Sunday, February 10, 2019
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Lake Merritt Columns
599 El Embarcadero, Oakland, California 94610

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The Venezuelan people are mobilized, following the call of their legitimate President,Nicolás Maduro, to defend their sovereignty, peace and constitutionality. The Bolivarian nation also has the majority support of the international community

Washington, DC
National March on Washington: Hands off Venezuela!

Saturday, March 16 at 12 pm
Gather at Lafayette Park

February 23: International Day of Actions to Stop U.S. War, Mobilize Solidarity with Venezuela

The weekend of Saturday, February 23 – the 1 month anniversary of the U.S.-backed coup attempt in Venezuela – has been set as a day of internationally coordinated actions in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and against the U.S., Wall Street, and the Pentagon’s drive to war.

www.NoWarOnVenezuela.org

During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — before he became the next settler-colonial imperialist-in-chief — he made the claim of being the law-and-order candidate. Trump stated, “We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent.” (Politico, July 11, 2016)

He had also said that crime and violence are an attack on the poor and that lawless conduct would not be tolerated under a Trump administration. But what was he really saying?

It’s clear that the crime and violence he was talking about were not the crime of poverty that leaves people starving and struggling to survive on a daily basis.

Trump wasn’t talking about the violence of racist policing that targets poor, working-class and oppressed peoples in their own neighborhoods.

Nor was he referring to the violence of people not being provided with shelter, especially in times where in some parts of the country extreme temperatures have led to houseless folks losing their lives.

Instead, he was using his platform to strengthen racist narratives that target the poor and oppressed, while advocating for more police in their neighborhoods. And that’s exactly what he has done so far under his presidency.

In no way did he plan on holding accountable the lawless killer cops who commit the most heinous acts. So it should not come as a surprise when he is silent about the devastation the cops wreak on Black and Brown communities.

It’s no surprise that a system founded on genocide, rape, colonialism and slavery would be unwilling to hold these killer cops — and those who cover up for them — accountable.

Justice denied for Laquan McDonald

In the case of Laquan McDonald, an innocent Black teenager who was gunned down by the Chicago police in 2014, the hypocrisy of justice within the racist U.S. settler state is on full display.

His murderer was Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke. After years of struggle in the streets by the community and activists demanding justice for Laquan, Van Dyke was finally convicted of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery for each of the 16 shots that took Laquan McDonald’s life. (Chicago Sun-Times, October 5, 2018)

On Jan. 17, three Chicago police officers (David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney) who faced charges of falsifying reports and covering up the murder of Laquan were acquitted.

To make matters worse, the killer cop Van Dyke — who was looking at a possible sentence of 96 years — was sentenced to only 81 months in prison on Jan. 18. That’s less than seven years. And he has the possibility of being released in as little as three-and-a-half years.

The point made here by the racist court and so-called proponents of “law and order” is that this term doesn’t apply as long as you commit your crimes against the people on behalf of the repressive capitalist state. This kind of disregard for Black life by the courts emboldens white supremacists to feel they can terrorize Black and Brown people just as the police would.

A recent example of this terror is the attempted lynching of actor Jussie Smollett, a gay Black man, in Chicago on Jan. 29. Smollett was seriously beaten, had unknown chemicals poured on him and a noose put around his neck by two men who shouted racist and homophobic slurs. The men were reportedly wearing MAGA hats.

The growing assault on the most oppressed sections of our class by the capitalist state and the reactionaries that work alongside it must be resisted at all levels.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has ordered a review of “the record of law” in the case of Laquan McDonald, to investigate the court’s blatant disregard for the facts established at Van Dyke’s trial when it came time for sentencing him. Judge Vincent Gaughan’s decision was to find the most lenient possible sentence for killer cop Van Dyke — a luxury that is not afforded to working-class and poor Black and Brown people, who face the most relentless sentencings by the injustice system.

Laquan McDonald’s family and community organizers have teamed up to urge Attorney General Raoul to investigate further and appeal the sentence. At this link, you can sign the petition to support this campaign.

The call for community control over the police is as necessary now as it has ever been. We must continue to support the work of the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), led by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and work alongside the community and progressive organizations that seek to defend their lives and neighborhoods in every city and state.

The year 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 uprising of workers and students in France. In light of the Yellow Vests protest movement shaking France today and the continued relevance of the lessons of 1968 for anti-capitalist struggles, Struggle-La Lucha is publishing a series of articles written at that time by Sam Marcy, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. This piece (Part 5 in the series) originally appeared in the July 18, 1968, issue of Workers World newspaper.

