964 which contains his brilliant deconstruction of the Democratic Party’s phony “friends of black workers” charade as well as his famous “the ballot or the bullet” warning to the racist capitalist US government.

Though the majority of the Democratic Party’s top leaders have long since dispensed with the outright white supremacist ideology they espoused at the time Malcolm X gave this speech, they still run most of the US’ major cities: every one of which is a racist hellhole for black and Hispanic workers, prominently featuring a brutally racist police department and judicial system run and defended by the Democrats.  In 2017, many major US cities – where unemployment for black workers runs as high as 60% or more and where the racist cops routinely gun down black workers as if they were dogs – are run by black Democrats.  The end result of the racist US criminal justice system remains largely the same as it was back when all these cities were run by white segregationists.  Black workers are still the last hired and first fired; the jails and prisons are packed with mostly black and brown bodies.  Today, instead of Northern Democrats running the country (as Malcolm X says) “in cahoots with Southern Dixiecrats” they are running the country as a giant “con game” in cahoots with their fellow hatchet-men (and women) of the US capitalist class in the Republican Party.

Malcolm X – brilliant as he was when he was at his best (and in this speech he is at his best) was never won over to revolutionary – that is, revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist – politics.  He was at first a Muslim fundamentalist, and later a black nationalist.  Neither of these ideologies are revolutionary in the 21st century, especially in a modern capitalist society whose working class is composed of workers of all ethnic backgrounds.  Only Marxist revolutionary integrationism can organize the multi-ethnic working class of the United States into an unconquerable, unified revolutionary force necessary to emancipate the working class from the capitalist system which is fundamentally based on the exploitation of the working class.

Malcolm X presented a militant counterpoint to the non-violent method of “struggle” favored by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the pacifist, pro-capitalist wing of the Civil Rights Movement that wound up its career in the lucrative (for them) but politically dead-end of Democratic Party politics.  Today the utter bankruptcy of the idea that by placing “black faces in high places” (in the Mayors’ and Congressional offices and offices of the municipal police forces)  racism would gradually “wither away” under the capitalist system – is fully exposed as the fraud the revolutionary Marxists always said it was.  Millions of black workers have long ago stopped even bothering to look for jobs that no longer exist as the capitalist greedheads have turned formerly thriving industrial cities into jobless ghost towns.

Malcolm X points out how the division of labor between the Northern Democrats and the Southern Dixiecrats prevented the successful promulgation of Civil Rights legislation from being passed until the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the threat that it could turn into an integrated revolutionary movement of the working class forced the bourgeoisie to make concessions to head off the birth of that potential revolutionary movement.  Bourgeois historians tell the lie that the Democrats – as they had done in the 1930s and 40s with Roosevelt’s New Deal – proved they had the interests of the working class and black workers at heart.  In fact the Democrats were merely doing their best to save the capitalist system from itself in both cases, by heading off the development of a revolutionary socialist workers movement by making timely concessions to the workers, thus temporarily defusing the powder keg of working class anger that threatened to bring down the entire US capitalist system.

This is why we say that the Democrats are not the “friends of labor” but the mortal enemies of the working class and the most formidable obstacle to the development of revolutionary consciousness among workers – and particularly black workers – in the USA.   The willingness of the bourgeoisie to absorb and neuter nascent revolutionary movements via last-minute concession-making is one of the keys to the resilience of a capitalist system that should have been overthrown decades ago.  We say :”Dump the Democrats (and of course the Republicans too) and build a workers party to fight for a workers government!  If we want there to be a future for our children and grandchildren free of poverty, racism, sexism, unemployment and war we absolutely MUST overthrow the capitalist system before it staggers into World War Three – a prospect which seems more likely with each passing day.  Quite simply put: “Capitalism must die so that the working class may live”.  And this is why we seek to create the vitally necessary revolutionary Trotskyist vanguard party composed of workers from every ethnic background to fight side-by-side as sisters and brothers against the common enemy: the US capitalist class and its bought-and-paid for Democratic and Republican political water-carriers.  Only a workers party based upon the only model that has successfully overthrown the capitalist system – a Leninist vanguard party – has the capability to overthrow the racist exploitative capitalist system of the US and create an egalitarian socialist workers republic where racism, sexism, poverty, homelessness, unemployment and war will become permanently relegated to the history books.

Workers of the World, Unite!

— IWPCHI

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

Note: The audio file that this transcript is made from can be downloaded (or listened to) here:  https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/malcolm-x/the-dixicrats.mp3

Malcolm X speech: “The Democrats are Dixiecrats – it’s the Ballot or the Bullet” (1964/5?)

“22 million black victims of Americanism are waking up; and they’re gaining a new political consciousness… becoming politically mature. And as they become… develop this political maturity they’re able to see the recent trends in these political elections. They see that the whites are so evenly divided that every time they vote the race is so close they have to go back and count the votes all over again… which means that any bloc… any minority that has a bloc of votes that stick together is in a strategic position. Either way you go, that’s who gets it. [Applause] You’re in a position to determine who’ll go to the White House and who’ll stay in the dog house. [Laughter, applause]. You’re the one who has that power. You can keep [President Lyndon Baines] Johnson in Washington, D.C. or you can send him back to his Texas cotton patch. [Shouts, applause]

“You’re the one who sent Kennedy to Washington; you’re the one who put the present Democratic administration in Washington, D.C.. The whites were evenly divided; it was the fact that you threw 80 per cent of your votes behind the Democrats that put the Democrats in the White House.

“When you see this, you can see that the Negro vote is the key factor. And despite the fact that you are in a position to be the determining factor, what do you get out of it? The Democrats have been in Washington, D.C. only because of the Negro vote: they’ve been down there four years; and their… all other legislation they wanted to bring up they’ve brought it up and gotten it out of the way, and now they bring up you! And now they bring up you! [Scattered laughter] You put them first and they put you last! [Laughter, “That’s right!”] ‘Cause you’re a chump! [Laughter, applause] “A political chump! [Voices: “That’s right Malcolm!” “That’s right.”]

“In Washington D.C., in the House of Representatives, there are 257 who are Democrats; only 177 are Republicans. In the Senate there are 67… Democrats; only 33 are Republicans. The party that you’ve backed controls two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate… and still they can’t keep their promise to you! ‘Cause you’re a chump. [Voices: That’s right! Applause]

“Any time you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two thirds of the government and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election-time and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that party you’re not only a chump but you’re a traitor to your race! [Shouts, applause]

“And what kind of alibi do they come up with? They try and “pass the buck” to the Dixiecrats.

“Now, back during the days when you were blind, deaf and dumb – ignorant, politically immature – naturally, you went along with that. But today, as your eyes come open and you develop political maturity, you’re able to see and think for yourself; and you can see that a Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat… [Shouts: “Yeah! Light applause] … in disguise. {Applause]

“You look at the structure of the government that controls this country: it’s controlled by sixteen Senatorial committees and twenty Congressional committees. Of the sixteen Senatorial committees that run the government, ten of them are in the hands of southern segregationists. [Voices: “That’s right!”] Of the twenty Congressional committees that run the government, twelve of them are in the hands of southern segregationists! And they gonna tell you and me that the South lost the war! [Laughter, applause]

“You, today, are in the hands of a government of segregationists: racists; white supremacists who belong to the Democratic Party but disguise themselves as Dixiecrats! A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat. Whoever runs the Democrats is also the father of the Dixiecrats! And the father of all of them is sitting in the White House! [Voices: “Right!” Applause]

“I say and I say it again: you got a President who is nothing but a southern segregationist. [Voice: “That’s right!” Applause] From the state of Texas. They’ll lynch you in Texas as quick as they’ll lynch you in Mississippi… [Applause] … only, in Texas, they lynch you with a Texas accent; in Mississippi they lynch you with a Mississippi accent! [Laughter, applause]

“And the first thing the cracker does when he comes in power, he takes all the Negro leaders and invites them for coffee! [Laughter, applause] To show that he’s all right! [Laughter] And those Uncle Toms can’t pass up the coffee! [Laughter… a pause… then applause]

“They come away from the coffee table… telling you and me that ‘this man is all right’. [Laughter] ‘Cause he’s from the South! [Laughter] And ‘since he’s from the South, he can deal with the South’!

