Class War, Vol 1, No 5, Summer 2013

   Class War Vol. 1.  No. 5 by JohnnBrown

Defend Bradley Manning! Defend Edward Snowden! Down with the social-imperialist Pride Board!

A holy alliance between the Pride Board, the local Democratic Clubs, and corporate sponsorship paves a comfortable and familiar path for the politicians to arrive at PRIDE leveraging the interests of the status-quo over those of the masses.  And thus when Bradley Manning, whose actions are viewed as heroic by those oppressed and victimized by the US imperialist military is elevated to Grand Marshall status in a clear expression of anti-imperialist sentiment - the true heart of the LGBT community - the class line had been drawn!  By rejecting the community’s anti-imperialist wishes, the Pride board became social-imperialists, besides being undemocratic, arbitrary and biased.

For those who live under the jackboot of imperialism every act that stymies the imperialist forces’ ability to act militarily, economically or to act with impunity is heroic.  Every defeat inflicted on imperialism on the battlefield of public credibility is a victory for the international working class.  Embracing Bradley Manning, the heart and soul of the LGBT movement was drawing the class line against imperialism and therefore had to be slapped down by the social-imperialist, pro-corporate PRIDE board.

NGO’s, CBO’s and Democratic Party and Log Cabin Republicans have narrowed the agenda, strategy and tactics of the movement.  They claim mainstreaming of the movement led to the overturn of DOMA and Prop 8 by the Supreme Court.  These decisions secured some but not all democratic rights for LGBT persons, and came with a price that has been paid for with decades of abuse.  Counted as nothing are decades of Acting Up and fighting back.  The true cost of the mainstreaming of the movement, was the abandonment of it’s allies among the most oppressed and the crossing of the class line  to embrace and support the political shills and representatives of imperialism (Obama, Clinton, Pelosi) and the imposers of capitalist austerity on the state and local level (Newsom, Leno, Amianno, Harris and Brown).

Working people and the base of the LGBT community need to know these same “LBGT-friendly” politicians and corporations are themselves imposing the austerity, while approving, building and endorsing the National Security State.  These very politicians defend and are responsible for US imperialist actions and their cover-ups.  Thus in classic social-imperialist style, the Pride board conceded everything to the wishes of their corporate sponsors!  This should have come as no surprise as the corporations have privatized the official LGBT movement, narrowing its agenda to equal rights in marriage and the military.

The San Francisco Gay Pride board shamed the history of the LGBT movement by overturning the decision to name “Queer Hero” Bradley Manning the Grand Marshall of the S.F. Gay Pride parade.  The LGBT movement (both generally and concretely) grew out of and allied itself with, the civil rights, black and brown liberation, anti-war, anti-imperialist, United Farm workers, women's, feminist, socialist and libertarian movements.  For LGBT youth and working class people this is still the case, yet for the middle class LGBT and labor aristocratic layers the status quo of bourgeois politics prevailed.

The Pride board had an opportunity to build solidarity with those who by their millions see Bradley Manning as a hero.  But this board sold its soul for a bowl of pottage; to protect their cozy political and corporate relations they choose the narrowed interests of the LGBT elite over those of the masses, the working class and the victims of capitalist exploitation and imperialist military brutality internationally.

The program for full LGBT liberation is yet to be written and cannot be until the movement breaks from the political parties which are based on the capitalist system, the system synonymous with patriarchy and the propertied gender-dominant roles that perpetuate Women’s, Youth and LGBT oppression.

Such a program would include: full democratic rights for all; protection from bullying through LGBT; labor self defense, intervention and education by self organization against homophobic violence; end homelessness, create safe transition centers for the homeless and the runaways, with sufficient social services to elevate each from the misery of street life; for socialized childcare, medical care and education, free abortion on demand, free 24 hour child care services, and equal pay for equal work, for jobs for all and we militantly refuse to accept  gay bashing or exclusion from employment based on sexual preference or orientation.

Defend Snowden, Manning and Assange!

The July 8^th Militant  (organ of the US Socialist Workers Party [SWP]) tells workers that Manning and Snowden are not heroes or traitors.

“Those who think that secret revelations from whistleblowers are the way workers find out about how capitalism and its war machine operate, or inspire mass action in defense of political rights, sow naïve and dangerous illusions about the source of the problem and the road to its solution.

…Manning and Snowden act on the premise that revelations will make some capitalist politicians come to their senses and do the right thing.

