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The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with Mark Kruger about his new book, The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Douglas Lyons: Mark, could you tell us something about your background and how you became interested in this little-known yet extraordinary and revolutionary event in American history?

Mark Kruger: Thanks very much for inviting me. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the late 60s and that was a life changing event, just being on that campus then. After that I went to law school at Washington University in St. Louis and then later received a PhD from Saint Louis University.

Through the years in reading labor history, I kept coming across these short remarks about how during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 workers seized power in St. Louis. I had to wait until my retirement when I had time to sit down and look at it to begin to try to piece together the answers to some of those questions. So, the subject was on my mind for a number of years but it was really about four years ago that I began to really research it and delve into it.

DL: Were you involved in left-wing, working class politics?

MK: I formed a group that would go after individual kinds of problems, political, environmental, that sort of thing. For a while I was involved with the Workers League [forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party]. They came down from New York and sponsored a talk on campus on the Vietnam War. And also, the YSA [the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party]. I always liked the Black Panther Party because they had that class analysis, so I began selling their newspapers on the Washington University campus.

DL: What's so important about your book is that you put the St. Louis Commune in the international context of the First International, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1848 revolutionaries. I was wondering if you can explain more about this influence on the American working class.

MK: As I got into it, I realized that this was almost more of a European event than it was an American event, because the roots of the St. Louis Commune were in Europe and that you had to look at those events to understand the Commune. So, for example, you had the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe but especially in the German-speaking states and after that was suppressed those people moved to the United States and many of them settled in St. Louis because the city had a very long history of German immigration. It was very attractive to German immigrants to come here because there were a lot of people who spoke their language and had their culture. All of those things were present.

You had all these revolutionaries from the German-speaking areas coming to St. Louis, as well as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago and other places. Then, in 1871, the Paris Commune was suppressed. A lot of those people also came to the United States, many of them settling in St. Louis because it was originally a very French city.

Marx formed the First International in 1864, and that moved headquarters to the United States in 1872. So, you had a thread between all these revolutionaries where they were all members, or mostly members, of the First International. And it came together in the city. St. Louis had a very strong section of the International with German, French, Bohemian, and British or English-speaking sections. You had all of these European influences that ultimately resulted in the St. Louis general strike that grew out of the Railroad Strike of 1877.

DL: What was the city itself like? Could you compare it to others such as Chicago or Pittsburgh?

MK: It was the fourth-largest city in the country and growing by leaps and bounds. There were even efforts to move the nations capital to St. Louis. The city was big in manufacturing. It had large iron ore deposits in the Carondelet area of the city. It rivaled Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Birmingham, Alabama in steel production. There was massive trade going through the city into the West and South. Hence, its claimed today to be the Gateway to the West.

St. Louis is sort of a mix between a northern and southern city and some people have joked that it combined the best of northern hospitality with southern efficiency. It was a racist city, but at the time it was a very racist country so that was not unusual. But before the Civil War, because of the German immigrants, there was a very strong anti-slavery feeling to the city and as a result there was strong support for the Republican Party and strong support for Abraham Lincoln.

The state of Missouri on the other hand was very conservative, very Confederate in the southern and western parts of the state. St. Louis was kind of an island in this sea of Confederacy. The governor of Missouri during the Civil War was Claiborne Jackson who was a Confederate sympathizer, trying to get Missouri to join the Confederacy. St. Louis residents resisted, especially the Germans, many of whom became Union generals and very strong Unionists.

DL: Your book does a fantastic job covering Joseph Weydemeyer, a German revolutionary and friend of Karl Marx. Were there other prominent 1848ers in St. Louis?

MK: In St. Louis, the big hero was Franz Sigel. There is still a statue to him in Forest Park. He had been in the Prussian army and then took part in the 1848 revolutions and at one time considered going to Italy to fight in the revolution there, but instead came to the United States and fought for the Union during the Civil War. To this day he is still a hero among the German-descent citizens here.

DL: Why did these German revolutionaries support Lincoln?

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

MK: Lincoln kind of fit into the Marxist perspective of the capitalists taking control from feudalists in the South. Marx would support that as part of the progressive movement toward socialism. So, Lincoln was a very progressive figure and was supported by a lot of these German revolutionaries.

DL: You mentioned racism in St. Louis and Missouri, but, during the strike, white and black workers united along class lines, as did different nationalities.

MK: Its always hard to put your yourself in the place of people 150 years ago. You get bits and pieces, like a puzzle, and you try to give an idea of what something looked like. But 1877 was a very racist time and you had a young working class in the United States. Slaves were only recently freed, and as a result, a lot of the early unions were racist in nature. Most unions did not allow blacks. Blacks formed their own unions in many cases. Only later did we overcome that. The Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union (NLU) were two unions that went out and specifically attempted to organize women and black people, which was very unusual 150 years ago. The NLU was immense in its membership, having about 800,000 members. They were two unions that tried to organize on the basis of class rather than race.

What emerged in St. Louis in 1877 was a coming together of black and white people in the general strike. You had black workers on the bargaining committee that met with the railroad owners. You had white workers supporting black steamship workers and helped them get a 50 percent raise in wages. You had blacks marching with whites through the streets. The newspapers at the time were full of descriptions of black hordes marching with white people and taking over society, so the Commune actually brought together black and white workers in a class focus.

DL: One episode which definitely showed the evolution of American society was when two former Union and Confederate generals united and took orders from the government to squash the revolutionaries.

MK: When I saw that a Union general and a Confederate general were both chosen to lead the forces against the St. Louis community, against the workers, I thought how symbolic is that: Two former enemies that were killing each other came together now to suppress the workers. In the antebellum South, the generals supported the southern plantation owners, the feudal interests. In the North, the capitalist class was emerging, and they controlled their own forces, so when the North won the Civil War and the northern capitalists took control of the American government, the army then was going to follow the orders and support the interests of that ruling class. The new enemy was not slaveowners in the South; the new enemy of those capitalists was the working class.

