There's been back-and-forth arguments on this sub-site of the "It's Your Times" site about what the old Soviet Union was, mainly stemming from my self-characterization of myself as a Marxist.

Some, such as Captain Al, have "defended" me against the label of "communist" by calling the old Soviet Union "communist" or "communistic."

Some, such as the fascist, Spanish fascist totalitarian right-wing labor-smashing dictator, Franco, and German Nazi fascist totalitarian dictator and Nazi Holocaust perpetrator, Hitler, fakenamed "Mayor of Moronia," have lumped the old Stalinist political system of the former Soviet Union with its economy of a state-owned and state-planned economy, and have implicitly accepted Captain Al's designation of "communistic" or "communism" as equal to the lumping together such fascist right-wingers like Mayor make.

But there is an alternative view to both the view of Mayor of Moronia and of Captain Al.

And that is the view of Marxists who will often interchangeably use the word, "socialism," and the word, "communism," and mean by both words something quite different from what existed in the old Soviet Union, or than what exists currently in contemporary China, or Cuba, or Vietnam, or North Korea.

There were any number of important Marxist political currents among workers and intellectuals that took their political inspiration from a kind of perspective similar to this third alternative.

And in some parts of the world, in fact, at least one of them, Trotskyism, acquired some significant followings.  For instance, in Southern Vietnam in the 1930s, the "official" South Vietnamese Communist Party adhering to a Stalinist perspective was numerically inferior to the Vietnamese Trotskyist variety of communism, particularly in Saigon (which today is called, Ho Chi Minh City, since the victory in 1975 of the Vietnamese Revolution and armed forces of the DRV, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam against the U.S.).  Saigon, the former capital of the former country of South Vietnam, had a pretty rich and vibrant labor movement in the 1930s.  And the labor movement of South Vietnam, especially in Saigon in the 1930s, gave its political support pretty much in Saigon political elections to two Trotskyist parties, both of which adhered not to Stalin or the official Stalinist-influenced "Third International" of that time, but to the aim of Trotsky and his international supporters to form a Fourth International opposed to the Stalinist-supported Third International, and also opposed to the reformist-minded Second International of Social-Democratic reformist labor parties.  The Vietnamese Trotskyists in the 1930s in Saigon ran for election and some of them won posts in the Saigon city council.

Also, for a considerable period of time, in the little island of what used to be called, Ceylon, off the West Coast of India, for a number of years in particularly the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, Trotskyism acquired a mass political following and at least officially was embodied in a Ceylonese political party called, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party.  In fact, at one point, they even elected to the Ceylon parliament a number of deputies, including perhaps most famously the late Edmund Samarakkoddy, who was considered the venerable key leader of Ceylon revolutionary socialism for many years, and was himself one of the most distinguished leftist radical lawyers and attorneys in Ceylon, who devoted his great legal talents and legal skills to defending in the Ceylon courts many poor, oppressed individuals of many poor and oppressed communities in Ceylon, especially members of  the nationally oppressed Tamil nationality people beaten down and oppressed by the Ceylon Sinhalese majority nationality.

Additionally, during World War Two, and the German Nazi occupation of many European countries, diverse representatives and individuals espousing a Trotskyist perspective worked underground against both Hitler's Nazi mass murderers and killers and their capitalist totalitarian imperialist Nazi imperialist occupation of their countries, and often suffered and died for their work for socialism.  In Belgium, for instance, the former Zionist turned Trotskyist Belgian, Abram Leon, was very active in the underground Belgian Trotskyist movement while the Nazi scum occupied his country, and he was eventually caught by Hitler's Nazi gestapo killers, and sent to the Auschwitz death camp where he was murdered by Hitler's killers in 1944.