July 15 — Now that the revolutionary tide in France has receded for the moment, it is possible to take a closer look at the political character of the de Gaulle regime. This can be fruitful and instructive in preparing for the next phase of the struggle.

Much has been written about the de Gaulle regime. However, most of it is extremely superficial and positively tendentious. It is calculated to blur its true class character and distort its basic political feature. The de Gaulle regime is a special type of Bonapartism, that is, Bonapartism as Marxists have understood that term since Engels first analyzed the phenomenon in his “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State” — and as Lenin further developed it in his “State and Revolution.”

“The contemporary representative state,” said Engels, “is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur when the warring classes are so nearly balanced that the state power, ostensibly appearing as a mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain independence in relation to both.”

Examples of this, says Lenin in commenting on this passage, “were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismark regime in Germany.” There have been numerous examples since then, including the period immediately before Hitler took power in Germany, during the Von Papen and Schleicher regimes.

“Above classes” — for the bourgeoisie

De Gaulle is a Bonapartist because in his entire tenure as head of the French state, he has tried to assume the role of mediator between the basic classes in French society. As such, he has deemed it to be his duty to muffle the irreconcilable class antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie by putting himself in the pretended position of one who is allegedly acting independently of both classes and is seemingly aloof from the so-called partisan politics of the various groups and parties in France.

De Gaulle, unquestionably a man of the right from the very outset of his career, has tried to lean first on the bourgeoisie, when faced with a challenge from the workers, and then again, also lean on the workers for political support, when he was challenged by the ultraright section of the bourgeoisie.

During the Algerian crisis, when he was faced with an imminent attempt at a coup d’état by the ultraright, he openly called on the working class for support, and were it not for that spontaneous and elemental surge of the masses during those momentous days, he surely would have been overthrown. But once the ultras were defeated, he veered back again to his usual politics of straddling the fence between the classes, leaning this time heavily on the bourgeoisie.

But whether he was veering towards right or left, he was acting in the interests of bourgeois society — in the interest of the bankers, industrialists and landlords. He was always trying to save the social foundation of the bourgeoisie from the excesses of the extreme right, which could endanger the social system, or from the proletariat, which could overthrow the bourgeoisie and put an end to the system of capitalist exploitation altogether.

De Gaulle’s wartime role was unquestionably that of a Bonapartist. Without the Resistance Army (Maquis), which was mainly composed of revolutionary young workers, students and peasants, de Gaulle would have been left with nothing but the shadow of a bourgeois ruling clique, since the larger section of the bourgeoisie had actually capitulated to Hitler and were for the most part either open or covert collaborators of the Vichy Regime. Couve de Murville, the present premier and the financier who married into the Schweisguth family, another wealthy banking group, was an official in the Vichy government.

Bonapartism obscured by stability

The decadelong period from 1958 to 1968 after the defeat of the ultraright obscured the Bonapartist role of de Gaulle. This was because he leaned more and more openly on the bourgeoisie for support, while the working class, led by the French Communist Party and General Confederation of Labor (CGT), abandoned any type of meaningful political struggle against the de Gaulle regime.

A principal characteristic of Bonapartist rule, especially as manifested by de Gaulle in recent years, is the almost total reliance on rule through the police, army and occasionally the parliament. In fact, in order to be able to maneuver between the basic classes of society, a Bonapartist ruler must necessarily turn more and more to rely ultimately on the police and the army and whatever coalition he is able to obtain by parliamentary maneuvering.

It is by this combination in one form or another that de Gaulle by dexterous juggling has been able to maintain himself in power. But whenever a truly momentous sharpening of the class struggle develops, a Bonapartist regime invariably exposes its fundamental weakness, its isolation from both class camps.

A truly revolutionary situation existed in France in May-June 1968. And it was a splendid example of how a Bonapartist regime, which hitherto apparently enjoyed such wide popular support because it was presumed to have had one of its two legs in each of the class camps, suddenly seemed not to have a shred of support in either camp.

Rulers looked for new savior during crisis

During the critical days, the struggle of the French working class reached its peak and was pulling along with it untold hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. The bourgeoisie itself seemed to be pulling away from support of de Gaulle and was looking elsewhere for a new savior or a political combination of leftist politicians which could draw the support of the workers and students and return them to order. But now, the crisis of Gaullism seems to have been temporarily overcome, the acute internal convulsions which had wracked it have been publicly disclosed, and they can be examined more carefully.

