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As a junior doctor working in the coronavirus wards, I have witnessed socialism in action. Health workers of every grade have worked to exhaustion to save other people. The workers of the National Health Service, whether in crisis or in times of greater calm, were not motivated by profit or individual gain, but for the highest human principle the fight for life.

This historic crisis has also exposed the dark side of our system. From Boris Johnsons dishonesty to our health systems reliance on grubby corporate profiteers to deliver life-saving equipment, it couldnt be clearer that things should not go on like this. Our country has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world. That is a result of not only our governments appalling decisions, but the neoliberal political system that has been the norm for all my life.

Working in the NHS, I have been desperate for Labour to expose the full extent of the crisis our health system is under a systemic failure that has left my colleagues doing their best to save lives with decaying infrastructure and out-of-date PPE. Our party has been far too willing to go along with government policy, and not willing enough to present a courageous alternative.

Many young members are disappointed and angry. I have been persuading them with all my heart to stay in the Labour Party, but we have to prove that were worth sticking with. Tony Benn spoke of the two flames in every person: the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope in a better world. I feel both of those flames burning in me, and this is why I am once again standing to represent young members on our partys national executive committee (NEC).

In the midst of a global crisis, nobody should be too keen on discussing internal elections. But the two things are closely linked. Soon, well be entering one of the greatest recessions in history. When that crisis will be handled by a hard-right Tory government propped up by billionaires and corporate conmen, we need a party that wont accept their plans to reshape society in their interests but will resist with all its might. All too often, it feels like Sir Keir Starmers leadership is doing quite the opposite.

When asked by angry members about why they should stay, I remind them of the socialist heritage in our party. The left-wingers who ignored Labours leadership and confronted the Blackshirts during the struggles of the Thirties. The stalwarts like Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott, who fought racism and sexism when these issues were embarrassing to the party establishment. The Tribune group and union-sponsored MPs who resisted attempts to water down our commitment to workers rights when we were in power, and figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Dennis Skinner who spoke out against the War on Terror and the demonisation of Britains Muslim community.

This is the red thread of Labour I proudly identify with. And organising with the oppressed must remain at the heart of our path to victory. When a young, multiracial movement in Bristol tears down the statue of a slave trader, Young Labour should be on their side, proudly and loudly saying that Black Lives Matter. From the oppression of the Kashmiris and the annexation of the West Bank to the murderous counter-offensive against socialists and social democrats in Latin America, Young Labour must stand with them.

When trans people face horrific levels of discrimination for simply existing, Young Labour should stand in solidarity with them, whether that bigotry comes from street harassment or government legislation. When Boris Johnson tries to force teachers and carers to work in potentially lethal conditions during a pandemic, Young Labour must be unconditionally with those workers and their unions, not invested in petty parliamentary games.

This is the Young Labour Ive helped to build over the past two years, and one we must keep on building. As our generation faces Tory rule, a resurgent far-right, living and working at the mercy of bosses and landlords, and a looming climate breakdown, we need an organised, fighting youth movement.

I am proud of the last two years. At Labours 2019 party conference, Young Labour wrote and passed a comprehensive housing crisis policy. It demanded rent controls, the end of Right to Buy on day one of a Labour government, and for legal powers regarding the public ownership of land, so that Britain can finally build genuinely affordable housing on a mass scale.

I organised a National Political School, which brought together young members with council leaders, trade union militants, Windrush justice campaigners, socialist economists and veterans of the underground struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Our conference Youth Days have also seen similarly fascinating discussions between young people from all over the world, coupled with inviting socials that strengthen the bonds and friendship of the whole movement.

And after the era of New Labour contempt for our unions, Ive used my time as an NEC member to maximise the voice and role of organised workers. I lobbied successfully for all Labour Party employees to be paid at least a living wage of 10 an hour. After years of what seemed like a hopeless struggle, I was delighted to begin the process by which Young Labour members have the open, democratic student wing they deserve. All student members can now elect their representatives for the first time.