Additionally, the Trotskyists were a considerable numerical force in the Soviet Union's Stalinist slave labor camps and Stalinist prison camps themselves, and in the 1920s, for instance, after the Stalinist totalitarian bureaucracy smashed by physical totalitarian means all political oppositions in the ruling Soviet Communist Party, thousands -- and that word, thousands, is correct -- of Trotskyist workers and intellectuals (mainly workers, too), fighting for what they considered the political integrity and continuity of the Socialist Revolution of November 7, 1917 were sent to Stalin's first slave labor and prison camps in Siberia.  There is a famous photograph of some of these militant Trotskyist communist internationalist revolutionaries dressed in their winter clothes at one of Stalin's slave labor prison camps in Siberia on the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917 holding up protest signs and placards and pictures of the revolutionary leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917, Lenin, and Trotsky, in a protest demonstration against their imprisonment and incarceration, and also in a protest demonstration against what they saw as the bureaucratic Stalinist degeneration of the socialist revolution.  Anyone interested should try to get ahold of the interesting book of Marxist and socialist and communist writings of political opponents of Stalin and of the Stalinist regime published by the socialist publishing company, Pathfinder Press (www.pathfinderpress.com), entitled, Samizdat:  Voices of the Soviet Opposition.  Trotskyists considered themselves Marxist communists operating in the tradition of authentic Marxism, and they considered Stalin to be a traitor to and betrayer of the original Bolshevik Revolution -- the socialist revolution -- of November 7, 1917.  And they were no wimpy reformist-minded social-democratic reformists, but firm revolutionary Marxist communists who held that only world socialist revolutions in the course of which all the working people of the entire world took over the world and made it into a socialist world would save humanity, civilization, culture, and the planet, from destruction by the capitalist imperialist exploiters and predators off of humanity.  They considered the Stalinist totalitarian bureaucracy as, in essentials, a bureaucracy that within the Soviet Union represented the outside pressures on the Soviet Union by the capitalist imperialist ruling classes of the rest of the world, a pressure that constantly threatened to undo the internal gains of the November 7, 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution.

Trotsky provided his most mature analysis of the Soviet Union and its nature in his 1937 book, The Revolution Betrayed:  What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?  Trotsky fought the Stalinist bureaucracy from 1923, while he was still one of the most prominent people in the Soviet government and in the Soviet ruling party, the Communist Party, till his murder by a Stalinist murderer and assassin in Mexico where Trotsky was then living in exile in 1940.  And he was, perhaps, the most prominent Marxist communist opponent of Stalin and also Stalinism, and he had a following of often deeply courageous followers in many countries of the world who adhered to the original vision, aim, and perspective voiced by Lenin and Trotsky in the November 7, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

I should here add that there were a number of other Marxist opponents of Stalinism who never renounced the word, "communism," as representing their political views, and, in fact, they considered that "Stalinism," which they considered the real word for what had arisen in the old Soviet Union, to be a far more accurate and correct, scientifically speaking, word for the sort of regime that had arisen in the old Soviet Union than "communism" was or, for that matter, than "socialism" was.

There was a wing of the original Third International of Communist Parties which formed in 1919 which derived their political and programmatic inspiration not so much from the Trotskyist viewpoint, but from what came loosely to be called left-communism.  Some of these people included, for instance, inside Russia, a guy named Timothy Sapronov, an eminent old worker-Bolshevik of Lenin's party whose revolutionary working class socialist activism and labor activism went back to the early part of the 20th Century, when he was working and struggling with other blue-collar working class revolutionary socialists in Lenin's party underground against the Russian tsarist police state, then in the 1905-1906 Russian Revolution, then through his and the Bolshevik Party (Russian Social-democratic Labor Party-Bolshevik, which was the name of Lenin's current of Russian socialism) opposition to World War One (1914-1918), then in his activism in the Russian Revolutions of March 1917 and November 1917, and then, in Sapronov's opposition to what he first discerned as bureaucratic developments in the Communist Party-ruled Soviet state early on, first starting in 1918, then continuing into the 1920s.  Sapronov organized several of the oppositional currents not inspired by Trotsky and the Trotskyists, and the best known of his oppositional currents is known as the Democratic-Centralist opposition in 1926-1927.  Sapronov, and his supporters, like Trotsky's followers and supporters, ended up in Stalinist slave labor and prison camps for their defense of what they considered to be the integrity and preservation of the Russian socialist revolution against what they saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the socialist revolution and what they saw as its movement back in the direction of capitalism.  Their main difference with the Trotskyist opposition is that Trotsky never used the term, "capitalism," or "state capitalism," to characterize the Stalinistically bureaucratically degenerated Soviet state, but, rather, Trotsky characterized that state as what he called, a "bureaucratically degenerated workers' state," while Sapronov considered the new Stalinist bureaucracy as embodying a new kind of capitalist exploitation, a kind of "state-capitalism."  But both Sapronov, and Trotsky, both considered themselves commuists in the Marxist sense, and internationalist revolutionaries in the Marxist sense.