An analysis shows that de Gaulle had become isolated not only from the broad masses of people but that the bourgeoisie was on the verge of abandoning him and that his own political family was so much torn by inner strife that its members were at each other’s throats. For the moment, the Bonapartist regime of de Gaulle had become paralyzed as a result of the unprecedented revolutionary mass pressure exerted upon the regime by the workers and the students, as well as by the urban and rural poor.

Whenever a Bonapartist regime is faced by a genuine revolutionary struggle and both class camps seem to be in an irreconcilable conflict, the isolation of the regime becomes fully apparent and its tendency to resort to naked military-police pressure becomes enormously accelerated. That is precisely what happened with de Gaulle.

The military maneuvers which de Gaulle embarked upon, and which we covered in preceding articles, unfortunately proved successful, only because the working-class leaders became cowed and surrendered before de Gaulle’s threats of the use of force.

Whether he could have marshalled the necessary force to quell the revolutionary uprising is another story. For, as a true Bonapartist regime during times of social crisis, its isolation from both class camps became much too apparent and its only supports were in the military and the police, and even these seemed of a dubious character.

Abandoned by his own deputies

In addition, the facts now show that his regime was hopelessly split. It is now admitted that the inner strife in de Gaulle’s official clique was so sharp that his own “parliamentary group came close to demanding the resignation of President de Gaulle.” (New York Times, July 12, 1968)

That is a fact of enormous significance. If de Gaulle couldn’t rely on his own parliamentary faction, it must be that his parliamentary deputies had become terror-stricken by the dimensions of the struggle that the workers and students were putting up and that even the right-wing bourgeois elements that these deputies represented were for abandoning de Gaulle.

Even more significant was the deep cleavage which had developed between de Gaulle and Pompidou. It had gotten to the point where, as we pointed out earlier, de Gaulle had accused Pompidou of treason.

Now, the relationship between President de Gaulle and Premier Pompidou can be likened to the relationship that exists between the chairman of the board of a corporation and its chief executive officer. In this case, Pompidou is the chief executive officer, and has all the operating ends of the bourgeois corporation in his hands.

Furthermore, Pompidou at the moment was urging the resignation of de Gaulle. This moment indeed was the very apex of the crisis in the camp of the bourgeoisie. Pompidou was not merely an official or just another parliamentary figure in de Gaulle’s political entourage. He also is a banker and representative of huge industrial and financial interests of the bourgeoisie. His vacillations and fears pointed out the acuteness of the crisis which was rending the Gaullist clique.

It was Pompidou who was negotiating with the trade union leaders. It was in the negotiations with them that he was able to gauge much better than others the mood of the workers which in one way or another had filtered through the leaders of the CGT and was passed on to him.

But with the recession of the crisis, the relationship reversed. De Gaulle has temporarily strengthened his personal rule and reorganized his clique, and Pompidou has been ousted.

From the point of view of the class interest of the proletariat, there is no fundamental difference between de Gaulle and Pompidou. Each in his own way was seeking a means of subduing the workers and students and getting them to submit peacefully to the same old oppressive system of exploitation. But these two bourgeois leaders had become hopelessly entangled on the method of solving the crisis which the massive character of the strike had brought on.

When the leadership of the bourgeoisie becomes entangled as a result of its own contradictions, shows signs of vacillation, hesitation, coupled with concessions, it not only shows weakness but also shows that it is incapable of acting in unison. What a splendid opportunity for the leadership of the workers to take advantage of the disorder and chaos in the ruling class and press the advantage to the hilt. This was their bounden duty to the workers and to the people of France in general. But they didn’t do it.

Once de Gaulle gave up the idea of the referendum, it was an indubitable sign of a split in his ruling group. Together with the fact that the Gaullist parliamentary faction showed signs of favoring the exit of de Gaulle, the Bonapartist character of de Gaulle’s rule had completely exposed itself as lacking any major support even in the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Only option — the army and police

De Gaulle, therefore, was left only with the possible support of the army and police. And although de Gaulle had visited Baden-Baden in Germany and Mulhouse in Alsace, as well as Taverny, and conspired with the fascist generals, it is an open question whether in a showdown he could have counted on his ultraright-wing conspirators and rivals to go through a military assault on the French workers and students, in view of the unprecedented popular support they had, and in view of the inner divisions within the military establishment of France, which is wracked by as many clique struggles as is the civilian part of the government, if not more.

All this is important to recall, because the so-called massive electoral victory obtained by de Gaulle seems to give the appearance of a solid phalanx of support for his rule.

This electoral support, which suffices in normal times to stabilize the regime, restore the equilibrium between the antagonistic classes and insure the continued exploitation of the working people by finance capital, does not hold in times of revolutionary crisis.