DL: Can you talk more about the labor movement after the Civil War and how it coalesced around the international trends you study?

MK: At that time, what was happening in Europe and in the United States was a big change in the working class with the industrial revolution and new machinery in the factories. A lot of the skilled workers were being forced into factories as wage earners. Before they were earning a pretty good wage and they controlled their own lives and working conditions. But now their skills were not valued, and as a result their higher wages were lowered because they were just running the machines like any unskilled worker.

Low wages and bad working conditions were ubiquitous all through American industry. This is a very young working class that really is searching for its consciousness. At the same time, you have all these German and French revolutionaries coming to the United States and joining the working class and trying to instill this class consciousness in the workers and unite them.

DL: Why do you think the Great Railroad Strike followed a spontaneous course, and why did it draw in skilled and unskilled workers, white and black workers, and the unemployed?

MK: Conditions were so bad for the working class at that time. The railroad industry plays a big part in the book because the working conditions were so dangerous and with the three pay cuts in 1877. But the whole working class was really suffering. There was no social safety net. If you could not buy coal to heat your house, then you would freeze to death. If you could not buy food, you would starve to death, and that was a pretty general situation. All it took was one spark and then everybody who was in the same boat began to react. These strikes began happening in Martinsburg, West Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland, and then spreading west from there. It was all spontaneous and within a week it had reached California. That is how fast it was moving.

DL: But in St. Louis the Workingmens Party (WP) harnessed this eruption.

MK: Workers did form, out of the First International, the Workingmens Party of the United States, but in 1877 it was only a year old. You have got a young party that is watching this, and they are taken by surprise. In the eastern states it happened too fastthey could not react to it but in St. Louis it took a few days to reach the city and the party tried to provide some leadership. They organized a general strike, and when the city was abandoned, they took it over. But they were not ready to take leadership and make it a national movement, rather than individual movements in different localities.

DL: The demands of the WP, such as nationalization of the railroads and telegraph industries under the control of the working class, underscore the influence of the First International.

MK: The 1848 revolutionaries that came to St. Louis provided the philosophy of class consciousness that was otherwise lacking among workers in the city. You had with the WP a radical leadership. James Cope was one of the leaders and he was a member of the London, England trades council before he came to the city. Albert Currlin was a member of the First International and a founder of the party. Twenty percent of the WP lived in St. Louis, so you had a lot of revolutionaries and radicals, and that had the effect of changing what was a strike over wages and working conditions into something broader. These were Marxists that recognized this was a struggle between classes that was emerging, and they tried to provide that leadership and that philosophy to educate the workers.

The WP held these mass meetings where a number of speakers were talking about not just wages and working conditions such as the eight-hour day and the end to child labor, but also planned out the takeover of these different industries to be run for the benefit of the working class rather than a few rich capitalists. They infused the philosophy of socialism.

DL: This era was termed the Gilded Age, and today the term the Second Gilded Age is being used to describe the state of society. What similarities do you see between 1877 and today and what do you think will happen when another working class uprising happens in the United States?

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

MK: There were so many things about the Gilded Age that are similar to today. The expansion of capitalism, the control of the government by the capitalists, the suppression of working class organizations. And today unions are at their weakest point they have been in many years. You have voter suppression and a tremendous gap in wealth between the capitalists and the workers. A lot of the conditions are there for a struggle to emerge.

When I was a kid, I grew up in a very working class town just north of Chicago which has become infamous in recent days Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city of [fascist killer] Kyle Rittenhouse. The town was extremely working class. American Motors was headquartered there and so was Simmons Mattress. Everyone it seemed belonged to a union and all of my friendsall of their fathers belonged to unions, and they all lived in middle-class neighborhoods, a very middle-class life. That was the post-war period when the economy was good, and the unions were strong.

When I was a sophomore in Madison in 1968, I thought there was going to be a revolution before I graduated college. People were talking about what are you going to do after the revolution. But today is similar to 1877, nobody expected it to break out when it did and so that could happen at any time.

I think that what was lacking in St. Louis in 1877, which is lacking today, is a leadership that was socialist, was Marxist. There was a Workers Party there, which attempted to lead this uprising. But it was young and inexperienced. I think a socialist leadership is necessary if something is going to happen now.

DL: We saw the immense power of the youth and workers after the horrendous murder of George Floyd. That was a huge spontaneous uprising sending shockwaves throughout the entire world. But I would have to disagree with you on the leadership, because we have the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party.

I would also have to argue that the trade unions have not done anything for workers. They are going along with the capitalist class to keep workers in COVID-infested workplaces and schools for profit. We are calling on the working class to create new organizations of struggle based on internationalism and socialism, rank-and-file committees. This will not come through the corporatist and nationalist AFL-CIO and other unions.

MK: I think you are right. When we talked about the earlier movements, leadership is so important. When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged, one of the things that they stressed was a lack of leadership. And they were proud of that. The first thing that entered my mind was the Students for a Democratic Society meetings in the 1960s, where there was no leadership in those meetings. It went on for hours and hours and hours, and accomplished very little. The leadership of a socialist organization like yours I think is crucial to any kind of working class movement.

Marx talked about building up workers organizations and then a workers party, and he said that if workers supported any of the mainstream parties, the capitalist parties, they would be exploited by those parties for their votes but they would not get anything in return. And that seems to me to be exactly what has happened in this country. It is going to take some real leadership, I think, in order to point the working class in the direction of class interests rather than just a few more dollars or one hour less of a workday.

That is totally related to my biggest fear right now and that is the emergence of fascism in the United States. This is being fed by the Republican Party today. The threat is a lot stronger than I think a lot of people realize.

DL: This brings me to the other capitalist party that divides the working class through identity politics, the Democratic Party, which, through its main organ, the New York Times, has waged a falsification of history in the 1619 Project. What are your thoughts on this?

MK: I did read a number of those articles and interviews that are in your book, and to me it is so simplistic and wrong to say that race is the one factor that has defined all of history. History is so complicated, and there are so many different things going on at the same time. It takes a great deal of thinking and research to try to understand what forces are at work and what effect they were having.