Another old Bolshevik revolutionary worker was, Gabriel Miasnikov, who, like Sapronov, had a revolutionary labor activist and socialist political career going back to the days of work in the underground of Russia when the tsarist police state was the type of the government there, and like Sapronov, Miasnikov, too, was active in organizing several working class socialist-minded political oppositions, including one in 1918, and one in 1923.  He again always considered himself a communist and internationalist.  He was also expelled from the ruling Soviet party earlier than either Sapronov or Trotsky were.  I do recall that both Trotsky and Sapronov were expelled from the ruling party by 1929, and I believe Trotsky had been expelled in 1928, but Miasnikov was expelled in 1923.  The only reason these diverse Marxist revolutionaries were expelled from the ruling communist party of their own country was, the growing totalitarianization of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in that country as it rose to power and sought to destroy all Marxist opponents and Marxist oppositions to Stalin's rule.

There were other Marxist opponents of Stalinism and what they falsely considered to be the term, communism, which, they felt, Stalin, and the Stalinists, had falsely usurped or stolen from what real Marxist communism really meant.

The group of people formerly close to Trotsky in Holland, for instance, around a fellow named Sneevliet, who later came to gravitate closer to a left-communist perspective, were compelled to go underground and work in the underground in Holland after Holland was imperialistically invaded by German Nazi fascist totalitarian right-wing killer and murderer and thug, Hitler, in the early period of World War Two (1939-1945), and in 1942, this group of left-socialist, communist-internationalist-minded Marxists, were discovered by the Nazi gestapo murderers, and were murdered by the Nazi occupiers - in, moreover, a torture-oriented fashion.  The Nazis hung these courageous Marxist internationalist communists with piano wire.  This sort of torture was par for the course for fascists in power.  Sneevliet's group was not Trotskyist, but they did consider themselves adherents of a kind of Marxist internationalist socialist/communist viewpoint.  They participated in Holland in, for instance, some brief uprisings of Dutch working class people against both the Nazi occupation of Holland and in defense of Dutch Jews against the Nazi killers' seizure of Dutch Jews for extermination in the Nazi death camps.

Different Marxist communists in the period of especially 1939-1945, World War Two, had it tough because they were targets of being murdered by both Hitler's German Nazi killers, Mussolini's Italian fascist killers, and Stalin's killers.  In well-known and late Soviet dissident and writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn notes that the inmates of Stalin's slave labor camps who had the toughest time from the Stalinist-appointed overseers of the slave labor and prison camps were any prisoners with the letter, "T," before their names.  To Stalin and the Stalinists, the letter, "T," meant that they were "Trotskyites," and the word, "Trotskyite" (in contradiction to the correct word, Trotskyist), was the typical Stalinist slur term for any Marxist who adhered to the views of Leon Trotsky.  But, of course, by the time of the mass murders and purges of political prisoners in Stalin's slave labor camps in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, any Marxist-communist-minded political prisoners in Stalin's slave labor camps were all lumped together and called "Trotskyites."  So the letter, "T," in front of the names of many Marxist-minded political prisoners did not always accurately reflect the kind of Marxist socialism or communism espoused by the particular kind of political prisoner so labeled by the Stalinist government of the country or the Stalinist-appointed prison and camp guards.