“And look at the logic that they’re using: what about [racist Mississippi Senator James] Eastland? He’s from the South! Make him the President! He can… if Johnson is a ‘good man’ ’cause he’s from Texas and being from Texas will enable him to ‘deal with the South’, Eastland can ‘deal with the South’ better than Johnson! [Laughter, applause]

“No-oo, I say you’ve been misled. You been had! You been took! [Laughter, applause]

“I was in Washington a couple weeks ago… while the Senators were filibustering. And I noticed in the back of the Senate a huge map; and on this map it showed the distribution of Negroes in America. And, surprisingly, the same Senators that were involved in the filibuster were from the state where there were the most Negroes. Why were they filibustering the Civil Rights legislation? Because the Civil Rights legislation is supposed to guarantee voting rights to Negroes in those states; and those Senators from those states know that if the Negroes in those states can vote, those Senators are down the drain! [Voices: “Yeah!” Applause] The Representatives of those states go down the drain!

“And in the Constitution of this country it has a stipulation wherein whenever the rights, the voting rights of people in a certain district are violated then the Representative who’s from that particular district – according to the Constitution – is supposed to be expelled from the Congress. [Voice: “That’s right!] Now, if this particular aspect of the Constitution was enforced, why, you wouldn’t have a cracker in Washington, D.C.! [Shouts, applause]

“But what would happen? When you expel the Dixiecrat, you’re expelling the Democrat! When you destroy the power of the Dixiecrat you’re destroying the power of the Democratic Party! [Voice: “Amen!”] So how in the world can the Democratic Party in the South [he probably meant to say “North” – IWPCHI] actually side with you, in sincerity, when all of its power is based in the… in the South? These Northern Democrats are in cahoots with the Southern Democrats! [Applause]

“They’re playing a giant con game: a political con game! You know how it goes: one of ’em comes to you and makes believe he’s for you; and he’s in cahoots with the other one that’s not for you. Why? Because neither one of ’em is for you! But they got to make you to go with one of ’em or the other. So this is a con game! And this is what they’ve been doing with you and me all these years.

“First thing – Johnson got off the plane, when he become President… he asked: ‘Where’s Dickie?’ [Voice: Yeahhh!] You know who ‘Dickie’ is? Dickie… woah! Southern cracker Richard… [Georgia Senator] Richard Russell! [Laughter] Look here! Yeeesssss! Lyndon B. Johnson’s best friend is the one who’s heading the forces that are filibustering Civil Rights legislation! You tell me how in the hell [slaps hand on podium] is he gonna be Johnson’s best friend? [Applause]

“How can Johnson be his friend, and your friend, too? [Voices: “Right!”] Naw, that man is too tricky – especially if his friend is still old Dickie! [Laughter and applause]

“Whenever the Negroes keep the Democrats in power, they’re keeping the Dixiecrats in power. This is true! [Voices: “That’s right!”] A vote for a Democrat is nothing but a vote for a Dixiecrat!

“I know you don’t like me saying that! But I… [Shouts, applause] … I’m not the kind of person who’d come here to say what you like. I’m gonna tell you the truth whether you like it or not! [Shouts, applause]

“Up here in the North you have the same thing. The Democratic Party don’t… don’t do it, doesn’t… they don’t do it that way; they got a thing that they call ‘gerrymandering’. [Laughter, shouts] They… they maneuver you out of power! [Laughter] Even though you can vote they fix it so you voting for nobody. [Laughter] They got you going and coming. In the South they’re outright political wolves; in the North they’re political foxes. [Laughter] A fox and a wolf are both canine; both belong to the dog family. [Laughter, applause] Now… you take your choice: you gonna choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? [Laughter, applause] Because either dog you choose, I’ll guarantee you, you’ll still be in the dog house! [Laughter, applause]

“This is why I say: “it’s the ballot or the bullet”; it’s liberty or it’s death; it’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. [Applause, shouts]

“America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody: oh, yes they are. They haven’t ever had a blood-less revolution. [Shouts] Or a “non-violent” revolution. [Voice: “Right!”] That don’t happen even in Hollywood. [Laughter, applause] You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy. And you don’t have a revolution in which you’re begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems; [Applause] revolutions destroy systems. [Applause] A revolution is bloody…. [long pause, audience is silent] … but America is in a unique position: she’s the only country in history in a position actually to become involved in a blood-less revolution. The Russian Revolution was bloody; Chinese Revolution was bloody; French Revolution was bloody; Cuban Revolution was bloody – and there was nothing more bloody than the American Revolution. [Voices: “That’s right.”] But today, this country can become involved in a revolution that won’t take bloodshed. All she’s got to do is give the black man in this country everything that’s due him. [Voices: “That’s right! Applause] Everything! [Applause]

—- Original transcription by IWPCHI

No support to James Comey or the FBI – Mortal Enemies of the US Working Class!

This week’s firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey by President Donald Trump has aroused the indignation of conservatives and liberals alike, who decry the Trump Administration’s alleged attempt at “politicization” of the FBI by interfering with the “work” of the agency as it investigated alleged collusion between members of the Trump for President campaign and the Russian Government of Vladimir Putin in order to “rig” the US Presidential election of 2016 in favor of Trump.

As revolutionary Trotskyists, we take as the fundamental basis of any analysis of any capitalist government and its agencies that the working class and its organizations must oppose all of the police agencies of the capitalist state and recognize that they are NOT designed “to protect and serve the people” nor are they “neutral arbiters” of the law – as the liberals and the fake-socialists would have you believe – but are in fact highly politicized and partisan in favor of the capitalist class and against the working class, its organizations and their supporters.  As revolutionary Trotskyists, though we do defend the very real gains of the bourgeois revolutions of 1776 and 1865 and though we defend and seek to extend the limited rights enjoyed by the workers which are enshrined in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, we do not defend or support the capitalist state, its police agencies, its military or its courts, as they are all weapons in the hands of the capitalist class which are used to suppress and destroy the workers movement as the working class struggles to emancipate itself from the capitalist system of wage slavery, racism, unemployment, poverty and war.

The FBI is nothing less than a US version of the same secret police agencies in every nation-state in the capitalist era that have terrorized and sought to “disrupt, discredit and destroy” every organization the working class has created to fight to defend workers rights against the depredations of the capitalist class and its greed-based economic system of capitalism. The FBI was designed, from its very inception, to be the federal police agency that would be responsible for crushing the militant and revolutionary socialist workers movement of the United States. Shamelessly propagandistic US television shows and movies portray the FBI as some kind of squeaky-clean utterly non-political honest and trustworthy police agency – nothing could be further from the truth! If “the truth is out there” – you can be sure that the FBI and its hordes of agents, informers, provocateurs and apologists are doing their best to find it, kill it and bury it where it will never be found! To hell with the FBI!

The FBI traces its origins to the Red Scare run by US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who organized the notorious “Palmer Raids” to round up suspected US radicals and labor militants who sympathised with or openly supported the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917, which was the very first successful revolution in world history that made the workers and peasants the ruling class of what was formerly Tsarist Russia. The militant labor movement in the US at the time was led largely by the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, which had, along with the Bolsheviks and a handful of other revolutionary socialist parties, steadfastly refused to support the United States Government’s intervention in WWI; they were joined by the powerful anarcho-syndicalist trade union movement organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); both organizations had opposed the war and many members of both came out in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Debs was thrown into prison for giving anti-war speeches against the recruitment of US workers into the US military in WWI.

