SeeingRed [Dear Goran]

Dear Goran;

Let me start by saying how much I admired and appreciated your reportage from Belgrade. Every week I made a point of passing your "sceal" along to our family friend, Richard Johnson, an IRA prisoner in Lewisberg Federal Prison. Your word has gotten around to where it can be appreciated.

I guess I have to dispute your notions of the US working class though. The concept of the Amerikkkan working class as reactionary patriots and consumers of Budweiser's horse piss & "wrestler mania" TV is,well, a bit of a caricature.

Now I can't speak to the TV viewing habits of the workers, but I can give you some solid facts on the beer drinking habits of the workers in my town;

If you drive west out of Wilmington on Delaware Rt.#2, the first town you pass through is Elsmere. If you look to your right, the ugly red brick building with the statue of Mary on the lawn is St. Dionysius Catholic Church. Next door, the equally-ugly brick building with the "BOYCOTT BUDWEISER BEER" sign on the lawn is the hall of the Building Trades Council AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations, the federation of U.S. labor unions - editor]. Look to your left, the gray frame building with the boarded-up windows was (past tense) Hamil's Irish Pub,they broke the boycott and paid the price. Now, if the thirst should come on you, take a left by the fire station and pull into George's Family Restaurant and Pizza Castle. On the door is the logo of the AFL-CIO Trades Council and the words, "Please Patronize" ,here you can slake the thirst, with Honey Brown, Rolling Rock and Miller on tap.

But no Bud.

Continue out of town on Rt.#2, at Prices' Corner, the big ugly cinderblock building, behind Sears, that's the United Auto Workers hall. On their lawn is another billboard: "BOYCOTT BUDWEISER." About a half mile away is the biggest beer distributor in Delaware, Liquor World; in front of the door is a picket line of Teamsters [largest U.S. union - ed.] to help the customers decide not to buy Bud. (The regional wholesaler locked out the teamsters and warehousemen last summer, and the struggle goes on.)

I know, this is only a tiny struggle in a rather big country. But--take my word on this--ten years ago, the workers would have given up at once

Things are changing.

For something a little more political, consider the strike at Newport News Naval Shipyard. This yard is where the fleet carriers and destroyers that will be sent to bomb Yugoslavia, are serviced, refueled and armed. The workers are striking to recover all the years of wage lost during the Reagan era and to win decent pensions. Naturally, the bosses and the Navy played the patriotism card. The workers were told, "You can't strike, there's a war on." The workers replied; "That's your war. Our war is with you." OK, this is very far from a communist consciousness; but it's hardly imperialist patriotism. Let's just say things like this did not happen in naval shipyards in 1941 or 1951.

When strikes, like this began to happen in war industries and naval bases in 1969, we knew that our class had turned against the war in Vietnam.

I think this is very deep, very serious.

Let's take a lesson from the past. The year is 1964 (I am 25, my wife is 23) and opponents of the Vietnam War are planning a series of public meetings ("teach - ins") on campuses across the country. The Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee invites two prominent European intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher, and Isaac Deutscher, the distinguished Polish Marxist dissident and biographer of Trotsky. [Leon Trotsky, second only to Lenin as leader of the Russian Revolution, later led the fight against Stalinism - ed.]

Satre refused to come. In his letter explaining his refusal, Sartre was very clear that no anti-war struggle could be built in Amerikkka, where the working class, to a man, was an utterly-corrupted pro imperialist mass. "The fact is I can not help [anti-war activists] at all. Because their political weight is nil". A man of the American left who has a clear view of the situation, and whon "is indeed one of the accursed of the earth."

On the other hand, Deutscher not only spoke at Berkeley, he embarked on a Young Socialist Alliance organized tour of the USA, speaking at dozens of campuses and public meetings, sometimes to crowds of thousand -- a serious effort for an old man in his seventh decade of life. Me and my wife heard him in some stadium, we were holding hands, I will always remember the conclusion and how the crowd of students cheered. "The division may perhaps once again run within nations rather than between nations. And once the division begins to run within nations, progress begins anew, the progress toward the only solution of our problems, not of all our problems, but of the critical political problems and social problems, the only solution, which is a socialist world, one socialist world."

Four years later and we were leading a feeder march of about 10,000 people down Medford Avenue to link up with the main column in Harvard Square. That day, the city of Boston was shut down by a general strike ("moratorium on business as usual") and 500,000 rallied on the Common (the central square) to demand U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and at the time the city's population was 500,000.

Similar actions swept every city and town in the state.