To me, the 1619 Project is the logical consequence of identity politics. I do not say that looking at certain groups or focusing on them to understand those groups is not important, for example, the Black Power movement. I think it serves some ends in understanding what has happened to that particular group. Courses on womens history helps women understand why they have been repressed in the society. But it is not the answer to the ultimate question.

The claim that the American Revolution was primarily in order to preserve slavery in the United States, is, to me, ridiculous. It totally ignores the Enlightenment. All the leaders of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment, children of the Enlightenment. The 1619 Project does not touch the issue that the purpose of colonies was to exploit them and provide profits for the mother country. You had the fledgling capitalist corporations in England setting up colonies, and the whole idea was to take as much from them as possible and line your pockets with that exploitation.

There are a number of factors that go into the American Revolution. A lot of the colonists were slaveowners. But we are talking about the 1700s, and there were slaves all over the world at the time, not just in what was to become the United States. So to say that a countrys entire history is based on its treatment of black people I think is very simplistic, very one dimensional. And what it has is the effect of dividing the working class into a number of different groups, each with their own interest, each with their own complaints, and failing to see the common denominator.

I just read a book by Les Payne called The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. No one was more race conscious in his earlier years than Malcolm X. He attributed all the problems of black people to the blonde-haired blue-eyed devil, white people. An extremely racist-focused interpretation of history. But then he began to change in his later years. There were a couple of things in the book that caught my attention: Malcolm told [civil rights leader and later Congressman] John Lewis in Nairobi, Kenya, to shift focus from race to class. Malcolm came to a certain understanding that class and capitalism lead to racism, rather than it being some kind of natural thing, a natural conflict between white people and black people. I think that is where the 1619 Project goes wrong. It just focuses on one thing, tries to draw conclusions based on one element in American history, and that is much too narrow and much too simplistic to explain anything.

DL: Martin Luther King Jr. moved towards a class analysis of society as well, which the 1619 Project completely ignores.

MK: Right, they went from marches in the South for black civil rights to the Poor Peoples Campaign, trying to unite black and white workers. It may be a coincidence, but that raises the question of his assassination, when he started this campaign. This raises a point with the Workingmens Party. For them the problem of racism and the repression of women would all be solved when capitalism was ended, the basic problem that led to both of those problems was capitalism.

DL: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this important book and subject.

MK: Thank you for having me. Its not everybody that is interested in a weeklong event that occurred in St. Louis 150 years ago. But I always thought that the first general strike in American history, and the only time an American city was being run by communists, was pretty interesting.

Read more here:
An interview with Mark Kruger, author of The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland - WSWS

Christiane Taubira, the former Socialist justice minister who won a so-called popular primary of the French left and environmentalists on Sunday night, has said the poll would be the last chance for a possible union of the left.

The primary was intended to whittle the number of left and Green candidates in the French presidential race from seven down to one. But feuding contestants refused to accept the results and the exercise in futility increased chaos and confusion, 2 months before the election.

Sandrine Rousseau, who lost the Greens primary last September, told Le Monde: Every day, or almost, some new variable complicates the equation on the left. The sudden appearance of Christiane Taubira, the ambiguity created by [former Socialist president] Franois Hollande [about his possible candidacy] . . . Collectively, we look ridiculous.

The online primary was organised by the environmentalist activist Mathilde Imer (31) and Samuel Grzbowski (29), a leftist Catholic, because they were, Imer said, fed up with losing elections and watching the progression of voter abstention.

While only 23 per cent of respondents showed any interest in the popular primary in an Ifop poll published on January 20th, 392,738 people nonetheless voted in the three-day election. Taubira was the only one of the top five candidates who promised to accept the results and pull out of the race if she lost.

The others claimed the primary was a scheme to promote Taubira, who did not declare herself a presidential candidate until January 15th. Her victory on Sunday night changed nothing, they said, refusing to rally behind her. Taubira denounced the others lack of respect for the process.

The economic daily Les chos prints a daily barometer of voter intentions, compiled by the Opinion Way polling company. Mondays poll still showed the left and Greens at the bottom of the pile in projected first-round results. President Emmanuel Macron is steady at 24 per cent while his three conservative and far-right challengers are at 17 and 13 per cent.

Despite Taubiras victory in the poll, Jean-Luc Mlenchon, an accomplished orator and showman from the far left, is leading the losers pack at 10 per cent. Taubira and the Green MEP Yannick Jadot are tied at 5 per cent, while the official Socialist candidate and mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, and the Communist candidate Fabien Roussel, are at 3 per cent too low to recoup their election expenses.

Hidalgo and Jadot won Socialist and Green primaries last year. Hidalgo is at war with Olivier Faure, the secretary-general of her own party. Faure reportedly hopes that Hidalgos poor performance in the poll she ranked fifth will force her to drop out of the race.

In December, Hidalgo briefly defended the idea of the popular primary before concluding that it was a vehicle for Taubira. Hidalgo said she would participate, but only if Jadot also accepted the results, which he categorically refused to do. Mlenchon denounced the primary as obscure tricks to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

The Covid pandemic has fostered a greater desire for a protective state, public services, and social justice. Rising inflation has made purchasing power a leading concern of French voters, along with global warming. These themes ought to favour the left and Greens, at a time when the right is obsessed with immigration, security and identity politics. But there is a disconnect between voter concerns and left and Green politicians, who lack charisma.

The French Socialist Party was founded at the Congrs dpinay 50 years ago last June and its glory days were during Franois Mitterrands 1981-1995 presidency, with a brief revival under Lionel Jospins plural left government from 1997 until 2002. The Socialist leader Franois Hollande was elected in 2012 because the electorate rejected Nicolas Sarkozy. His term was a huge disappointment.

This movement was one of the great components of European life for generations of workers, intellectuals and citizens, the philosopher Pierre Manent told Europe 1 radio station, lamenting the pathetic perplexity which has seized French socialism.