Fearing that the Russian Revolution was the beginning of a world-wide movement to overthrow the capitalist system, which had been massively discredited by the horrific mass slaughter of WWI caused by the inter-imperialist rivalries of the leading capitalist nation-states of the time, the US capitalist class , like its fellow capitalist ruling classes worldwide, was thrown into a state of panic at the prospect that here in the USA there would be a similar uprising of the working class to overthrow the capitalist class that had been responsible for the slaughter of millions of workers in WWI. To prevent this from happening, the US Attorney General Palmer unleashed the US Justice Department’s “Bureau of Investigation” to hunt down, brutalize and imprison – and even deport – “radicals” who sympathised with the Russian Revolution. Casting the widest net possible, the cops arrested, brutalized and murdered workers in every part of the US labor movement, from the AFL-CIO to the IWW. Union halls were destroyed; pro-union newspapers had their presses smashed. One of the things the US capitalist class hated the most about the socialists was that they welcomed into their organizations workers of every nationality and race, including immigrant workers. The socialists and IWWs (or Wobblies”) fought against racism and sought to organize all workers together in the same unions – black and white, native-born and immigrant. For all these reasons the infant Communist Party of the US as well as the pro-Soviet Socialist Party and the IWW were the main targets of the Palmer Raids and suffered the most from the attacks. It was an onslaught was so brutally “successful” (in the eyes of the US capitalist class) that it wasn’t until the 1930s that the trade union movement was able to get back on its feet once again with a militant communist and communist-sympathising leadership that built the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and led the greatest rise in trade union membership and increase in the standard of living for workers that the US has ever seen (~1935-1948).

The forerunner organization that would later become the FBI was created by Palmer in August of 1919; it was organized as the Bureau of Investigation’s “General Intelligence Division”: its first leader was the notorious J. Edgar Hoover.

Palmer charged Hoover “with the responsibility of gathering and coordinating all information concerning domestic radical activities… through the unstinting zeal of Hoover, this unit rapidly became the nerve center of the entire Justice Department… by 1920 [it had] made its war on radicalism the department’s primary occupation.” (Source: “Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920” by Robert K. Murray; McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Hoover, who had learned about organizing huge collections of files from his work at the Library of Congress, organized a file system in which he placed the names of over 200,000 US citizens and immigrant workers who were classified as “radicals”. This was the rotten foundation upon which the FBI was built.

From 1919 to the present day, every US citizen or resident who ever supported the Civil Rights Movement, the socialist movement or the Communist Party or any event organized by the various US revolutionary socialist parties thereby came under the scrutiny of the FBI.  From E.B. White to John Lennon every singer, artist, writer or political activist that ever opposed the US Government in any way or who criticised the FBI was added to the FBI’s voluminous files of “subversives”.  (See, for example “Dangerous Dossiers” by Herbert Mitgang, Ballantine, 1988)

Since its inception the FBI has been at the forefront of every attempt by the US capitalist class to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the workers movement of the USA. The FBI attacked unions; it attacked socialist and communist parties; it attacked the Civil Rights Movement; it set up the infamous COINTELPRO conspiracy against those elements of the US working class it fears most: the communists and the black working class.

The FBI has sent its agents and placed informers in fascist and Ku Klux Klan organizations and then stood by and watched as those Klan and Nazi scum beat and murdered workers, including men, women and children. It has conspired to assassinate young leaders of the workers movement, like Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party.  In the 1960’s the NAACP’s Robert F. Williams was set up for summary execution by local, state and federal police agencies by the FBI’s lying slander that he was an “armed and dangerous” “kidnapper”.

The FBI was also instrumental in the frame-up and 20-year-plus imprisonments of class-war prisoners Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier – as well as the still-running persecution of such heroic US political activists as  Assata Shakur – and many others.

In 1993, the FBI, through its paid informer Emad Salem, organized and carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, in which 6 people were killed and a thousand injured.

It has organized mass murder of dissident workers like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; it has most recently been involved in the planning of attacks against antigovernment protestors, one of which resulted in the murder of LaVoy Finicum during the 2015-16 protest at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The FBI’s infamous “crime lab” was caught red-handed grossly exaggerating and falsifying evidence, tailoring it to suit state and federal prosecutors’ cases! FBI crime lab technicians and FBI agents have a long, long history of consciously committing perjury in US courtrooms. The FBI has framed up environmentalists and sent them to prison for decades; it has framed up anarchists and antifascistss and sent them to prison. The FBI has taken organized crime hitmen, put them on its payroll and helped them take over leadership of organized crime networks… and then looked the other way while they committed murders! The FBI has proven again and again to be the mortal enemy of the US working class and of anyone who dares to stand up to the continuous attacks on workers rights and the environment launched endlessly by the money-worshipping US capitalist class and its corporations. There is literally no crime which the FBI and its agents have not committed during its far-too-long malignant existence! Only a child, fool or a congenital liar can look you in the eye and call the FBI a pillar of impartial justice.

In short: we don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to the FBI – so long as it weakens that cesspool of reactionary intrigue and conspiracy against the working class! When the workers of the USA finally overthrow the capitalist class and take power, the FBI will be immediately dismantled, root and branch and its leaders – past and present – will be brought before the courts of the new workers republic to answer for their many, many crimes.

Two of the most disgusting developments of this Trump vs. FBI dog-and-pony show have been the statements made in support of the FBI by courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks!

Snowden – who still imagines that he will one day be welcomed back to the NSA and CIA as a hero for exposing the “excesses” of the US domestic and international spying operations he revealed to the world – took the bizarre step of writing a series of Tweets in support of now-deposed former FBI head James Comey!

Snowden’s most recent “expose” is of his vast ignorance of how the political system of the United States works – and how the US capitalist class and its government views “traitors” like himself. It is likely that the only way Edward Snowden will ever be able to return to the US as a free man is in the wake of a workers socialist revolution in the USA. But if he keeps expressing his love for the FBI and keeps pining to get his old security clearance and desk back at Langley, he’ll still be “persona non grata” then as well!

Julian Assange went a step further, offering Comey a job working for WikiLeaks’ non-existent bureau in Washington D.C.!

He’d better be kidding.

Assange – whose politics are a somewhat milder version of repulsive pro-capitalist and reactionary libertarianism – also would do well to take a few months of his sequestration in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London to study the basics of Marxism. If nothing else, it would help to clarify what side of the class line he wishes to take his stand upon: that of the working class or of the capitalist class. We created the “Friends of WikiLeaks – Chicago” organization to defend WikiLeaks from attacks launched against it by the US Government. In the event that Julkian Assange and WikiLeaks begin to hire “former” FBI agents to work for WikiLeaks, the days of our support for them will be over. Once they start hiring agents of US imperialism to work for them, WikiLeaks will quickly be transformed into another pro-US NGO like Human Rights Watch, that will be just another brick in the wall of US imperialism.

The Democrats are now posing as the great defenders of the FBI’s “independence” as a law enforcement agency against the alleged attacks being made against the FBI by the Trump administration. First of all, anyone who thinks that US billionaire real-estate swindler has ever given a moment’s thought to dismantling the FBI can just do everyone a favor and give up political analysis now and forever and get back to doing word-search puzzles or something. James Comey’s half-witted interference in the 2016 US Presidential election was enough to get him fired right then and there. He did more damage to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton than all the hackers and Russian agents combined. If anything needs to be investigated it is the interference of the CIA and the rest of the US “deep state” into the US presidential elections, both before and after the election proper. The machinations of Comey and of the Pentagon and its agents who are the focus of the alleged connections between the Russian Government and the Trump campaign need investigation; as well as the CIA-Pentagon takeover of “Trump’s” National Security Council!