At the conclusion of World War II, 1939-1945, a group of revolutionary socialists who called themselve the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald, surfaced in one of Hitler's Nazi slave labor death camps, Buchenwald death camp.  These courageous revolutionaries had had to operate in complete and utter secrecy and clandestine conditions in the inside of the Nazi-overseen Buchenwald death camp during the period of German Nazi rule.  And inside the Buchenwald camp, they not only had to watch out for the Nazi killers, but they sometimes had to watch out inside the same camp for other political prisoners who were Stalinists -- Communist Party supporters -- because the Stalinist regime in Russia had long since concluded in the 1930s that anybody considered a "Trotskyite" should be killed.  By the time of the middle 1930s, for instance, Stalin himself, and the Stalinist regime, had a policy of killing Marxist opponents of his.  In 1938, when a long-time Soviet intelligence official named Ignace Reiss, working in dangerous conditions on behalf of the Soviet intelligence network in Europe, and whose political history went back to the days of the Socialist Revolution of November 7, 1917, wrote to the Central Committee of the Soviet ruling party resigning his membership in the Soviet party, returning his Order of Lenin medals, breaking from the Soviet party and the Third International, and declaring in support of Trotsky's Fourth International, Stalinist agents of the Soviet party in Europe murdered Reiss and his bullet-riddled body was found not far from Lausanne, Switzerland.  After this occurred, Trotsky and his followers launched an international campaign to try to save the life of Elisabeth Poretsky, Reiss's widow, and, fortunately, she was able to get out of the Soviet Union and be saved.  She later wrote a book about her experiences entitled, Our Own People.  The title was taken by a statement her husband, himself a dedicated Communist, but one who hated Stalin's guts as a traitor and betrayer of the Russian socialist revolution, and a courageous Soviet spy and agent working in very tough and dangerous conditions in Europe when Hitler's Nazi government was very much a power in Europe, had once said to her.  He had said, "Either the enemy will kill us or our own people will hang us."  That statement embodied the political confusion -- a tragic kind of political confusion -- of dedicated revolutionary communists who, on one side, tried to defend the basic nationalized means of production of their own country, the Soviet Union, which they rightly saw as having issued out of the 1917 socialist revolution, and which they rightly also saw as embodying and retaining some element of social and economic progress, but, on the other side, saw Stalinism and the Stalinists as not only betrayers and traitors, but also confusedly as "our own people."  Reiss, a gutsy man, embodied in some sense that confusion.  By the time he broke with the ruling Soviet government in 1938, it had long since passed the point wherein an authentic communist dissenter and devoted Marxist could break with it and move toward a genuine Marxist alternative if he was in the Soviet spy apparatus; that was considered the rankest kind of heresy by Stalin and his gangsters.  And they repaid it with murdering Reiss.

There is another book by another courageous Soviet intelligence agent, Leopold Trepper, who organized perhaps the most sophisticated Soviet underground spy network of Soviet spies and Soviet agents in Europe in precisely the period when the Soviet Union's most horrific enemy, Hitler, and his Nazi government, had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and was threatening to destroy the Soviet Union and replace it's nationalized means of production with private capitalism by violent Nazi means.  Trepper's book is entitled, The Great Game:  Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn't Silence.  Trepper's underground Soviet intelligence network came to be feared and also admired by their main enemy, the Nazis, and the Nazis dubbed Trepper's organization "the Red Orchestra."  Trepper, although he was a hardcore devoted Soviet agent, was, like his counterpart, Reiss, one who hated Stalin's guts and had concluded that Stalin had become a traitor to socialist and Marxist and communist ideals of the 1917 Revolution.  After courageously defending by underground spy means the Soviet Union throughout his underground World War Two years of 1941-1945 in Europe, Trepper was called back to Moscow (Russia) -- and promptly thrown into a series of Stalinist prisons, mainly because, having lived in and become acquainted with Western Europe, Stalin and the Stalinist government considered Trepper too "untrustworthy" even despite his manifest and dedicated courage in defending the Soviet Union in the darkest years of World War II (1941-1945).  In 1954, after Stalin's death in 1953, Trepper was released from prison, and he was allowed to migrate back to his original home country of Poland.  In the 1960s, a series of Polish Stalinist-government-orchestrated anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic campaigns put Trepper into a difficult spot, forcing him into house arrest, and particularly after he signed an international letter of left-wing working class and socialist political and intellectual leaders opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and defending the Prague Spring against Stalinism in 1968, Trepper was kept under close surveillance by the Polish Stalinist (Communist Party) government.  But an international campaign waged by left-wing intellectuals and worker leaders on his behalf finally enabled him to leave Poland, and in his last years, he settled first in England, and subsequently, just before he died, in Israel