….Revelations like those of Manning and Snowden do not point a road forward for the working class. They foster conspiracy theories and paranoia that divert and demobilize us. ”

In contrast the Militant polishes its own lapel  by referring to their 1973 lawsuit which exposed the Cointelpro program (government spying and infiltration of workers, civil rights, black liberation and anti-imperialist groups) and says nothing about the illusions in the capitalist judiciary fostered by this type of lawsuit!  Like the pot calling the kettle black, the Militant skirts this issues completely.  The Militant claims the SWP case rested its strength on the masses of  the proletarians who mobilized to end Jim Crow and the mass movement which ended the Vietnam war.  Yet the case was hardly used for mobilizing masses in the streets or in the unions; it was an academic and legal exercise carried out as the movement was on the wane, by the middle class base and periphery of the SWP which had de-proletarianized staking everything on the student and other single-issue sector al movements.

Did the Cointelpro case create expectations that with exposure in the courts, the police state’s undemocratic behavior would be abated?   Indeed for the SWP’s middle class periphery such was supposed to be a reasonable expectation, especially as the SWP’s public action and program fostered many similar illusions in parliamentarism (think of Novack’s ‘linear extension of democracy’) and the legal-peaceful road to “revolution”!

Yet despite their victorious case and all good work done, forty years later the exposures of the COINTELPRO case have not abated the behavior of the National Security State, not one iota.  Nor should we expect it to have done so.

Marxists understood the value of smearing egg on the face of the state, of defending our militants in court and of arming the movement with the information acquired from the procedural process of the legal inquiry.  However, the capitalists run the state and organize their security police as they see fit.  We get ample proof of this  from the contemporary revelations of Manning, Assange and Snowden.

By their actions the rhetorical question is posed, “if this is democracy what is wrong with this picture?”   The Militant, in essence, tells whistle blowers, “don’t leak secrets…” – this the same thing Obama, Kerry and Pelosi are telling workers!  Or they are cynically saying we’ll tell you when revelations have a special meaning for the working class!

Marxists on the other hand support every action on the battlefield of war or of public opinion that pushes imperialism towards it grave.  Snowden and Manning may have had illusions in the democratic institutions of the State at the time of their decisions; however, since then they have undoubtedly received an accelerated education.   Manning has become an explicit anti-imperialist. Snowden says he doesn’t want to live in a country or a world that practices espionage against the person.  The hypocrisy of the imperial state attempting to kill the messenger is a moral blow to imperialism’s credibility, to its benefactors, its apologists and the dominance of its ideological sway. A time survey polls shows 70% of youth age 18-34 support Snowden and approve of his actions.   

Socialists support every exposure of the imperialist states secrets. If the workers movement had organized the rank and file of the military against imperialist wars instead of building the anti-war movement around social pacifism, there would be a movement of workers in uniform taking action against and exposing the secrets of imperialism, in which case the whistle blowers like Manning and Snowden would not be driven by their moral convictions to act alone.  The workers movement would have their back and defend them everywhere.

Even now with no such movement we should solidarize with and support any individuals whose conscience drives them to expose the secrets of the state.  Class war prisoners like Snowden, Manning and Assange, in uniform or work-clothes, should be defended unconditionally and where possible liberated by the workers movement and not derided for “fostering conspiracy theories…” and “demobilizing us”!  

Revolutionary socialists call on rank and file military to form up your own councils, elect your own officers, expose military and intelligence secrets that defend imperialism and its interests, arrest officers whose actions and orders are illegal, predatory, aggressive and constitute crimes against humanity!  Organize a “Let’s Go Home!” movement and close all overseas bases now!

[reblogged from CWG-USA blog]

Mohamed Bouazizi: Political Suicide as a Revolutionary Act

The self-immolation of Mahomed Bouazizi in Tunisia that sparked off the uprising in that country last week ousting the dictator, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been followed by others in North Africa, such as Algeria and Egypt, posing the question of the significance of political suicide as a revolutionary act in opening up revolutionary uprisings.

While these acts of self-immolation are ones in which individuals act in relative isolation it should not be overlooked that political suicide can mean any revolutionary act that is met with state violence. The Jihardist suicide bombers against US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those in Pakistan and India, are no different from the many acts of heroism of militants confronting state forces in revolutionary uprisings. These were not new as all revolutions are heralded by the actions of martyrs who are killed by counter-revolutionary forces.

We can also see the suicides of those in the imperialist occupying armies as politically motivated.The US military has lost more soldiers to suicide in its invasions of Iraq and Afganistan  in 2009 and 2010 than it lost in combat. These suicides are just as much the result of political oppression and repression as those of the freedom fighters of the resistance movements they are sent to fight.

