Michael Steven Smith’s Notebook

LEARNING FROM A REVOLUTIONARY

NORTH STAR by Peter Camejo   (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010)

by Michael Steven Smith and Paul Le Blanc

    Peter Camejo opens his gripping, page-turner of a memoir North Star by recounting his 1979 escape from a CIA murder attempt in the airport in Cali, Columbia.  In order to “neutralize” this revolutionary activist, the CIA had fingered him as a “drug dealer.”  Airport workers, like him part of the revolutionary socialist movement, got him out of there.  There is little mystery as to why Peter would have been a target.  He was a militant in the Fourth International (founded by Leon Trotsky and other dissident Communists in the 1930s), in contact with numerous left-wing groups and individuals throughout Latin America and at that time touring Latin American cities in support of the Nicaraguan revolution and about to travel to Peru to  meet with peasant leader Hugo Blanco.

He was already one of the most remarkable figures in the history of U.S. radicalism, helping to educate, mobilize and radicalize tens of thousands of people in the sixties and seventies as a leading spokesperson for the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP).  The SWP played a central role in building a mass opposition in the United States that was part of bringing the Vietnam war to an end.  After the SWP suffered a devastating, largely self-inflicted decline, Peter revised some of his perspectives while seeking to remain true to his core beliefs.  Over the next three decades, experimenting with various forms of activism in California, he became associated with the Green Party.

Peter knew he was dying of cancer. He hastened to finish this book, working on the penultimate chapter even as he was taken to the hospital for the last time.  He dedicated North Star   “To the thousands upon thousands of people who have worked with me through the years for peace, for social justice, against racism, and for human rights.” He believed that yet another wave of radical activism was gathering now, as it had in the sixties, the thirties, and before the First World War.   North Star is his last contribution - for “the children, the future participants of mass social struggles who will make the Third American Revolution.”

   Trotskyist and Anti-War Leader

    Peter came from a  Latin American family with deep roots in his country’s history. Yet he was born, almost by accident, in New York City, when his mother traveled there from her native Venezuela for medical treatment.   Growing up in the l950s in Great Neck, a village east of New York City, he became interested in socialist ideas while still quite young.  When he was l8, his girlfriend’s grandmother (an old socialist who had run for Congress in l922) brought the two of them to a meeting sponsored by the SWP, the Communist Party, and the National Guardian newspaper to explore possibilities for a unified ticket of socialist candidates. He met members of the SWP there and wrote “that meeting would change my life.”  Not long after, he went off to college in Boston at MIT, rooming with Barry Sheppard, also a socialist.  The two formed the Greater Boston Socialist Student Organization, which evolved into a chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance, the SWP’s youth group.  They soon  moved to New York City in l960 to become YSA national leaders.

Peter was in the SWP for over 20 years.  This was a revolutionary socialist organization rooted in the U.S. radical traditions of Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party, the heroic Industrial Workers of the World, and the early Communist Party.  Its militant cadres had broken away in reaction to the increasingly authoritarian influences in the world Communist movement emanating from Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR.  They had rallied to the ideas of Leon Trotsky, and through the 1930s and 1940s had played a role in militant and sometimes momentous working-class struggles, standing for “workers’ democracy” and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.  By the mid-1950s, the organization had been weakened by a series of organizational splits, the ravages of Cold War anti-communism and an extended period of capitalist prosperity that had de-radicalized the labor movement of which it had been part.  Yet what had become a small, half exhausted, semi-sectarian group of radicals was soon to experience a rejuvenating influx of radicalized students, the beginning of a remarkable upswing.

     Peter was part of this new wave.  When he joined in 1959, there were maybe 150 active members in SWP branches in several major cities.  By l975, the U.S. Trotskyists had 3000 members, including the youth group (Young Socialist Alliance), with a presence in almost every major U.S. city. The SWP had a weekly newspaper, The Militant, a monthly theoretical magazine (then called the International Socialist Review), a publishing house that put out hundreds of books and pamphlets (Pathfinder Press, a sort of predecessor to Haymarket Books) , a high tech printing press, even a large library,  housed in the party’s own building, a five story old ship equipment repair place on Manhattan’s West Side Highway.  This was paid for and refitted by party members themselves.  (more…)

Michael Smith’s review of The Assassination of Fred Hampton
[From Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

By Jeffrey Haas, Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95, 376 pages, index

This is a remarkable work, a well told tale, a true crime story, a page turning legal political thriller which is as important for us to comprehend now as it was in the sixties.