And France is still in the throes of a revolutionary crisis. The working class has not been vanquished. They have gone back to work, but as Time magazine aptly describes the mood of the workers: “They went back with rage in their hearts.” That is not a defeatist mood, not by any means.

And scarcely has a fortnight passed since the elections and the students are once again on the move.

All that the electoral victory for de Gaulle means is that he has papered over the social crisis, but has not solved it.

True to his role as a Bonapartist, de Gaulle has once more shifted to a leftist posture. He has passed down the word that his “new” scheme for social reform will mean vast changes for the betterment of the workers, the students and the farmers, and so on. His plan for reform, which goes under the label of Participation, is nothing but a new catchword for an old hoax whereby the workers are supposed to be given a say in the management of the economy.

But de Gaulle’s new political stance will not fool the workers. Once the scare of civil war by which he managed to mobilize the bourgeoisie and all its duped followers wears off, all the grievances which the workers, the unemployed and the poor peasants had faced before the revolutionary struggle began will once again stare them in the face. The class struggle will be resumed.

What we are witnessing now is a pause between one phase of the revolutionary class struggle in France and the transition to another.

Part 1 – Revolutionary situation in France 1968: Which road for the mass struggle?

Part 2 – Decisive question in France 1968: Revolutionary or reformist leadership?

Part 3 – Lesson of France 1968: Workers must declare themselves in power

Part 4 – Tactics after 1968 uprising in France

Hey, psst … that’s right, I’m talkin’ to you. Can we talk. Want to know what we can do to fight back and win?

What can we do about capitalism’s white supremacy, racist violence by the cops against Black and Brown people and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement against im/migrants and refugees? What can we do about mass incarceration, sexual violence and misogyny, anti-trans violence and the general attack on LGBTQ2S communities? What can we do about further war against the living standards and jobs of working and poor people; and about climate change, which threatens our very existence?

In the first place, we must understand who our friends are as compared to our enemies. That’s important because many of the solutions proposed by both Democrats and Republicans would have us rely on politicians bought and paid for by the industrial and financial monopoly entities that actually run this country. We can’t depend on them. They profit from our misery. So who can we depend on and get leadership from?

Well, if you look in the mirror, you may see the courageous teachers in Los Angeles, whose strike successfully challenged the ruling-class march towards school privatization and denial of opportunity for our children. You might see Black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose determination to remain in the struggle and whose strength outlasted those who would execute him and who now has won the right to appeal — a major win for our movement and the national liberation struggles of all oppressed working people. Oh yeah, you’ll also see yourself — because you, as a member of our class, in unity with all the sectors of our working class, are the solution.

That unity is probably one of the most important weapons that empowers our class — as long as it remains principled. In other words, we don’t throw any sector of our class under the bus for any temporary gains. The need to fight racism, misogyny, LGBTQ2 oppression and the persecution of migrants must never be questioned, and these issues must never be pitted in opposition to each other.

Unfortunately, when they ask us to support U.S. imperialist wars, that is exactly what is being called into question — our solidarity with the international working class. We must never forget that U.S. imperialist war eats up all the resources necessary for the basic needs of people in this country.

So, what can we do? We can build a movement that puts the building of unity of our class and unity of all progressive forces in society, especially left and socialist forces, at the forefront. We can build a movement that therefore rejects racism and sexism. And, for that matter, rejects any sophisticated sounding new or old ideologies attempting to erode our solidarity with each other by directing our anger against each other, rather than against the real enemy.

We can also build a movement that emphatically and consistently says No! to U.S. wars and the phony justifications for those wars, like the attempts to pit us against the people of Venezuela and their elected government.

March 16 in Los Angeles: Unity for Revolution & Socialism Conference

And, we can join forces with a gathering of revolutionaries dedicated to doing all of the above, by attending the conference hosted by Struggle for Socialism/La Lucha por Socialismo, being held this March 16 in Los Angeles. Many organizations and individuals are being invited to participate for a dialogue on solutions and immediate steps to move forward in revolutionary unity for the purpose of defeating U.S. war, racism and capitalism and for building socialism.

So, what are you going to do? (Hint: get to Los Angeles! Call (323) 306-6240 for more details.)

U.S. hands off Bolivarian Venezuela!

Saturday, February 9 — 2 p.m.

Featuring news and analysis from Afro-Brazilian revolutionary Jefferson Azevedo and hear a live update from a Chavismo support on the frontlines in Venezuela.

At Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice

5278 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019

For info (323) 306-6240