The question we need to ask is: if revolution is about the struggle for freedom, is it necessary that the revolution has its martyrs? Is death the price of freedom?
 
Yes, it is a necessary price in such a struggle because revolutions begin with the acts of heroism of its most committed militants before the mass support sufficient to overthrow the reactionary regimes has developed.  This means that such militants are isolated and face death since the ruling classes see political assassination of militant leaders as necessary to stop revolutions from gaining momentum. But their martyrdom often becomes a catalyst in mobilising that mass revolutionary support.This is also true of suicides in invading armies since the demoralisation and rejection of war, suffering fatique, PTSD and other health problems that motivates such acts, are also the inevitable product of weakness of individual soldiers trapped in an imperialist army, yet can serve as a spur to more widespread resistance.

Currently Bradley Manning, accused by the US military of being a whistle blower who released US secrets to wikileaks, is on suicide watch in solidary confinement in the Marine jail of Quantico. The authorities are using solitary confinement to torture Manning into confessing and implicating Julian Assange of wikileaks as a war criminal. If Manning is driven to suicide in jail this would be a clear case of political assassination and again prove the point that suicide for political reasons is a revolutionary act.

Suicides are therefore political acts used in situations where resistance is weak and there is no organisation to turn individual self-destruction into a collective armed struggle to defeat and destroying the oppressor.

This is especially true when we are talking about states in which the mass movement has been repressed for a long period and when the revolutionary forces are weak or where their leaderships betrayed them. In the colonial revolutions that won independence after WW2 each revolution had its martyrs. Gandhi, Lumumba, Fanon, Biko to name a few. But these revolutions only began the process of decolonisation as national bourgeosies came to power in the service of imperialism. The national revolutions remain trapped, or frozen by neo-colonialism.

When popular movements rose up against neo-colonialism, as in Latin America, Asia and Africa, imperialism adapted to maintain control. They resorted to popular fronts or patriotic fronts of all classes (Peron, Allende, Chavez) and when these fail to contain the masses, dictatorships follow. Where national leaders went against imperialism, coups or invasions were imposed to restore compliant national leaders (e.g. Vietnam 1955, Iran 1956, Indonesia 1965, Nicaragua 1979 etc). Sometimes these coups and invasions failed or were reversed (China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq). At every revolutionary or reactionary turn, thousands of militants are martyred.

Today, facing the global crisis of capitalism, the masses are once again moving against imperialism and its national neo-colonial lackeys, and again a wave of uprisings sparked by martyrdom is evident. At the same time the suicide rate in the imperialist armed forces is on the rise. What we see here is the initial imbalance of forces where the oppressed do not yet have organised mass support to express their opposition to oppression as mass action. Such individual acts, even when copycatted, will continue until such time as collectively the international proletariat takes on its shoulders the task of socialist revolution.

The task today then is to recognise the heroism of martyrs but at the same time to use their heroism as inspiration to build a mass revolutionary movement and revolutionary program that is able to complete the socialist revolution and make it no longer necessary for the best fighters to die for freedom, but rather to create the conditions that will allow death to take its natural course within the realm of freedom.

Free Bradley Manning and Defend Wikileaks!

 Capitalism trains its own gravediggers

Marx observed that capitalism had to create its own gravediggers. It had to empower its working class in order to exploit it and so its fate was sooner or later sealed. But capitalism doesnt just roll over and die leaving only the need for a burial. Workers are not handed socialism on a plate they are propelled towards it by the whole of capitalist history which begins with a revolution to overturn feudalism, then the rapid development of its incredible productive forces, before ending its life as a parasite living off the blood of its workers and of nature. The gravediggers are the working class which becomes an organised revolutionary class because it is enmeshed into a total global labour force which has to free itself from the shackles of capitalism or die. Marx even referred to this global capitalist labour force as 'socialised'.

Nothing expresses the extent of its global 'socialisation' at this point in history more than the role of the internet and cyberspace. While century-old capitalist imperialism is locked into its need to maximise profits, it now makes its biggest profits by speeding up the circulation time of capital via the new digital techology of the internet. And it competes with its rivals by speeding up communications, espionage and warfare via cyberspace. Its like the old man going out on a dose of adrenaline or viagra. He has had several bypasses and at least one heart transplant (China) but is more an more exhausted. Who will administer the final rites of passage? China?

