Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Workers Call this Pussyfooting: Socialist Resurgence and Left Voice tiptoe around movement self-defense.

Workers Call this Pussyfooting: Socialist Resurgence and Left Voice tiptoe around movement self-defense.  Michael Forest Reinoehl Presente!

“…The petty bourgeois democrats – including Social Democrats, Stalinists and Anarchists – yell louder about the struggle against fascism the more cravenly they capitulate to it in actuality. Only armed workers’ detachments, who feel the support of tens of millions of toilers behind them, can successfully prevail against the fascist bands. The struggle against fascism does not start in the liberal editorial office but in the factory – and ends in the street. Scabs and private gunmen in factory plants are the basic nuclei of the fascist army. Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure. In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.” – Leon Trotsky, “Transitional Program – The Picket Line, Defense Guards/Workers’ Militia and The Arming of the Proletariat”

Barr and Trump ordered the execution of Michael Forest Reinoehl as a warning to any leftists who assert their 2nd amendment rights to self defense against the fascist thugs.  There was no attempt to arrest him.  It was an execution authorized from the top. Trump and Barr ordered the hit and Biden gave them permission with his Pittsburgh speech about rioting and looting.  The state has openly come out in defense of white nationalism again: kid gloves for Dylann Roof and Kyle Rittenhouse, bullets for AntiFa defenders of Black Lives Matter protests.

Biden’s play to split the protest movement, trying to drive a wedge between the “legitimate protesters” and those who take advantage of the federally promoted chaos to expropriate the product of workers collective labor power back from the corporate retail outlets. The petty bourgeois left that has gone all-in for Biden need to contemplate what he said. He is offering you the same future as Trump, albeit legalistically camouflaged. If you call yourselves Debsians, how do you swallow this!:  

“I want to make it absolutely clear: Rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting,” Biden says at the start of the 60-second ad, which will air on cable news networks nationally and in key swing states. “It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those who do it should be prosecuted.”………….“He can’t stop the violence because for years, he’s fomented it,” Biden says in the ad. “His failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.” 

This is how Biden plays to the centrist Democrats, the DNC and Blue Dogs. He lectures protesters on street tactics, telling us rioting is not protesting.  This coming from one who has never protested for justice and faced the wrath of the militarized police.  He says nothing about the role of provocateurs  initiating the  breaking of windows (which he calls violence)  and the subsequent street fighting, which we have known since long before  the Kerner Commission Report that riots are initiated by police violence.  Biden like Trump is pointing at the protesters and yelling riot!  Biden along with Obama militarized the police prior to and during the 2009 anti-austerity movement that developed into Occupy.  Today Trump and Democratic mayors use the repressive state forces built up and enabled by  Obama/Biden to turn protests against racist cop murders into police riots. 

Socialist Resurgence’s article “Trump, Biden and Far Right Militias” mentions nothing about the necessity of building  worker’s self defense guards, a basic tenet of Trotsky’s transitional program and the methods of revolutionary Marxism. The article makes it sound like a few big mobilizations, like Boston following Charlottesville, will put this to all to rest. No doubt mass anti-fascist moblizations will have an impact on the tactics needed for self defense (linked arms of 10,000 may replace the need for tactical equipment). Sorry, but all the miseducation  about ‘peaceful-legal’ protest as a strategy you learned, in the then centrist YSA, has got to go.  It was not Marxism the SWP was teaching, it was an opportunist adaptation to the Gandhian’s of the civil rights movement.  

That is why today the spin offs of the SWP are ill prepared  to lead any workers in struggle.  In the face of a counter-revolutionary insurgency, Trotskyists recall the methods of Farrell Dobbs and the fighting Teamsters who beat back the ‘Silver Shirts” the anti-labor fascist mobs akin to white citizens militias that terrorized the Black and Brown communities.  Today these scum reemerge flying the Confederate Flag and Trump Banners in the guise of Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Boogaloo Bois, etc.  Where Trosky said acquaint the fascists’ heads with the pavement, the Barnes crowd famously defended free speech for fascists in Skokie, IL in 1976 and in 2013 in Kansas City as well.

To defeat the violent counter-revolutionaries in the streets  we need Labor, Black and Brown self defense guards training in every union hall and assemblies of the specially oppressed to organize defense of strikers and anti-racist actions  and anti-fascist mobilizations. But Dobbs did not not just put out a call for such self defense; the Trotskyists had to struggle for the leadership of the Teamsters and defeat the class collaborators and pacifists in order to arm the workers both theoretically and tactically to win their strike. The labor leadership prevents this. Only a direct challenge for the leadership of the Trade Union movement and their class collaborationist political strategy, a challenge based on a transitional program, can alter the political landscape in favor of our class.