Unfortunately, since the US working class has not one elected official in the Congress to call for such an investigation, it will not happen. The Democrats – supposedly the “friends of the working class” – have proven time and time again their incapacity to carry out their oversight responsibilities over the US “Deep State”, as the various satraps of the NSA, CIA and Pentagon routinely “testify” falsely to Congress, get caught doing it and… nothing is done to them!

The US “Deep State” proved it actually runs the USA when the CIA was caught red-handed spying on US Senate staffers as they attempted to investigate the CIA’s secret torture camps set up to brutalize suspected “terrorists” into “confessing” their “sins” past and present.  (See: NY Times, “Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel”, 31 July 2014)  That was a clear-cut case of the CIA placing itself illegally and monstrously above and outside the purview of the highest legislative body in the land. What did the Democrats do about it? Absolutely nothing! The CIA’s director at the time as well as everyone involved in the spying operation against the Congressional investigators should be cooling their heels in prison cells these days – but they weren’t even disciplined! Having abdicated their responsibility to the public to bring the CIA leadership up on charges of illegally spying on Congress, the Democrats surrendered the last line of defense the nation had against the “Deep State” this side of workers revolution. Now the Democrats can be seen running around frantically trying to pass the hat to anyone who is willing to commit political suicide by launching an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the allegations of Russian meddling in the US Presidential election and the Trump campaign’s alleged involvement in that scheme. When Comey made his damning presentation to Congress regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails, stopping just short of issuing indictments for her criminal acts just weeks before the election, the Democrats were furious and many were screaming for Comey’s head to be placed on a platter and sent to the House of Repesentatives: now, when Comey is fired by Trump for his inability to testify before Congress without, essentially, committing perjury, the Democrats are ready to begin the process for impeaching Trump! The US Congress has become such a banal comedy act that it has become a national embarrassment – to the US’ allies. Here in the USA, the bourgeois press has become so insipid and the working class (for the most part) has become so sick of the political games being played there, that the prospects for anything other than a continuation of the long-term dysfunction of the federal government look bleak to say the least.

It is absolutely imperative that the US working class organize its own revolutionary Trotskyist workers party immediately, to begin the work necessary to eventually kick this sad capitalist political fraud to the curb and in its place to build a workers government that will take the responsibility to guarantee all the necessities of human life in the 21^st century for every woman, man and child in this country and around the world. This phony “democracy” is a conspiracy against the working class designed to squeeze every penny of profit possible from each and every one of us, leaving us without the money to provide ourselves with decent housing, clothing, food and everything else we need. These capitalist cretins and their politicians promise us a “future” of endless wars against endless enemies who they will constantly be creating via their endless wars – until they finally set off the chain of events that leads to the next world war – a nuclear world war – in which, this time, many if not all of the US’ major cities will be totally destroyed! If this is your idea of the kind of future you want for you, your kids, and your grandkids then just keep on doing what you’re doing now – supporting the capitalist class and capitalism by voting for its bought-and-paid-for political parties – and your “American Dream(TM)” will undoubtedly come true (in a brief blaze of fascist “glory”)… and then it’ll be Berlin, 1945 for the fascist USA!  (Trust us: you don’t want to go there).

Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1945.  If the USA keeps heading in the direction of fascism, it will end up like Nazi Germany…. except with far more people dead and far fewer buildings left standing after a nuclear WWIII.

If you want to create a long-term future of peace and prosperity for future generations, then you must realize that capitalism is barring the door to that future, and until we overthrow it, the human race can not go one step further! To overthrow capitalism we must create a revolutionary Trotskyist workers party that will lead that revolution to success and to the establishment of an egalitarian socialist workers republic where we won’t just have the right merely “to PURSUE happiness” but for everyone to actually achieve it. Join us!

Independent Workers Party of Chicago

100th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution: Trotsky on the Doomed Tsar and Tsarina

We present here the background to the great Russian Revolution of 1917 on its hundredth anniversary – as told by one of its chief organizers: Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution” is not only a great read: it is also an almost unique first-person account of a great revolution as told by one of its chief organizers.  It is almost unique among the histories of any revolution.  Most revolutionary leaders never lived to write their own history of the revolutions they led.  So from that standpoint alone, Trotsky’s “History” is of inestimable value – especially to workers who want to know the truth about the Bolshevik Revolution.

As part of our series commemorating the 100th anniversary of the very first successful communist-led workers revolution we present to our readers this excerpt from “The History of the Russian Revolution” by Leon Trotsky.  In it we will get a glimpse of the wonderful regime that was brutally destroyed by the extremists of the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin and Trotsky.  This chapter that describes the repulsive chaRracters of the Tsar and Tsarina are among our favorite written works in any genre of literature.  This version of the book comes from the Marxists.org website at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch04.htm   In the US we are taught to have sympathy for the executed Tsar and his family.  The hideousness of the regime is fully explored in this essay; workers who study the history of the disgusting Romanov dynasty will come to understand after reading this essay that this Tsarist regime deserves absolutely no sympathy at all.  Enjoy!

—IWPCHI

Leon Trotsky

The History of the Russian Revolution

Volume One: The Overthrow of Tzarism

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Chapter 4
The Tzar and the Tzarina

 

This book will concern itself least of all with those unrelated psychological researches which are now so often substituted for social and historical analysis. Foremost in our field of vision will stand the great, moving forces of history, which are super-personal in character. Monarchy is one of them. But all these forces operate through people. And monarchy is by its very principle bound up with the personal. This in itself justifies an interest in the personality of that monarch whom the process of social development brought face to face with a revolution. Moreover, we hope to show in what follows, partially at least, just where in a personality the strictly personal ends – often much sooner than we think – and how frequently the “distinguishing traits” of a person are merely individual scratches made by a higher law of development.

Nicholas II inherited from his ancestors not only a giant empire, but also a revolution. And they did not bequeath him one quality which would have made him capable of governing an empire or even a province or a county. To that historic flood which was rolling its billows each one closer to the gates of his palace, the last Romanov opposed only a dumb indifference. It seemed as though between his consciousness and his epoch there stood some transparent but absolutely impenetrable medium.

People surrounding the tzar often recalled after the revolution that in the most tragic moments of his reign – at the time of the surrender of Port Arthur and the sinking of the fleet at Tsushima, and ten years later at the time of the retreat of the Russian troops from Galicia, and then two years later during the days preceding his abdication when all those around him were depressed, alarmed, shaken – Nicholas alone preserved his tranquillity. He would inquire as usual how many versts he had covered in his journeys about Russia, would recall episodes of hunting expeditions in the past, anecdotes of official meetings, would interest himself generally in the little rubbish of the day’s doings, while thunders roared over him and lightnings flashed. “What is this?” asked one of his attendant generals, “a gigantic, almost unbelievable self-restraint, the product of breeding, of a belief in the divine predetermination of events? Or is it inadequate consciousness?” The answer is more than half included in the question. The so-called “breeding” of the tzar, his ability to control himself in the most extraordinary circumstances, cannot be explained by a mere external training; its essence was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will. That mask of indifference which was called breeding in certain circles, was a natural part of Nicholas at birth.

The tzar’s diary is the best of all testimony. From day to day and from year to year drags along upon its pages the depressing record of spiritual emptiness. “Walked long and killed two crows. Drank tea by daylight.” Promenades on foot, rides in a boat. And then again crows, and again tea. All on the borderline of physiology. Recollections of church ceremonies are jotted down in the same tome as a drinking party.