All these things and more met with organised resistance. Looking at the relationships we built with the Norwegian Labour Party, the Austrian Social Democrats, and the Workers Party of Lula who we made our honorary president in a gesture of international defiance and solidarity we saw that Young Labour lags far behind our sister organisations elsewhere. Unlike in other countries, young democratic socialists in Britain lack the institutional resources and autonomy to run mass campaigns that speak directly to young peoples concerns and hopes.

Under the previous leadership, even the democracy review proved to be a huge disappointment, despite Young Labours best efforts. Given the ugly internal culture of unaccountable power and prejudice unmasked by the leaked Labour report, greater transparency and democracy is still the watchword.

Labour frustrates us all sometimes. I campaign to make it better because I love this party and desperately want a Labour government. We cannot win with young people alone, but we cannot win without my generation either. From Jeremy Corbyns leadership to the Black Lives Matter protests, we certainly wont win by delegitimising visions of a better world that galvanise the youth. They are movements, not moments, and our party cant afford to ignore them.

We cant forget that this Tory government went hard and won big on false promises of radical change to left-behind communities. There cant be any real return to the false comfort of business-as-usual politics. We need a Labour Party that is serious about a socialist alternative that takes us from anger to hope and victory. I desperately want Keir Starmer to be the next Prime Minister, but we have to be honest that wont happen unless Labour goes into the next election staying true to the radical principles on which he was elected to lead our party.

These are my truths, and if you lend me your vote to send me back to the NEC, I will fight for them with determination. I will do all I can to build a Young Labour that leads the way. I dont take no for an answer, and I dont stop until we win.

Original post:
Lara McNeill: Why Im standing again to be Labours NEC youth rep - LabourList

4 July 2020

Today marks the 244th anniversary of the public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, which established the United States of America. By the time the Declaration was issued, the American colonistsand especially those of Massachusettshad already been at war with the immensely powerful military forces of Great Britain for 15 months. Though the final decision for independence had not yet been taken, the drafting of a Declaration was assigned on June 11 by the Continental Congress, assembled in Philadelphia, to a Committee of Five. It consisted of Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

After agreeing on an outline of the document, the Committee decided that the first draft should be written by the 33-year-old Tom Jefferson, whose exceptional intellect and remarkable literary gifts were already widely recognized. On June 28, he completed his draft, which was then reviewed by members of the Congress. Various changes were made in the course of the editing process. The most substantial change was the removal of Jeffersons indictment of Great Britain for having imposed slavery on the colonies. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution that authorized the break with Great Britain. Two days later, on July 4, it approved the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

The immediate political consequence of the documentthe formal break with Britain and the initiation of a full-scale war to secure the independence of the United Stateswas, in itself, sufficient to impart to the Declaration immense and enduring historical significance. But it is not only the direct political impact of the document but, rather, the principles it proclaimed that determined the world historical stature of the Declaration.

The document begins with the words, When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another What these words meant was that governments, and the political and social relations upon which they were based and which they defended, were not timeless and unalterable. They were the creation of men, not God. This assertion exploded the essential justification, sanctified by religion, for monarchy, aristocracy, i.e., for all forms of political power based on obscurantist veneration of bloodlines. What was created by man could be changed by man.

The Declaration then proceeded to a remarkable assertion: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In a strictly empirical sense, there was nothing self-evidentthat is, so obviously true that it hardly required further argumentabout any of these truths. Reality, as it was to be observed in every part of the world, including the colonies, contradicted what the Declaration claimed to be self-evident.

In the world of the late eighteenth century, most human beings were treated like beasts of burden, if not worse. Where in the world did existing conditions substantiate the claim that all of humanity had been created equal? The monarchies and aristocracies were based on the unchallengeable legitimacy of inherent inequality. The place of people in society, even where there had been a slow erosion of feudal relations, was a manifestation of a divine design.

Where was Life, for the great mass of people, honored and protected? In advanced Britain, children as young as six could be hanged for pick-pocketing a wealthy persons handkerchief. The great mass of people lived in wretched poverty, enforced by strict relations of feudal and semi-feudal hierarchy. There was little Happiness in the lives of the general population, let alone for the millions throughout the world and in the Americas who were enslaved and hardly considered to be human.