The Socialist candidate Benot Hamon won only 6.36 per cent of the vote in the last presidential election. The partys membership has shrunk from 111,450 in 2016 to 22,000 at present.

It appears that political parties, like individuals and states, are incapable of learning from their past. As the left heads for disaster in April, many are again blaming Taubira for sowing division. Had she not insisted on standing for a splinter party in 2002, the Socialist prime minister Jospin would have made it to the runoff and might have defeated Jacques Chirac.

The shambles on the French left is all the more striking because Social Democrat parties are in power in Denmark, Germany where Greens also play a prominent role and Sweden, and Socialists lead the governments of Portugal and Spain.

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'Popular primary' does nothing to mitigate shambles on French left - The Irish Times

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According to a new dirt sheet rumor, WWE has run out of people to fire and is now firing people who don't even work there! Shane McMahon, who is reportedly not under contract to WWE, has reportedly been fired by the company for ruining the Royal Rumble!

Greetings, comrades! It is I, your El Presidente, bringing you the latest wrestling news and hot goss burning up the dirt sheets and the IWC. This latest report comes from the always-reliable Ringside News, claiming that Vince McMahon has "quietly" fired Shane McMahon after the Best in the World was blamed for botching the Royal Rumble booking. Haw haw haw haw! Someone has got to take the fall, comrade!

This year's Rumble was disappointing to most viewers, not because it was particularly worse than the rest of WWE's terrible weekly programming, but because people tend to have higher expectations for the Rumble. While the Women's Royal Rumble match at least featured multiple legends to garner nostalgia pops and the return of Ronda Rousey so that fans can boo her as a babyface while WWE inserts fake crowd noise from the WWE 2k video game series to make it seem like people are actually cheering, the Men's Royal Rumble match was an absolute wasteland of boring wrestlers, boring action, and a predictable and boring outcome as Brock Lesnar returned to win the Rumble.

The only "surprise" in the match was the return of Shane McMahon himself, who, according to backstage rumors, was also heavily involved in producing the match, and the wrestlers involved were just as disappointed as fans were. When the Royal Rumble, meant to kick off the excitement of WrestleMania season, otherwise known as the only time of year WWE comes close to being entertaining, went over like a wet fart, someone had to take the fall.

And so, according to Ringside News, Shane McMahon has been "quietly let go" by his own father, Vince McMahon, despite rumors Shane would appear regularly on WWE Raw and have a match at WrestleMania. But there's just one problem: even by the admission of Ringside News itself in the same report, Shane McMahon isn't actually an employee of WWE. So how can you fire someone who doesn't even technically work there? Well, comrades, when it comes to WWE, if there's a will, there's a way. Besides, it's better than Vince McMahon taking ultimate responsibility for producing a bland and boring product for the last twenty years.

Of course, it's important to take rumors like this with a grain of salt that is if you can get your hands on any, thanks to supply chain issues. Until next time, comrades, remember: socialism or death!

See the rest here:
Rumor: Shane McMahon Fired by WWE Even Though He Doesn't Work There - Bleeding Cool News

A mass political and military movement led by the working class and headed by Communists freed Italy from fascism in the early 1940s. A society which seemed extremely stable and controlled, destined to continue in the same way forever, suddenly exploded from below with mass activity, such that for a brief period everything seemed possible, Marxist historian Tom Behan writes of the period.

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had ruled the country since 1922. But the tide turned in 1942-43. His army suffered disastrous military defeats in North Africa and, from 5 March 1943, more than 200,000 workers in Turin went on strike for higher wages, greater rations and an end to the war. It was the first and largest strike wave in occupied Europe during the Second World War, and it sealed Mussolinis downfall.

In July 1943, the Allied armies invaded Italy from the south, landing in Sicily. Two months later, Italy announced an armistice. Meanwhile, Germany invaded the north of the country and propped up Mussolini. An alliance of anti-fascist parties formed the National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale). And at the end of September, Naples was liberated without assistance from the Allies, the first civilian uprising against Nazi occupation in Europe.

From this time until the final liberation of Italy from fascism in April 1945, the country was split in two. In the south, the Allies ran the show in concert with General Pietro Badoglio and the kinga non-fascist regime, but nonetheless repressive towards workers and the left.

The Italian resistance in the north was military, political and industrial, led by workers and the left. In March 1944, 1.2 million workers went on strike, demanding peace and the cessation of war production for Nazi Germany. In terms of mass demonstrations, in occupied Europe nothing can come close to the revolt of Italian workers, a New York Times reporter wrote.

The Communist Party had cells in many factories in the northern cities. Some of them had access to arms and carried out armed actions against the occupying German forces at night and on weekends. According to a party report, at Milans Redaelli factory, of 1,295 workers, there were twenty male party members, one female, and many sympathisers. A committee of agitation exists. Football team [code for armed workers] discreetly equipped. Many women were couriers who would transport information, medicine, money, ammunition or bombs.

Florence was liberated by a three-week insurrection in July and August. The partisans refused the Allies demands to disarm and made it known than if the Allies tried to disarm them, they would be treated as an enemy. Partisans liberated their own city, and residents spontaneously joined the insurrection.

Left-wing newspapers began to be sold openly, even during the fighting, as Behan recounts in The Italian Resistance. A man stopped me in piazza San Marco, he must have been 70-75. Without saying a word he held out his hand to take the paper, and held it just as a Christian might hold a sacred object, Socialist leader Sandro Pertini recalled of his time selling the party paper, Avanti. And he kissed it ... And he started crying.

Hundreds of thousands of partisans fought in the mountains, usually operating in military units of 40 to 50. The Communist Party organised the Garibaldi Brigades, comprising at least half of the partisans. Each brigade had a military commander and a political commander, both elected and recallable. The political commander organised a political hour every day to discuss the war and to organise more general political education and debate. They even tried to keep libraries of books.

With little equipment or military experience, and being poorly fed, clothed and housed, partisans faced the most formidable fighting machine in the world in the German army. The resistance was full of left-wing volunteers, fighting not just for the defeat of fascism, but for a better world. This was key to their victory.