Forty years ago this December 4th, National Lawyers Guild attorney Jeffrey Haas was in a Chicago jail interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancee Deborah Johnson.  She was in her nightgown, pregnant, shaking and sobbing, barely having survived  the hail of 80 bullets that came into her apartment and into her bedroom, just four hours before.   She had  been sleeping at 4 in the morning next to Fred Hampton, the extraordinary young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. She described to Haas how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one of the officers say, “He’s still alive.”   Next, two gunshots. A second officer said “He’s good and dead now.” She looked at Jeff and asked, “What can you do?”

Haas tells the story, interwoven beautifully with his own personal and political biography, of a truly amazing piece of movement lawyering. It took thirteen years of grueling litigation and political agitation outside the courtroom.  Finally, after an l8 month trial, which they lost, and an appeal to the Federal Circuit Court (Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F. 2d 600), which they won in a famous civil rights decision,  Haas, Flint Taylor, his Peoples Law Office collective, Dennis Cunningham, and Morty Stavis from the Center for Constitutional Rights,  finally nailed the FBI, the Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and the Chicago police for their summary execution of the exceptionally promising - he was only 2l at the time - young black leader. “Who knows what he may have become, if they hadn’t killed him,” his mother Iberia Hampton told Jeff.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had an idea of what Hampton might become. He was concerned, in his words written in a Cointelpro directive, about “the rise of a new black Messiah.”  King and Malcolm had already been murdered.   Haas and Taylor uncovered the story about how the government killed Hampton and remarkably, at the end of the day, made them all admit guilt by paying his parents a wrongful death settlement.   It took over 37,000 hours of work.  What a truly amazing piece of lawyering, especially since Jeff was barely out of the University of Chicago law school at the time he undertook to represent the family, and Flint was still a law student at Northwestern. And more amazing still, considering that their law collective had no resources to speak of and were up against a mendacious stalling government whose litigation fund was unlimited.

Lenny Bruce used to quip that “Chicago is so corrupt it is thrilling.” It was run by the machine of Mayor Richard Daley, head of the Cook County Democratic Party, his true source of power.  The machine appointed the judges, investigators, “independent panels”, prosecutors, and police.  But Jeff, just out of law school, and Flint, still attending Northwestern, with little financial resources,  took them on, exposing the conspiracy to assassinate Hampton, the raid and the subsequent cover-up.

Fred Hampton, even at 2l, was an accomplished person. He worked a factory job and saved money to pay his college tuition.  Like Malcolm, he wanted to be a lawyer.   Fred was by all accounts a master orator.  He studied Malcolm’s speeches.  While in high school he founded a youth chapter of the NAACP.   When he turned l8 in l966 he refused to register for the draft, like Muhammad Ali, who famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.  No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”     Hampton was well read, rising at least two hours before facing the day to read Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Mao, Marx, Lenin and DuBois.  Like them, he understood that “a revolution is a class struggle.  It was one class - the oppressed - versus those other classes - the oppressor.  Indeed it was this sort of radicalism - the advocacy of black power and socialism - that made him dangerous.  And Hoover knew it.  Black power for Hampton, as Haas  observes, was “not a tool to attack whites, but … a concept to bring blacks together and build their confidence.”

Hampton was targeted by the police and arrested several times on technical traffic violations.  After being arrested for “mob action” he was put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index, (more…)

Michael Ratner on Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates
[from the radio show Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with Sartre and asking him and debating with him questions on Marxism, existentialism, his life with Simone de Beauvoir, his depression, his plays, novels, political activism, and views about anti-colonial and revolutionary violence both before and after a revolution. In this short piece I write only about this latter subject—taken from the book– in which he takes positions which are almost never found in writings on the political left in the United States today. Even if one disagrees with Sartre, which Michael Smith and I do, it is a timely discussion in today’s world.

What Makes a Revolutionary?