The truths invoked by Jefferson were not self-evident in a crudely empirical sense. They were, rather, truths that were obtained through the application of scientific thought, i.e., Reason, as it had developed under the influence of the physicist Isaac Newton, materialist thinkers such as John Locke, and the great French philosophes of the Enlightenment, to the study of history and human society. It was the application of Reason that determined what was, and was not, politically legitimate. It was science, not the irrational and unsubstantiated invocations of a divine order, that determined what must be. It was in this profound sense that the equality of man and the unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness were self-evident.

Jefferson and his comrades in arms were well aware that empirically existing political and social conditions did not conform to the self-evident Truths asserted in the Declaration. From this fact, the following conclusion was drawn: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Therefore, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thus, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed revolution to be a legitimate and even necessary means of removing from power governments that had become oppressive and injurious to the Happiness of the people. Jefferson adhered to this principle and displayed not the slightest squeamishness when the masses of France, inspired by American Revolution, took bloody vengeance against King Louis XVI and the aristocracy. Louis, declared Jefferson, ought to be punished like other criminals. Rather than witness the defeat of the French Revolution, Jefferson wrote to a friend, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now. He expressed unmitigated joy at the prospect of the revolutions victory, which would bring at length kings, nobles and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood.

It is, of course, an undeniable historical fact that Jeffersons personal ownership of slaves and his compromises with slavery represent the great irony and even tragedy of his life. They were the expression in his personal biography of the existing social conditions and contradictions of the world into which he was borna world in which slavery, serfdom, and numerous forms of indentured servitude flourished and whose legitimacy was hardly questioned. No doubt, the moralizing philistines of academia will continue to condemn Jefferson. But their condemnations do not alter by one iota the revolutionary impact of the Declaration of the Independence.

The American Revolution of 177583 did not solve the problem of slavery. This is not because the solution was blocked by Jefferson or other revolutionary leaders, like Washington, who owned slaves. The incomplete character of the first stage of the American bourgeois democratic revolution was determined by the existing objective conditionsand not simply those that existed in North America. Mankind, as Marx was later to explain, always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. The conditions for a decisive settlement with slavery did not yet exist. That still required several decades of industrial development and the emergence of an economically powerful capitalist class in the North. Moreover, that class had to develop a democratic political movement capable of mobilizing masses and sustaining a long and bitter civil war.

This essential social and economic process unfolded rapidly in the decades that followed the American Revolution. The capitalist development of the North became increasingly incompatible with the political domination of the United States by the Slave Power. This objective incompatibility found its ideological expression in the ever more intense awareness that the ideals of human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence could not be reconciled with the horrifying reality of slavery.

However, it must be stressed that the process of historical causation that led up to the Civil War was not driven in a one-sided manner by socioeconomic factors, with the ideological conflicts a mere reflection of the former. The influence exerted by the principles articulated in the Declaration played an immense, almost independent, role in influencing mass political consciousness in the North and preparing it for an intransigent struggle against the Slave Power.

Abraham Lincolns intellectual and political development epitomized the influence exerted by Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration that he authored. Again and again, in numerous speeches, Lincoln invoked the political legacy of Jefferson. For example, in a letter written in 1859, Lincoln stated:

All honor to Jeffersonto the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Following his election to the presidency in 1860, Lincoln declared: I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

And on his way to Washington to assume the presidency, Lincoln explained:

It [the Revolution] was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but [of] that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson was the author of the great revolutionary manifesto that provided the ideological inspiration for the Civil War. Under Lincolns leadership, the Union armieswhich ultimately mobilized and armed tens of thousands of slaves in struggle against the Confederacydestroyed slavery.

Of course, the United States that emerged from the Civil War soon betrayed the promises of democracy and equality that Lincoln had made. The new birth of freedom gave way to the imperatives of modern capitalism. A new form of social struggle, between an emerging working class and an industrial bourgeoisie, came to dominate the political and social landscape. In this new class struggle, the northern bourgeoisie saw the benefit of an alliance with the remnants of the old slave-owning class. Reconstruction was brought to an end. Racism was incited and utilized as a potent weapon against the unity of the working class.