China is no way out for capitalism

China cannot despite being the dynamic new imperialist power that has stopped a full slide into global depression.  The new Chinese imperialism is winning the battle for the global economy and its rivalry with the US is becoming increasingly hostile. But China will not replace the US as the hegemonic power for some years, and meanwhile its own working class is emerging as the most powerful and dynamic section of the global labour force. Thus the China/US rivalry may spill over from proxy wars such as in the Sudan to regional wars and even wider nuclear destruction, but the global working class, which now includes a billion Chinese workers, has the power to stop these wars before it is buried along with capitalism in a nuclear catastrophe.

The death rites of imperialism are now being prepared as the global working class moves stage center. Cue the awakening of the world proletariat to the reality of the brutality and barbarism of capitalism in its dying days. When ordinary enlisted soldiers break ranks to blow the whistle on mass murder; when the middle class libertarians use their advanced computer skills to home in on the US as the NO 1 threat to human rights; when hundreds of thousands are risking their lives engaged in spontaneous street protests, general strikes and occupations; then capitalism's days are numbered.

Death sentences for cyberwarriors

Private Bradley Manning, the international working class hero of 2010, risks his life (did he do it, or didnt he?) because US imperialism must make an example of an enlisted whistleblower who disregards orders and leaks its military secrets while listening to Lady Gaga. The US ruling class has no sense of humor. Manning is now incarcerated in a US marine prison at Quantico in solidary confinement for one reason only, to break him and make him confess to conspiring with wikileaks boss Julian Assange to reveal the secrets that expose US imperialism as a giant mafia with millions of hired killers on its payroll. While Assange has to answer the rape charges made against him, we are opposed to his extradition to Sweden if this is likely to result in his 'rendition' to the US.

Such is the fear of the US ruling class that exposure of its lies and secrets will threaten its 'legitimacy' and lead to socialist revolution, that its natural impulse is to extend its many global wars, occupations and missile rings, into the total surveillance of cyberwars.  They will try to lock up Manning for 50 years, and if they can cook up a story that Assange is a spy, they will try to get him lynched under the 1917 US Espionage Act. The clear intent of the US to kill those who blow its military secrets will politicise another mass layer of anti-US imperialist militants, bringing the end of US hegemony even closer. If the US goes down this road expect a mass worker uprising that will unleash the full repressive state apparatus on its head.

The emperor has no clothes

So US imperialism since 9/11 has been forced to expose its open hypocrisy in destroying bourgeois democracy in order to save it. Since it cannot win the battle for the hearts and minds of even its own working class majority that opposes its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it must resort to force to suppress the rise of a militant working class. It will try to divide and rule the militant working class. It will have to turn the Tea Party into a fully fascist militia. This will raise the stakes and lead to sacrifices such as those of the youth in North Africa who have burned themselves alive to to prove they are prepared to die to live. These state forces are made up of working class or peasant ranks and can be split from their officers who represent the ruling class. Armed workers, peasants and soldiers militias will deprive capital of its state forces allowing the working class majority to take power and remove all barriers to socialism.

The class war has never stopped. But today the ongoing global crisis of capital has shifted the many fronts from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan into cyberspace. Drones are now the US weapon of choice, and computer viruses are used to destroy the enemies' weapons control. We are approaching Starwars where the evil empire is surrounded and undermined by miriads of subversives and freedom fighters who are not only at home on the streets but in the internet and cyberspace. The old man is dosed up on adrenaline and all dressed up to kill but has nowhere to go.

Free Bradley Manning!
Defend Assange and Wikileaks from state repression!
Defeat US and Chinese and all other imperialisms!
For international class struggle across borders!
For a Revolutionary World Party of Socialism!
For Workers' and Peasants' Councils and Militias!
For rank and file soldiers councils to overthrow their officers!
For general strikes to unite the working class and take power!
For Workers' and Peasants' Governments everywhere!

Release Sergeant Bradley Manning - War Hero!

The release of the Afghanistan 'war logs' that blew the secrecy surrounding the inhuman war in Afghanistan have been traced by the Pentagon to Bradley Manning - bradass87 - (photo above) an intelligence officer based in Iraq. The logs that expose the ongoing conduct of a brutal, murderous war against the people of Afghanistan are likely to fuel a new wave of anti-war opinion against the war.

While Wikileaks role in facilitating the publication of the logs is to be welcomed, the real hero of this scandal is bradass87 who was arrested in May and has spend two months in jail in Kuwait. We say the workers of the world must demand the immediate release of Brad Manning as a war hero!

