Michael Steven Smith’s Notebook

“At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.” - Karl Marx

Lynne Stewart is a friend.   She used to practice law in New York City.  I still do.   I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July 19th for her re-sentencing.   The Judge John Koetl buried her alive.  We should have seen it coming when he told her to take all the time she needed at the start when she spoke before the sentence was read.  It didn’t matter what she said.  He had already written his decision, which he read out loud for to a courtroom packed with supporters.  It was well crafted.  Bullet proof on appeal.   He is smart and cautious. After about an hour into his pronouncement he came to the buried alive part.  He prefaced it by citing the unprecedented 400 letters of support people had sent him, all of which he said he read. He noted Lynne’s three decades of service to the poor and the outcast.  He stressed that she is a seventy year old breast cancer survivor with high blood pressure and other serious health problems.  And then he laid it on her: 120 months.

Everyone in the courthouse divided 120 by 12.   He had given her a death sentence we all thought.  She’ll never get out.   He almost quadrupled the 28 month sentence he had originally pronounced.  She had told him that 28 months was a horizon, that she had  hope.  But no more.  Lynne’s granddaughter gasped.  Then started sobbing.   She kept crying even as Judge John Koetl kept reading.  And reading.  And reading.  It was awful.  The sentence was pitiless and cruel.  How to understand it?

Lynne’s lawyer Jill Shellow Levine rose after the Judge finished.  She asked him why.  He was candid.  He was told to do it by his supervisors, the judges on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.   This court is an institution of the elite. It is considered the second highest court in America next to the Supreme Court because it presides over the financial center of the empire, not its capital, that is in D.C., but its real capital.  This court makes policy and Lynne Stewart was to be made an example of in “the war against terrorism” just as a half a century before, in the same court, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were condemned to death in the war  against communism, told that they had caused the deaths of 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Korean War, and found guilty of the ridiculous charge of “stealing the secret” of the atomic bomb, when there was no secret, it was only a matter of technology.   The sentencing Judge Kaufman knew they would leave behind two orphan children, Robert and Michael, ages six and three.

In 1947 George Kennan, the ideological father of the cold war,  wrote that the United States had but six per cent of the world’s population and fifty per cent of its wealth.   The problem was to keep it.   Anti-communism served as the ideological cover the U.S. ruling classes used.   But communism ceased to exist after capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union in 1991.  A new ideological cover has been constructed in the wake of the September 11th criminal attack on the World Tread Center and the Pentagon: The War Against Terror.  Nationalist opposition to U.S. economic and foreign policy in parts of  the Arab world is no longer led by communists but by fundamentalist Muslims.

Lynne Stewart represented one of them,  Sheik Abdel Rahman, who was the leading oppositionist to the U.S. sponsored Murabak dictatorship in Egypt, which gets more money from America than any other country in the world except Israel.    In 1993, at the behest of the Egyptian government, Sheik Rahman was criminally indicted and later convicted of the crime of “sedition” for suggesting to  government informer that rather than blow up New York City landmarks he choose “a military target.”  It was on the occasion of a post-conviction prison visit that Lynne helped her client.  She released his statement to Reuters press service announcing his withdrawal of support for a cease fire between his group and the Egyptian government.   This was in violation of a Special Administrative Measure (SAMs) that Lynne had agreed to with the U.S. Government.  She wasn’t supposed to be a medium for commincation between her client and the outside world.  She should have challenged the constitutionality of the SAMs,  she now realizes, and not just have violated them. (more…)

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…)