Intransigent opposition to this specific form of political reaction became a central task of the working class in the fight for socialism. Only though the establishment of workers' power, the ending of capitalism, and the building of a socialist society on a world scale can the scourge of racism and all forms of social oppression be overcome. And in this fight, the words and deeds of both Jefferson and Lincoln will continue to inspire. All that was historically progressive in their lifework lives on in the modern socialist movement.

David North

Here is the original post:
The two American Revolutions in world history - World Socialist Web Site

By 1920, the name Eugene Debs represented different things to different groups. For some, he was a visionary union leader and politician who rose to the national stage to unite American workers under the banner of socialism. To others, he was a dangerous traitor who sought to discredit the nations war effort and undo the tremendous progress the countrys economy had made in the beginning of the 20th century. And to the employees at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he was inmate number 9653.

The first two viewpoints depend solely on a person's political leanings, but the third was an indisputable fact. Debs was indeed an imprisoned manwho also happened to be running for President of the United States from his cell.

Eugene Victor Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Marguerite Bettrich and Jean Daniel Debs, two immigrants from Alsace, France.They came to the U.S. in1849and worked in the grocery business. At age 14, Eugenetook a jobas a paint scraper at Vandalia Railroad, where he earned just $.50 a day. He soon moved up to become a railroad fireman, shoveling piles of coal into the locomotives firebox for more than $1 each night [PDF]. This was at a time when workers toiled for16 hoursa day, six days a week.

In 1875, Debs was elected secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and was an editor for the organizations monthly magazine. Seeing the dangers firemen faced firsthand, Debs said his brotherhood would fight to provide for the widows and orphans who are daily left penniless and at the mercy of public charity by the death of a brother.His growing interest in social and economic issues also led to a two-term stint as Terre Haute City Clerk from 1879 to 1883, and a term serving as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly in 1884.

On June 20, 1893, Debs's ambitions grew when he founded the American Railway Union (ARU) to protect all workers throughout the railroad industry, not just firemen. The union was soon one of the countrys largest, with 125 local chapters nationwide; at one point, enrollments hit 2000 a day.

In May 1894, after suffering a series of salary cuts,workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company walked off the job. In response,Debs and the ARU organized a massive sympathy boycott of any trains and railroads using Pullman cars, and by June,125,000 ARU workershadjoined the cause.A nation that thrived on cross-country train commerce was now being stopped in its tracks.

The workers'defiance soon turned to anger. After Debs made a speech to workers on June 29 in Blue Island, Illinois, some in the crowd broke off and began a riot. By day's end, buildings had been burned to the ground and a locomotive with a mail train attached to it lay topped over.

With the U.S. mail system affected by the strike, andvital rail service crippled,President Grover Clevelandnow considered the unruliness to be a federal matter. In early July, Attorney General Richard Olney issued an injunction against Debs and other ARU leaders that forbid them from communicating with their union members. The press at the time turned on Debs, too, claiming the strike he organized around the Pullman situation was a power grab. One political cartoon in the Chicago Tribune portrayed Dictator Debsas a cigar-chomping would-be king who liked to rest his feet on the U.S. Constitution [PDF].

President Cleveland deployed troops to Chicago to quell the ongoing demonstrations, but on July 7, the conflicts turned violent. Members of the National Guard killed anywhere from four to 30 strikers in the clash.Debs, who was no longer legallyallowed to communicate with his members, could do nothing to calm tensions.

That same month, Debs was arrested and charged with contempt of court and conspiracy to interfere with U.S. mail,and spent six months behind bars. The ARU crumbled soon after, and while many Pullman workers were eventually rehired, they had to agree in writing to never form a union.

Behind bars, Debs read Karl Marxs Das Kapitaland convertedto socialism.In 1897, two years after leaving prison, he established the Social Democratic Party of America.

Under this banner, Debs made his first run for president in 1900 on a platform revolving around workers equality and better wages. William McKinleywon the race with a total of 7,207,923 votes, while Debs garnered just86,935.Still, it was a start.

Debs ran again in 1904, this time as a member of the next political party he helped establish: the Socialist Party of America. His totals jumped to around 402,000 votes; in 1908, he returned with 420,000 votes, losing to Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, respectively.