In the days preceding the opening of the State Duma, when the whole country was shaking with convulsions, Nicholas wrote: “April 14. Took a walk in a thin shirt and took up paddling again. Had tea in a balcony. Stana dined and took a ride with us. Read.” Not a word as to the subject of his reading. Some sentimental English romance? Or a report from the Police Department? “April 15: Accepted Witte’s resignation. Marie and Dmitri to dinner. Drove them home to the palace.”

On the day of the decision to dissolve the Duma, when the court as well as the liberal circles were going through a paroxysm of fright, the tzar wrote in his diary: “July 7. Friday. Very busy morning. Half hour late to breakfast with the officers … A storm came up and it was very muggy. We walked together. Received Goremykin. Signed a decree dissolving the Duma! Dined with Olga and Petia. Read all evening.” An exclamation point after the coming dissolution of the Duma is the highest expression of his emotions. The deputies of the dispersed Duma summoned the people to refuse to pay taxes. A series of military uprisings followed: in Sveaborg, Kronstadt, on ships, in army units. The revolutionary terror against high officials was renewed on an unheard-of scale. The tzar writes: “July 9. Sunday. It has happened! The Duma was closed today. At breakfast after Mass long faces were noticeable among many … The weather was fine. On our walk we met Uncle Misha who came over yesterday from Gatchina. Was quietly busy until dinner and all evening. Went padding in a canoe.” It was in a canoe he went paddling – that is told. But with what he was busy all evening is not indicated. So it was always.

And further in those same fatal days: “July 14. Got dressed and rode a bicycle to the bathing beach and bathed enjoyably in the sea.” “July 15. Bathed twice. It was very hot. Only us two at dinner. A storm passed over.” “July 19. Bathed in the morning. Received at the farm. Uncle Vladimir and Chagin lunched with us.” An insurrection and explosions of dynamite are barely touched upon with a single phrase, “Pretty doings!” – astonishing in its imperturbable indifference, which never rose to conscious cynicism.

“At 9:30 in the morning we rode out to the Caspian regiment … walked for a long time. The weather was wonderful. Bathed in the sea. After tea received Lvov and Guchkov.” Not a word of the fact that this unexpected reception of the two liberals was brought about by the attempt of Stolypin to include opposition leaders in his ministry. Prince Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government, said of that reception at the time: “I expected to see the sovereign stricken with grief, but instead of that there came out to meet me a jolly sprightly fellow in a raspberry-coloured shirt.” The tzar’s outlook was not broader than that of a minor police official – with this difference, that the latter would have a better knowledge of reality and be less burdened with superstitions. The sole paper which Nicholas read for years, and from which he derived his ideas, was a weekly published on state revenue by Prince Meshchersky, a vile, bribed journalist of the reactionary bureaucratic clique, despised even in his own circle. The tzar kept his outlook unchanged through two wars and two revolutions. Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium – indifference. Nicholas was called, not without foundation, a fatalist. It is only necessary to add that his fatalism was the exact opposite of an active belief in his “star.” Nicholas indeed considered himself unlucky. His fatalism was only a form of passive self-defence against historic evolution, and went hand in hand with an arbitrariness, trivial in psychological motivation, but monstrous in its consequences.

“I wish it and therefore it must be —,” writes Count Witte. “That motto appeared in all the activities of this weak ruler, who only through weakness did all the things which characterised his reign – a wholesale shedding of more or less innocent blood, for the most part without aim.”

Nicholas is sometimes compared with his half-crazy great-great-grandfather Paul, who was strangled by a camarilla acting in agreement with his own son, Alexander “the Blessed.” These two Romanovs were actually alike in their distrust of everybody due to a distrust of themselves, their touchiness as of omnipotent nobodies, their feeling of abnegation, their consciousness, as you might say, of being crowned pariahs. But Paul was incomparably more colourful; there was an element of fancy in his rantings, however irresponsible. In his descendant everything was dim; there was not one sharp trait.

Nicholas was not only unstable, but treacherous. Flatterers called him a charmer, bewitcher, because of his gentle way with the courtiers. But the tzar reserved his special caresses for just those officials whom he had decided to dismiss. Charmed beyond measure at a reception, the minister would go home and find a letter requesting his resignation. That was a kind of revenge on the tzar’s part for his own nonentity.

Nicholas recoiled in hostility before everything gifted and significant. He felt at ease only among completely mediocre and brainless people, saintly fakers, holy men, to whom he did not have to look up. He had his amour propre, indeed it was rather keen. But it was not active, not possessed of a grain of initiative, enviously defensive. He selected his ministers on a principle of continual deterioration. Men of brain and character he summoned only in extreme situations when there was no other way out, just as we call in a surgeon to save our lives. It was so with Witte, and afterwards with Stolypin. The tzar treated both with ill-concealed hostility. As soon as the crisis had passed, he hastened to part with these counsellors who were too tall for him. This selection operated so systematically that the president of the last Duma, Rodzianko, on the 7th of January 1917, with the revolution already knocking at the doors, ventured to say to the tzar: “Your Majesty, there is not one reliable or honest man left around you; all the best men have been removed or have retired. There remain only those of ill repute.”

All the efforts of the liberal bourgeoisie to find a common language with the court came to nothing. The tireless and noisy Rodzianko tried to shake up the tzar with his reports, but in vain. The latter gave no answer either to argument or to impudence, but quietly made ready to dissolve the Duma. Grand Duke Dmitri, a former favourite of the tzar, and future accomplice in the murder of Rasputin, complained to his colleague, Prince Yussupov, that the tzar at headquarters was becoming every day more indifferent to everything around him. In Dmitri’s opinion the tzar was being fed some kind of dope which had a benumbing action upon his spiritual faculties. “Rumours went round,” writes the liberal historian Miliukov, “that this condition of mental and moral apathy was sustained in the tzar by an increased use of alcohol.” This was all fancy or exaggeration. The tzar had no need of narcotics: the fatal “dope” was in his blood. Its symptoms merely seemed especially striking on the background of those great events of war and domestic crisis which led up to the revolution. Rasputin, who was a psychologist, said briefly of the tzar that he “lacked insides.”

This dim, equable and “well-bred” man was cruel – not with the active cruelty of Ivan the Terrible or of Peter, in the pursuit of historic aims – What had Nicholas the Second in common with them? – but with the cowardly cruelty of the late born, frightened at his own doom. At the very dawn of his reign Nicholas praised the Phanagoritsy regiment as “fine fellows” for shooting down workers. He always “read with satisfaction” how they flogged with whips the bob-haired girl-students, or cracked the heads of defenceless people during Jewish pogroms. This crowned black sheep gravitated with all his soul to the very dregs of society, the Black Hundred hooligans. He not only paid them generously from the state treasury, but loved to chat with them about their exploits, and would pardon them when they accidentally got mixed up in the murder of an opposition deputy. Witte, who stood at the head of the government during the putting down of the first revolution, has written in his memoirs: “When news of the useless cruel antics of the chiefs of those detachments reached the sovereign, they met with his approval, or in any case his defence.” In answer to the demand of the governor-general of the Baltic States that he stop a certain lieutenant-captain, Richter, who was “executing on his own authority and without trial non-resistant persons,” the tzar wrote on the report: “Ah, what a fine fellow!” Such encouragements are innumerable. This “charmer,” without will, without aim, without imagination, was more awful than all the tyrants of ancient and modern history.

The tzar was mightily under the influence of the tzarina, an influence which increased with the years and the difficulties. Together they constituted a kind of unit – and that combination shows already to what an extent the personal, under pressure of circumstances, is supplemented by the group. But first we must speak of the tzarina herself.

Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador at Petrograd during the war, a refined psychologist for French academicians and janitresses, offers a meticulously licked portrait of the last tzarina: “Moral restlessness, a chronic sadness, infinite longing, intermittent ups and downs of strength, anguishing thoughts of the invisible other world, superstitions – are not all these traits, so clearly apparent in the personality of the empress, the characteristic traits of the Russian people?” Strange as it may seem, there is in this saccharine lie just a grain of truth. The Russian satirist Saltykov, with some justification, called the ministers and governors from among the Baltic barons “Germans with a Russian soul.” It is indubitable that aliens, in no way connected with the people, developed the most pure culture of the “genuine Russian” administrator.

But why did the people repay with such open hatred a tzarina who, in the words of Paléologue, had so completely assimilated their soul? The answer is simple. In order to justify her new situation, this German woman adopted with a kind of cold fury all the traditions and nuances of Russian mediaevalism, the most meagre and crude of all mediaevalisms, in that very period when the people were making mighty efforts to free themselves from it. This Hessian princess was literally possessed by the demon of autocracy. Having risen from her rural corner to the heights of Byzantine despotism, she would not for anything take a step down. In the orthodox religion she found a mysticism and a magic adapted to her new lot. She believed the more inflexibly in her vocation, the more naked became the foulness of the old régime. With a strong character and a gift for dry and hard exaltations, the tzarina supplemented the weak-willed tzar, ruling over him.

On March 17, 1916, a year before the revolution, when the tortured country was already writhing in the grip of defeat and ruin, the tzarina wrote to her husband at military headquarters: “You must not give indulgences, a responsible ministry, etc. … or anything that they want. This must be your war and your peace, and the honour yours and our fatherland’s, and not by any means the Duma’s. They have not the right to say a single word in these matters.” This was at any rate a thoroughgoing programme. And it was in just this way that she always had the whip hand over the continually vacillating tzar.

After Nicholas’ departure to the army in the capacity of fictitious commander-in-chief, the tzarina began openly to take charge of internal affairs. The ministers came to her with reports as to a regent. She entered into a conspiracy with a small camarilla against the Duma, against the ministers, against the staff-generals, against the whole world – to some extent indeed against the tzar. On December 6, 1916, the tzarina wrote to the tzar: “… Once you have said that you want to keep Protopopov, how does he (Premier Trepov) go against you? Bring down your fist on the table. Don’t yield. Be the boss. Obey your firm little wife and our Friend. Believe in us.” Again three days late: “You know you are right. Carry your head high. Command Trepov to work with him … Strike your fist on the table.” Those phrases sound as though they were made up, but they are taken from authentic letters. Besides, you cannot make up things like that.

On December 13 the tzarina suggest to the tzar: “Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. Everything is getting quiet and better, but people want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me, for whole years, the same thing: ’Russia loves to feel the whip.’ That is their nature!” This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only “incarnates” the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. Their nature demands the whip – writes the Russian tzarina to the Russian tzar about the Russian people, just two months and a half before the monarchy tips over into the abyss.

In contrast to her force of character, the intellectual force of the tzarina is not higher, but rather lower than her husband’s. Even more than he, she craves the society of simpletons. The close and long-lasting friendship of the tzar and tzarina with their lady-in-waiting Vyrubova gives a measure of the spiritual stature of this autocratic pair. Vyrubova has described herself as a fool, and this is not modesty. Witte, to whom one cannot deny an accurate eye, characterised her as “a most commonplace, stupid, Petersburg young lady, homely as a bubble in the biscuit dough.” In the society of this person, with whom elderly officials, ambassadors and financiers obsequiously flirted, and who had just enough brains not to forget about her own pockets, the tzar and tzarina would pass many hours, consulting her about affairs, corresponding with her and about her. She was more influential than the State Duma, and even that the ministry.

But Vyrubova herself was only an instrument of “The Friend,” whose authority superseded all three. “… This is my private opinion,” writes the tzarina to the tzar, “I will find out what our Friend thinks.” The opinion of the “Friend” is not private, it decides. “… I am firm,” insists the tzarina a few weeks later, “but listen to me, i.e. this means our Friend, and trust in everything … I suffer for you as for a gentle soft-hearted child – who needs guidance, but listens to bad counsellors, while a man sent by God is telling him what he should do.”

The Friend sent by God was Gregory Rasputin.

“… The prayers and the help of our Friend – then all will be well.”

“If we did not have Him, all would have been over long ago. I am absolutely convinced of that.”

Throughout the whole reign of Nicholas and Alexandra soothsayers and hysterics were imported for the court not only from all over Russia, but from other countries. Special official purveyors arose, who would gather around the momentary oracle, forming a powerful Upper Chamber attached to the monarch. There was no lack of bigoted old women with the title of countess, nor of functionaries weary of doing nothing, nor of financiers who had entire ministries in their hire. With a jealous eye on the unchartered competition of mesmerists and sorcerers, the high priesthood of the Orthodox Church would hasten to pry their way into the holy of holies of the intrigue. Witte called this ruling circle, against which he himself twice stubbed his toe, “the leprous court camarilla.”

The more isolated the dynasty became, and the more unsheltered the autocrat felt, the more he needed some help from the other world. Certain savages, in order to bring good weather, wave in the air a shingle on a string. The tzar and tzarina used shingles for the greatest variety of purposes. In the tzar’s train there was a whole chapel full of large and small images, and all sorts of fetiches, which were brought to bear, first against the Japanese, then against the German artillery.

The level of the court circle really had not changed much from generation to generation. Under Alexander II, called the “Liberator,” the grand dukes had sincerely believed in house spirits and witches. Under Alexander III it was no better, only quieter. The “leprous camarilla” had existed always, changed only its personnel and its method. Nicholas II did not create, but inherited from his ancestors, this court atmosphere of savage mediaevalism. But the country during these same decades had been changing, its problems growing more complex, its culture rising to a higher level. The court circle was thus left far behind.

Although the monarchy did under compulsion make concessions to the new forces, nevertheless inwardly it completely failed to become modernised. On the contrary it withdrew into itself. Its spirit of mediaevalism thickened under the pressure of hostility and fear, until it acquired the character of a disgusting nightmare overhanging the country.

Towards November 1905 – that is, at the most critical moment of the first revolution – the tzar writes in his diary: “We got acquainted with a man of God, Gregory, from the Tobolsk province.” That was Rasputin – a Siberian peasant with a bald scar on his head, the result of a beating for horse-stealing. Put forward at an appropriate moment, this “Man of God” soon found official helpers – or rather they found him – and thus was formed a new ruling class which got a firm hold of the tzarina, and through her of the tzar.

From the winter of 1913-14 it was openly said in Petersburg society that all high appointments, posts and contracts depended upon the Rasputin clique. The “Elder” himself gradually turned into a state institution. He was carefully guarded, and no less carefully sought after by the competing ministers. Spies of the Police Department kept a diary of his life by hours, and did not fail to report how on a visit to his home village of Pokrovsky he got into a drunken and bloody fight with his own father on the street. On the same day that this happened – September 9, 1915 – Rasputin sent two friendly telegrams, one to Tzarskoe Selo, to the tzarina, the other to headquarters to the tzar. In epic language the police spies registered from day to day the revels of the Friend. “He returned today 5 o’clock in the morning completely drunk.” “On the night of the 25-26th the actress V. spent the night with Rasputin.” “He arrived with Princess D. (the wife of a gentleman of the bedchamber of the Tzar’s court) at the Hotel Astoria.”…And right beside this: “Came home from Tzarskoe Selo about 11 o’clock in the evening.” “Rasputin came home with Princess Sh- very drunk and together they went out immediately.” In the morning or evening of the following day a trip to Tzarskoe Selo. To a sympathetic question from the spy as to why the Elder was thoughtful, the answer came: “Can’t decide whether to convoke the Duma or not.” And then again: “He came home at 5 in the morning pretty drunk.” Thus for months and years the melody was played on three keys: “Pretty drunk,” “Very drunk,” and “Completely drunk.” These communications of state importance were brought together and countersigned by the general of gendarmes, Gorbachev.