In his book on his experiences as a Soviet spy against Hitler working on behalf of the Soviet Union in World War II, Trepper made an interesting statement.  He said, of all the left-wing Marxist opponents of Stalin, the ones who had the greatest right to speak were, the Trotskyists, and, he added (and this is from memory, so it may not be as exact as I would have wished it), but they should remember that unlike the rest of us, they had a coherent political program and system by which to replace Stalin and Stalinism.  And, Trepper also noted, they never capitulated to Stalin and Stalinism, because they did not see Stalin and Stalinism as being in the interests of socialism and communism.  Rather, they never capitulated to Stalinism because they saw such a capitulation as not serving the interests of socialism, communism, the working class, or the Soviet Union.  Trepper's book, The Great Game, is a hair-raising, but also fascinating, book on the historical period of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and Trepper's experience opposing the two main totalitarians of modern times, Hitler, and Stalin, and what Trepper went through to do so.  But it is also a testament to the socialist and Marxist and, yes, communist, integrity of the guy, who never renounced the word, communism, but simply felt Stalin and Stalinism did not mean what the original and authentic meaning of the word, communism, meant.

I mentioned earlier the political influence in Vietnam of Trotskyism in the 1930s.  In the period before World War II, Vietnam (which had originally been called by its French occupiers French Indochina) had been occupied by French imperialism and colonialism.  Japanese imperialism eventually drove out the French in the early years of World War II and replaced the occupation of Vietnam by Japanese occupation of Vietnam.  In those conditions, of course, the Vietnamese Trotsyists, like their Belgian counterparts under Nazi occupation, had to work underground.  In 1944-45, the U.S. and Britain militarily defeated Japan and the Japanese were forced to withdraw from Vietnam.  During the period of the Second World War, Vietnamese Communist Party leader, Stalinist Ho Chi Minh, had worked for awhile as a United States agent in the O.S.S., Office of Strategic Services, against Japanese occupation of Vietnam.  The O.S.S. was one of the predecessors to what became the C.I.A., Central Intelligence Agency.  In 1945, a mass uprising of the Vietnamese workers and peasants broke out in Vietnam.  The masses of the people of Vietnam threw up what they called "peoples' assemblies" or "peoples' committees."  These mass elected assemblies of the people (of the workers and peasants) were roughly the same kinds of mass elected organs and organizations that in 1917 in Russia the workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors there had thrown up and called soviets, and they were the same kinds of mass elected organs and organizations that in 1918-1919 in the period of the German Revolution after the defeat of Germany in World War I (1914-1918) the German workers, soldiers, sailors, farm laborers, and peasants had thrown up and called workers councils.  The Vietnamese workers and peasants elected to leadership in some of these elected councils some of the Trotskyists who in the 1930s had played a significant role in Saigon labor socialist politics.  These Vietnamese Trotskyists in their political program called for both an independent Vietnam and a socialist Vietnam based on the workers and peasants' councils, a position that was both socialist and anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist.  But Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese Stalinist party, did not like this situation one bit.  He and his Stalinists had aquired a significant power in the Northern part of Vietnam.  They sent goon squads and thugs into the areas where there were Trotskyist leaders -- Vietnamese Trotskyist leaders -- elected to delegate status of the Vietnamese peoples' assemblies.  These goon squads seized these Vietnamese Trotskyists, took them out, trucked them off, and shot all of them.  Ho did that because he was partly trying to prove his loyalty to the United States and to Harry Truman in order that Vietnam would become united, but under him, Ho, and so that the U.S. might pressure the French imperialist and colonialist state to stay out of Vietnam.  But Harry Truman gave his response when, in 1946, after receiving telegrams from Ho Chi Minh quoting the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 back to Truman, Truman threw Ho Chi Minh's telegrams into the wastepaper basket.  The U.S. firmly supported French capitalist imperialism's and colonialism's re-seizure of Vietnam.  This in turn compelled the war in Vietnam against French imperialism on the part of Ho Chi Minh to finally be resumed.  The Vietnamese ended up fighting under Ho against French imperialism till the French were expelled in 1954, and then against American imperialism from 1954 to 1975, when the Americans and their last agents were finally expelled from the country.