Debs's peak came in the election of 1912one of the great wild cards in U.S. history. It featured the incumbent, Taft, running against Democrat Woodrow Wilson; former president Roosevelt, who was running as a member of the Progressive Party; and Debs, running again as a Socialist on a platform that put an emphasis on workers, women's suffrage, and ending child labor.

Debs fell short once again, but his total ballooned to more than900,000 votes6 percent of the popular vote. It's still the highest percentage of the vote a Socialist candidate has ever received in a presidential election, and its more than double the amount he earned in 1908. It would be another eight years before his fifth and final presidential campaignarguably one of the strangest the country has seen.

By 1914, Debs was expressing his ardent opposition to Americas seemingly inevitable involvement in World War I in a series of anti-war editorials in the National Rip-Saw, where he stuck to one main message: Capitalist nations not only exploit their workers, but ruthlessly invade, plunder, and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all.

Written words gave way to public rallies. Debs traveled across the Northeast to speak to his base of frustrated workers looking for a unifying voice against war. During one memorable stop in Boston, he asked a packed crowd of workers: Must we send the workers of one country against those of another because a citizen has been torpedoed on the high seas, while we do nothing about the 600,000 workingmen that are crushed each year needlessly under our industrial machinery?

Socialist opposition to the military action had little real effect. On April 6, 1917, the United States officially declared war against Germany. Just a few months later, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which targeted disloyal citizens who attempted to interfere with military progress during the war. This was followed by thecomplementary Sedition Act of 1918, giving federal authorities the power to punish anyone using disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language toward the Constitution, the military, or the country.

Debs knew the risks he was taking with his anti-war crusade, but hecontinued throughout the Midwest, culminating in a speech at a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918. For two hours, the impassioned orator made his case, criticizing everything from the war to the Sedition Act to the military draft.

The master class has always declared the wars, the 62-year-old told the crowd. The subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to loseespecially their lives.

Days later, Debs was arrested while heading to another party event in Cleveland. The jury found him guilty onthree counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts. On September 18, 1918, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Even prison couldnt quiet Debs. In fact, by 1920, he was again nominated to be the Socialist Party's candidate for president, his fifth run overall. While he was accustomed to campaigning by train and speaking in front of thousands, in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Debs was allowed [PDF] to give one political statement every week, which was then handed over to news wires. Supporters did the campaigning for him on the ground, making posters featuring the slogan From Atlanta Prison to the White House, 1920 and campaign buttons that showed Debs in a prison jumpsuit with the words For President: Convict No. 9653 splashed across them. It wasn't so much a campaign as it was a protest against what many thought was Debs's unconstitutional imprisonment.

Amazingly, Debs still captured 3.4 percent of the popular vote, meaning more than 910,000 people chose a socialist in prisonover Warren G. Harding or his opponent, James M. Cox.

By December 1921, with the war over, President Harding pardoned Debsand invited him to the White House. I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally, Harding said upon meeting him. Indeed, Debs had left prison almost as a mythic figure to his followers50,000 of whom lined up to watch his train pull in upon his return to Terra Haute.

Though the meeting with Harding was as close as he ever got to the White House, Debs proved he didn't need to win an election to make his voice heard.

Link:
Eugene V. Debs, the Five-Time Socialist Candidate for President Who Once Campaigned From Prison - Mental Floss

The NDA crossed 100 Rajya Sabha seats on Friday, further consolidating the BJP as Indias dominant political force in its 40th year.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was formed in April, 1980, after its members were expelled from the Janata Party, the joint opposition force that was launched three years before that to counter Indira Gandhi. One of the components of the Janata Party was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, launched in 1951.

According to its own record, the Jana Sangh was the result of three events. First the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in December 1950, second the resignation of Syama Prasad Mookerjee from the Nehru government the same year, and the election also in 1950 and subsequent forcing out of PD Tandon as Congress president.

Tandon was seen as a Hindu conservative opposed to Nehrus secularism and after Patels death, Nehru forced Tandon to resign.Another event, also acknowledged by the Jana Sangh as being important to its formation, was the banning of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after the murder of Gandhi in 1948 and the arrest of its leader MS Golwalkar. The RSS was not registered as a political organisation and the ban was lifted in 1949, on the condition that the RSS adopt a constitution, which it agreed to do.