Gerassi and Sartre discuss what makes a revolutionary. Sartre had great respect for Che and seems to have agreed with Che that “a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” However, Sartre also said that a revolutionary was possessed of both “hatred and love.”  Hating injustice and hating the enemy. Sartre believed it was necessary to hate the enemy in order for a revolution to succeed. As Sartre said,

“That’s very important hatred. Without it one stops too soon.  It happened in the French Revolution; I think it happens in every revolution, when those who do not hate the enemy suddenly say, Enough already, and stop short of accomplishing the complete restructuring of society, and the result is that the revolution is betrayed.” (56)

Executions in Cuba After the Revolution

Sartre then applies some of his thinking to the Cuban Revolution—at least from an ethical point of view. Gerassi asks Sartre about Fidel putting on trial the Batista torturers where the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Gerassi says that even Time magazine claimed the trials were a catharsis and saved the country from a bloodbath of vengeance. Presumably, this was because the people would have taken justice in their own hands and enacted vengeance without trials. But then 365 torturers were executed and that showed that Fidel was “not just a bourgeois reformer but a genuine revolutionary” and Time and the United States condemned him.  Gerassi then asks what Sartre thinks of the executions when all knew including Fidel that the real culprits were the owners of United Fruit, IT&T and other corporations for who Batista exploited the people of Cuba.
Sartre answers “that under an ideal situation, the torturers could have been rehabilitated.” But he agreed with Fidel that at

“that moment a bloodbath had to be avoided, and these torturers were scum, after all, so if executing them for their proven crimes, even if the president of IT&T is ultimately responsible, will avoid that bloodbath, then ethically their execution was justified….”

However, Sartre points out that had the trials taken place a year later and there was no risk of a bloodbath, “then no, their executions would not have been justified.” (98-99)

Counter Terror Against Terror

Sartre was consistent on the question of the morality of counter terror against terror. (This is not to say he recommended it as a tactic.)  He supported the FLN in fighting the French for the liberation of Algeria even if that meant killings on the streets of Paris. In the context he even believed the Baader-Meinhof group was “totally justified.”  As Sartre says, (more…)

The Dissidents: Cuban State Security Agents Reveal the True Story
by Rosa Miriam Elizalde and Luis Baez
published by Editora Politica/ LaHabana, 2003

This is an important and persuasive book. It should be brought to the attention of all those who are inclined to support Cuba but who are not fully informed about the “dissidents”, tried and imprisoned by the Cuban government last year. “Progressive Cuba bashers,” to use Richard Levins’ apt term, mistakenly believe, like David Frankel, writing in the September/October 2004 issue of Against the Current, that those imprisoned were victimized “for non-violent expression of views the regime can’t tolerate.” This is not the case as this book proves.

In his speech given at the launching of this book, which is printed as the introduction to the English edition, Felipe Peres Roque, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, observed that “the so-called ‘dissidents’ in Cuba are a creation of the aggressive policy of the U.S. government…and form part of the strategy to obtain, through pressure and blackmail, the condemnation of Cuba in the (U.N.) Commission on Human Rights, which can then be used as justification for the blockade.” While tolerated for years, it was only after Bush made “pre-emptive war” against Iraq and, without a sense of irony, labeled Cuba “terrorist,” and put it high on its list for “regime change” that the “dissidents” were arrested for provocation and subversion - not for “non-violent expression of views the regime can’t tolerate” - and brought to justice. Their efforts to build a network to overthrow Cuban socialism, to “aid in the transition,” as American legislation authorizing money (some 20 million so far under the l966 Helms-Burton Act) delicately puts it, was thwarted by these agents of Cuban State Security. (more…)

ON THE BORDER by Michael Warschawski

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

Profoundly moving, beautifully written, intellectually penetrating, On The Border by Israeli socialist Michel Warschawski, is the outstanding political memoir of the generation of sixties radicals. Warschawski is the singularly most eloquent and effective anti-colonialst leader Israel has produced. “Mikado,” as he is known, is respected internationally for his unconditional, if not always uncritical, support of and solidarity with the Palestinians.

The problem of the Zionist project, from its inception in the l9th century, until now, is that there were already Arabs living in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, conducted his first Zionist congress in l897 in Basel, Switzerland. (The German Jews of Munich refused to host the congress on the grounds that they were successfully assimilated and therefore there was no Jewish question.) Afterwards the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact finding mission. They cabled back, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (more…)

RADICALS, RABBIS, AND PEACEMAKERS: Conversations With Jewish Critics of Israel, by Seth Farber, Common Courage Press, 252 Pages, $l9.95. 207-525-0900.