We are prepared to be smeared by these stealth pacifists. We recall the SWP’s COINTELPRO lawsuit, where the Barnes’ group’s lawyers called the Internationalist Tendency (IT) members “terrorists,” just as the “Friends of the FBI” did in the Congressional Record. We recall the lie that ITers were calling for arming the party. We recall the Barnesite denunciation of the Argentine and Bolivian workers’ militias who fought fascist dictatorships, arms in hand. We recall how they refused to raise the demand “Solidarity With the Chilean Resistance.” For cover, Socialist Resurgence (SR) gives backhanded praise to Black self-organized self-defense of the 1950s and ‘60s. But within the logic of the article, as well as the historical record, they are saying, “we approve”, but from a safe distance–an idea you can’t pin on them!

In 1974 the predecessor political tendencies of  Socialist Resurgence and Left Voice found were in nominal unity in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. At that time they were members of the Leninist Trotskyist Faction (LTF) which united the Jack Barnes wing of the SWP with the Nahuel Moreno wing of the Argentine PST against the International Majority Tendency (IMT) led by Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan and Pierre Frank. The crisis at the time was the looming counter-revolutionary coup in Argentina which would result in the murder and disappearance of thousands of worker militants and revolutionaries.  The IMT was warning of the impending right wing movement onslaught which would result in continental warfare, while the LTF saw this as a petty bourgeois retreat from the working class. Or so they put it, not taking a side in a battle  already in progress. While the LTF was correct about the need for an orientation to the working class, they were already poisoned by their opportunist orientation to Gandhianism and the trade union bureaucracy, so they were ill prepared to counter the “guerrilla mania” of the IMT with the method of the Transitional Program for workers self defense militias, which defend the workers movement and become the armed basis for the  workers government.  The orientation to electoralism and legalism resulted in the slaughters, imprisonment and the break up of the trade union and socialist groups across Latin America for decades.They junked the Transitional Program.

Left Voice, in “Federal Police Gun Down Black Lives matter Activist in Washington” adds their own view of working class self-defense:

“So in this moment of continued uprisings against racism and racist police violence, it is more important than ever that working people learn to watch out for and protect each other from right-wing attacks, whether it be vigilantes or uniformed police, and we unequivocally defend the rights of the working class and oppressed to defend themselves against these forces. However, while protest security groups like the one that Reinoehl was involved in are one way of doing this, they are insufficient. A few armed BLM protesters are no match for the weapons of the police and right-wing militias. Further, self defense is not only about armed militias, but crucially, depends upon the political and social support of the masses. The real power of the working class can only be realized in numbers, through mass self-organization in the workplaces and neighborhoods and through the use of working class methods of struggle such as general strikes. This is why the fight against police violence cannot be separated from the other struggles of working people during this crisis. Only by uniting the fight against police violence and racism with the struggles of the unemployed, immigrants, tenants, organized labor, and against all forms of economic and social exploitation can the working class truly find its power.”  – “Federal Police Gun Down Black Lives Matter Activist In Washington”

To which we respond “where is your criticism of the labor bureaucracy? This could have been written by SOLIDARITY, who deny the bureaucracy is parasitic and privileged based on 3rd world super-exploitation.” The trade union tops completely abdicate to the police union position, apart from a banner on the DC HQ building.

Left Voice, the American section of La Izquierda Diario / Left Voice, calls for mass self-organization of the working class. So does the CWG, except that in the face of fascist and police murder and violence, we explicitly call for organized working class self-defense.  Armed, trained, militant and disciplined Labor, Black and Brown Self-Defense Guards are urgently needed now, organized out of our union halls and community centers.  The Union movement has a responsibility to insure that existing self-defense organizations of the oppressed,  such as the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, the Not F***ing Around Coalition, the John Brown Gun Clubs do not stand isolated, but will be linked to the social power of the organized labor movement. Labor, Black and Brown Self-Defense Guards are needed to defend every demonstration, along with mass trade union contingents to drive the fascists and white supremacists from the streets. For United Front self-defense of the workers and the oppressed!

The more organized, militant and resolute the workers are, the more likely are the capitalist state forces of repression, the cops, CBP, ICE, etc. to hesitate, to not attack the demonstrations and to stand aside rather than defend the fascists. Workers self-defense, patrolling the Black and Brown communities, will also put some restraints on the rampant racist cop terror that will never end so long as capitalism exists. The liberal methods of defunding the police, rewriting police policies, civilian review boards, more training, and community policing will do nothing to curb the racist police violence that is endemic to American capitalism.

Build armed, trained, and disciplined Labor, Black and Brown Self-Defense Guards from out of our union halls and community centers to defend against racist cop and fascist terror!

No platform for fascists or white supermacists! For mass Labor, Black and Brown mobilizations with organized trade union contingents to sweep the fascists and white supremacists from the streets!  Defend immigrants!  Drive ICE and the CBP from the workplaces and communities!

For Labor political strikes in response to racist cop terror and violence!  “They shoot us down, we shut them down!”  For Worker/Oppressed tribunals to find justice for all victims of racist cop violence and murder!

Cops and prison guards are not workers! Kick the cops and prison guards out of our labor unions,  councils and labor federations!

Build a fighting Workers/Labor Party, a class struggle combat party of the workers and oppressed to organize and coordinate struggle!  Fight for a workers government to put an end to racism, cop and fascist terror, anti-immigrant attacks and capitalist exploitation once and for all!  For workers rule and socialism!