Read more here:
Both secularism and socialism figure in BJPs constitution! - National Herald

By Fred Mazelis 26 June 2020

This week marks 25 years since the death of Ed Winn, a longtime member of the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party in the US, and twice the Workers Leagues presidential candidate. This obituary, commemorating Ed Winns life and work, appeared in the International Workers Bulletin , a forerunner of the World Socialist Web Site . It has been slightly edited for republication.

Ed Winn, a leader of the Workers League and the partys candidate for US President in 1984 and 1988, died in Wilmington, North Carolina on June 20, 1995. He was 58 years old.

Comrade Winn had suffered for some years from kidney disease and had been on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. However, his death from an apparent heart attack was sudden and unexpected. It is a great loss for the working class and the revolutionary movement.

For nearly two decades, Ed Winn was a member of the Workers League and a political supporter of the Fourth International. His history of struggle, as a transit worker in New York City and, above all, as a leader of the Trotskyist movement, is bound up with the great political issues of our time.

Ed was born on February 12, 1937 in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father, Richard, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Anna, a homemaker. His family, like millions of others, struggled to sustain itself during a period of mass unemployment and poverty.

The Jim Crow system of racial apartheid was firmly entrenched in North Carolina during his childhood. Eds political awareness as he matured in the 1950s was shaped by the growing civil rights struggle. He recalled the threats from the police and white racists and the whole system of segregation: the separate drinking fountains set up for white people, the separate public facilities that were set up by the racist laws of Southern states from Maryland, where I had relatives, all the way to Mississippi, where I visited and stayed for a while.

Ed was 18 years old when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was beaten and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Sumner, Mississippi in the fall of 1955. Till, a Chicago youth who was visiting relatives, was slain for the crime of allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers were acquitted.

When Ed Winn arrived in New York City in 1958 he already knew a great deal about the struggle for equal rights. He soon found out about the struggles of workers on the job. He obtained work at a clothing store and became for a period a member of the clothing workers union. ln late 1965 he was hired by the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked for the next 22 years.

Only a few months after becoming a transit worker, Ed joined thousands of others in a militant strike which shut down the System. The 1966 transit strike was among the bitter struggles, including those in auto, the mines and other sections of basic industry, which erupted as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill, the unions founder, was forced to call the walkout and defy the capitalist politicians and the courts. Quill, who suffered from a serious heart ailment, had a fatal heart attack after being jailed.

The strike ended in a victory for the transit workers, although the gains made in wages and benefits have since been largely destroyed by years of concessionary contracts. Ed was elected as a shop steward at a car maintenance yard during his first year on the job.

Several years later, Ed joined an opposition caucus in Local 100, the Rank and File Committee, which was dominated by a black nationalist outlook. The Opposition challenged the right-wing union leadership on racial grounds, claiming that attacks on workers were the result of discrimination and arguing that the increasing number of black workers in the transit system made possible a change to black leadership of Local 100.

As Ed Winn later explained, We did not understand the class issues that were involved, that the problems that were developing in work locations were problems affecting both black and white workers, that these were problems affecting the working class itself. Our narrow nationalist outlook prevented us from bringing black and white workers together in order to take up a common struggle against those, namely, the bankers and businessmen, who wanted to place the burden of the crisis in transit onto the backs of the workers.

The Rank and File Committee disintegrated in 1972. Ed, along with most of its other active supporters, turned away for a time from political and union activity.

In the mid-1970s, world capitalism was shaken by a series of economic and political convulsions. In the US, the Watergate crisis precipitated the resignation of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the defeat of the American war against Vietnam. In 1975 New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and a state Emergency Financial Control Board was established to tear up union contracts and force city workers to pay for the crisis.

Ed was by now working as a bus maintainer at the East New York surface maintenance shop in Brooklyn. It was here that he came into contact with the Workers League. He heard about the partys campaign on behalf of Gary Tyler, a youth who had been framed up and imprisoned in Louisiana for a crime he did not commit.

Tom Henehan, a young leader of the Workers League and its youth movement, the Young Socialists, played the key role in recruiting Ed Winn into the Workers League.