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

My grandparents came to America from Hungary in 1912. My family who stayed there and the Hungarian Jewish population were mostly killed by the facists in the bitter winter of l944, some 800,000. Twenty thousand alone died of the cold and disease, huddled in the great unheated synagogue, the largest in the world, on Dohany Street in Budapest. I was in Budapest with my wife and sister and friends this past October vacationing and visiting my cousins. As it happened it was during Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday and new year. We are not religious, nor are my Hungarian relatives, but we asked them to take us to that synagogue for Yom Kippur services. It was quite stirring to be there amongst the remnant of that ancient Jewish community that had been in Budapest going back to the times of the Romans.

My Hungarian cousin Anti is still alive and vigorous at age 96. He was not picked up in l944 with the others but rather in l94l, because he was a communist. So was his wife Manci. They managed to place their two year old son Vili with a sympathetic Christian woman before being arrested and put in separate labor camps. Anti soon escaped and fought in the forests with the Partisans. He is figure mentioned by his country’s historians. Manci lived. In l945 with the Russian liberation they returned to Budapest to fetch their son. Vili answered the door. “I am your mother,” said Manci. “No you are not,” answered Vili. “My mother was beautiful.” She was ninety pounds and bald. So they started anew. (more…)

This review was written for Socialism and Democracy (www.sdonline.org) and will appear in the journal’s November 2007 issue (no. 45; vol. 21, no.3).

Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (London and Ann Arbor Pluto Press, 2007).

Joel Kovel has given us an impressive and important book. Its first printing sold out without a single review, major or otherwise. Nevertheless word of this extraordinary work is spreading. The taboo in the United States (not Israel) against seriously discussing and criticizing Zionist Israel has been broken with the publication of Jimmy Carter’s bold book labeling the situation in the Occupied Territories “apartheid” and with the exposure by prestigious professors Mearsheimer and Walt – in the London Review of Books after rejection by the Atlantic Monthly – of the power of the Israeli lobby. Kovel, by focusing squarely on how to “overcome” Zionism, takes the discussion exactly where it needs to go from there. He writes beautifully, even poetically, not just on Zionism’s sordid history, but on its ideology, its ethics, and even on the terrible ecological devastation in Israel itself, where every river is polluted, some to lethal levels. And he writes with courage and hope.

Kovel believes that the creation of Israel in l948, as a colony of settlers who established an exclusively Jewish and discriminatory state, has created a multi-faceted disaster – “a dreadful mistake” – that should be undone, with Israel de-Zionized and integrated into the Middle East. His solution is stated in the book’s subtitle and restated in the title of the last chapter: “Palesrael: A Secular and Universal Democracy for Israel/Palestine.” This is an elegant solution, and he lays out an action program to accomplish it. (more…)

JAMES P. CANNON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT
1890 - 1928 by Bryan D. Palmer, University of Illinois Press, www.press.uillinois.edu, 2007
A root of the National Lawyers Guild, formed in l937, goes further back to the post WWI
American revolutionary left, to the newly established Communist (Workers) Party (1919) and beyond that to the legendary Industrial Workers of the World, the legendary often romanticized fighters for industrial democracy and the precursor of the CIO, the magnificent Wobblies.

For the IWW, “An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.” It was the Wobby poet Ralph Chapin who wrote the famous working class anthem “Solidarity Forever”. They expressed their class solidarity in the concept of “mass defense”, a practise the NLG undertakes to this very day with its support to and work in the defense, say, of Mumia Abu Jamal, The Cuban Five, or The Jena Six. The one person most responsible for this aspect of our heritage was James P. Cannon, as Professor Brian Palmer shows in his beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book JAMES P. CANNON and the ORIGINS of the AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT 1990 - 1928.

Cannon was a radical Irishman from the Midwest. His dad, John Cannon, was a rank and filer, what was called then a “Jimmy Higgins”, and a stalwart in the Debsian wing of the Socialist Party. Jim Cannon, at age 18, joined the SP in 1908. He took up with the Wobblies in the left wing of the SP and developed into an excellent organizer and speaker. Jim worked with two outstanding Wobbly leaders, Vincent St. John and the founder in1905 of the IWW and head of The Western Federation of Miners, the great almost mythical figure William “Big Bill” Heywood. (more…)