But the point here is, Trotskyism, a left-current opposed to Stalinism, had considerable numbers of adherents in Vietnam at one point, and they never repudiated the word, communism.  They considered themselves authentic communists, and they considered the so-called "Communist" Parties to have improperly hung onto and retained that word against what it really meant.

And by what it really meant, they went back to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who held that communism meant a classless, stateless society without class divisions or class exploitation or repressions or prisons or cops of any kind, and also saw socialism as merely the lowest phase of that kind of society.  And the Trotskyists, as well as other Marxist opponents of Stalin and Stalinism, like Sapronov, and Miasnikov, and the Sneevliet group in Holland, and here in this country the late Paul Mattick and his Living Marxism group, and Trotskyists here, too, all would have, I think, agreed that Marx and Engels and, at least formally, Lenin, held that you could not have had real socialism or real communism so long as the institution or organization of the state (police, prisons, special bodies of armed people plus prisons) continued existing.

So I wanted to set the record straight on the word, communism, and the word, socialism.

Neither of those words mean Stalinism.

I do not repudiate and I do not renounce the authentic meaning of the word, communism, as, it seems, Captain Al makes me out to repudiate and renounce.

Nor do I lump together the nationalized planned economy of countries where private capitalism has been dispossessed with the often repressive Stalinist governments overseeing those sorts of anti-capitalistic economic and social overturns.

I am probably closer to Trotsky's analysis in The Revolution Betrayed in my consideration as to the nature of the remaining formally mislabeled countries of North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, China, as being called "communist" or "socialist," labels I believe to be improperly and anti-scientifically applied to these countries.

I do think it's better to have nationalized means of production than it is not to have them.

But that is not the same thing as either socialism or communism.

Best for now,

Allan

PROFESSIONAL CHARACTER ASSASSIN.

Allan advocates a command economy such as the old USSR had. But the reality is a few heads arent better than millions of heads. Millions of consumers let you know quickly how valuable your goods and services are. When FORD made the Edsel and no one wanted it, they stopped making Edsels. In a command economy an Edsel is what all the peasants drive if the bureacrats decide to make Edsels.

Bureaucrats decide every aspect of your life: where you live, what you do, how many kids you have, what you read and watch on tv, what you eat, and when you can see a doctor. Panels of idiots decide everything. 

And so the people get fed up eating chicken necks and beans, and black markets appear for all the stuff people want. 

UPDATED VERSION OF A PROGRAM TO FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT, HOMELESSNESS, POVERTY:

PROGRAM TO FIGHT POVERTY, UNEMPLOYMENT, HOMELESSNESS:

1. FIGHT FOR A $75.00 PER HOUR MINIMUM WAGE;

2. FOR A SHORTER WORK WEEK AT NO LOSS IN PAY; SPREAD ALL THE EXCESS WORK CREATED TO THE UNEMPLOYED; IF THE CAPITALIST EMPLOYING CLASS BOSSES SCREAM THEY CAN'T DO IT, TELL THEM TO OPEN THEIR BOOKS; IF THEY'VE MISMANAGED THEIR COMPANIES INTO THE GROUND, EXPROPRIATE THE COMPANIES AND MAKE THEM THE PROPERTY OF THE WORKING PEOPLE;