The Communist Party was by far the largest left force in the resistance. Its members and supporters were fighting for socialism. But the leadership pursued a fundamentally conservative strategy. The party argued for national liberation first and progressive democracy secondan application of the Stalinised Cominterns Popular Front to Italy. The working class was to form an alliance with the progressive section of the bourgeoisie, while the party would form a political alliance with the centre-right Christian Democratic Party.

After the 1943 Allied invasion, Communist leaders agreed to work with the Italian army and the king to oust Mussolini. Meanwhile, the Badoglio government was shooting down striking workers. On 2 April 1944, after a meeting with Stalin, Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti issued the Salerno turn, announcing that the party would join the kings government under Badoglio.

This ensured the integrity of the Italian state and set the scene for the rehabilitation of fascists after the war. As journalist and partisan Giorgio Bocca argued, Whoever collaborates with Pietro Badoglio, Marshal of the Empire, and with the King, who legalised the March on Rome, can obviously no longer demand the purging of those who worked on behalf of the fascist state. Togliatti and the PCI received great political prestige because they provided a lot: a previously non-existent certificate of anti-fascist credibility.

Other left-wing parties with a national presence were the Action Party and the Socialist Party. The Action Party provided about one in five of the resistance fighters. Its revolutionary wing rejected the Soviet Union as a socialist model. It attracted many radicals to its ranks and was less willing than the Communist Party to compromise on issues of principle. But it didnt have a stable working-class base, having been founded only in 1942.

Unlike the Communists, the Italian Socialist Party hadnt maintained an underground organisation. Like the Action Party, it had both revolutionary and reformist wings. The revolutionary wing was highly critical of the Badoglio government. But it was too small to have a decisive influence on events.

Other political forces to the left of the Communist Party operated in various cities. In Rome, there was the group Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag), which was the biggest resistance faction in the city. In the two decades of Mussolinis rule, Communist cadres had been exiled in France or the Soviet Union. But local activists, left to their own devices for decades, had not undergone the same process of indoctrination in Stalinism. Historian David Broder writes that they rejected the idea of a common national interest and pursued a class war and revolutionary agenda.

The Allies and the anti-fascist partisans had a tense relationship. Britain and Americas alliance with the partisans in Italy was based on geopolitical considerations, not a principled opposition to fascism. And their support was limited. Supply drops focused on non-military goods.

The Allies wanted fighters who would risk their lives but make no political demands. What they got was hundreds of thousands of armed partisans, largely workers, alongside a political mass movement and strikes in the cities.

On 13 November 1944, Allied officer General Harold Alexander ordered the cessation of operations and cut off supplies for months. The partisans were ordered to go homean impossibility for outlaws. The partisan movement survived but was weakened. In December, resistance leaders agreed to disarm and hand over military and political power to the Allies immediately upon liberation, in return for money.

Women were involved in all aspects of the resistance, as striking workers, anti-fascist activists and armed fighters. There were female commanders and all-female units. Some urban militias (terrorist groups) were led by women.

Eighty of the 200 members of the 7th Gianni GAP (Patriotic Action Group) in Emilia-Romagna were women. Commander Novella Vanda Albertazzi reportedly said: It seemed absurd and impossible to stay bent over a table ten hours a day, to gossip with friends, while the Germans walked the streets, while the fascists arrested young men. An estimated 35,000 women took part in military action. Five hundred and twelve women were recognised to have been political commissars.

While the politics of the Communist Party regarding women, and the behaviour of male partisans, were far from perfect, the mass struggle opened up a space for womens involvement in politics and for sexist attitudes to be challenged. After the resistance struggle, women were granted the vote.

In April 1945, insurrections took place in all the cities of the northern industrial triangleMilan, Turin and Genoato finally throw off the shackles of fascism. All took place before the Allied armies arrived.

Thirty thousand German troops were stationed in Genoa in the lead-up to the insurrection. Partisans numbered 8,000, some with only hand guns. Against the Allies wishes, the resistance called for an insurrection and told the Nazis they would accept only unconditional surrender.

Residents spontaneously joined partisan squads, arming themselves with weapons seized from fascists. Gunther Meinhold, a decorated major general and career officer in the German army, surrendered to an emaciated partisan in civilian clothes, Remo Scappini, an industrial worker and Communist leader. In the days after the liberation, Mussolini and his closest associates were executed by partisans.

When the Allies arrived in liberated cities, they found them functioning, with some form of democratic control over civil society. Bosses feared the prospect of social revolution. But they need not have worried. The Communist Party wasnt interested in mobilising the masses to create organs of workers power. It insisted on a self-limiting insurrection aimed at giving its leaders a bargaining chip to ensure their participation in the postwar Italian state. The insurrection we want does not have the goal of imposing social or political changes in a socialist or communist sense, party leader Togliatti declared.

As historian Paul Ginsborg argues in A History of Contemporary Italy, the Stalinist strategy of national liberation first, social and political reform second, caused the party to dissipate the strength of the resistance and of worker and peasant agitation ... at the very moment when the partisan and workers movement was at its height ... The Communists accepted the postponement of all questions of a social and political nature until the end of the war.

The Allies were handed control of the cities and the workers guns, while the Communist Party leaders took three ministries in a grand coalition government.

While fascism was defeated, many partisans were disappointed with postwar Italy. Factory bosses who had collaborated with fascism and profited from the war stayed around. The purging of the state apparatus was limited. Togliatti, as justice minister, shamefully passed an amnestywhich meant that many fascist acts of torture, rape and murder went unpunishedand worked closely with Giuseppe Azzariti, the president of the Tribunal of the Race, which enforced anti-Semitic laws from 1938 to 1943. Hunger and rationing continued, and many former partisans were left unemployed.

Workers hid their arms on a huge scale. In large factories, one or two workers were delegated to keep weapons in working order. In Emilia Romagna, 413 kilos of ammunition were found between 1970 and 1995. For partisan and historian Claudio Pavone, the burying of the machine gun symbolised the covering up of an alternative pathone that would not have stopped with the defeat of fascism, but would have continued on to try to establish a socialist society.