Tom discussed the Workers League pamphlet Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory with Ed, arguing that the fundamental issue facing every section of workers was the class struggle and not struggles based on race. Tom also stressed the importance of taking up a fight inside the transit union against its pro-capitalist leadership and of fighting to build a labor party to establish a workers government.[1]

As a result of these discussions and his reading of the Bulletin, as the newspaper of the Workers League was then called, Ed joined the Workers League in early 1976.

He later said that the very first work by Leon Trotsky that I read was Marxism and the Trade Unions, in which he dealt with the economic decay of capitalism and the necessity for transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organizations. This, in turn, meant replacing the reformist union leadership with a revolutionary leadership. At the same time Trotsky warned that the trade unions could not replace the revolutionary party: that the revolutionary leadership could only come through the building of a party trained in the Marxist world outlook and a scientific perspective.

One of the crucial political experiences through which Ed and other members of the Workers League passed came less than two years later, when Tom Henehan, then 26 years old, was shot and killed at a Young Socialists dance in support of Gary Tyler in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Along with other members and supporters of the Workers League, Ed Winn responded strongly to this political murder, gathering the support of thousands of transit workers and others on petitions demanding an investigation of the killing and action to bring the assassins to trial. After more than three years, the two gunmen were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to maximum prison terms.

In December 1977, Ed Winn was elected to the executive board of TWU Local 100, representing more than 1,000 workers in the Surface Maintenance division of the union. He ran on a program calling for the building of a labor party and socialist policies. He was reelected in 1979.

During these years Ed developed as a Marxist fighter in the working class. When the transit workers struck once again in 1980, he was on the executive board and fought against the moves of the bureaucracy, then headed by John Lawe, to isolate and betray the strike.

Ed fought for transit workers to turn to the entire working class against the union-busting Democratic Mayor Ed Koch. Lawes other opponents on the Local 100 executive board, however, based themselves simply on trade union militancy and ignored the political issues in the struggle against the union bureaucracy. They themselves refused to break from the capitalist Democratic Party and challenge the so-called right of a few billionaire bankers to dictate wage concessions, layoffs and cuts in social services, Ed stated. Therefore, they could offer no viable alternative to the capitulatory policy of the Lawe leadership.

The defeat of the transit workers in 1980 foreshadowed the betrayal of the PATCO air traffic controllers struggle one year later and the ensuing decade of betrayed and broken strikes. The next stage of Ed Winns activity as a transit worker and a leader of the Workers League was bound up with the struggle against these betrayals. In 1984 Ed applied for and was granted a leave of absence from his transit job in order to run as the presidential candidate of the Workers League in its first-ever national campaign.

This was a period of wholesale wage-cutting, concessions, plant closures and union-busting. The assault on the working class was carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Jesse Jackson pursued his own campaign as a Democrat in order to keep workers tied to that big business party. Ed and his running mate Helen Halyard were placed on the ballot in six industrial states, and they received 14,363 votes. He spoke to thousands of workers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota.

In 1988, Ed was again the Workers League candidate for President, joined this time by Barry Porster as the vice-presidential candidate. The Workers League campaign exposed the deterioration in the social conditions of millions following eight years of the Reagan presidency and the huge transfer of wealth to the rich, as well as the crisis facing the labor movement.

The union-busting onslaught, aided and abetted by the AFL-CIO leadership itself, had deepened during the 1980s. The defeat of the Hormel meatpacking strike was followed by the frame-up of the four coal miners involved in the 1984-85 strike against A.T. Massey in Kentucky. During this period trade union membership continued to decline rapidly.

One of the high points of the 1988 campaign was Ed Winns appearance before one thousand paperworkers and their supporters at a rally in Lock Haven, Pa., marking the first anniversary of the struggle against International Paper. In that speech, listened to intently by locked-out workers and strikers from several States, Winn analyzed the defeats suffered in the 1980s and explained their source.

No one can claim, he concluded, that American workers did not want to fight the corporate union-busters or that they were too weak to defeat them. The weakness is not in the ranks of labor, but in the cowardice and treachery of the bureaucrats. With a revolutionary leadership, a leadership which fights for socialist policies, and a revolutionary strategy, the working class can defeat its enemies and open up a new road for society, throughout the United States and internationally. This is what I call upon you to do.