The bloom of Raputin’s influence lasted six years, the last years of the monarchy. “His life in Petrograd,” says Prince Yussupov, who participated to some extent in that life, and afterward killed Rasputin, “became a continual revel, the durnken debauch of a galley slave who had come into an unexpected fortune.” “I had at my disposition,” wrote the president of the Duma, Rodzianko, “a whole mass of letters from mothers whose daughters had been dishonoured by this insolent rake.” Nevertheless the Petrograd metropolitan, Pitirim, owed his position to Rasputin, as also the almost illiterate Archbishop Varnava. The Procuror of the Holy Synod, Sabler, was long sustained by Rasputin; and Premier Kokovtsev was removed at his wish, having refused to receive the “Elder.” Rasputin appointed Stürmer President of the Council of Ministers, Protopopov Minister of the Interior, the new Procuror of the Synod, Raev, and many others. The ambassador of the French republic, Paléologue, sought an interview with Rasputin, embraced him and cried, “Voilà, un véritable illuminé!” hoping in this way to win the heart of the tzarina to the cause of France. The Jew Simanovich, financial agent of the “Elder,” himself under the eye of the Secret Police as a nightclub gambler and usurer – introduced into the Ministry of Justice through Rasputin the completely dishonest creature Dobrovolsky.

“Keep by you the little list,” writes the tzarina to the tzar, in regard to new appointments. “Our friend has asked that you talk all this over with Protopopov.” Two days later: “Our friend says that Stürmer may remain a few days longer as President of the Council of Ministers.” And again: “Protopopov venerates our friend and will be blessed.”

On one of those days when the police spies were counting up the number of bottles and women, the tzarina grieved in a letter to the tzar: “They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc. Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting.” This reference to the apostles would hardly convince the police spies. In another letter the tzarina goes still farther. “During vespers I thought so much about our friend,” she writes, “how the Scribes and Pharisees are persecuting Christ pretending that they are so perfect … yes, in truth no man is a prophet in his own country.”

The comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satisfied with an impersonal God and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of “the Son of Man.” In Rasputin the rejected and agonising monarchy found a Christ in its own image.

“If there had been no Rasputin,” said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old régime, “it would have been necessary to invent one.” There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined. If by the word hooliganism we understand the extreme expression of those anti-social parasite elements at the bottom of society, we may define Rasputinism as a crowned hooliganism at its very top.

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DEFEND NORTH KOREA! DPRK Defends its Right to Nuclear Self-Defense vs. “Nuclear Blackmail” of US Govt.

Voice of Korea website homepage, 17 April 2017

[N.B.: The United States and its massive propaganda machine – encompassing much of the world’s bourgeois press – has long been selling the outrageous and obvious lie that tiny North Korea, with its handful of nuclear weapons mounted (so far) only on CONTINENTAL ballistic missiles poses a deadly existential threat to the US and the entire world.  Only the willfully blind would believe this fraudulent claim, especially coming as it does from the US government, which possesses THOUSANDS of nuclear warheads capable of hitting North Korea from land, air and sea-based launch platforms.  The United States murdered an estimated 3 million Koreans in the Korean War, fought by the US capitalist class to prevent the Korean workers from taking power into their own hands and establishing a revolutionary socialist workers government at the end of WWII.  It was only due to the existence of the nuclear arsenal of the USSR that the US was prevented from using nuclear weapons against North Korea and China just as they had against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was the nuclear arsenal of the USSR and, later, China, that prevented the US from deploying nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese workers during the brutal, barbaric Vietnam War.  Today, despite the massive historical record proving that it has been the USA that poses the greatest threat North Korea – and  to the human race – due to its proven willingness to use nuclear weapons – the world is supposed to believe that the quite reasonable desire of the tiny Stalinist workers state of North Korea to possess a few nukes as self-defense against the massive nuclear-armed US imperialist war machine poses a deadly threat to – the US!  Of course, this is a monstrous lie, as the following declaration of the DPRK’s “Voice of Korea” website makes clear.  Since it is impossible to get the DPRK’s side of the story from any US bourgeois press outlet, we are making an attempt to “break the US propaganda blockade” against the North Korean Stalinized workers state by publishing a few of their statements here on our website.  We say: US HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA! and US GET THE HELL OUT OF ASIA, NOW!

The following unattributed statement was transcribed from an English-language audio recording presented on the “Voice of Korea” website at http://www.vok.rep.kp/CBC/index.php?CHANNEL=6&lang= on 17 April 2017 by IWPCHI. All bracketed phrases were added by us. — IWPCHI]

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“Shamelessness of the United States, Kingpin of Nuclear Proliferation”

Some time ago, the US representative to the United Nations said: “Negotiations on [the] ‘Convention on Banning Nuclear Weapons’ are unrealistic because of the nuclear threat of North Korea”. Taking the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea as the reason why the United States does not take part in the UN conference for negotiations on the Convention on banning nuclear weapons, he said: “Is there anyone who believes that North Korea would agree on banning nuclear weapons? It is impossible to say that the people can be protected in the way of disallowing such countries as the United States – trying to defend peace and security – to have nuclear weapons; and then allowing their opponents to have them.”

It is really a shameless and brigandish sophistry; it is a manifestation of the shameless attempt of the United States to cover up its heinous crimes – the country that is the only user of nukes in the world; a country that has invited worldwide nuclear arms race with nuclear threat and blackmail.

Looking back upon the history of nuclear arms development, the United States and other big powers played the leading role in making international conventions on nuclear weapons and signed them (or not, in their interests), for the purpose of keeping non-nuclear states from possessing nukes. The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea has risen up as a nuclear power in the East to cope with the vicious use of threat of nuclear war, which has lasted tens of years; so it is quite natural for the DPRK not to take part in the UN conference for negotiations on the convention on banning nuclear weapons, which presupposes nuclear renunciation.

The United States is the kingpin of nuclear proliferation, that did not hesitate to impose nuclear calamity upon humanity to realize its ambition for world domination, but trifled international treaties for nuclear disarmament and is conniving at, encouraging and shielding the nuclear arms development of its stooges.

Recently, in the United States (which talked about a ‘nuclear-free world’ more loudly than others) remarks are openly made that the nuclear force of the United States ‘lags behind’ other countries, and nuclear force will be strengthened to keep it in military power. Still advocating ‘peace by strength’, the United States is invariably promoting the modernization of nuclear weapons costing one trillion US dollars (which was accelerated by the former administration) and does not hesitate to maintain that the treaties on nuclear disarmament with other nuclear powers must be abolished.

It is illogical and the acme of shamelessness that such an outrageous nuclear devil slanders the nuclear force of the DPRK – a direct product of [the US’] nuclear blackmail. The United States must clearly know it is an invariable stand of the DPRK that peace and security of the Korean peninsula can be defended only by reliable nuclear deterrence, as long as there exists a nuclear state in hostile relations with the DPRK.

As the nuclear threat and blackmail of the United States and its followers continue, the DPRK will [afford?], expand and strengthen its nuclear force [equal?] to the self-reliant defense capability and pre-emptive striking capacity.

— [Voice of Korea]

DEFEND NORTH KOREA! DPRK Slams U.S. Human Rights Record, Citing Racism, Slavery, Child Abuse

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, known in the US as simply “North Korea”) slammed the US’ human rights record recently, calling out the US Government for its blatant hypocrisy regarding human rights in the US and wherever the US military has launched attacks against countries around the world.