3. THE WORKING CLASS, THE POOR, THE HOMELESS, THE UNEMPLOYED, FOREIGN-BORN WORKERS, BLACK WORKERS, DID NOT CAUSE THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM WHICH IS TRYING TO BRING US ALL DOWN WITH IT; THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM WAS CAUSED BY THE CAPITALIST RULING CLASS ITSELF, BIG THIEVES WHO HAVE BROUGHT OUR COUNTRY AND BROUGHT THE WORLD TO RUIN, AND HAVE LED US TO THE BIGGEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION; WE NEED WORKERS' UNITY TO FIGHT THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM AND FIGHT TO ELIMINATE THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM AND MAKE A WORKERS' ORDER; WE DON'T NEED FASCIST, RACISTS, RIGHT-WING GARBAGE WHO SEEK TO DIVIDE US WORKERS BY SKIN COLOR, BY NATIONALITY, BY RELIGION, BY SEX, BY SO-CALLED SEXUAL ORIENTATION; THE FASCISTS, THE RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS, ARE OUR ENEMIES, AND THEY KEEP LABOR DIVIDED FOR THE PROFITS OF THE EMPLOYING CAPITALIST CLASS, WHO STARTED AND CAUSED THIS CRISIS IN THE FIRST PLACE; SMASH THE FASCISTS, SMASH THE RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS, SMASH THE KKK, SMASH THE NAZIS, ON THE ROAD TO SMASHING THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM AND MAKING A WORKERS' SOCIETY IN WHICH THERE WILL BE NO MORE UNEMPLOYMENT, NO MORE HOMELESSNESS, NO MORE POVERTY, NO MORE IMPERIALIST WARS THE BOSSES AND THEIR GOVERNMENT MAKE US CANNON FODDER TO FIGHT IN FOR THEIR DECLINING PROFIT RATES;

4. FIGHT FOR WORKERS' UNITY, NOT DIVIDING THE WORKING CLASS; FIGHT FOR UNITY OF NATIVE WORKERS AND FOREIGN BORN WORKERS, UNITY OF WORKERS BLACK, BROWN, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, RELIGIOUS, NONRELIGIOUS, MEN, WOMEN, GAY, STRAIGHT, IMMIGRANT, NATIVE-BORN;

5. UNIONIZE ALL NON-UNION WORKERS; FOR A MASSIVE MILITANT LABOR UNION CAMPAIGN TO ORGANIZE ALL THE UNORGANIZED, BOTH NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN WORKERS; KICK THE NO-FIGHT BUREAUCRATS OUT OF THE UNIONS, AND MAKE THE UNIONS INTO FIGHTING, CLASS WAR ORGANIZATIONS TO UNITE ALL WORKERS, IMMIGRANT, NATIVE-BORN, BLACK, BROWN, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, MALE, FEMALE, GAY, STRAIGHT, ALL RELIGIONS, NO RELIGION, AGAINST THE CAPITALIST EMPLOYING BOSS CLASS; WE CAN'T PLAY BY THE BOSSES' RULES; LABOR'S GOTTA PLAY HARDBALL TO START WINNING VICTORIES AGAINST THE BOSSES;