See the original post here:
The Italian resistance to fascism - Red Flag

Mike Parker, a lifelong fighter for social justice, died at the age of eighty-one on January 15, 2022. He was not broadly known even in left circles, as he stayed out of the limelight throughout his life to instead promote others. But his contributions to a wide range of social movements, the labor movement, and socialist thinking were enormous.

Mikes activism began in college in the antiwar movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and continued until his death as a member of the Steering Committee of the Richmond Progressive Alliance. Throughout his life, he was a leader of various socialist organizations. He was a rank-and-file autoworker and an early supporter of Labor Notes. Mike was committed, kind, brilliant, and generous with his time and ideas. Countless activists considered him a mentor; he was respected and loved by many. His death is an incalculable loss to the cause of winning a more just and democratic world.

Mikes parents had been members of the Socialist Party, and growing up, he viewed himself as a socialist in the way children identify with the political party of their parents. In the antiwar movement, he came to understand that socialism required a fundamental restructuring of society. He joined the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) in 1959.

Mike first became an activist in the antiwar movement, years before the Vietnam War, and was a national leader of the SPU (Student Peace Union), the largest student organization in the country in the early 1960s, headquartered in Chicago. Mike ran the SPU office, often sleeping there. In the small organizations campaigns, especially around issues of nuclear weapons, Mike did it all, running the mimeograph machine when needed and giving political guidance to the many who called. Kim Moody, a writer on labor issues, founder of Labor Notes, and socialist for many decades, recalls meeting Mike for the first time at an SPU convention in 1960: Mike was impressive even then.

In the SPU, Mike began questioning the role of the US arms industry. In an interview about those early years with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) activist Jeremy Gong, Mike explained, You realize that youre up against these arms contractors and have this crude understanding why is the US basically building for annihilation of the human race? And why are we spending all of this [money] on that? He concluded that the arms industry needed war to thrive under capitalism.

Even in these early days, Mike was always drawing activists around him. One of them was Senator Bernie Sanders, who released a statement upon Mikes passing:

I knew Mike Parker when I was a student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. Mike was a brilliant advocate for workers and unions then, and he remained so for the rest of his life. Mike fought tirelessly for human solidarity and a more just and humane world. His lifes work and dedication should serve as an example for us all.

From the beginning, Mike was always involved in both broad social movements and socialist groups. He was deeply affected by the Soviet Unions crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. YPSLs anti-Stalinism fit with his developing politics. In the group, Mike discussed the nature of class society, the primacy of the working class in the struggle for socialism, how capitalists use racism to divide the working class, and how workers consciousness changes through struggle. These ideas informed Mikes beliefs for the rest of his life.

In 1964, Mike moved to Berkeley, California, as a graduate student in political science and became part of the political ferment of the moment. Mike was a leader of the campus Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and he was on the Steering Committee of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), one of the wellsprings of the 1960s movement for change. The university had imposed a rule, under pressure from corporate politicians like former US senator William Knowland, banning the recruitment of other students to join the civil rights movement.

The FSM not only won free speech at UC Berkeley but also helped spawn a new generation of activists. It was then that Mike, along with well-known Marxist scholar Hal Draper and other young activists, formed the Independent Socialist Club (ISC). The ISC stood for socialism from below, meaning that working people themselves would shape the socialist struggle. It rejected the existing Communist states as another form of class society. The ISC recognized that middle-class students could be an important pool of activists, but that socialists should orient toward the diverse working class.

How an independent party of the working class in the United States would be built was a question that Mike wrestled with his entire political life. Mike told Gong that he understood that

most deeply held political ideas for most people are only changed through experience. People open up to new ideas, and allies and enemies become clearer in the course of struggle. That is why we look for opportunities to engage in electoral struggle while also strengthening the understanding of the need for independent organization and exposing the nature of the Democratic Party.

Mike attempted to put some of these ideas into practice in the development of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) in California in 1967.

The Community for New Politics, an organization Mike and other activists participated in, was convinced to get a new, independent third party on the ballot. The idea was to base this new party on the social movements of the day: the massive movement against the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. Starting a new party and getting it on the ballot was not an easy task: voters would have to first cancel their registration with the party they had registered with, then reregister with the PFP.

One PFP member had a bus painted in psychedelic colors that he drove around the Bay Area, exhorting people over a loudspeaker to register PFP. Members of the Black Panther Party approached people in the bus looking for help. Huey P. Newton, the chair of the Black Panther Party, had just been jailed because of a shoot-out in Oakland. The Panthers offered to help register people in the black community if the PFP would make Hueys plight more broadly known. Mike led the move to ally with the Panthers to unite the antiwar movement with the movement for black political power.

The PFP got on the ballot, but the party did not thrive. Nonetheless, the PFP brought many young people into political activism for the first time and taught them how to organize. As the electoral expression of the antiwar movement and the Black Power movement in 1967 and early 1968, the PFPs fortunes waned as those movements went in different directions.

When Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the 1968 presidential race on an antiwar agenda, many in the PFP switched course to Get Clean for Gene and joined his campaign. The Black Panther Party became increasingly infiltrated by the FBI and went in more dangerous directions. But for a short period, the mainly white antiwar movement and the Panthers joined forces around the radical demands of Free Huey and, regarding Vietnam, Out Now. Mike led on these issues and on forging an alliance between the two movements.

Following the Berkeley model, other ISCs formed in cities around the country. This federation of local organizations became the International Socialists (IS) in 1969. As the group grew, members took jobs in industry, including auto plants in the Midwest. Mike moved to Detroit in 1975 to join the resident leadership of the IS.

In Detroit, Mike was a mentor to the IS socialist youth group, the Red Tide, which grew among high school students and those recently out of high school. The mostly African-American Red Tide took on local issues at high schools, like stopping the expansion of armed police in schools. A signature national issue was Free Gary Tyler, a young student who was sentenced to death in Louisiana after white students attacked black students at a newly integrated school. Tylers cause was later taken up by legal advocates, and after many appeals, Tyler was released from prison forty-two years later.