Writing back on 28 February, the Korean Central News Agency (the official DPRK news website) accused the US of being the “world’s worst human rights abuser”, citing the US’ long record of racism and traffic in human flesh which “began with black slave trade”.

“Last year the U.S. released a ‘report on world’s human traffic in 2016’ in which it slandered 188 countries and regions, blaming them for failing to combat flesh traffic. Not content with this, the U.S. went the lengths of mapping out a list of such countries.
“There is no such country as the U.S. where human existence and security are not guaranteed and even the elementary rights of human beings are being violated blatantly.
“The U.S. is a cesspool of crimes and a veritable hell where grisly human rights abuses and bloody man-killing are rampant. It came into being through bloody man-killing and exists by dint of human rights abuses.

“The U.S. is only the country where children without their protectors are thrown behind bars for an indefinite period. About 70 000 children met such fate in 2014 only.
“It is shameless for such country to talk about international law and standards and pull up most of the countries in the world over their ‘human rights situation.'”

The full text of the KCNA article is reprinted below.

The complete political disorientation of the Kim Jong-Il-led DPRK leadership is shown in this article by their uncritical citation of a statement from the viciously anti-woman, anticommunist and antigay Iranian government regarding the US human rights record.  For alleged communists to needlessly make common cause with one of the most hideously backward and anti-worker regimes on the face of the planet merely in order to “buttress” a political attack against the USA’s human rights record is absurd.  It is a fine example of how once a “revolutionary socialist” leadership abandons the fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist internationalism in favor of the utopian programme of “building socialism in one country” their ability to even distinguish friend from foe is completely lost.

While we do not agree with the Stalinist politics of the North Korean DPRK leadership, which long ago abandoned the fundamental tenets of Marxism/Leninism by repudiating the idea of building  revolutionary socialist political parties around the world dedicated to the global overthrow of the capitalist system in favor the utopian idea of building socialism in half a country, we defend the Stalinized North Korean workers state – despite its obvious and major flaws – as an important and historic conquest of the workers of Korea and of the world.  As Trotsky pointed out: if revolutionary socialist and anarchist workers refuse to defend existing victories of the working class they will never be able to conquer new ones.  Heroic North Korea stands today as the last nation in the world where the capitalist classes have been completely kicked out and are unable to exploit a single North Korean worker!  This is precisely why the United States and its capitalist allies in the UN hate North Korea and want to see it destroyed.  We desire to help build the political leadership necessary to launch a Trotskyist workers socialist political revolution inside the DPRK to replace the hereditary Kim Il Sungist/Stalinist bureaucracy with a true proletarian democracy that fights to defend socialism in North Korea, while simultaneously fighting against capitalist restoration in all the other Maoist/Stalinist degenerated workers states, from China to Cuba.

There has historically always been a strong internationalist current in the Korean communist movement, which was fully expressed by the heroic exiled Korean communist worker-leaders of the 1930s who provided crucial leadership for the Chinese working class in the workers movement of China back when Korea was occupied by the Japanese.  Today as the disgusting fake-communist Chinese “Communist Party” leadership slowly restores capitalism to China, stuffing its leaders’ pockets with money and sending the children of the fake-Communist Party leaders to study capitalist business practices in places like Harvard Business School, they stoop so low as to threaten to refuse to defend their brave sisters and brothers in North Korea from US attacks!  Overthrowing what is left of the gains of the Chinese Revolution is the Number One priority of US imperialism; the US seeks to split China away from North Korea by bribing the top Chinese “Communist Party” leaders with cold, hard cash.  The workers of China must oust the betrayers in the fake-“Chinese Communist Party” leadership and replace these cat’s paws of world capitalism with a revolutionary socialist leadership dedicated to defending and extending the historic gains of the Chinese workers and peasants socialist revolution! The restoration of capitalism in China – like the restoration of capitalism in the countries of the former USSR – will be a huge disaster for the workers and peasants of China and of the whole world! The capitalist world has barely recovered from its last great global crisis and is now staggering towards its next great economic collapse.  There is no future for the workers of the world under capitalism other than a future of endless wars, more poverty and more environmental and human degradation!  Every TRUE communist knows this fact down to the marrow of their bones!  A “communist party” that seeks “peaceful coexistence” with a capitalist world that must overthrow every gain of the working class in order to survive is not a “communist party” at all but is in fact a nest of conspiring counterrevolutionaries poised to betray the working class in exchange for the biggest bribes they can get from the capitalists!  The pro-capitalist leadership of the Chinese “Communist Party” must be arrested and thrown in jail – overthrown – by the workers of China in a pro-socialist Trotskyist political revolution before those fake-Communists sell China to the highest bidder!  China must DEFEND THE DPRK FROM EVERY ATTACK LAUNCHED AGAINST IT BY US IMPERIALISM!  The US and its capitalist allies are not potential “friends” of the Chinese working class but are their mortal enemies and future hangmen!

Likewise, we call for the DPRK to return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky and away from the death trap of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist and Maoist programme of abandoning internationalist Marxism in favor of building socialism in one country.  The Korean workers revolution led by the great revolutionary leader Kim Il-Sung has sacrificed to much in the cause of the workers and peasants of the world to be sqandered away by the politically disoriented Stalinist epigones of the “Juche Idea” – which is nothing but a Korean version of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist doctrine of “building socialism in one country” that led directly to the Stalinists’ betrayal of the workers of the USSR. DPRK workers: return to the road of revolutionary Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist internationalism!

The workers of the US and the entire capitalist world must defend our sister and brother workers in North Korea from the continuous death threats issued by US imperialism and its UN/EU/NATO allies.  US: Hands Off North Korea and China!  US OUT OF THE KOREAN PENINSULA NOW!

-IWPCHI

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True Colors of U.S. as World’s Worst Human Rights Abuser

Pyongyang, February 28 (KCNA) — The U.S. has come under fire by the international community for its human rights abuses revealed one after another.
Quoting the results of the recent survey made by Polaris, the national human traffic survey institution, UPI disclosed that the flesh traffic increased 35.7 percent in the U.S. last year over that in the previous year.
It said that more than 7 572 cases of flesh traffic were reported in California, Texas, Florida, etc., terming them “a form of modern-day slave system.”
Seyed Ali Khamenei, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, referred to the fact that a five-year-old boy was detained with his hands manacled in the U.S. some time ago, saying that this shows the present “human rights situation in the U.S.”
All facts go to clearly show before the world once again the true colors of the U.S. as the worst human rights abuser.
Last year the U.S. released a “report on world’s human traffic in 2016” in which it slandered 188 countries and regions, blaming them for failing to combat flesh traffic. Not content with this, the U.S. went the lengths of mapping out a list of such countries.
There is no such country as the U.S. where human existence and security are not guaranteed and even the elementary rights of human beings are being violated blatantly.
The U.S. is a cesspool of crimes and a veritable hell where grisly human rights abuses and bloody man-killing are rampant. It came into being through bloody man-killing and exists by dint of human rights abuses.
It has a history of the most cursed and disgraceful flesh traffic in the world.
Its history began with black slave trade and is still known as the world’s worst country in flesh traffic. 100 000 to 500 000 fall victim to the flesh traffic for slave labor every year and 100 000 children are forced into prostitution annually.
The U.S. is only the country where children without their protectors are thrown behind bars for an indefinite period. About 70 000 children met such fate in 2014 only.
It is shameless for such country to talk about international law and standards and pull up most of the countries in the world over their “human rights situation.”
The U.S. is loudmouthed about “defence of human rights” and “equality for all” world-wide but it can never cover up its true colors as the world’s worst human rights abuser.
The U.S. “human rights” campaign will never work on any country. -0-