Manning was dobbed in to the army by a former hacker Adrian Lamo. According to the Guardian:

It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a suspect, and that was only after a very strange sequence of events. On 21 May, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: "hi... how are you?… im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad … if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?"
For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified "secret"; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to "top secret". He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things … that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … almost criminal political backdealings … the non-PR version of world events and crises."
Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.
He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: "its open diplomacy … its Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth … its beautiful and horrifying … It's public data, it belongs in the public domain." At one point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: "i can't believe what im confessing to you." It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their exchange, on 23 May, Lamo had contacted the US military. On 25 May he met officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department in a Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87's online chat.
On 26 May, at US Forward Operating Base Hammer, 25 miles outside Baghdad, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested, shipped across the border to Kuwait and locked up in a military prison

Lamo's reason for informing on Manning to the military was that the log could identify and expose military in the field. Perhaps this was as the result of the first Wikileak from Manning, the video of the massacre of civilians:

... on 5 April, Assange held a press conference in Washington to reveal US military video of a group of civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters staff, being shot down in the street in 2007 by Apache helicopters: their crew could be heard crowing about their "good shooting" before destroying a van which had come to rescue a wounded man and which turned out to be carrying two children on its front seat.

This obscenity led to a scramble to find the perpetrators, not of the assassination but of the leaks. Lamo tries to throw dirt on Manning's motives:

Lamo, 29, who lives in Sacramento, said that the Afghan war documents are "basically a large dump of battlefield intelligence systems that Manning had access to."
He said, however, that Manning lacked the technical expertise to obtain and transmit all the data and received help from people who worked with WikiLeaks. "There was overlap between people who were his friends and people working with WikiLeaks," Lamo said.
"They made him feel real cool by putting him in touch with Assange," he said. "They were WikiLeaks' 'shopper' for classified information. There are at least two people in his social circle who are in contact with WikiLeaks."
Lamo said he does not know how Manning's friends came to know or work with WikiLeaks. "At some point he was either induced, or of his own volition, decided to contact [WikiLeaks]," Lamo said.

So Manning is risking the lives of his fellow soldiers because he wants to feel 'cool' by associating with WikiLeaks? But it doesnt really matter if Manning felt 'cool' or not, he jeopardised his career, his freedom (he could face 50 years in jail) and possibly his life by acting on his beliefs that the war was "criminal". If Manning's posts on his dig.com address and his support for wikileaks role in 'climategate' are any indication, Manning may have right-wing libertarian politics.

A blogger says that Manning was screaming "look at me, I'm a hero waiting to happen".

I can't say if this has harmed the security of our troops. But I don't think it's advanced the cause of peace. This information gives us a measure of insight into what it's like on the ground of a massive war - but how much did we need that, and what cost was it worth paying to obtain? As far as I can see, two things have been satisfied by this leak: bradass87's desire for notoriety, and our need for voyeurism.

So bradass87's actions that can lead to a courtmartial and years in jail are motivated by nothing more than a 'desire for notoriety' to feed our need for 'voyeurism'.


Whatever Manning's motives and whatever our reaction, the truth about the war can only bring about stronger actions to end this imperialist war and the capitalist system that makes it necessary.

Manning's case is proceeding within the military justice system, with the Army Criminal Investigation Command leading the probe. The next step is a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to recommend a court-martial, Lapan said. If individuals not connected to the military are found to be involved in the leak, "then that's when Justice and the others would potentially get involved," he said. 

Here we see the military rushing to suppress the truth and punish the whistleblowers and of the 'messengers' such as Wikileaks. 

The world's workers must defend whistleblowers against imperialist war!

As for the argument that the truth be suppressed for the sake of the lives of the military personnel, we say bring on the truth, more truth and nothing but the truth.  A recent case of the photo of NZ SAS soldier on duty in Afghanistan, Willie Apiata, (photo below) when published in the corporate media, met with condemnation by the RSA (Returned Services) who said it put him at risk. We say more photos please.

Postcript on Lieutenant Timothy O'Donnell

On August 4th NZ time the first NZ casualty of the war in Afghanistan occurred. The dead soldier was Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell (photo below) aged 28, a member of the NZ Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamyan Province. A decorated career soldier who also served in East Timor, O'Donnell was killed when his convoy hit a roadside bomb. The irony is that the war in Afghanistan is lost, the COIN of McCrystal and Petreus (counterinsergency operation) has failed, and Obama is looking to do a deal to get out leaving a massive US base at Bagram. Not only that, the people of Bamyan do not want the Reconstruction Team as there is no nation building possible in a middle of a war. Yet the death of this soldier becomes a cause for national mourning in New Zealand. As communists we do not mourn his death, nor do we welcome it. As a professional soldier and an officer O'Donnell was prepared to risk his life to wage an oppressive war. His death is part of the defeat of imperialism in Afghanistan.