Mike served as a friend and teacher (and occasional car mechanic) for the Red Tide. Larry Bradshaw, a former Red Tider, explains:

Many of us met Mike when we were still in high school. The Red Tide, a fusion of several radical high school collectives, became the ISs youth group in 1975. Although we didnt use the term mentor in the 1970s, that is what Mike was for so many of us. He respected the organic leadership of youth, allowing us to grapple with a myriad of organizational and political questions on our own, make mistakes, learn from them and grow. His light-hand of leadership was a gift to Red Tide leaders. Mike was there when he needed to be, prodding and challenging us. In turn, we challenged Mike with our brash, youthful revolutionary impatience. Serious Mike also had his fun side, graciously accepting the nickname The P-Funk given to him by Red Tiders. Many Red Tiders learned our foundational socialist principles from and with Mike: a radical democratic socialism from below, a fierce anti-racism, an implacable anti-imperialism, understanding the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism, and the insight that the Democratic Party was neither a strategy nor a tool for liberation.

Another former Red Tider, Kyle Hoppy Hopkins, says:

The Red Tide was the youth group of the IS, and Mike was the liaison between the two organizations. But Mike was so much more to us. Mike was teacher and guide to us. A big brother. Mike sat on our executive committee meetings but didnt vote. He allowed us to work out issues and make mistakes.

We affectionately called him P-Funk, because he was pure, uncut funk. The Bomb! I was only seventeen when I was elected as the organizer of the Red Tide. I was quiet and unsure of my ability to lead. He mentored me in organizing skills, teaching me leadership skills and public speaking and conflict resolution. When I became frustrated and wanted to resign my position, it was Mike who convinced me that I could do the job.

As the youth leader of my church, I have used the lessons that I learned from Mike to mentor the young people who I lead. I am forever grateful to have known Mike.

By the end of the 1970s, the American left was in decline, as was the IS. Mike, along with others, argued for regroupment with other compatible organizations in some manner. These efforts met with limited success. Many socialist groups had collapsed, and others were too ideologically distant from IS politics.

In 1984, however, the IS merged with several small groups to form a broader socialist organization, Solidarity, which continues to the present. In a time of limited left activity, Mike viewed Solidarity as a vehicle to keep socialist ideas alive. He and others published the magazine Against the Current as well as other educational material.

Among his many skills, Mike was a brilliant electrician, and eventually he was able to get skilled trades jobs in a series of auto plants in Detroit. He worked first at the Chrysler Warren Stamping Plant. After being laid off from Warren, he got a job at the Ford River Rouge Complex. After another layoff at the Rouge Plant, Mike ended up at the Chrysler Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP). His brother Bill was the president of the local union in Sterling Heights, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 1700, for a number of years. (Mike drove an aging Chrysler, made at that plant, until he died.)

Following his hiring at Sterling Heights, Mike soon took an active role in the ongoing struggles over safety and control of the shop floor. He was asked by the local to lead skilled trades training in the plant, which he did with his insightful understanding of power both political and electrical. He was an important element of the locals in-plant strategy and taught others how to fight management on the shop floor.

While at the Sterling Heights plant, Mike published his own newsletter called, tongue in cheek,Meatballs.The name was a middle finger to management who derided some of the workers as meatballs.Underneath the masthead,Mike wrote that the title came from a Depression-era song with the lyric You gets no bread with one meatball.The newsletter addressed issues that interested Mike, such as democracy, safety, and other plant-wide issues.

Mikes youngest brother, Bill, says, Mike was always there for us, a powerful and progressive example of what a life well-lived could be. Bill, too, was a rank-and-file militant. Because of the ups and downs of the auto industry, he worked at two different auto plants from 1974 to 2018, when he retired; he began work at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant from 1984 until retirement and was president of Local 1700 at the plant from 1998 until 2013. Bill led struggles against the two-tiered wage scheme at Chrysler and successfully won the fight to keep SHAP open after a threatened closure. With Mike, he organized fights over safety issues and control of the shop floor.

Mike was on the board of Labor Notes for several decades. In the 1980s, he did pioneering work under its auspices on labor-management cooperation schemes popular at the time. Mike was the first person to analyze the system of lean production a management system that was allegedly designed only to increase efficiency and eliminate waste and that was becoming increasingly popular from a workers point of view, dubbing it management by stress and showing how it was designed to force workers to work harder without needing the direct intervention of supervisors. He was also the first to analyze cooperation schemes such as quality circles, quality of work life, and employee involvement, his understanding of which was rooted in his own time as an autoworker at Ford and Chrysler.

His first book for Labor Notes was Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL (1985), followed by (with Jane Slaughter) Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept (1988) and Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering (1995). Because there was no other source of analysis and advice about how unionists should relate to these programs, Labor Notes became a resource for many unionists who knew there was something wrong.

Mike designed and cotaught a dozen team concept schools for Labor Notes and some unions, including the Communications Workers of America (CWA), that brought together unionists across unions to learn how to fight these programs. He taught that these employee participation schemes were designed to allow management to gain control over the work process and erode the informal standards set by work groups themselves as to reasonable output and speed, and helped workers strategize about how to resist them.

Mike coauthored with Martha Gruelle Democracy Is Power,which argued that democracy made unions stronger in fighting the boss and gave concrete advice about how to involve members, run a union democratically, and work to change your union from below. They argued that democracy was far more than formal practices but rather the presence of the union as a living and breathing force in members lives a force they felt was theirs. Gruelle says:

When we worked on Democracy Is Powertogether, I was honored that Mike invited me to challenge his thinking on the various points. I generally saw that he was right. Mike lived his life helping others learn. If weve absorbed some small part of his wisdom, the labor movement will be stronger, and the world will be better.