6. LABOR, ALL COLORS, ALL NATIONALITIES: WE DON'T NEED RACIST, FASCIST, BIGOTED SCUM WHO DIVIDE US; WE NEED WORKERS UNITY; BRING BACK THE CLASS WAR TACTICS OF THE 1930S THAT BUILT UNIONS: WE NEED MILITANT LABOR STRIKE ACTION; WE NEED PLANT, FACTORY, WORKSITE OCCUPATIONS BY THE WORKERS; WE NEED DAILY ELECTED LABOR STRIKE COMMITTEES; WE NEED DAILY LABOR STRIKE NEWSPAPERS; WE NEED WORKERS' LABOR "FLYING SQUADS" MOVING FROM PLANT TO PLANT, BRINGING OUT ON STRIKE ALL WORKERS; WE NEED MASS LABOR PICKET LINES THAT NO STRIKEBREAKER, NO SCAB, DARES CROSS; WE DON'T NEED BOOTLICKING FOR THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES, BUT WE NEED RELIANCE ONLY ON OUR OWN CLASS STRENGTH, NOT ON DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS, COPS, LEGISLATURES, COURTS, GOVERNORS, PRESIDENTS, WHO ARE REPRESENTATIVES OF OUR CLASS ENEMY, THE CAPITALIST EMPLOYING CLASS BOSSES; NO COPS IN THE UNIONS, NO SECURITY GUARDS IN THE UNIONS, KICK THEM OUT, NO GUN CONTROL AND NO GUNS FOR COPS, NO GUNS FOR SECURITY GUARDS; DISARM AND SMASH THE KU KLUX KLANNERS, NEO-NAZIS, ANTI-ABORTION TERRORISTS, OTHER FASCIST, RACIST, BIGOTED, LABOR-HATING SCUM WHO KEEP LABOR DIVIDED;

7. LABOR MUST DEFEND THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS OF IMMIGRANT WORKERS, MINORITY WORKERS; EVERYONE WHO'S MADE IT HERE HAS THE RIGHT TO STAY; SMASH FASCISTS BY MASS MOBILIZATIONS OF UNIONS, WORKERS' ORGANIZATIONS, BLACK, BROWN, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, TO BUST UP FASCIST, RACIST ORGANIZATIONS; FOR THE RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENSE, INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF ARMED SELF-DEFENSE, AGAINST RACIST, FASCIST, RIGHT-WING TERRORIST SCUM; FOR MASS MOBILIZATIONS OF WORKERS' ORGANIZATIONS TO DEFEND ALL WORKERS AGAINST FASCIST TERROR;

8. EXPROPRIATE THE REAL ESTATE ROBBER BARONS; GIVE ALL THE UNUSED OFFICE BUILDINGS, UNUSED CONDOS, UNUSED APARTMENT BUILDINGS TO THE HOMELESS; FOR WORKERS' DEFENSE GUARDS, ARMED AND LEVELHEADED, TO DEFEND THE HOMELESS AGAINST VIOLENCE AND VIOLENT ATTACK;

9. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS' PARTY, FIGHT FOR A WORKERS' GOVERNMENT, FIGHT FOR A SOCIALIST AMERICA, FIGHT FOR THE FULL EQUALITY OF ALL WORKERS OF ALL PARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS, BLACK, BROWN, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, FEMALE, MALE, IMMIGRANT, NATIVE-BORN, UNDOCUMENTED, DOCUMENTED, GAY, STRAIGHT, RELIGIOUS, NONRELIGIOUS; NO SCAPEGOATING ANY PART OF THE WORKING CLASS; INSTEAD, FIGHT ROTTING, DECAYING CAPITALISM, WHICH IS THE ENEMY OF THE ENTIRE WORKING CLASS; EXPROPRIATE ALL MAJOR INDUSTRY, BANKING, CORPORATIONS, FINANCE, INSURANCE COMPANIES, UNDER A WORKERS' GOVERNMENT OF ELECTED WORKERS' COUNCILS; MAKE A SOCIALIST PLANNED ECONOMY; EXPROPRIATE ALL MAJOR INDUSTRY, BANKS, CORPORATIONS, BY A WORKERS' GOVERNMENT OF ELECTED WORKERS COUNCILS; MAKE A FIGHTING WORKERS' PARTY TO GET THAT!

--Allan Greene

Real Unemployment Versus Official Unemployment:  Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now for August 10, 2009:

Link to Text of Headline 1:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/10/headlines#1

Link to August 10, 2009 Audio of Democracy Now Broadcast:

http://www.democracynow.org/