The lesson I am trying to draw is that --whatever the apparent current situation-- Marxists look to the future and try to act to advance the class struggle. That's what Deutscher did in 1969. Sartre, unable to see beyond his nose, struck an artistic pose, wrote his crappy moralistic letter and shirked his historic political responsibility. Point is, try to look beyond the bombed buildings, the ruined cities and the dead -- reach out for the next link in the chain of struggle. And grab and pull hard when times begin to turn.

Oh, about the US working class as a special labor aristocracy, well, fair enough, when compared to the toilers of Brazil or Indonesia. On the other hand, the working class in most western European imperialist nations have won a higher standard of living, a better share of the social wage, than workers in the USA. That's a fact.

How to spell America? Personally, the "Amerikkka" spelling cooks for me --my first political act was to sit in at Woolworth's lunch counter to protest their policy of refusing service to Black people. Perhaps the spelling is passé. Richard Johnson uses it, though.

Oh, and what color is the US working class? If you looked at basic industry in my "hood", you'd find that about half the workers in the big Chrysler plant are non white. If you had seen the Philadelphia Transit Workers strike last summer, you'd have seen that at least half the strikers were Black and that leaders of the strike were mostly Black. (Blacks are maybe 25% of Delaware's population and more than one third of Philadelphia^Òs population.) The same story on the docks and the steel mills^Å I think Afro-Americans (and other non whites) need to be seen as a vanguard of the US working class.

Finally, Kosova, Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico.

You know, the USA has a colonial possession, Puerto Rico. These workers, though nominal citizens, are subjected to a whole series of social and political insults and deprivations. They are fighting for their national liberation, in defense of their language, culture and national sovereignty. Last year there was a powerful general strike to protest the sale of the state-owned telephone company.

Sometimes fighters carry out armed actions, like fighters elsewhere, and are of course called "terrorists" by the rulers' media. Thus it's utterly appropriate that one fighter, Antonio Comacho, ended up sharing a U.S. jail cell with the Irish Republican, Richard Johnson.

In terms of Puerto Rico, the material interests of U.S. workers (yes, including relative "labor aristocrats") lie with ignoring the rulers' propaganda and extending solidarity to the freedom fighters. They can only benefit from the power (and example) of a general strike, from a defeat for privatization and austerity, from blows struck against their own enemy, the U.S. ruling class and its government.

This is what matters, not how many realize this at any particular moment (or how many grasp that the war against Yugoslavia is ultimately aimed at them). Put it like this: you can look at today^Òs situation and be either Satre ... or Deutscher.

Meanwhile, those workers conscious enough to be Reds are especially obligated to explain the critical importance of solidarity with the oppressed, up to and including the right of succession. After all, the oppressed can trust only those workers from the oppressing nation who support the freedom fight in deeds, as well as words.

This is obvious to me in terms of Puerto Rico -- and also certainly in terms of U.S. Blacks. It seems it should be equally obvious to you in terms of Kosovars -- can you honestly expect them to blithely accept "Yugoslavian unity" --even "the unity of Yugoslavian workers" with people who have inflicted mass terror, mass murder and ethnic cleansing upon them? --or with those who did not stand against it?

Wait --you protest-- not all Serbs are mass-murdering, ethnic cleansing reactionary nationalists. Right --I say-- neither are all Americans Budweiser-swilling, pro-war TV junkies.

So what should we do? I think I said that Marxists must look to the future and act to advance the class struggle. Today this means we've both got to fight against Washington and its occupation of Yugoslavia, to join fights for the rights of the working class, and to unconditionally support the struggles of those oppressed by our own governments.

And reach out to win as many as possible to a different way of looking at things -- a way which starts with justice, equality and freedom, not ^Ómy country "tis of thee...." [words from U.S. patriotic song - ed.], a way which sees a jail cell that holds "the terrorists" Richard Johnson and Antonio Comacho as one which holds humanity itself.

No doubt this is crudely expressed. Better to let Deutscher explain it again: "The division may perhaps once again run within nations rather than between nations. And once the division begins to run within nations, progress begins anew, the progress toward the only solution of our problems, not of all our problems, but of the critical political problems and social problems, the only solution, which is a socialist world, one socialist world."

Certainly this is the only path for Budweiser-swillers and for ethnic-cleansers.

But it's even more the path for Reds.

Follow it and we'll all be leading marches of 10,000 . . . sooner than you think.

But that's just for starters.

Take care comrade,

Roger Collins

____________________________________
[The quotes from Sartre and Deutscher are from Out Now! A Participant's Account of the Movement against the VietNam War by Fred Halstead, Pathfinder Press (1992), pps. 59 & 60.]