In remembering Mike, long-term Labor Notes staffer Jane Slaughter said that Mike was an ideal coauthor and teacher because of his brilliant mind but also because he wanted so much to help workers fight the boss. I learned more from him than from anyone else Ive known.

Mikes commitment to working people was not limited to the United States. Through his work with Labor Notes, Mike met and worked with trade unionists from Brazil, Argentina, Japan, and elsewhere. Yamasaki Seiichi wrote on hearing of Mikes death:

Mike first came to Japan in 1989 to participate in the Asian Labor Solidarity Conference. Since then, he was involved in the Japanese labor movement primarily through the late Hideo Totsuka and the late Ben Watanabe. . . . I served as an interpreter for Mike at the 1989 conference. I remember that he did not make fun of me for not knowing the word deregulation but explained it to me in detail. I also have fond memories of my first visit to the United States in 1997, when I was invited to stay at his home in Detroit. . . . I imagine he finished his life of struggle with satisfaction that the work of the Labor Notes for over forty years has been passed on to the next generation and is growing.

Valter Sanches, former general secretary of IndustriALL Global Union in Brazil, was also influenced by Mike:

In the beginning of the 90s, the books Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL and Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept gave me a different perspective that helped me a lot in negotiating the restructuring of Mercedes-Benz in Brazil as a member of the local workers council. The exchanges I had with Mike in the following years always brought me new ideas for the role of the union and its members and leaders. I fondly remember Mikes generous mentorship.

After he retired from Chrysler in 2007, Mike and Margaret Jordan, his wife and partner and an activist in her own right, moved to Richmond, California, after Margaret inherited her parents house. Richmond is home to the largest oil refinery in the West, and Chevron dominated Richmond politics. A community movement, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, was challenging that domination. Mike and Margaret soon joined the RPA, becoming deeply involved in its work.

The RPA has fought for many issues on behalf of ordinary people: support for public schools and not charter schools, rent control, a $15 minimum wage, and other social justice issues. Mike worked on a campaign to reimagine policing, which was able to transfer money from the police budget to support needed social services such as mental health crisis intervention and services for unhoused residents. He cowrote an article for Jacobin about this campaign, writing, Richmond is leading the way on shifting public resources away from more and more policing and toward social programs that can achieve real public safety.

In 2018, Mike advised Jovanka Beckless campaign for California State Assembly. Although Beckles, a member of the RPA and former city council member, did not win, she came close. In their 2020 book, Bigger than Bernie, Jacobins Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht wrote that the campaign

offers a case study in how to wage class struggle on the campaign trail, and how socialists can use those campaigns even when theyre not successful in winning office to strengthen their own skillsets and relationships and apply to workers struggles on the ground.

Beckles went on to win her DSA-backed race for the regional transit board in 2020.

About Mike, Beckles says,

Words cannot express the sadness and loss I feel. Mike was a mentor, a comrade, and a dear friend to me. When I first met him fifteen years ago, I had no idea what a legend and a legendary mentor he was. I quickly came to discover just how much he had done for so many causes and individuals. Mike was generous and gracious. In addition to the patience he had with my countless political and labor questions, he was truly a friend whom I could count on to pick up his phone to provide political guidance. I sought him out because of his brilliant strategic mind. I wouldnt be where I am without his astute guidance. Mike helped the RPA become the organizing machine that it is today. He was the strategic mastermind behind many of our campaigns for environmental, racial, social, and economic justice, and elected office and labor struggles.

In 2017, young socialists in the East Bay branch of DSA found Mike and Martha Gruelles book, Democracy is Power. Learning that Mike lived nearby in Richmond, they reached out to him. Soon after, Mike joined the branch; he was also a founding member of the Bread and Roses caucus of DSA. Although Mike never had the time to play a leadership role in DSA, he was frequently asked for advice, which he willingly gave. He also played a role in involving DSA members in Jovanka Beckless campaigns for state assembly and for the transit board.

Jeremy Gong, a former member of DSAs National Political Committee and leader in DSAs Bread and Roses caucus who interviewed Mike extensively before his death, viewed Mike as a friend and mentor:

Since 2017, in the heady days of the rebirth of US socialism among a new generation, Mike became a mentor to me and others who had no idea what we were doing. After a life of building socialist organizations and building union and movement struggles, Mike always had excellent and concise advice for us on almost every topic. He always pushed us to go beyond already converted socialists and learn how to build movements and organizations with broader layers of activists. Mikes support of young socialists and his faith in the goodness and power of ordinary people will continue to give us confidence in our mission to transform the world.

(Gong has amassed a list of Mikes writings, which can be found here.)

In his last year, Mike joined with Ken Paff, a friend and fellow labor organizer of more than fifty years who was a longtime organizer with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), to form a foundation to help fund and carry on his lifes work, the Social Justice and Solidarity Fund.

Mike was my guide and sometimes my patient critic, as he has been to hundreds of other activists, Paff wrote in his own tribute to Mike:

He followed the work of our TDU movement and was always ready with generous solidarity and helpful ideas for me and other TDU leaders. Just over a year ago, Mikes oncologist told him he had about a year to live. Unlike most of us, he had no bucket list. His goal was to keep doing what he loved: working to make a better community and more just world. On the day he died, he was weak and didnt talk much, but asked to hear about the announcement of the mayoral candidacy in Richmond, California by Mikes friend, Eduardo Martinez. He smiled when I told him it went very well.

Mikes partner and wife, Margaret Jordan, died two years ago. She was a fighter for social justice as well and recognized by many for her key role in the activist community. Mike and Margaret are survived by their beloved daughter, Johanna Parker, and her partner, Matt Sylvester. Mike has three brothers, Bob, Bill, and Jerry, all activists, and numerous nieces and nephews. Mike Parker was caring, thoughtful, creative, and inspirational. His loss is felt by many.

He was also my friend for fifty years. I echo everything everyone has said about him. We also had fun together and laughed a lot. He is simply irreplaceable.

Originally posted here:
Mike Parker, a Life Well-Lived on the Left - Jacobin magazine