In the 1988 campaign the Workers League placed its candidates on the ballot in eight states and the District of Columbia. Ed Winn received 18,662 votes.

The period between the 1984 and 1988 campaigns also witnessed a historic struggle against opportunism inside the Fourth International. The Workers League and its co-thinkers internationally defeated the opportunist leadership of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, which reacted to the protracted degeneration of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the trade union bureaucracy by abandoning the fight for revolutionary leadership. The struggle between the majority of the International Committee and the WRP leadership, which began in the early 1980s, culminated in a split in 1985-86.

In 1984, Ed had a chance to witness the degeneration of the WRP first-hand, when he visited Britain as the presidential candidate of the American Trotskyists. At a public meeting his hosts introduced him simply as a transit worker, omitting all mention of the Workers League election campaign. In fact, at this point the WRP was providing Jesse Jackson with favorable coverage in its press.

Ed retired from his transit job in order to devote himself fully to the 1988 election campaign and other political work. Soon after the campaign, however, he was diagnosed as suffering from polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary disorder leading to progressive loss of kidney function. He began receiving kidney dialysis treatments and prepared for an eventual transplant, which would enable him once again to lead a normal and active life.

During this period Ed continued to participate in political work to the best of his ability. He met with his fellow transit workers, spoke at public meetings of the Workers League, and wrote articles and columns for the Bulletin on the struggle in transit, as well as on other subjects.

In 1990 and 1991 New York City was the scene of several bitter struggles, including the Daily News and the Greyhound strikes. In November 1990, police, with the collaboration of Newspaper Guild union officials, arrested Ed on the Daily News picket line on a phony charge of disorderly conduct. A campaign by the Workers League forced the Guild to come to Eds defense, and the charges were dropped.

The fear which Ed Winn continued to evoke within the TWU bureaucracy, three years after his retirement, was demonstrated in March 1991, when Local 100 President Sonny Hall wrote Winn a hysterical and threatening letter in response to a column in the Bulletin which exposed Halls fraudulent claim to support the Daily News strikers. Hall wrote, what you ... wanted was a Mass Strike, not to win wages, but to bring down the government. In Winns reply, he wrote: Whats so terrible about that? If thats what it takes to defend the jobs and living standards of transit workers, then so be it!

Ed was always proudest of his collaboration with his international comrades in the Trotskyist movement in Europe, Asia and Australia. In November 1991 he was able to travel as part of the US delegation to the World Conference Against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in Berlin, where he met with workers from many parts of the world and participated in its proceedings.

Comrade Winn moved back to Wilmington in 1993 after his fathers death and remained on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. He continued to participate in the political life of the Workers League, meeting with other party members and discussing political developments.

Ed is survived by his three children, Ed Jr., Adrienne and Debbie, and by ten grandchildren. A funeral took place in Wilmington on June 25. The Workers League will soon announce the date for a memorial meeting to be held in New York City.

Anyone who knew Ed Winn would be willing to testify to his integrity and honesty. He was universally respected by his fellow workers, even those who disagreed with his political views, and by his neighbors in Brooklyn. A calm and dignified man, he would seethe with scarcely concealed emotion when fundamental questions of principle were at stake. He had an intellectual and moral impact on those who encountered him.

Eds political legacy has to be set against the degeneration and collapse of the old leaderships of the working class all over the world.

He never wavered in his dedication to the struggles of workers, his confidence that a new period of revolutionary struggle was approaching, and his scientific conviction of the necessity for the socialist transformation of society. That is why so many workers will learn from and honor the example that he set.

[1] During this period, the Workers League fought for the building of a Labor Party, based on a socialist program, as the political form through which the American working class could establish its independence from capitalist politics. The bankruptcy of the nationalist program of the unions, and their degeneration into direct instruments of the corporate financial elite to police the working class, led the Workers League to conclude in 1995 that the Labor Party demand was no longer viable. For more information, see The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality PartyPart 11 .

The author also recommends:

Tom Henehan: A revolutionary life [16 October 2017]

Why are trade unions hostile to socialism? [28 September 2019]

The rest is here:
Twenty-five years since the death of Ed Winn - World Socialist Web Site